Working within a coaching context, we often refer to values as being the key components of our neurology which assist in the shaping of our personality. A great deal of importance is often attributed to personal values and rightly so, as values govern all of the behaviour we produce. Values are often referred to and quoted as the reasons for our actions, the justification for our produced behaviour. Do we really understand what values are and how we can employ them as the foundation of change?
Values are what we move towards and away from. We are willing to spend time and resources on our values, to achieve them and to maintain them. They provide that very special kinaesthetic movement towards motivation to act and then serve as judge and jury after the fact. They operate largely at the unconscious level and are the most powerful drivers of our true purpose as individuals.
Our core values form the basis of our personality. They are created at the unconscious level and their installation may be as simple as watching the interactions of our parents before we reached the age of seven years old, our imprint period and later in life by the unconscious modelling of our environmental interactions. Core values are the most pervasive and they have the greatest impact on us because they exist in a realm outside of our conscious awareness.
Values are powerful drivers of our personality and behaviour and are therefore quite clearly key contributors to the success of the coaching process and the longevity of change.
The elicitation of core values is a simple and quite often lengthy process. Values are most usefully elicited in a highly contextualised manner to avoid hierarchies of values, which only exist in certain elements of the whole which is life, becoming cross contextualised and therefore conflicted. It is crucial to get past the more conscious, surface values in order to successfully elicit the core values. If the coach only elicits ten values and then stops, the most powerful values which reside at the unconscious level will remain unnoticed. It takes time to discover the core values and they often reside within motivation strategies and over threshold boundaries.
Visibility of the values hierarchy is often a moment of realisation for the coachee. Previously unexplained sources of incongruence, internal conflict, misalignment and behaviour instantly become very clear. A values hierarchy which is in conflict with the values system of the current environment feels very uncomfortable with no obvious reason as to why the discomfort exists. It is fortunate that our values hierarchy, even at the core level, can be modified if it would better suit the environment we choose to be in.
As a coach, assisting a client to change their values carries with it a degree of responsibility and the ecology of the change must be carefully and extensively explored with the coachee. With both parties having total understanding of the consequences of change, then values can be changed at the unconscious level by considering how the client represents each value and then carefully modifying the building blocks which encode each representation. The simplicity and speed of this change process means that we can completely alter a behaviour or sense of conflict in a particular context very easily with incredible outcomes.
Complementing our core values are a set of values which constantly redefine themselves and evolve over time. Dr. Claire Graves postulated that there are seven levels of values which are most significant in the modern world. Others have since postulated a further seven levels, however, the majority of people in the world today are functioning within the first seven.
The Graves system of development states that our values are in constant flux in response to the changing conditions of our environment. Values levels shape the lens through which we view the world and are defined by our ability to adapt to diverse conditions. As environmental conditions evolve, they become more complex and in turn create the development of more complex thinking, our values level. We all have internal access to all of the values levels and we will have one which is predominant right now. During the process we consider the client’s current values level and assist them to awaken the thinking of the next level. It is a challenge to understand the client's values system which drive the present behaviour and their current level of values development.
The consideration of values is essential to any well-formed coaching relationship and also within any business or organisation. An organisation with values which are congruently aligned across the whole workforce and management hierarchy is an organisation capable of producing excellence with happy, contented and motivated people.
The value of values is undeniable, they are the differences which make a difference.
For an assessment send us an email to arrange a teleconference appointment. The process and the relationship is strictly confidential. The client might use a nick name if he/she requires absolute anonymity!
