A proactive brain uses details from past experiences to make analogies with your current surroundings.
It then helps you determine where you are and envision future possibilities.
We are all born with proactive brains, but these three things can help improve brain performance:
- Give your brain a rich bank of life experiences. Expose it to diverse environments and situations. Increasing the breadth of your experiences provides richer information for your brain to draw on as it helps you anticipate new situations.
- Let it borrow from the experiences of others by communicating, reading, or interacting with or about others.
- Think about what you want from the future. Take time to reflect on individual and team values and goals, both immediate and down the road. These will help guide your brain as it envisions future scenarios that may best help you achieve your objectives.
- Actively ponder future rewards or accomplishments. Emphasize rich, detailed thinking about long-term outcomes. This reduces the lure (and the danger) of instant gratification.
- Give yourself periods of relatively uninterrupted thought during which you let your mind wander. Doing this gives the brain's memory system extra time to recombine your prior experiences in ways that can help you envision future possibilities.
