Yes, this is what the gurus tell you to do. I did it.

But I missed one of the biggest questions – are my values conducive to running a business and making money?

Bugger… I never thought of that!

Before I started coaching my values were:

• Fun
• Challenging
• Excitement

Money was nowhere to be found.

My business was a little bit pants.

How can we have a successful business if money isn’t part of the values?

So, with my coach I changed my values around. I added in money at my number 3 value, and guess what’s happened since?

To work with me as your coach, illicit your values and work out if your values are conducive to doing what you want, book your free discovery call.

a guest blog post by Joanna Taylor  MHS (Acc)

Joanna Taylor is a Clinical Hypnotherapist, Trainee Psychotherapist and Certified Trainer of NLP.  She provides courses and in-house training in hypnosis, communication skills and stress management, in addition to one-to-one coaching and therapy for clients suffering from stress, anxiety, phobias and low self-esteem.

How many of us find that, however much we love them, prolonged close proximity to visiting relatives can make us a little… well… fractious?  Perhaps an offer of help in the kitchen from Great Aunt Flo results in something being prepared not quite the way you would have liked it to be (“I like my vegetables so that they just melt in the mouth, dear!”), or a nephew wants to play a video game on the television when all you want is peace and quiet in front of the fire.  The fact is, we all have different ideas of what makes our leisure time perfect for us, and often fail to understand another’s behaviour (“…and he answered his mobile at the table during supper!”)  This is largely due to our own individual values, which are unique and personal to each of us.  I will never put anything down on the enamel top of my Aga, for example, in case I scratch it, but I have a close friend who slides pans off the hobs to keep warm on hers – and she doesn’t mind the scratches.

Our values are what is important to us; more than any other element in our personal and professional lives, values are the basis for, and have the most effect on, our behaviours and any changes that are made.  Our values drive our true purpose as human beings; they are those things in which we are willing to invest time, energy and resources to achieve or avoid.  Our values are, as the name suggests, an evaluation filter, operating differently in different contexts, and are used to provide motivation before we take action (“I’ve eaten far too much over the holiday; I need to go on a diet.”), and also for after-the-fact evaluation; judgements about our actions and those of other people (“Well, I wouldn’t let any child of mine behave like that!”).

Our values are the way we judge good and bad, right and wrong, and they remain for the most part unconscious; we don’t usually think about our values at all, until somebody else treads on them…

In our professional lives, too, we will all have our own, individual values.  What is important to you about your job?  When I ask this in a training session, I will receive a different list from everybody – working with people, making a difference, having fun, money, security and so on.  And your practice as a whole will have its own values; for example, at our practice we have certain values around time.  It’s really important to us that we spend plenty of time with our patients and that, as far as is possible, we run to time – we want our patients to know that we take time to listen to them and we appreciate that their time is just as important as our own.  It’s therefore important to us that our staff share those particular values – so if, for example, we were looking for an associate, we would not want somebody who took only five minutes to do a check-up and who constantly ran late.  When everyone’s values are aligned within a practice, you know you can move forward together to achieve your vision for the future, because what is important to you is also important to them.

One of the main reasons why people leave their existing job is because they don’t “feel valued”.  In other words, their own values are being violated by somebody else’s, or their values are not in alignment with those of their place of work.  Do you know what’s important to your staff or your colleagues about their work?  Have you ever asked them?

Just as in our personal life, a conflict of values at work can cause conflict between individuals.  In NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) we adopt the philosophy that everybody lives in their own “Model of the World” – that is, they have their own beliefs, values and opinions that shape their view of reality.  We all have the right to hold our own personal beliefs and values, so it can help to diffuse conflict by accepting this philosophy and respecting another person’s “Model of the World”.  We might not agree with it, but we can have total respect for their right to believe differently from ourselves.

Do you know what is really important to your patients?  Sometimes their ideas might be radically different from yours because we all have our own opinion as to what is important to us.  How useful would it be if you could discover a patient’s values just through conversation?  When you understand what is important to your patient, it means that you know exactly how to satisfy their needs, and your patient knows you are really listening to them.  You may consider that a patient with discoloured teeth would certainly be interested in a whitening treatment, but is that their value, or your own?  Respect their “Model of the World” – and in order to do that, you first need to find out what that is…

Contact details:   joanna@joanna-taylor.co.uk

01723 859147

www.joanna-taylor.co.uk

Let’s discuss shall we.

Now, first things first – and to put my discussion in context – yes I am an NLP Master Practitioner, however I also have a Master’s Degree in Business so I’m well used to the reductionist model of breaking everything down to measurable, repeatable and finite levels and the rigours of testing for scientific proof.

