By: Shantanu Das Sharma, Sr. Associate Editor, ICN Group
Quick recap of what we have covered in Part 34
Discovering Your ‘Towards Values’
My Towards Values
Means Values and Ends Values
Ranking Your ‘Towards Values’
My Towards Values (Ranked)
Eliciting Your ‘Away-From’ Values
My Away-From Values
Ranking Your Away-From Values
Away-From Values (Ranked)
Values Definition
Two Boys: Very Different Personalities
Define Your Towards and Away-From Values
Towards Values Definition (What must happen)
Away-From Values Definition (What must happen)
Analyze Your Values… They Reveal the Inner You
Do Your Values Sabotage Your Success?
KOLKATA: More importantly, I want you to see if your values have sabotaged your success up to now. Is the way you have ranked your values or the way you have defined them caused you any conflict? Are they misaligned with your goals? Do they help you to achieve your ultimate dreams? If there are certain areas in your life where you have consistently not got the desired results, it can almost always be traced back to a values conflict. Let me give you a few examples I have come across.
The Ambitious Career Counselor Who Had Conflicting Values
I once worked with a career counselor (let’s call him Prasun) who had big dreams and grand plans about setting up his own business. It was a partnership. However, Prasun just could not bring in much business to his current partnership and felt frustrated with himself.
When I analyzed Prasun’s values, I found that his top towards value was ‘success’ (definition: when I achieve my goals). That explained why he wanted to do it so badly. Unfortunately, his top away-from values were ‘rejection’ and ‘failure’. He felt rejected whenever someone rejected his ideas or his services. He also defined failure as ‘when I do not reach my goals’. Do you see the big conflict here? It’s no wonder Prasun could not reach his goals. On the one hand, he wanted to succeed by bringing in more business to achieve his sales targets. On the other hand, he never took any action to solicit for business or come up with creative ideas because he was so fearful of rejection and failure. So he felt stuck and frustrated all the time. Until Prasun changes his values to align with his goals, he will never get what he wants.
Conflict of Values in the Career Counselor
| Towards Value Definition | Away-From Value Definition |
| Success Reach my goal | Rejection When people reject my ideas |
| Failure When I don’t reach my goals |
Spiritual Growth and Money Do Not Mix?
Then there was a woman who came to my NLP+ Lifestyle Coaching and learned that what was holding her back were her two top towards values that seemed to be in conflict. Her number one value was spiritual growth. Her number two value was money. So, every time she worked hard for money, she felt guilty because she felt that making money would make her less spiritual. In the end, she felt totally unfulfilled.
Love and Freedom Make for Conflict
Another guy discovered why his relationships never lasted for very long. His top value was love (he felt love when he was in a steady relationship). On the other hand, he had freedom as one of his top two value (freedom to him meant not answering to anyone and being free to do his own thing). Whenever he was single, he would be driven to settle down in a steady relationship (driven by the need to feel loved). The moment he was in a steady relationship, he felt like he had no freedom, so he would unconsciously sabotage his relationship and become single again, earning his freedom. As a result, his relationships would always break down within three months or so. The way this guy set up these two top values just tore him apart. As you can see, it is not just how we rank our values that determine whether they empower or limit us. More importantly,
it is how we have learnt to define these values.
Happiness Means Everything Going Her Way!
I had another woman in my NLP+ Lifestyle Coaching who appeared to be clearly unhappy with her life. She constantly wore a frown and had a pattern of finding problems with the people around her. When it came to the session on values, she ranked happiness as a number one value. You would think she wanted to be happy all the time. However, her definition of happiness was ‘everything must go exactly the way I want’. It is no wonder she felt and acted in such a miserable way. She never felt happy! And that unhappiness prevented her from taking the action she needed to build relationships with people and work towards her goals.
Do You Have Rejection As One of Your Away-From Values?
Again, the way you define rejection could empower you or limit you. I believe that most people would do anything to avoid rejection. The difference is that people who take action towards their goals tend to define rejection very differently. If you feel rejected the moment someone rejects your idea, it is likely you will never dare to take much risks in life. You would avoid venturing out, coming up with new ideas and developing new clients for fear of feeling rejected.
Do you think George W Bush, President of the United States fears rejection? I’m sure he does. But to him he may only feel rejected if more than 50% of the people around him reject his ideas!
Even though half of America voted against Bush and half the world hates him for attacking Iraq, he still went ahead because it was difficult for him to feel rejection. It doesn’t bother him that millions disagree with his policy; he goes ahead and does it anyway. Another potential conflict could be the way you define failure. If failure is a top away-from value, then it may prevent you from setting goals and taking action. What must happen for you to feel ‘failure?’ Most people feel like a failure when they do not reach their goal. As a result, they dare not set goals and take action as they risk feeling what they want to avoid the most, failure! Their motto is, ‘if I don’t try anything, I cannot fail.’
Change Your Values, Change Your Life!
