Read Online Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) by Peg Streep - Free Book Online Page A

being, respectively, whatever action and whatever result you wish. Approach goals can be either concrete (“If I smile at her and engage her interest, she’ll go out with me”) or abstract (“If I learn another language, people will think I am more cultured”). Similarly, we choose avoidance goals to dodge an unwanted outcome. The formula here is “If I don’t do X,then Y won’t happen.” It’s why some people never smoke and others stop, for example. Both approach and avoidance goals play an important role in human life, not to mention the lives of lower species, including the dog or cat that may be sitting at your feet as you read, or the gazelle that decides to stay thirsty when it sees the lion at the watering hole. As John A. Bargh and his colleagues’ work has shown, for the most part, human beings automatically and often without consciousness classify and evaluate whatever comes into view on a positive or negative dimension; it’s built into the survival of our own species and that of other species.
    Andrew J. Elliot and Todd M. Thrash have suggested that approach and avoidance could equally be used to describe a person’s temperament. Doing so yields a different and perhaps more effective model of personality when it comes to goals than the “big five” characteristics used in psychology. Elliot and Thrash argue that people with approach temperaments have a sensitivity to positive and desirable goals, show emotional and behavioral receptivity to these positive goals, and are inclined to pursue them. People with avoidance temperaments, on the other hand, are inclined to respond to the negatives inherent in any situation, choose goals on the basis of avoidance, and focus on the negative cues in their environments.
    Approach and avoidance temperaments aren’t synonyms for looking at the glass as half full or half empty—an optimistic or pessimistic point of view—but a much broader life approach that operates across affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to situations, events, and even people and relationships in the world. In fact, the orientation—either approach or avoidance—is so fixed that it actually crosses over from one domain to another, as can be seen in a series of experiments Elliot and his colleagues conducted and are consistent across the life span.
    Imagine two people, each of whom has the goal of forging a friendship. One of them is motivated by approach, drawn to the goal of making a friend because of the satisfying social connection, the shared intimacy, the way friends help open up a person’s social and emotional understanding. The other person is motivated byavoidance; he or she seeks friendship to avoid the social isolation of being alone, not wanting to feel unpopular, rejected, or out of sync in a world where people have friends. If these two people were to try to forge a friendship with each other, what would follow is a reasonably predictable script of misunderstandings and disappointments. Even though the goal (making friends) is ostensibly the same, the “why” behind the goal is startlingly different. Shift this example to a more intimate relationship—boyfriend and girlfriend, lovers, or husband and wife—and the importance of the motivation becomes all the more apparent.
    The distinction between these two motivations and what happens to the people with one orientation or the other is enormous. As Elliot notes, “avoidance motivation is limited in a structural sense, in that by its very nature it can only lead to the absence of a negative outcome (when effective) or the presence of a negative outcome (when ineffective).” More tellingly (and perhaps depressingly), “thus, avoidance motivation is designed to facilitate surviving, while approach motivation is designed to facilitate thriving.”
    Switching into “survival mode,” even when there’s no