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Values are expressed in concepts such as security, love, honesty, honor, loyalty, reliability, responsibility, and so on. They lie behind our behaviors and serve as internal motivators. If you want to change your behavior but hold values that contradict the desired behavior, you will not succeed. You won’t be able to sustain your new behavior for long.
Only when your values support your behavior will you succeed in creating lasting change in your life. Because our values also form the basis of our life rules.
Overview
- What are values?
- Values in Relationships
- Values Analysis
- Values Hierarchy
- Changing My Values Hierarchy
What Are Values?
Definition: Usually formulated as abstract nominalizations, values are of great significance for individuals, companies, and society as a whole. Values drive and guide our behavior and serve as criteria for evaluating our actions. They form an ideal framework that directs our activities and judgments toward achieving desired outcomes. Values must be experienced and negotiated in a concrete context of interaction, as they form the foundation for our judgments about what makes life worthwhile.
Every person uses their personal values to move toward their goals and results. The feeling of satisfaction and wholeness arises from the alignment between current behavior and personal values. The people you love or befriend, the way you raise your children, the political direction you support, how you perform your job, the clothes you wear, the food you eat – all of this is influenced by the individual values you claim for yourself.
In our podcast, we explain why values are important and what kinds of values exist. On our NLP blog, you can find Podcast Episode 27: Values and Value Determination. Enjoy listening!
Additionally, our Online Academy offers a 75-minute recording of a seminar on this topic, which you can watch in full right away. Simply click the “Watch Video” button to learn more.
Types
Social Values:
Core values on which a society is built (norms).
Examples: Security, Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Progress
Ethical Values:
Everyone has their own ethical values that guide their actions and judgments.
Examples: Success, Respect, Honesty, Health
With regard to motivational factors, values can be categorized as follows:
- Change: Freedom (thought, action), stimulation (emotional, intellectual), etc.
- Personal Reinforcement: Success, power, material wealth, etc.
- Social Reinforcement: Care, justice, tolerance, love, etc.
- Preservation: Conformity, tradition, environmental protection, health, etc.
Origin
In addition to ethics, values also play an important role in sociology, education, psychology, and theology. Values are often not rational but emotional, instinctive, aesthetic, moral, or religious in nature. Through our values, we judge what is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, true or false, beautiful or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate.
Since values are deeply personal and emotionally charged principles of orientation and motivation that include our beliefs, their development follows the same phases as the acquisition of belief systems:
After a period of “unconscious modeling” through introjection and identification with primary caregivers, a time of extrafamilial socialization follows — through school, peer groups, and work. Finally, values can also be integrated through conscious modeling.
The sources of our value development are: our family of origin, our friends, the community we grow up in, social institutions (school, church, clubs, etc.), the work environment, and the economic, social, and political conditions. Values are thus deeply connected with our identity, beliefs, and attitudes.
Values are among the most unconscious parts of our personality. They are principles, standards, or qualities that individuals or groups regard as valuable or desirable.
Values appear in close connection with beliefs, attitudes, and meta-programs of a person. Terms like honor, responsibility, friendship, love, and creativity can be values and criteria that serve as orientation and sorting principles for situations and actions in every context. Perceived circumstances and behaviors are filtered through our five senses, and our actions are aligned to achieve desired values. Different individuals or institutions may prioritize different values. Even belief itself can manifest as a value — for instance, faith in religion or a particular deity can also be a value.
Values in Relationships
Reflecting on your personal values and recognizing which ones are most important to you helps make life more meaningful. It can explain many conflicts as well as many decisions and needs. Clarifying values in a relationship can be especially helpful at the beginning of a new partnership, strengthening the foundation and enhancing everyday life. Clarity about your own values — and your partner’s — creates a strong and lasting bond.
Carlos Salgado explains in his online seminar "Values in Relationships" how essential values are in relationships. You can immediately watch the 90-minute seminar recording — just click the image below:
Values Analysis
What are our priorities, and where do we draw the line?
People, social relationships, time, place, activities, nature, or circumstances vary in importance at different times and stages of life. For example, when getting married or having a child, a shift in values and evaluation criteria usually occurs.
It is perfectly natural that in various life situations and through changes, value conflicts arise. These can be stimulating and interesting — but sometimes they simply block you.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming offers communicators different methods to identify and transform a hierarchy of personal and conflicting values.
Decision-making is based on values and systems, and is usually unconscious. However, for an attentive communicator, this can be detected through the use of modal operators of necessity:
- "I have to do this"
- "I absolutely need this"
- "I can’t do otherwise than follow through"
Depending on the context and the desired outcome, values and criteria can come into conflict — for example, when one value or criterion must be placed above or below another.
Example: “I need to take better care of my health and relax more”
vs. “It’s important for me to finish this project by the end of the month.”
What Are My Values?
Values and criteria can be discovered by paying attention to the nominalizations a person uses, or by asking simple questions such as:
- "What motivated you to take your current job?"
- "What is most important to you in your social relationships?"
