Eliciting your real values, by Romilla Ready

Category: Coaching Notes

Coaching notes When I was a youngster, my aunt, an English teacher, wrote these words by Shakespeare in my autograph book:

To thine own self be true,

and it must follow, as the night the day,

thou canst not then be false to any man.

I puzzled over this for a long time as I really wasn’t sure what it meant to be true to myself. When I asked for an explanation, my aunt, too, spoke in vague terms of being honest, truthful etc and being good Church going people, we decided it must mean living according to the Christian tenets. But thinking about this retrospectively, this was actually being true to someone else’s truth, which in itself, may or may not be a bad thing.

I had a real epiphany when writing a chapter for Neuro-linguistic Programming for Dummies® which was that one powerful way in which we can be true to ourselves is to know our real values and live according to them. This is particularly important as values, in turn, influence our identity and define who we are. By recognising our true values we can be happy and content in our own skin. Personal experience has shown that when I live according to my true values, the universe conspires to help me with my quest for more clients, a better relationship with my husband or teenager or whatever goal it is I want to achieve.

The reason I have emphasised true values is because our values are created at different stages in our lives and are moulded by outside influences such as culture, family, friends and what we experience in life. Our values can be so deeply held that we are unaware of how they were formed and therefore, have no choice over evaluating whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and whether we might decide to change the way they dictate our behaviour at the most unconscious level.

Just as a major cause of conflict between people can be a difference in values, not knowing what your own values are, or trying to live by others’ values can also create major conflict within you. A client of mine was in a highly paid management role. He had a very busy social life and brilliant prospects. His parents were always telling friends and family about their very successful son. Yet my client hated his job. He felt tired, listless and unfulfilled. Once we had worked out his values, my client was able to design the work he wanted to do. It took him a couple of years to make the transition at a pace with which he was comfortable. He is now happy as Larry, working for himself, training the clientele he wants to have an affect on. He isn’t earning as much and doesn’t have the responsibilities he used to have but as these were not motivating factors in his life he is unaffected by their absence and sadly, his parents are a lot quieter these days.

So having made a case for the importance of knowing your values in finding happiness, success at work or in a relationship, or indeed, in whatever it is you may be seeking, the question is how might you go about finding out what your values are in relation to a particular area of your life?

The best way would be to find a coach trained in eliciting values because they could help you examine whether your values were taking you towards what you really want (towards pleasure) or making you expend energy, unnecessarily, in avoiding what you don’t want (away from pain). In the case of values with ‘away from’ tendencies you could be holding onto past negative emotions and decisions or emotional traumas and the coach could use a number of tools to assist you in overcoming these and releasing the hold your past may be exerting on your present.

Or you could try this exercise.

Think of an area of your life which you want to improve.

Make a list of what is important to you in this context.

You may notice that the first few values will come to mind very quickly. As you sit and think a little more about what is important, another lot of values will surface.

Put all of these into an order of importance.

You will probably find the ones that surfaced later have a greater significance for you.

N.B. If you have trouble rearranging the list, imagine you are in a life raft that is taking on water. You need to lighten the load in the raft and each value is written on a heavy bag. In what order would you throw the bags overboard?

Suppose you end up with the list of values below, which may relate to your job.

Excellence

Recognition

Achievement

Adventure

Financial security

By studying the list, you may decide that financial security is much more important to you than adventure or perhaps that a value needs to be added to the list or that another value isn’t really all that important. The result may look like:

Excellence

Fulfillment ~~Recognition~~

Achievement

Financial security

Adventure

And… if you are unhappy doing the work you are doing, wouldn’t your productivity soar if you could align your personal values to those of the organisation for which you are working?

Romilla Ready is co-author with Kate Burton of Neuro-linguistic Programming for Dummies and principal of Ready Solutions Limited

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