Have you paid attention to the way in which you move? Now, I don’t mean the way you move your hips or the graceful movement of your hand gestures when you are talking. I mean the DIRECTION that you move your thinking.
There are two ways that you can move on any issue – TOWARDS what you want or AWAY from what you don’t want. In other words, do you move towards the carrot achieving something or the stick of the repurcussions of missing out or not achieving it?
Whilst your preferred direction of movement does depend on the circumstances, in most situations you will know your preference. Now, I wonder whether you know which it is?
In our experience coaching people in the ‘helping professions’ we notice that our clients get very excited with the potential that their clients have. Most helpers have the Quadrant preference involving Q3 and they want to move people towards the possibilities of what they can become. They are keen on taking the person towards these furute outcomes and feel devastated when people don’t follow through with their recommendations for this and they drop out before they have reached that optimum objective.
When this scenario has presented itself there is a very high chance that the ‘helper’ has used a TOWARDS strategy with their client when the client is using a moving AWAY from strategy.
There is a fair chance that when working with people in your life you will use YOUR preferences to communicate with them and it is here that you can get things very wrong resulting in the person moving away from you and your valuable skills and contribution to their life.
Over the next few weeks notice your communication to people. Are you trying to move them TOWARDS a bright future? Are you trying to empower them to change their life because of the wonderful things the future will hold for them if they do? Are you painting big pictures of the nirvana of the future?
Next week we will look at the space that most people occupy and how to tailor your message to move with them.