- "What do you consider particularly valuable in your life?"
- "Why are you doing this?"
Individual Work
- Which projects, plans, activities, or leisure pursuits have you undertaken in the past 2–5 years? Make a list, identify the associated values, and assign percentage proportions.
- Which projects, plans, or activities would you like to pursue in the next 2–5 years? Make a list, identify the corresponding values, and assign percentage proportions.
(Alternatively or additionally to 1 and 2, you can ask: “How do you spend your time?” “What do you spend your money on?” “What do you invest your energy in?” The more precisely these questions are answered, the more one learns about real preferences — and indirectly, about guiding values. What a person consciously says about their values will always be a mix of rationalization, idealized self-image, and some accurate self-observation.)
Partner Work
- Discover the values by asking questions like:
Why do you do that?
What do you get from it?
For what purpose do you do it?
What do you give yourself through it? - From these observations, create a hierarchy of personal values.
Values Hierarchy
Discover your own hierarchy of values. What is most important to you in life? Which words have the strongest meaning for you?
Your set of values is, of course, highly individual; the following list is intended only to give you inspiration.
| Love | Success | Creativity |
| Selflessness | Understanding | Sexuality |
| Attractiveness | Respect | Obedience |
| Admiration | Honesty | Integrity |
| Health | Professionalism | Generosity |
| Freedom | Adventure | Influence |
| Power | Independence | Ambition |
| Passion | Fun | Trust |
To make it easier to rank your values, I will show you with a few examples how to order them in a hierarchy. This is just an example — your values are uniquely yours!
Example
The values might include: Passion, Imagination, Freedom, Growth, Adventure, Success, and Health.
Now I ask myself, which value is more important to me.
Is passion or imagination more important to me? Passion.
Is passion more important than freedom? Yes.
What is more important: passion or growth? ...
So I compare all values one by one with passion. If there is no value more important than passion, passion comes first. If there is one that is more important, it moves ahead and is then compared with all others. For instance, if success is more important than passion, then success becomes number one. By doing this consistently, you will quickly establish your top values in order of priority.
Difficulties in Ranking
At certain points, you might find it difficult to rank your values.
Example: Is freedom more important to me than adventure? When I experience adventure, I feel free; without freedom, I can’t experience adventure.
Suggestion: If you get stuck, ask yourself, “What does freedom mean to me? What does adventure mean to me?”
Freedom might mean being able to do whatever I want. Adventure might mean facing exciting challenges. Now you can compare more clearly: What is more important — doing whatever I want, or facing exciting challenges? Facing challenges — adventure is therefore a higher value.
If you still cannot distinguish clearly, ask yourself: “What would happen if one of these values disappeared?” Could I imagine a life without adventure? It would be boring, I’d feel lifeless and unmotivated. How about a life without freedom? I’d be dependent. Which is worse — dependency or lifelessness? Lifelessness. So adventure is more important than freedom. Would I rather live without freedom but have adventure, or have freedom but no adventure?
My Values Hierarchy
1.
2.
3.
etc.
Questioning Each Value
Now go through your list again and explore what each value truly means to you.
Ask yourself: What does love/success/passion mean to me?
Example: Love means to me going through thick and thin with another person. What does it mean to go through thick and thin? Being able to trust that person. Keep asking, because often what a word means to us is very different from what another person assumes it means.
Changing My Values Hierarchy
- Identify a hierarchy of personal values.
- Decide on changing the hierarchy: work with your partner to determine which personal value they would like to shift in importance within their hierarchy.
- Change the hierarchy: identify the submodalities, meta programs, strategies, and representation systems of the most important value and the one to be changed.
Use the submodalities of the most important value and transfer them to the value to be changed. Check whether the meta programs and strategies have already shifted. If not, adjust them to support this process. - Create a new hierarchy: ask your communication partner to reorder their personal values. How would you arrange them now? Where does the changed value stand?
- Test and Future Pace.
Values and Life Development
- Identify a hierarchy of personal values
Ask your communication partner to name the personal values in their life: “What do you consider particularly valuable in your life?” Create a hierarchy of these personal values using evaluation criteria: “Which of these values is most important, less important, and least important to you?” - Structure of the most important value and evidence criterion
Elicit the strategy or evidence for the most important value: “How do you know this is your most important value?” “How is this value represented in your thinking?” - Life history of the value
Anchor the evidence (image, sound, voice, etc.) and the related feeling for the value, and let all associated experiences and memories resurface. - Generalization, Belief System, Meta Programs
Review life experiences related to the value and uncover the structure:
“What generalizations do you draw from these examples?”
“What is most important in your perception — people, self, goals, activities, etc.? (Meta Programs)”
“What do you think about the world from this perspective?”
“What do you think about yourself in these contexts?” - Future Pace
Transfer the most important value into the future:
“How will you shape your life if you maintain this value and act in alignment with it?”
Being aware of your values and their hierarchy — or consciously shaping them — is a foundation for changing your life rules, which also helps you redesign your life.