58 Leading with NLP
Try the following exercise. It may give you some insights into
your personal value equivalents.
Personal Leadership Exercise 2:
Evidence for Values
How do you judge when your values are fulfilled?
Take one category, work for example, and look at
each of the three values you found in the earlier exercise.
Ask yourself, ‘What has to happen for me to know
this value is being met?’
Think back to a time when you felt that value was met- a ‘reference experience’ for that value. What hap-
pened that gave you that satisfaction?
Now think about what has to happen for you to know
that a value has been disregarded. You probably have a
reference experience for that too.
You cannot cover all the possibilities here, because val-
ues are at a more encompassing level than behaviour.
There could be thousands of possible forms of behav-
iour that could support or undermine your values,
depending on the situation. But you can get an idea of
the sort of actions that support or violate your values.
Then think about the following questions:Are your rules for your values easy or difficult to meet?
Two possibilities here. First, you have many different
rules about what breaches your values and few about
how they are met. Second, you may have only a few
rules, but be extremely sensitive to your values being
breached, like a thermostat that has been set too high.
How far are you in control of your rules?
Are they freely chosen?
Does the evidence you look for come predominantly
from you or from others?