Understanding Values

What are values, exactly, and why is it worth exploring them?

Senge, Kleiner, and others describe values as deeply rooted views about what we consider worthwhile, shaped by parents, religion, school, friends, and the culture we grow up in. In NLP, values are what matters to a person, what gives them meaning and motivates them. From a systemic perspective, values are constructs whose validity within a given context is silently assumed. So satisfaction can mean something entirely different in a company than it does in a family.

When two people mean the same value, but something different

That silent assumption is exactly what makes things tricky in everyday life. An example from my practice: a couple’s issue was appreciation. Both were convinced they lived that value, and that the other neglected it. When I asked what appreciation actually meant to each of them, we found the sticking point: for her, it meant dinner on the table in the evening and a warm welcome when he came home from work. For him, it meant going straight to the kids’ room after work to relieve her, since she’d handled childcare all day. Both wanted the same thing, appreciation in the relationship, but with different ideas of how it should show up. Once that was clear, we could work out what a shared version of appreciation might look like.

We often assume, without thinking about it, that values have universally shared meanings. But what do they actually mean to you? To find out, it’s worth asking: how would you notice that you, or someone else, is living a particular value?

Where our values come from

We’re handed a basic set of values from our parents’ home, and it changes over the course of a lifetime. If I’m allowed to climb trees as a child and feel how good it is to look down from up there, something like confidence and trust can develop, which later shows up as a willingness to try new things. If instead I have very cautious parents who keep pointing out the dangers of climbing, I might learn caution instead. Values play a role in our behavior all the time, often below the surface, giving us orientation and sometimes making us uncomfortable when they’re violated.