The Life Orientation That Shapes How You Relate to Yourself, Others, and the World
I worked with a senior leader some time ago who was, by every external measure, highly successful. He had built a track record of results, commanded the respect of his peers, and was known for his strategic brilliance. Yet when I started working with him, something was clearly missing. His relationships with his team were polite, but distant. He was amazing at strategy, but he struggled to inspire people towards vision and strategy on a visceral level.
When his business encountered head-winds, his first instinct was to double down on analysis and strategy rather than work with his team. He was not a bad leader – he actually cared a lot about his team. But there was a quality of absence in him – as if he were perpetually managing life from a slightly remote location, rather than fully inhabiting it.
What I was observing was a life orientation. Not a skill deficit. Not a values problem. A fundamental posture towards existence itself.
The Gottman Foundation
The groundbreaking research of John Gottman about what makes relationships last has brought remarkable clarity to what actually determines the long-term stability of intimate relationships. Gottman discovered that relationships are built – and destroyed – not in moments of grand conflict, but in the thousands of small, everyday interactions he calls bids for connection. Imagine your partner mentions an interesting book she has read. How do you respond? Do you put down what you are doing and engage with genuine curiosity? Do you keep reading the newspaper, neither acknowledging nor dismissing her? Or do you tell her the book sounds like a waste of time?
These three reactions represent three archetypal orientations in relationships:
- Turning towards – engaging with the other person with interest and openness
- Turning away – withdrawing, ignoring, remaining absent
- Turning against – attacking, dismissing, or belittling the other person
Gottman’s data on this is unambiguous. Couples who remain together turn towards each other 86% of the time. Those who eventually divorce do so only 33% of the time. The margin between a lasting bond and a broken relationship is not intelligence, compatibility, or even love. It is the repeated, moment-to-moment orientation to turn towards each other that fuels interaction, understanding, and – over time – deep connection and love. It is the fuel that allows love not just to exist, but to endure. Subsequent research on responsiveness confirms this pattern. Across contexts, not only in romantic relationships, the experience of feeling seen, understood, and valued is one of the strongest predictors of relationship quality and trust.
Gottman is careful to note that people do not turn away or turn against their spouse because they are unkind. They usually do so because they are stressed, tired, overloaded, or distracted – and in that state, they miss the cues and respond carelessly. The intention is rarely malicious. But the impact accumulates regardless.
Beyond Relationships: Towards A Philosophy of Life
I believe that Gottman’s three orientations can be used to describe something far more fundamental than relationship dynamics. They describe three basic stances towards existence itself – orientations that determine not only how we relate to others, but also how we relate to ourselves and to reality.
At any moment, you are either moving towards, away from, or against – yourself, others, and the world around you. That choice shapes everything.
Across psychology, neuroscience, and organizational research, the pattern is remarkably consistent: growth, connection, and performance all emerge when we turn towards rather than away or against.
Turning Towards Yourself
The healthy mode of turning towards yourself begins with honest self-attunement. It means listening to your own needs, emotions, and physical signals with the same quality of attention you would offer a valued friend. It means maintaining what we might call a healthy ego – taking genuine care of yourself, without losing your ability to show up for others or take your responsibilities seriously.
Research on self-compassion reinforces this. People who treat themselves with understanding rather than harsh self-criticism demonstrate higher resilience, greater motivation, and more sustainable performance over time.
Turning towards yourself also means self-awareness and radical self-honesty. You see your own inner operating system clearly – your drivers, your defense mechanisms, your blind spots – and you take full ownership of your intentions, actions, and outcomes. When you screw up, you own it – processing the emotions, taking responsibility for the consequences, and extending yourself the self-compassion required to learn and move on.
Turning away from yourself manifests as the perpetual chase for external stimulation and validation – seeking happiness in activities, circumstances, sensations, and achievements rather than in genuine self-knowledge. People who habitually turn away from themselves are not at home in their own inner world. They are always on the move, but actually they are running away from themselves. As a result, they are trapped in a non-growth loop – permanently stimulated, rarely transformed.
In the words of Blaise Pascal, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Turning against yourself is the domain of the internalized inner critic. Many people carry within themselves a relentless voice that tells them they are not enough – not smart enough, not worthy of love, not entitled to rest.
This inner critic is the internalized voice of others who have criticized us earlier in life – parents, teachers, partners, bosses. Turning against means granting that critic the authority to govern your behavior. It shows up as perfectionism, chronic overworking, self-sabotage, and the compulsive drive to push through regardless of cost. It is not ambition. It is self-punishment dressed up as discipline.
Turning Towards Others
Turning towards others means bringing both genuine attentiveness and authentic self-expression into your relationships simultaneously. It means showing empathy and listening deeply – not to evaluate, but to understand.
It means taking a true interest in the goals, emotions, and the inner world of the other person.
But turning towards others is not simply about being warm or receptive. It also requires the willingness to bring your full self into the relationship – to share openly, to speak your own truth, and to engage with conflict or tension rather than avoid it.
The magic of genuine connection happens when two autonomous human beings meet – each bringing both attentiveness and assertiveness into the relationship, each seeing and respecting the other as a whole person rather than as a role, while being willing to engage fully.
