Towards/Away From
Are you more motivated towards goals, targets and what you desire, or away from problems and difficulties?
Extreme ‘Towards’ people will be gung-ho, and will overlook potential
problems that can trip them up – think ‘invasion of Iraq’ or stock market
booms.
People who are very ‘Away-From’ will be perceived as fault-finding and
overly negative or cynical by their colleagues, and will lack direction
unless given a problem to solve or a crisis to fix.
They also will run out of motivation the further away they get from what
they wanted to avoid – so they might never lose that last 8 pounds, or get
close to their professed goals but let them slide before they finally attain
them.
Like all meta programs, this one is context-dependent. You may find that
someone is strongly ‘Towards’ or strongly ‘Away-From’ in almost all
contexts that you ask about.
Identifying the Towards/Away From pattern
Ask “What do you want in a job?” (or car, or relationship, or house). This
will start to give you the person’s values. For each value, you can ask
“Why is that important to you?”
The answers will be either towards, away-from, or a mixture. Some
values may be more towards or away-from than others.
Keep asking “Why is that important to you?” – at least three times. The
initial answer is likely to be colored by the prevailing culture – e.g. in the
US you are likely to get a ‘towards’ answer – so you need to go a bit
deeper to find the person’s real pattern.
Towards
Language: talking about what they want, what they would like to see,
what they can get, achieve, benefits.
Body language: nodding, gestures indicating the vision they are moving
towards, ‘inclusive’ gestures
Away-From
Language: what to avoid, ‘yes but’, problems (including solving problems),
pitfalls, avoiding, removing, “hang on a minute”, comparative deletions,
modal operators of impossibility, referring to target dates as ‘deadlines’.
Body language: dismissive or ‘warding off’ gestures, shaking head.
Look out for ‘concealed away-froms’ in language patterns – where the away-from is not explicitly mentioned but it’s there in the person’s internal
representations
Comparative deletions e.g. “It’s better to have money”. Better than
what?
Modal operators of necessity e.g. “You’ve got to have money, haven’t
you?” What happens if you don’t?
Job role examples
A “Towards” pattern is useful in: visionary leaders, entrepreneurs,
creatives, ideas people. It’s often found in change agents, coaches, and
managers.
An “Away-from” pattern is useful in: health and safety officers, process
control, proof-reading, maintenance engineers. Often found in medicine,
pharmacy, solicitors, accountants, civil service.
Influencing and managing
Towards: this is what we can achieve, this is what it will get you,
benefits, results, achievement, winning, advantages, what you can have,
just think about it!
Away-From: solve the problem, fix it, avoid, sort out, eliminate, this is
what will happen unless we…, these will be the consequences if we don’t
do it.
If there are no immediate problems to motivate the Away-From person,
ask them to look into the future to see the problems that will occur if they
don’t take action now
Responses