We humans have two basic motivators – to move away from pain, and to move towards pleasure. In the world of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) and motivation theses are known as ‘away from’ and ‘towards goals’.

Away from goals maybe something like “I do not want to fail my exams”, “I do not want to be fat”, or “I do not want to go to prison”. The main problem with these goals is that the further you move from the pain, the less impact the goal will have on your sense of motivation. These kind of goals explain why you may be a yo-yo dieter, or why your university marks seems to go up and down with each year.

Towards goals maintain their effectiveness until you reach them, and often inspire us to come up with new goals. “I want to open my own business”, “I want to become fitter”, or “I want to become a millionaire”.

Aikido is a martial art for which its basis is built on leading your opponent rather than pushing or manipulating, and attaining the best position relative to your opponent. Both of which require a positive mind which can only be effectively reached through ‘towards goals’.

For example, when we are faced with an attacker delivering a basic frontal strike, the best position for us is to enter directly into the strike and place ourselves directly behind our attacker. Unfortunately, our first instinct is to ‘avoid the pain’ of the strike which causes us to block which in-turn limits our ability to enter completely, and we remain within our attacker’s active range. If we instead recognise the perfect position for ourselves and focus on reaching it with a ‘towards goal’, we will ignore the punch and enter smoothly and deeply. With this positive mind, and an almost ethereal feeling, we avoid the punch and have neutralised the attack purely from our positioning.