If you find that your life values are not arranged or defined in a way that will propel you to achieve your goals, then surely it’s time to take charge and re-design them! When you change a person’s values, you immediately change the way they make decisions, the way they behave and ultimately, their future. For example, if you took a person whose number one value was ‘security’ and swapped it with his number seven value of ‘freedom’, what would happen? You would literally change his entire decision-making process and the direction of his life. From being satisfied in a comfortable corporate job that gives him perceived ‘security’, he may suddenly decide to become self-employed and start his own business!
We must remember that the values we have today are not the result of conscious choices we have made in the past. You never consciously chose the values that you have today. They came about because of conditioning from your environment and the significant people in your life. If you grew up in a family where love and connection were valued a lot more than success and achievement, you would tend to unconsciously adopt those values as your own. We adopt values in order to fit in and be accepted by the people around us. Your values may have also come from your friends, teachers, colleagues and society at large. The problem is when we have values that conflict with each other or are not useful in helping us live an exceptional and fulfilling life. Right now, you have the choice to start designing the values that will drive you to get the best out of yourself.
So, I want you to think, ‘How should my values be arranged so that they propel me to achieve my life’s goals?’ ‘How can I define my values in such a way that they empower me to take action?’ Grab your pen and invest as much time as you need to complete the next exercise.
My New Values
| Towards values Definition | Away-From Values Definition |
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
For example, if success is currently a top value and health is not even on the list, it probably explains why you will always procrastinate going to the gym, citing no time as the main reason. If you realize that you need the energy and health to really get what you want, you may want to put health as one of your top values.
If success or money is currently a top value, while family is somewhere at the bottom, I wouldn’t be wrong if I guess that even if it’s your wife’s birthday, you would still be at the office telling her, ‘Darling, we will celebrate it another time’. Or, you’d be getting your secretary to buy her a big present and card, instead of doing it yourself. Well, if you really want to have an enduring and more fulfilling relationship, you will have to change. You will have to shift family to a higher priority, even above money and work.
Clinton Delayed Entering the Presidential Race…
Because of Daughter Chelsea (His Top Value at the Time) Bill Clinton would have made his bid for the presidency four years earlier than he had if he and Hillary had not decided that their precious daughter Chelsea was still too young to be exposed to the ugliness of politics and also she needed them to be around. As governor, Clinton even had a little desk for Chelsea in his office, so he could have her within ear-shot. Clinton made his choice with a great deal of deliberation and perhaps even reluctance at the time but their reward was seeing their daughter blossom into a fine young woman with all the right values.
Now we go back to the career counselor who was facing a lot of conflicts because of his conflicting top priority values. Remember, his number one towards value (success) conflicted with his number two away-from value (rejection); well, learning from his experience, you may want to shift ‘rejection’ down your list of away-from values.
Change Your Definition of Your Values… and You’ll Make Major Changes in Your Life
Besides changing the order of your values, changing the way you define your values will also create a major impact in your life. If your current definition of ‘failure’ is ‘not reaching my goals’, you may want to re-define it such that it propels you rather than stops you from taking action. I have discovered that successful people tend to define failure as ‘giving up’. In other words, if they don’t reach their goal, they don’t feel like a failure. To them, as long as they keep working towards it and not give up, they have not failed. Because of this, they keep on moving towards their goal. Would you find that a useful way to define failure? As for me, my definition of failure is ‘not giving my best’. And because I hate to fail (it is one of my top away-from values), I am always driven to give my very best!
Now, for the woman who initially defined happiness as ‘everything must go exactly the way I expect’, and who ended up feeling miserable, she too found it more useful to re-define happiness.
When she re-defined happiness as ‘as long as I live according to my principles’, everything changed for her. It was amazing. The instant she made that decision and wrote it down, it seemed as if a great burden had been lifted from her. She started to glow and smile and even remarked that she felt lighter and even happy. That is the power of a value change!
If rejection is an away-from value for you, you may also want to change what it means to feel rejected. We said earlier that if you are the sort of person who feels rejected at the slightest sign of ‘No’, then you would not take action, for fear that if you got even one rejection, you would feel depressed. You may now decide that you have been too thin-skinned. You must be more thick-skinned. To feel rejected, more than 50% of people must say no to you, or reject your ideas. If you did that, it would really be difficult for you to feel rejected. This definition of ‘rejection’ will not prevent you from taking action.
Are ‘Away-From’ Values Useful?
Some people have asked me, ‘if we can make a decision to change our values, then why not choose to throw away all our ‘away from’ values if they create negative emotions we want to avoid. Well, you must understand that ‘away-from’ values are very powerful in propelling you towards your goals as well. In fact, more people are motivated by a need to avoid pain than to obtain pleasure. For example, some people may be motivated to work overtime for fear of losing their job than for a desire to get a promotion.
