Life Coaches Blog

Oops! This post seems to have been a long time in coming. I’m going to share a way to find out what’s important to people, their values about specific things, and hopefully answer a question Jeslyn left in her comments.

After reading my previous post on Becoming More Aware of Others (Part 1 is here), you might have gone out to listen and catch the value words that people around you were floating around.

That’s the covert way of doing it, where you simply catch their values without them knowing it and reflect it back to them later.

This is the overt way of doing it, where you simply ask them:

“What’s most important to you about…?”

People have different values for different areas of life. If you’re looking for a TV set, there’d be certain qualities that are important (the features aside), like reliability, best value for money, or good design. Whereas in a relationship, you would look for totally different things, like love, or trust, honesty.

So, a person’s values for career might be different from parenting, and even life in general, although you most often see overlaps and certain values repeating themselves.

Which is important to you will depend on your context. If you’re the person selling the TV, you’d want to ask your client what’s important to them about one. The more you can meet your client’s values, the higher the chance you can close the sale (an important part in Solutions Selling).

The same goes for your girlfriend, your spouse, your parents, your boss, anyone with whom you have an important relationship where you have to fulfill expectations. You’ll find that fulfilling them will become easier when you actually know what they are.

Here are a couple of other questions you can use:

“What’s something that you absolutely must have in a…”

“What’s something that if you didn’t have in a…you wouldn’t even consider it?”

Now, just because you find out someone’s most important values, like love, freedom, or trust, does that mean that you know exactly how to fulfill them? It’s a start, but it’s still not precise. Remember that values are abstract words and not actual processes (I explained this in How to Motivate Specifically Part 1)? So you have to turn the value back into a process that you can fulfill.

And that’s what I’ll cover in the next part.

In the meantime, take this piece of the puzzle and test it out! Remember, mastery comes from mastering the small steps.

P.S. Here’s another tip, but it requires you to really listen. When someone says they need, versus they want something, there’s a subtle but very important difference. People can settle what not getting what they want, but not what they need. Why is that? Because describing something as a need means it’s more important, and therefore higher on their values scale.

So whenever someone tells you “I need…” listen for the juicy and important values that are coming out next!