This is what the philosopher Martin Buber meant when he distinguished between I-Thou and I-It relationships. In an I-Thou relationship, we encounter the other person as a full human being – not as a problem to be managed, an ally to be leveraged, or an object of desire.
In an I-It relationship, the other person is instrumentalized. They serve a function. They exist as an object of our desire, or a problem to be managed – in short, as a means to an end, relative to our own goals.
Research on high-quality connections in organizations shows that even brief moments of genuine engagement – micro-moments of turning towards – significantly increase performance, learning, and resilience in teams.
Turning towards in relationships also means recognizing when a relationship must end. Genuine respect for the other person’s goals and needs sometimes demands the courage to acknowledge that our needs and goals and the needs and goals of the other person do not intersect anymore. Fruitful relationships must enable both parties to express themselves and grow – when this is not possible, the relationship becomes a prison, rather than a container for growth.
Respect sometimes means letting go.
Turning against others, while it appears as aggression, dominance or excessive criticism, is actually often a defensive strategy – attacking others first so they don’t attack you, criticizing others before being criticized by them. At its extreme, it manifests in narcissistic or dark triad personality structures, where making others small is a psychological mechanism for preserving a fragile sense of superiority and dominance over others.
People with a deeply entrenched turning-against orientation will unconsciously seek complementary profiles – submissive, self-diminishing people who accept being diminished in order to gain a sense of safety and stability. Such profiles confirm the illusion of the dominance of the partner.
Turning away from others is the orientation of people who are either physically distant, or perpetually in their heads – speaking about content and strategy, but consistently failing to show up as full human beings in their interactions. Professional distance becomes a shield. Emotional withdrawal becomes a self-proclaimed virtue.
The result is an existence that others cannot truly penetrate – they may respect you, but they cannot feel you, understand you, or even reach you. And over time, they stop trying.
Sadly, turning away from others as a life orientation is often rooted in a history of neglect or abuse. People who have been neglected or abused in their childhood learn that they need to manage on their own, that other people cannot be trusted. In schema therapy, this is called a mistrust schema. Hence, while the person deeply longs for connection, they continuously withdraw – alienating themselves from the very relationships they need.
Turning Towards Reality
Of the three domains, turning towards reality may be the most demanding. Reality does not negotiate with your preferences. It requires what many spiritual traditions describe as radical acceptance of reality: the willingness to face whatever life puts in front of you – the good, the bad, and the ugly – without flinching, bargaining, or protesting.
Many of us carry an unconscious assumption that the universe owes us success, stability, and happiness. When life delivers hardship, failure, or loss instead, the reflexive response is resistance: Why me? This isn’t fair. This shouldn’t be happening. But this resistance does not change reality. It merely consumes the energy we need to respond to it.
Turning towards reality is powerful precisely because it is the prerequisite for meaningful action. You can only face what you are willing to acknowledge.
And as you develop the practice of facing what life actually puts in front of you – rather than the version of life you wish were true – you grow. You grow in your capacity to tolerate uncertainty and tension. You grow in skill and in judgment. And over time, you grow in the confidence that only comes from having navigated challenge and adversity repeatedly, rather than avoiding it.
Turning away from reality is the territory of avoidance, denial, and delusion. What makes avoidance so insidious is its compounding nature: the more challenges in life you choose not to face, the smaller your circle of influence becomes, and the more threatened and trapped you feel by anything that touches those avoided areas. Avoidance does not protect you from fear. It breeds it. Over time, it quietly erodes both confidence and self-efficacy.
Turning against reality is the trap of the compulsive problem-solver – the person who treats life itself as a problem to be solved. This mode fails to recognize that not everything in life can or should be solved. Some things must be endured. Some things must be waited out. Some tensions must be held rather than resolved. The wisdom to know when to act versus when to hold is not passivity. It is a form of intelligence that the perpetually reactive mind cannot access.
The Choice That Shapes Everything
My client – the analytically brilliant leader I mentioned at the beginning – eventually came to recognize his own turning-away pattern. He had spent decades perfecting his capacity to think and perform, while quietly retreating from the messy, uncontrollable aspects of life: his own emotions, genuine intimacy with others, the uncertainty inherent in leading through complexity and change. What he had avoided for years did not disappear – it simply waited for him to wake up and face it.
The shift did not happen because he learned a new framework or a new skill. It happened when he made a fundamental choice – to stop managing life from a safe, controlled distance and to instead start engaging with life fully. To turn towards himself, others, and reality and face the full intensity and messiness of life.
This is not a one-time decision. It is a life choice that becomes reality through consistent reflective practice – made in the small, repeated moments of everyday life. The moment you choose to put down your phone when your partner speaks. The moment you acknowledge your fear rather than override it. The moment you face a difficult truth about your organisation rather than sanitize it for the next town hall.
The three orientations of turning towards, turning against, or turning away from present an infinite number of daily choices. And across time, the sum of those choices determines the quality of your life, your relationships, and your leadership.
Ask yourself honestly: In which areas of your life are you turning away or turning against – yourself, others, or reality? What is it costing you? And how much richer and more meaningful would life be if you chose to turn towards instead?
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.
Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
ABRAHAM MASLOW