For example, if your top away-from value was failure (defined as giving up), this would motivate you to keep taking action until you succeed! Again, my definition of failure is ‘not doing my best’ and this away-from value really drives me to give my very best, all the time. So ‘failure’ as an away-from value can be a very powerful motivating force provided you define it in an empowering way! If you have an ‘away-from’ value of boredom, it could drive you to constantly make things happen, start new businesses and create new ideas! Sometimes, removing an ‘away-from’ value can be disastrous! One of my top ‘away-from’ value was ‘uncertainty’. As a result, every time there was an uncertainty about the end result, like a new project, I would keep worrying that something would go wrong. Initially, I thought that it was not a very useful pattern to have since I hated to be in a worried state. What I didn’t realize was that this intense fear of uncertainty was what got me to keep planning to the last detail…until I was certain that I had planned for everything. And that was why my projects ran smoothly. When I removed my away-from value of ‘uncertainty’, I stopped worrying and adopted a ‘everything will be fine’ attitude. As a result, I stopped planning and sure enough, things started screwing up! I quickly re-designed ‘uncertainty’ back into my values list. A valuable lesson had been learnt.
Create a Propulsion Effect
One of the most powerful ways is to design your values such that you create both a pull and a push effect (propulsion) towards your goals. It’s like putting food on one end and putting heat on the other end that drives the amoeba in one direction. How do you do this? Simply by aligning your top towards and away-from values so they push you in a single direction. Here are some possible value designs that can propel you forward.
| Towards | Away-From |
| Success (move towards my goals) | Failure (not attempting or giving up) |
| Achievement | Boredom
Procrastination |
How to Lock In Your New Values!
Now that you have consciously re-designed your values, how do you install them so they become a new pattern of thinking and behavior for you? First, you must understand that our life values change whenever we go through significant emotional experiences, both negative and positive. How do you think having a baby would affect most people’s values? For most, love and family would suddenly become a lot higher on their values list. I had a friend who, after suffering a heart attack and almost losing his life, experienced a shift of values! Suddenly, ‘health’ and ‘love’ became top priorities. So the way to integrate our new values into our nervous system is to supercharge them emotionally. There are four steps to take to integrate your values.
They are…First you must consciously commit to living by these new values. Once you start consciously making new decisions based on your new values, your mind will start to integrate them at an unconscious level and it will form a new pattern of thinking and living. So, don’t wait to change your values only when you experience a significant emotional event – it may be too late. Not everyone recovers from a heart attack or cancer.
1) Commit to Your New Values
The first step is to make a personal commitment (and you know what that means, don’t you?) and a public commitment. Go to at least five people you know well and tell them about your commitment to living by these new values. When you put yourself on the line, you will always follow through.
Write down at least five people you will make this commitment to.
a
b
c
d
e
2) Be In Constant Touch with Your New Values
Put your values in front of your desk or in your organizer, so you will be reminded of them daily.
3) Emotionally Charge Your Values
We must remember that our values were formed by neural patterns that were conditioned in our nervous system as a result of emotional experiences. Therefore, to lock in a new value, you need to associate a lot of emotions into it. We generate these emotions by using the power of visualization and sub modalities. Use the power of visualization to mentally rehearse making decisions and behaving according to your new values. Then, associate positive emotions towards this new value. For example, say you wanted to place ‘health’ as a top value in your life. Visualize the new decisions you will make and your behaviors as a result of this new value. In your mind’s eye, imagine yourself eating the right foods and exercising regularly. See yourself making the new decision of investing the time to take care of your body when faced with so many priorities. What’s more important is to visualize and associate all the positive benefits of doing this. See how much more energy you will have, how great you will look and how confident you feel. Use the power of sub modalities to intensify your mental experiences so that they become new powerful neuro-associations in your mind.
4) Live by Your New Values
Begin by making new decisions and taking new actions based on these new values. For example, if you have shifted health to be a top value, above success; make sure that when the choice arises, you will take time to go to the gym or go for that run, before getting your work done. As you keep making these new conscious choices, your brain will unconsciously begin to integrate your new values. Let’s say that you currently feel rejected every time someone does not agree with your ideas. And you set a new definition such that you only feel rejected when ‘more than ten people in a row do not agree’. The next time, someone rejects you, reframe the experience as a stepping stone to an acceptance. As you keep doing this, your mind will start realizing that you do not associate ‘painful emotions’ to a one, two or even three-time rejection, not anymore.
(I facilitate Thought Leaders, Change Makers; Professionals & Business Owners translate NLP concepts into actions to achieve and elicit personal excellence. I conduct NLP Lifestyle Coaching Certification programs for individuals, corporate and celebrity clients. In the next article, you will learn about How To Design Your Destiny. And after that you will come to know in subsequent articles, how you can utilize concepts of NLP+ in all walks of your life to replicate the success blueprint of a winner mindset to win through life.
Shantanu Das Sharma, Creator of the concept NLP Lifestyle Coaching with NLP+ and Founder of Neuromind Leadership Academy is an Amazon #1 Best Selling Author, NLP+ Lifestyle Master Trainer & Coach, First Certified Social Panorama Consultant in Eastern India, Clean Language Facilitator & Strategic Interventionist. To explore about NLP+ Lifestyle Coaching you may visit http://shantanudassharma.com/nlp-lifestyle-coaching/