One of the main arguments against NLP is the fact that many of the techniques have no scientific proof, for example:

1. Eye patterns and their link to the representational systems of Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic and Internal Self talk (Auditory Digital). Many studies have failed to find any empirical link between eye patterns and  representational systems, including Beale (1981), Poffel and Cross (1985) & Cody (1983)
2. The link between the words and the representational system of the speaker. Again studies have failed to find any empirical link between what people say and the way they represent the world, including Faulkender (1985) and Lange (1981).

I could go on… but you get my point!

NLP Where’s The Evidence?

So how come NLP is so popular with seemingly little scientific evidence?

The reason (in my opinion) is the paradigm in which we live. We live in the paradigm of scientific reductionism, we want to reduce EVERYTHING around us to a set of scientific and repeatable experiments. And if you are thinking ‘Yeh, that’s right, that’s the only way’ then you are probably thinking that because you live in this paradigm too!

However, what this approach fails to do is to understand the reasoning behind NLP plus, and here’s the big one… they are researching the wrong thing!

NLP is not really interested in why things work… all it wants to do is to understand how the client does something and then fix it.

One way that NLP is used is in performance enhancement and success management in life and business. Now, one can look at this claim (that NLP helps in success) and decide to break it down for research, we could choose to research many things such as:

1. What is the link between NLP mental rehearsal visualisation and success. What is the process and is it scientifically verified?
2. When an NLP practitioner uses Strategies, do these exist, are they repeatable and scientific?
3. If a practitioner elicits a clients Values, can they really be re-sequenced and is the entire process repeatable and empirically verifiable?

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever bought a car, and then noticed that there are actually loads of other cars on the road that are the same make and colour as yours? Yep, I thought so! Why did this happen? Can it be broken down in to scientific steps? Do you care, or is the fact that this phenomenon works all that really matters – proving why it works is not really especially useful – interesting perhaps, but even if we can’t prove why it works the phenomenon still exists all the same.

NLP is the same. If a client is asked to focus on what they want, by using visualisation techniques – does it matter that it can’t be researched and proved? Or is the fact that the client is now able to go out and spot opportunities that were always there but missed before the really important thing? Much like the car, bringing it in to your awareness, no matter how this happened is what’s important… so it’s the result that validates the process, not the ability to scientifically prove it.

The same goes with values. Whether or not we can prove that we can move values around e.g. to make ‘money’ more important is irrelevant. What matters is that when we go through the process the client is more focused on ‘money’ or ‘fun’ or ‘love’ (or what ever other value has been moved) and so does more in their life to attain more of this.

For me the proof is in the pudding, using NLP with clients and on myself has proved massively valuable in helping us achieve success and other things in life. We’re able to spot opportunities to be happy, be successful or anything else that otherwise we would have missed. We’re able to understand another persons point of view and avoid arguments better, we’re able to negotiate better and we can now see a clear focus of what we are trying to achieve in life and business and can identify the paths we need to take to achieve it.

In these examples, NLP has absolutely worked and continues to work – why, or how, or can we prove it? Can we verify how we moved our values, can we verify how we have changed a strategy or the process for removing a limiting belief… Who cares, so long as the practitioner is able to assist the client in getting results then that’s all that really matters!

NLP is more than just a series of techniques, it’s an attitude of continual learning, creativity and of the use of mind’s natural ability to do amazing things… whether it can be studied or not!

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Or what about people that don’t have great business because they fear the failure so much?

The problem in life and business is that we get what we focus on. Our unconscious minds find it supremely difficult to process negatives… don’t think of purple trees… see what I mean!

The result of this, and indeed the practical application is that people often think they are focusing on success, or wealth or good relationships… but in fact they are actually focusing on not being poor, or not being a failure or not being in a bad relationship.

If the focus is on what you do NOT want to be then that is where the motivation is, right at that end of the spectrum, then as you walk through life backwards towards the goal, all the while focusing on what you don’t want and moving away from it, there comes a point where you are so far away from the motivation that you bounce right back again to poverty, or failure… right back to the motivation so you can be motivated NOT to be poor all over again… starting to see a pattern in your life now huh?

 So do you feel like you are walking through life backwards, focusing on moving away from what you don’t want as fast as possible?

Often this is down to a limiting decision, perhaps you decided at some point that failure was not for you, or perhaps you decided that everything in life was unfair and doomed to failure. These are rarely conscious decisions, but they are decisions none the less, that are often made very early in life – typically under 7 years old so getting to the root cause of the problem is the only way that it will be sorted and resolved.

In NLP we would use 3 basic tools to get to the issue:

• Understanding which areas in your life you are moving away from – this is done using a ‘Values Analysis’
• Getting to the Root Cause of the problem – this is done using a technique called ‘Root Cause’
• Resolving either the emotion or limiting decision with Time Line Therapy