Your fundamental life values are powerful driving forces in your life. Your values are often create by chance while growing up and are not necessarily the most empowering at the current stage of your life. Values are such things as recognition, fame, comfort, fun, wealth, adventure and love; the prizes that you hold most highly in life.

 

Values form a hierarchy from the most to the least important and our whole behaviour is influenced by them. Your most important values at the top of our hierarchy have the most impact on your life. For example, if one person has comfort as their most important value and another has adventure, who is most likely to enjoy a bungee jumping and who would prefer to spend it on the beach?

 

For many people when it comes to finances and career, their values for wealth and money are not high enough in their hierarchy of values. However, the order of things can be changed by using a Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique.

• 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 that I have all the values already listed, what else is important to me?” Continue to ask yourself this question until you have a list of 10 to 20 values.
• 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 value. These will probably be images. If you find it hard to make visual images then see the exercises on the mental imagery 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.