Whether conscious of it or not, your unconscious or conscious set of beliefs and values affects or directs many, if not most, of your actions, behaviors, statements, and choices.
Knowing your personal beliefs and values can help you comprehend and control their impact on your mentoring and coaching interactions.
Suppose you look up a list of values online. In that case, you can formally define your own, consider its possible value and impact, and be ready to deal with any scenario where your ideals and those of the learner conflict or are similar.
Making the unseen visible for your clients means assisting them in changing their viewpoints and comprehending their underlying principles. You make sure they can never return to the personalities they had before starting to work for you.
What Shapes Beliefs And Values?
To comprehend your client’s thoughts, actions, and decisions, you must first understand the human brain. As a result of our experiences, the brain changes continuously. And the experiences we have had have an instant effect on how we feel in certain situations.
We create new neurons or build new neural connections whenever we experience anything new, which causes physical changes in the brain. No two people share the same ideas, habits, values, or personalities in the same way that no two people have the same childhood, diet, schooling, environment, or culture.
As a coach, being mindful of this helps you to understand the diversity of each of your clients and the relevance of grasping their different life experiences. It’s not just about what occurs to your client during an event but also about what they believe happens.
Making decisions that help us feel better depends on how we comprehend our experiences. To live in a certain situation, we create the way we see the world.
Our brain will continue to prioritize one view of the world over others if it finds that this vision helps us to interact with our surroundings and live. Additionally, the underlying neuronal route and connections get stronger each time our brain picks that experience, further strengthening it.
In this approach, we constantly think about what has worked to forecast what will work now or in the future. This series of events and results shape our beliefs and impact our decision-making.
What Exactly Is a Belief?
Your client’s adoption of something as true despite insufficient evidence or proof is known as a belief. In other words, it is how your client believes they should be.
Their views impact how they behave, feel, and interpret the world. A “meaning-making machine,” the human brain always makes new beliefs.
Your beliefs are something you create but also shape who you are. Most of our beliefs are picked up through our parents, friends, families, and culture while we are young, consciously or unconsciously. We cannot realize most of them as they were largely formed during our developmental years. We also spend a significant portion of our life looking for experiences that validate our views.
To help your client see how their behavior results from a deeply held belief about something, your major responsibility as a coach is to go deeper.
Beliefs Can Benefit Or Harm Your Clients
Although beliefs are meant to protect us, not all of them help us succeed. There are two main categories of beliefs:
Limiting Beliefs
These attitudes prevent your clients from expressing themselves completely.
Consider this: Your client witnessed his parents’ financial struggles as a young child. They both put up a lot of effort but got nowhere. As an adult, he can come to believe that despite his best efforts, he will always have financial difficulties.
This limiting thought often prevents people from moving forward.
Empowering Beliefs
These beliefs support your clients in achieving their highest potential.
Consider this: Your client’s father may have been very commanding, raising his voice whenever she attempted to provide an opinion. She came to believe that “opinions matter,” As an entrepreneur, she constantly encouraged her staff to speak up without holding back.
One of the most effective things a coach can do for a client is to help them discover their limiting beliefs and swap them out for more empowering ones.
Three-Step Method To Integrate A New Belief
Keep in mind that beliefs are not absolute truths. It is your client’s interpretation of reality based on a personal experience.
Uncover the roots of the belief.
Most of the time, changing begins with awareness. Your clients’ minds become more conscious when you help them identify a certain thought pattern limiting them.
By contradicting their beliefs, you open up fresh possibilities for them. They become more aware when you delve more into the roots of this way of thinking, whether from their parenting, society, formative years of experience, etc.
Reframe the belief so that the stranger seems known.
After increasing awareness, your next goal is to assist your clients in transforming their mental barriers into liberating ones. Now, our brain prefers safety and familiarity. Your clients will put off changing their current beliefs because of this.
You can help them break out of their comfort zone by making their problems familiar. You can do this by giving them strong self-affirmations, changing their surroundings, or taking repeated action.
Integrate the new concept.
You must incorporate your client’s new learning in order to prevent them from reverting to their old habits. Here is where you help them visualize their stark change and then help them create a procedure that will enable them to habitually act in line with their new belief.
Using these three steps, you can radically change how your clients think about and conduct their lives.
What Do Values Actually Mean?
Values differ from beliefs in that values reflect what your clients aspire to be. Your clients’ core values are what matter most to them. They are fundamental to them; thus, they use them as the basis for their judgment and decision-making.
Like beliefs, values are developed early on depending on personal experiences, seeing others and their environments, and other external factors. Your clients experience balance, joy, and peace when they make decisions based on their values, enabling them to lead lives consistent with who they are.
