Values – Motivating People to Do the Right Thing. What’s Important to You?
The elicitation of Values in NLP are extremely important. Why? Because everything you do or don’t do in life is based on your Values . Your personal Values are the key to our motivation. They are the key because they are really about what is important to you – not what you like or dislike – what’s important to you.
Before we do anything, we have values there to motivate us or not. By the way you do not have to like the thing that is important to you. It just has to be important. Remember this – it is important. An example, are you motivated to get your taxes done? Yes? Good. Do you like it? No? But you are motivated nevertheless.
So, What’s Important to You?
If you said, “nothing,” then read on.
As we outline in our NLP Master Practitioner training, what is important to you is what is motivating to you, and the description of that is expressed as your values. In spite of what you might have heard there is no such thing as “the right values”. The right values are always right for the person who has them. And they might not be right for somebody else. This is why people are not exactly the same – this is why we all have our own individuality and personality.
Values are those things you move Toward or Away From. Moving Toward is going for what you want. Moving Away From is going away from what you don’t want. (See previous article.)
Recently I had a NLP Coaching client who said to me, “My employees are not motivated when I give them a pep-talk.” I asked him, did you find out what their values are? He said, “Well no, but I know what should be important to them and I use that.
That is what most of us do. We take what should be important to the other person – our employees, our friends, our spouse, our kids – and we motivate them with that. To tell you the truth, that kind of motivation most often fails. It fails because we are motivating them with our values, not their values. While our values are motivating to us, they are just not motivating to someone else. This is all part of the NLP Coaching Master Practitioner training, and we will look at just a small bit of that here.
Now here is the question: how would you motivate someone else to do something that they did not want to do, but was good for them to do? The answer, Values.
If I were managing or coaching people in a business context, I would want to know what was important to them in business. How to do that? Just ask. Say, “In the context of your career, what is important to you. You can expect that you will get an answer, and that answer will consist of a number of words. Let’s say you get the following words:
- COMMITMENT
- RESULTS
- INTEGRITY
- SUCCESS
- RELATIONSHIPS
- MONEY
Once you have the words, you can wait 5 minutes and then just put them into a sentence that makes sense. Feedback the words in a sentence like this: “You know, Tad that because I have so much COMMITMENT to RESULTS and INTEGRITY, I want to tell you about a program that will insure our SUCCESS while improving our ability to advance in our RELATIONSHIPS and making a lot of MONEY.”
It is a simple process. Just feedback the words to the client in the order he gave them to you. (Alternatively you can put them in a Hierarchy of importance and feed them back. That is part of the NLP Coaching Master Practitioner training and it is easy to learn.
If you are interested to know more about this key element of human behavior, motivation and morals just call your NLP Coaching contact and they will assist you to get started. We’re looking forward to share with you everything we know.