How Values Can Inform and Change Beliefs

Word Count 884 reading time 3.5 minutes
Sometimes it’s easy to think that changing someone’s beliefs requires a big formal process.

I was out visiting some old familiar places in Silicon Valley last week.  After living there 25
years you make some interesting acquaintances.

Meeting an old pal for coffee one day he introduced me to a friend of his whose business had really been devastated by the economic downturn.

I’ll call him Gil. He had had several businesses and this was the third time that just as he was on the cusp of success it had been taken away.

This piqued my interest as while once is an occurrence, twice may be coincidence, but three times?  That’s not a charm, that’s a pattern. In today’s world the economic mess is sufficient to explain such an occurrence, but this had also happened to him in normal economic times.

So after chatting a bit and establishing some good consistent rapport I started asking a few questions that otherwise might have seemed very personal.  After a while he dropped a comment that “it was really true, it seemed, that if it wasn’t hard, you really hadn’t earned it.”

At first glance a belief like that could seem sufficient explanation for his dilemma but it didn’t seem to fully explain his situation.  So I inquired further and caught a comment “if you haven’t really earned it, you don’t really deserve it and so you didn’t get to keep it.”

This is what was happening for him. Every time he was on the cusp of success, of having it get easy, “something would happen” and it would go away.

A simple and seemingly obvious response would be to suggest changing his belief to the direct opposite, something like “If you can get it, you deserve it.”  However, that would have left a conflict with his strongly held belief in the morality of how he obtained financial independence, of having to deserve it.

One approach would be to go after changing that value, but aside from having no contract to do change work with him, I’m rather reluctant to mess with values that are part of an individual’s identity.

So I started exploring on a different tack, using the values elicitation process I wrote about here a few weeks ago.  I had noticed an interesting watch he wore, and I asked him if he had purchased it or if it was a gift.

It turns out it was a gift from his wife of fifteen years who “has always had faith in me and been true through thick and thin.”  There was a slight smile and a softening around the eyes that for a Silicon Valley executive was a huge signal indicating the deep importance of this relationship.

“Wear it often?” I asked; “all the time; it’s my favorite” he replied.  I asked what else he liked about it and he replied it was very well engineered, elegantly designed, simple to operate and thus really reliable.

So taking this into account I asked him if a business was also well engineered, elegantly designed to be simple to operate and thus really reliable would that mean it was a deserving business?  “Well of course it would be.”

“So it would be deserving of long term success even if it was easy and simple to operate?”  I asked.  Well, now I was seeing an expression usually labeled puzzlement on his face, as if it was so obvious the question was foolish.

“Of course.  Those are exactly the businesses that deserve to thrive and succeed for the long term.  Those are the ones that make it no matter the economic environment.  It’s exactly what Bill and Dave built.”  (Founders of HP, a Silicon Valley icon, a definition of long term success)

“Well, I suppose someone who built such a business would deserve all the benefits such a creation, wouldn’t they?”

“Totally” he replied.

So I switched back to the watch “Isn’t it interesting how a gift from someone we love who really knows us and shows us what’s important every time you look at it?”  A head nod as he was looking again at his watch, and a quick “Oh, look at the time – I didn’t realize how long we’ve been chatting” and I was satisfied.

What satisfied me?  I’d established in his mind a link between looking at his watch and the new frame on his deeply held values:  that a business that met those criteria was deserving of long term success and the builder of such a business deserved to enjoy the benefits thereof..  I’d moved the criterion of “deserving” from an obstacle to a solution.

And who would argue that a business that was well engineered, elegantly designed, simple to operate and thus really reliable didn’t deserve long term success?

In glancing at his watch while nodding his head in time with my hastily worded suggestion there was a good indication of agreement with that suggestion.  I doubt he’d remember our conversation even a week later.  Yet every time he looks at his watch there’ll be that subliminal suggestion to remember his criteria for success and how deserving he is of it.

My pal who’d introduced us and knows something about NLP had a big grin on his face.
Tom Dotz
 
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