During a wildfire in the Australian Outback, something strange is happening.
A falcon picks up a burning twig, flies for a while, then drops it. A new fire starts and the falcon flies circles in the air.
What is it doing?
In a few moments, it becomes apparent.
A small rodent scurries away from the burning grass and the falcon swoops down and snatches it.
The falcon is using fire to catch prey.
It turns out that this is not just one clever falcon, there have been dozens of sightings of them using this strategy to fill their bellies.
The falcon has noticed that its prey flees fire and has learned to take advantage of this fact.
This reminds me of the power of noticing new distinctions. Noticing new distinctions creates new choices that can improve our lives just as they improved the falcon’s ability to find food.
Fortunately, there is a distinction we can notice that gives us the power to follow through on our most important goals.
This is the distinction between towards motivation and away motivation.
What is towards and away motivation?
To answer that let’s look at my dog She-Ra.
When my wife or I come home, where is she? She’s waiting at the door for us. We are important to her. So she’s moving from towards motivation. She gets closer and wants us to pet her. And when I do pet her, I’m moving from towards motivation. She’s important to me and I’m doing something to move towards her.
When she was a puppy, I might come home to find that she’d made a mess. She once tore pages out of a book I had been reading. When I saw the mess, I started to clean it up. I just wanted to get that task over with. I was moving from away motivation. I had an unwanted feeling and wanted to move away from it.
Toward motivation involves moving towards who and what is important to you.
Away motivation involves moving away from or under the control of unwanted thoughts, feelings or other inner experiences.
How does noticing towards and away motivation help us follow through on our goals?
Imagine that you live in a place in which the weather can flip-flop between extremes in 24 hours.
One day it’s scorching hot.
The next it’s freezing cold.
Now imagine that for some reason you thought it was a good idea to commit to wearing a thick furry coat every day.
During a cold spell, you would probably put on that coat just to keep warm when you go outside.
But what about during warm weather? It would be so much easier to just leave that coat at home and just go out with a T-shirt.
If the motivation to wear the furry coat is to move away from feeling cold, then there is no question that you will only wear it when it’s cold outside. But if your motivation is to move towards something very important to you, such as a charitable cause, then you might still wear the coat even when it got very uncomfortable.
This is the key to persistence.
To persist in the long-term our behavior needs to be about moving towards who and what is important to us.
When we take actions that move us towards our values, we gain satisfaction from doing them. And as a result, we can persist for long periods of time.
When our behavior is about moving away from unwanted feelings, we only act when those feelings are present.
One example is doing taxes.
Most people turn in their taxes on time. But many turn them in at the very last minute. I was one of them. I’ve been to a post office in which there was a long line of cars parked around the block. Each person then waited in a long line at the post office so they could turn their taxes in before midnight.
Why does this happen to so many people?
Many of us are not experiencing towards motivation when we pay our taxes. It’s only as the deadline looms that the away motivation becomes strong enough to get us to finish them. In other words the emotions we want to escape like fear need to get strong enough for us to act on them.
Those who finish them early are generally of two types.
Those whose away motivation kicks in a lot earlier. They get scared of the consequences before the rest of us.
Those whose motivation to get them done is towards motivation. They feel that paying their taxes early serves some important values of theirs.
But can we change our motivation so that we are more likely to follow through?
Yes.
When I was in high school, I joined the Cross Country team in the Fall and Track in the Spring. In between seasons our coaches were not allowed to train us, so we were told to train on our own.
Every day, I would mean to get out and do some running.
Some days I would succeed .. but often I did not.
I wanted to train. But something within me was holding me back. My motivation was away motivation. I wanted to avoid the discomfort of running.
All this changed one year when I had a fantastic coach who knew just how to train me. I started winning races. At the end of the season, I became League Champion in the 800 meters.
When the season was over, what did I do? Did I just stop training and wait for the next running season to start?
No.
I started training on my own.
I saw training as preparing me to win. My motivation was now toward motivation. As a result, I was able to train on my own without a coach.
At one point I was running 60 miles a week on my own.
It’s easy to say that winning caused me to want to train. But I’ve had other times in my life when winning made me afraid to lose. And I’ve had clients who before working with me, would successfully complete a challenging project and then become afraid to try again fearing they might not do as well a second time.
Positive and negative events are not the factor that drives us.
The direction of our motivation is a far more important factor.
