Change Your Values

Our values are the things that drive our lives. They are the basic things like, recognition, fame, comfort, fun, wealth, adventure, love, honesty, security, satisfaction, challenge, and affection. Important stuff. They define our basic personality. But, they are often created by chance while growing up and are rarely consciously chosen. As a result, they are not necessarily the best values for what we want or need in our lives.

Some are more important than others. If we had to choose between love and fame, our choice would be controlled by which we considered the most important. This would make an enormous difference in our behaviour.

For example, if one person has comfort as their most important value and another has adventure, who is most likely to enjoy a holiday bungee jumping and who would prefer to spend it on the beach?

We all know of people that are very driven to make money or have to have an intimate relationship in their lives for them to feel fulfilled.

Wouldn't it be useful if you could change the relative importance of these. For example, if you were never motivated to seek out adventure and thought that life was very dull. It would be a neat trick if you could simply swap around security and adventure.

Interestingly, the following technique does exactly that. It is taken from Nuero Linguistic Programming practice. Please use it with caution and think through any changes first. You don't want to be surprised by any hidden consequences.

  • Step 1 List your values. Ask yourself “What is most important to in my…..X?” where X could be:
  • Career
  • Finances
  • Relationships
  • Family
  • Personal Development
  • Health

    • Then ask, “Given everything that I have already listed, what else is important to me?” Continue to ask yourself this question until you have a list between 10 to 20 different reasons.

  • Step 2 Number each value on the left from 1 (the most important) to 10 or 20 or whatever number you came up with.

  • Step 3 Now, on the right number each value in the order you would like them to be. If money is in your list do not put it in the number one position, this can be detrimental as money is gained from motivation to do other things not by its possession alone. For example, if you are considering career and comfort is way up near the top you may want to move it down the list as comfort is not a very motivating value in this context.

  • Step 4 Develop a subconscious representation of each one. These will probably be images. If you find it hard to make visual images then see the exercises on the Visualization page.

  • Step 5 Consider all of these images at the same time. These subconscious images will connect in a line of some kind from the most important to the least important. They may also change in some other way, for example, by going from dark to bright or from dull to vividly coloured.

  • Step 6 You can re-arrange your values one-by-one into your preferred order moving and changing the images in your mind.

    • This is quite a powerful technique and should be used with caution as you can make big changes. Always make sure that you consider any negative aspects to changes you might want to make. It is quite a tricky technique so if in any doubt then seek out the services of a trained NLP practitioner, preferably someone that comes recommended.

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