Toward and Away From
Toward
“I’m just not motivated anymore”– my NLP Coaching client said. “When we first started the business, I was really motivated. I could work 24 hours a day and never be tired. I would have ideas at 2 AM and I would get out of bed and write them down and then work on them the rest of the night. We often wondered where the payroll would come from the next week. It was always touch and go, and we even had the wolf at the door to make sure we were paying attention. My spouse and I were always working on the business – we talked the business, we thought about the business, we worked on the business’ advertising – it was business 24 hours a day. It was very exciting, the uncertainty”
Away From
“Now that things are working well, we’re making good money and the wolf is not at the door, I have to admit it is boring. I am tired and kind of feel burned out. We both need time off and we are looking for a change to happen.”
The scenario above is a common occurrence in a small or a start-up business, especially if the NLP Coaching client is driven to move away from what he doesn’t want. Let’s explain:
“Toward” means you are focusing on what you want. You are motivated by what you want, not what you don’t want. Someone who moves toward what he wants will be thinking about the “carrot” and not the stick.
“Away from” means you are focusing on what you don’t want. It means that you are motivated by what you don’t want. It means that what motivates us is to get Away From the “stick”.
Neither is better
Neither Toward nor Away From is better than the other, but it is important to know which one motivates you. Otherwise the origin of your motivation may be unknown. That is, you might be motivated and not know why. You might even say to yourself, “you know that just wasn’t me. I did that action but I am not sure why I did it.” Especially if you are managing other people, in NLP Coaching we would recommend that you are sure of your motivations.
While Away From motivation is useful in the short term to motivate someone, but for the motivation to be long lasting and to provide consistent results it should eventually be Toward. Let’s take an example:
Working Out
You know you should work out, you feel better when you work out, you look better when you work out, but you just don’t work out. Why not? If you’re like most people you wake up one day and you look in the mirror and you look terrible, you look sh***y. You say to yourself, “I gotta go work out”. So you do. And you work out for just enough time to start looking better. A little better. But when you start to look good (usually about 3 months according to health club research) you stop working out. It’s too early, you’re too tired, it is a rainy day, it is too hot/too cold, and so you pull the covers over your head and sleep in.
In order for your work out regime to really work and do well, sometime in the 3 months you have to switch over to a Toward motivation for working out and make it into a lifestyle. Most people do not do that. They work out for a while and then they look “good enough” and they stop.
While there is nothing wrong with Away From motivation, it causes us to focus on what we don’t want. The body is designed to produce behavior based on what you focus on. So, it is more efficient in the long run to focus on what you do want and not focus on what you do not want.
Now, what is the NLP Coaching solution for our client? There are two possibilities:
First of all, together, we could create little away from events, little crises, which would cause the client to respond in a way that he had to move away from. The second thing we could do is to get rid of all the away from values in his Values Hierarchy (but that is a topic for our next article). It is easy to solve the problem and we teach this in our NLP Master Coaching Practitioner trainings. See you there.