Move Toward And Away From, President Bill Clinton, President Obama And Politicians In General. What We Can Learn.
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We recently heard a comment by former President Bill Clinton that there is a great right wing conspiracy against President Obama. As we often see, so much of politics is all about spinning things against the opponent. Seldom do you hear politicians speak about what they stand for or what they can do for the people. Instead, they spend their time attacking opponents. This is sometimes called negative campaigning. Such a strategy is not limited to one political party or another since all of them engage it this type of behavior.
The question is: Why does this happen? There is, in fact, a behavioral root cause to such behavior. This type of behavior occurs time and time again because it works. There are two parts to the equation. Either people vote for candidates they like or else, more typically, they vote for candidates they don’t like. This is a reflection of human nature and happens to correspond to a behavioral pattern which we refer to as the Motivation People Pattern™. It is one of a series of powerful inherent patterns that together form what we call Personality Language™.
The reason why we do things in life comes down to one of two reasons which correspond to the two elements of the Motivation People Pattern™:
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Either we do things to get something we want
or
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We do things to avoid something we don’t want.
People who do things because they want to get something they want are called move toward people. Those who do things because they want to avoid what they don’t want are called move away from people.
This dichotomy manifests in all areas of life and it happens to be true in politics as well. In most cases, voters don’t know what they want, yet they know what they don’t want. Politicians know this and they try to be as vague as possible in order to have a minimal chance of offending anyone.
The reality of the situation is that most people don’t know what they want.
Avoiding the things you don’t want, doesn’t give you what you want. It only gives you what you don’t want. So what to do? We suggest that the most important thing to do is to decide what you want. Once you decide what you want, the next step is to take action to make this a reality. This is critical and once you do so, you will be much happier.
© Copyright 2009, by Marilyne Woodsmall, Ph. M., and Wyatt Woodsmall, Ph.D.
