Finding Your “Toward”: What Happens When the Direction Isn’t Clear Yet?
Finding my own “toward”
by prioritizing FUN!
Finding Your “Toward”: What Happens When the Direction Isn’t Clear Yet?
When I published my essay on Away vs. Toward, a dear friend read the essay and shared that she loved the concept — it landed for her the way good ideas do, with a kind of recognition and relief. But then she said something that stopped me: “I get it. I know what I’m moving away from. I just can’t figure out what I’m moving toward.” I sat with that for a while. She’s not alone in this. In fact, I think it might be the most common place people get stuck — not in the willingness to change, but in the inability to picture what they actually want instead. The Away is loud and clear. The Toward is quiet, or blurry, or hasn’t spoken yet. And for many of us, trying to conjure it through sheer will and journaling and goal-setting just doesn’t work.
Then the very next day I went hiking with another friend, and she talked about this article from Scientific American that landed like a perfectly timed answer. It described emerging research on new therapies for depression and anxiety — ones that flip the traditional approach on its head. Instead of trying to reduce what’s wrong, these treatments focus on amplifying what’s right, however small. Clinical psychologist Michelle Craske of UCLA, whose team has run multiple NIH-funded trials, explained the flaw in the old assumption: “We had always assumed that by reducing negative emotions — anger, fear, anxiety, sadness — the natural consequence would be for positive emotions to rise on their own. And they don’t — well, not reliably.” This is the clinical version of what my friend was describing. Getting rid of the Away does not automatically reveal the Toward. You have to go looking for it — and the way you find it is not through logic. It’s through noticing joy.
The research points toward something both simple and underused: the deliberate practice of identifying positive emotions, no matter how small or fleeting, and then staying with them. Savoring them. The clinical trial results on these positive-affect therapies are striking. One approach, called Augmented Depression Therapy (ADepT), outperformed standard CBT — 80 percent of participants showed reduced symptoms compared to 60 percent in the CBT group, and a year later, 60 percent of those who had improved with ADepT stayed well, compared to 50 percent sustained improvement of the CBT group. The researchers attributed this to one core shift: “choosing to turn toward the positive.” This is not toxic positivity or magical thinking. It’s a trained orientation — practicing the noticing of what lights you up, what makes you feel alive, what you lean into without effort. Those small signals are the raw material of your Toward. They are pointing somewhere, even when the destination isn’t visible yet.
So if you’re in the place my friend described — clear on your Away, foggy on your Toward — here is what the science and the practice both suggest. Don’t try to think your way to a vision. Start smaller. Notice what gives you even a flicker of pleasure today. The fragrance from a kitchen. The exuberance of a dog. A conversation that made you feel seen. The way the light looked on your walk. Stay with those moments a little longer than feels natural. They are data. They are the Toward, in its early, pre-language form — showing up before you have the words for it. Your job right now is not to name your destination.
Your job is to find and follow the joy.
Tres Jiménez is an executive coach, facilitator, and organizational consultant. She works with leaders and teams navigating change — helping them move from stuck to clear, and from clear to forward.
I love these fun photos taken in the creative studio of Shawnalee Anderton.
