Are You a Rule Breaker?
Breaking the Rules: Part I
In the world of coaching, there are rules.
One of those rules is, “Always remember everything your client ever said.” (A tough one to follow.)
Another one is, “Never talk about yourself.” (I break this one all the time.)
An essential one is, “Confidentiality is sacred. Never reveal information about your clients.” This one I won’t break, and I hope it’s obvious why.
Core values provide us with similar rules.
Let’s say I have a client who has the core value, “Originality,” but she has yet to distinguish it as a core value. She has a certain set of beliefs and behavioral standards based on her view of life, the world and herself through the lens of originality but she sees these as universal truths, instead of just her point of view.
She would have judgments and standards around how “original” people should behave and think. If it is truly a core value but yet undistinguished, she might even disagree with me that this is her core value. She would be completely immersed in these beliefs as facts like a fish immersed in water. It would be so much who she is that she’d be powerfully and subtly pulled by it — like gravity.
An interesting thing about gravity:
Even though we know it’s there, we don’t feel the sensation of being pulled by it. It’s just there acting upon us automatically, an ever-present part of our lives. Core values act upon us very similarly, but the two are different in a couple of ways.
We experience core values individually, not collectively as we do gravity. Gravity affects us all similarly, but each person you know has a unique experience of their core values.
We all know about gravity and what it does —“What goes up must come down” — but we are not nearly as aware of the impact our core values have on us.
Also invisible, core values are even more covert than gravity. Usually, we express core values as unconscious drivers of behavior that are so ubiquitous, we don’t think of them as core values. Instead, our default is to judge people by how they “should be.” What we eventually call that is a “point of view based on our core values.”
There are roughly 100 core values on our list, and if you’re a client of ours, you know what I’m talking about. Out of this list of 100, we ask our clients to identify which 3-5 most accurately define them.
For example, you might think Excellence, Productivity and Freedom are important to you and are things you value, but do they have a pervasive, gravitational effect on you? If they do, they may qualify as core values. Gravity doesn’t explain or ask questions, and neither do core values.
They both consistently pull you, and if you’re not ready for it, they knock you on your butt. We tend to avoid core value violations as regularly as falling down.
Back to rules.
Rules imply all sorts of standards, and our core values serve as our own little secret set of rules for everyone. We tend to impose these rules on others more than we follow the rules others set for us. Some of us love to follow rules like my colleague Martha Lynn, and some of us love to break them, like my colleague Craig Clark.
Whichever one you are, you’re not breaking the rules of gravity nor the rules of core values, because they are both here to stay … no matter how “original” you are.
~ Brett
Fundamental of the Week #20: APPRECIATE AND ACKNOWLEDGE
Regularly let people know you appreciate their qualities. Being acknowledged for a task well done is important; being acknowledged for a character quality is lasting.
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