Know Your Client’s Personal Values
You provide your clients with a road map to a more fulfilling life as a coach when you assist them in identifying their values. Three sub-kinds can be used to extensively classify values:
- Personal Values help you understand who your client is, what they want, and how and what they actually think about the way they do.
- Societal Values: These influence interpersonal relationships and social ties.
- Universal Values: This has an impact on how they view spirituality, cultural norms, and how they view life in general.
The Personal Values Assessment (PVA) is a clear and straightforward tool for identifying your client’s basic values and beliefs. The Values of Your Clients Can Be Discovered With These 6 Questions
- What characteristics have been most vital to your success?
- How do you want to be regarded once you leave a space?
- What do you enjoy most about your work?
- What do you provide others that make them feel most fulfilled?
- Of what do you feel the proudest?
- What are you good at, according to others?
The majority of the clients you work with will often have difficulty making significant life decisions. Discovering their values will help them in living a life based on what they actually want rather than what it should be.
Why should coaches consider their values?
Coaches always bring their own firmly held views, beliefs, and values in interactions with team members. It’s a piece of the “baggage” that all humans have with them at all times. Coaches are just human, and carrying baggage is not necessarily a problem unless the viewpoints, beliefs, and values associated with it are hidden and have an impact on how an individual sees and acts with others.
What steps can we take to lessen the chance that our rooted preconceptions, attitudes, and biases will have a negative effect on the coaching relationships we have with our clients and, eventually, the level of care we provide? Consider the following ideas, which we might put into practice as part of our professional growth:
Understanding ourselves” in accordance with our ideals
We won’t understand the nature of our subconscious biases and preconceptions or how they affect our judgments and opinions if we don’t know what drives us and the values that guide our way of life. We may perform a “values exercise” using basic Values Ranking Cards to get around this.
It can be easier for us to identify the values and beliefs that shape our life when these underlying meanings are brought to light. It’s also worthwhile to take a personality test (like the MBTI or Drivers Questionnaire) since it can offer insightful information into specific tendencies and habits in how we live our inner and outer lives.
Bringing the subject of values up in our coach supervision meetings
There are many reasons why coaches should be under supervision. Still, one of the most essential is the supervisor’s power to reflect on how the coach’s values may impact the relationships with the practitioners.
We should never be reluctant to bring up this subject. It’s a priceless chance to gain more self-knowledge from a dependable source of wisdom whose single goal is to develop us.
Conclusion
Coaches cannot afford to be unaware of the specific viewpoints, beliefs, and values that shape their attitudes and behaviors. They must be conscious of these factors to the best of their abilities. If we don’t take steps to ensure this won’t be the case, our inborn traits and judgments are influenced by our assumptions and attitudes, which could damage our relationships with specific team members.
Every coaching session is a chance to remind your client of what’s really important to them (their values) and what’s getting in the way of their goals (their limiting beliefs). Therefore, when your client brings up a concern in your next coaching session, go deeper rather than just addressing the symptoms.
FAQs
What is a coaching approach to exploring values and beliefs in clients?
A coaching approach to exploring values and beliefs in clients involves helping individuals identify and clarify their personal values and beliefs and how these shape their attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making.
Why is it important to explore values and beliefs in coaching?
Exploring values and beliefs is important in coaching because it can help individuals gain greater self-awareness, identify areas of personal and professional growth, and align their goals and actions with their core values and beliefs.
What are some techniques coaches can use to explore values and beliefs in clients?
Some techniques coaches can use to explore values and beliefs in clients include asking open-ended questions, active listening, reflection exercises, goal-setting, and values clarification exercises.
How can exploring values and beliefs benefit clients?
Exploring values and beliefs can benefit clients by helping them gain clarity and focus, increase motivation and commitment, make more aligned and purposeful decisions, and experience greater personal and professional satisfaction.
What are some common challenges that can arise when exploring values and beliefs with clients?
Some common challenges that can arise when exploring values and beliefs with clients include resistance or defensiveness, conflicting values and beliefs, unclear or vague values, and difficulty translating values into action.
What is the role of the coach in supporting clients to explore values and beliefs?
The role of the coach in supporting clients to explore values and beliefs is to create a safe and non-judgmental space for exploration, ask powerful questions to elicit self-reflection, provide guidance and support, and help clients develop an action plan to align their values and beliefs with their goals and actions.
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“Vision, strategy, and inspiration – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of “TheLeaderboy” dedicated to leadership and personal development. As a self-taught practitioner, I have been studying the principles of effective leadership for the past decade and my passion lies in sharing my insights with others. My mission is to empower individuals to become better leader