We’re all doing some sort of service for somebody else at the end of the day. But is it not completely and totally selfish of you to not share your talents and your true abilities? I mean let’s face it if you’re a teacher, you’re doing a job that’s changing people’s lives.
So here is an NLP technique that I think would be useful for teachers and education support staff. It’s called a Values Elicitation.
What this does is this elicits from your mind the values the things that you value most in a specific context. In this context we’re going to be looking at your career or your job. This is something that’s useful for you to do whether you are currently thinking about
starting up something on your own, doing something that you love for a living or whether this is just something you want to do with the job that you’re currently in and perhaps happy in or even unhappy in. This is going to tell you what is most important to you in
the context of your career or job and you can use this process to work on other contexts in your life such as relationships, such as health and fitness. Doesn’t matter what it is what it’s going to do is to help you to find out what are the most important things to you
and then we’re going to put them in order so that you find out in which order of importance they occur.
This is useful for us to do because we can start to discover whether there are any values that are working against each other that could be causing you some conflict and difficulty in achieving those values. It also allows us to find out if there are any what we
call ‘away from’ values which are things that look as if they’re important for you to be working towards but actually there’s some negative undertones to them and it means that instead of working towards the thing that you want to have and what you want to
achieve you end up more focussed on what you want to avoid and you can understand how that would be detrimental.
So, this is the question to get us started. The question is: what is most important to you in the context of your job or career? Now what you need to do at this stage is to grab a pen and paper and to start to jot down a list of different things. What’s also important
here is that the things that you write down need to be to do with the way they make you feel. They need to be what we call States and not stuff. So, stuff would be something for example like money. Money is a solid thing. It’s stuff that you could pick up and you could put in a wheelbarrow if you wanted to. What we’re interested in actually is the way that money makes you feel so interested in the state that that creates for you.
When you get to the stage were you have no more ideas to add to the list, there’s a question you can ask yourself which will help you to elicit even more values and usually these are the deeper level values that are way more important than the ones that you
thought of at the very beginning.
And the way that you elicit these is by asking the question: if you had all of those that you’ve already listed, is there anything that would make you want to leave? The thing that would have you leave doesn’t go on your values list, but the thing that would fix it
and have you stay, does.
Now here’s the next step. The next step is to get that list into some sort of order of importance. This step is a little bit fiddly and it can take a little while to work through particularly if you have an enormously long list. So, the place to start is where your gut
feeling takes you.
You need to do some cross referencing just to ensure that first value that you’ve picked out is definitely the first value that needs to go on your list. That it really is the one of the highest importance. So, this is the way that you do it. You take the one that you’ve picked and you start at the top of your list and you say if I had this and not the one on the top of my list would that be okay and if the answer is yes then at that stage, feeling that one that you’ve picked out is your top one, is definitely still your top one. You pick all of the others in the same way until you have reordered your list.
The final question is: Is what you’re doing now meeting all of those values?
People Building in an NLP and personal development training company for teachers and professionals working in education.
For more information about our courses designed to reduce stress in teachers and avoid ‘teacher burn-out’, contact us on 0345 3192 666
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