And fortunately, it’s a factor that you can learn to choose.
Before you get to that stage, you first have to gain the habit of noticing the direction of your motivation at any given moment.
For example, right now, I’m writing this article. My motivation is towards you, the reader. I want to make a contribution to your life.
Earlier this evening I was at Karate practice. I was about to practice under my sensei’s guidance the same part of the same kata (series of movements) for the 7th time and I could feel myself thinking “Let’s get this over with.” And I was hooked by that thought so my motivation was away. I noticed this and decided to look at what was important to me in that moment — mastering the kata, growing as a martial artist. And I was able to switch to toward motivation.
This helped me focus in the present and on absorbing the lesson.
So now it’s your turn.
You are reading this article. Is your motivation to move away from some thoughts, feelings or tasks? Or is your motivation to move toward some important ideas, values or people?
And if you are deciding not to answer those questions, even to yourself, is that coming from toward motivation or away motivation?
What’s it like to notice that you are motivated to move towards or away?
I hope you did that exercise.
It can be a powerful way to discover how we are motivated and eventually to increase the percentage of time we are moving toward what’s important to us so we can follow through and have more fulfillment.
Here are the steps that I use to teach it. Once you practice over and over you may find yourself doing it a bit differently and that’s OK.
- Ask “What am I doing now?”
- Ask “Am I motivated to move towards or away while doing this?”
- Ask “What am I moving towards or away from?”
- If you would like to shift motivation from away to towards ask “If I were to move towards, who or what would I be moving towards?” “Do I want to make this action about moving towards ___ (fill in the blank)?”
That’s all.
But how can simply noticing towards and away motivation change anything?
One thing I’ve noticed in my years of coaching is that changes in behavior usually come after a greater awareness of choice. The choice has to be felt to exist not just exist intellectually.
So this exercise makes the choice of how we are motivated feel real. Once that choice feels like a real option to you, you’ll find that you can choose the direction of your motivation whenever it suits you.
You can decide to increase the percentage of time that you spend motivated to move towards and such a choice is very fulfilling.
However, there are some common mistakes people make when deciding to notice towards and away motivation.
One is not having reminders.
If you are going to set up a new habit, especially a mental one, you need some kind of trigger to remind you to do it.
What will those triggers be?
They can be visual notes on post-its in places you will see them every day.
The bathroom mirror.
The dashboard of your car.
Your briefcase.
You can set up reminders on your phone.
You can set your browser new tab window become a reminder.
You can even have a reminder on or in your refrigerator.
The possibilities are endless.
If you are feeling overwhelmed or resistant to this. Simply notice that and notice whether in this moment you are experiencing towards motivation or away motivation. Then you can decide if you want to make the switch to toward motivation.
When a falcon discovers that wildfires drive rodents out of the brush, it’s just one more step to realize that it can pick up a burning twig, drop it somewhere else to spread the fire and flush out more rodents for easy picking.
When you make a habit of noticing towards and away motivation, it’s just one more step to notice that you can choose the direction of your motivation.
And when you choose towards motivation, you may find that you can follow through on your goals more consistently because you don’t need a fire at your back to get you going.
To sum up:
Towards motivation is moving towards who and what is important to you.
Away motivation is moving away from unwanted thoughts and feelings.
Noticing this distinction regularly helps you choose the direction of your motivation.
When you choose toward motivation you are more likely to follow through on your goals because you are less influenced by the feelings of the moment such as fear or boredom.
Next step
You’ve just learned a powerful idea that has changed my life and the lives of others. I invite you to take it and run with it. Just one question though. How fast do you want to run?
If you are currently working on yourself alone, I can tell you that the journey can feel pretty plodding at times. And if you are like me, you may even forget to apply many of the ideas you learn.
One way to overcome the issues that come with working on one’s own is to get a guide. A guide can help you see faster routes and help you avoid pitfalls and errors that have befallen many a traveler.
My coaching program is such a guide.
In it I show you how to take consistent action on your goals. And when inner storms show up and get in the way, I show you how to surf them. You don’t learn to muscle through difficulties. Instead, you learn skills that let get you to feel an inner guidance pulling you along.
Not everyone is right for my coaching program.
To find out if we are a fit, you can schedule a call with me.
Just click the link below and fill out the form and we can talk for 20 minutes on my dime to see if we are a fit.
