The previous chapter was about understanding how coaches can help clients manage their experience of change. Now we turn to the importance of understanding the client’s core values. My colleagues and I have examined 250 biographies of successful adults over the past twenty-five years, searching for the dominant inner anchors that guide people toward realizing their own greatness. We found that most successful leaders and professionals tend to measure their lives with one or more of six basic core values, and most often in some combination:
These six core values compete for our loyalty and passionate commitment throughout the adult journey, and we often shift gears throughout the adult years from familiar, accomplished value areas to new, challenging ones.
Most of those whom we studied combined two or three of these values (rarely more than three) to form an alliance that produced energy and direction for living and sustaining their sense of purpose, chapter by chapter. In a life transition, individuals (or organizations) go through a reevaluation of core values, making a conscious selection based on the reconstructed self at the end of the cocooning process. This choice of values in the middle of a transition generates immense energy and sense of purpose, which join together to prepare persons to evolve as they move on successfully into the creation of new visions and plans. Coaches are most likely to facilitate this process of values clarification, commitment, and action when their clients are sorting emerging core values in a major life transition. Each core value or passion draws on a different aspect of our human abilities, but every adult has the capacity to tap all six passions at various times in the adult journey by way of sustaining vitality and purpose. Too often we lock ourselves into the passions and values of our young adult years and burn out on them during midlife. A better approach is to keep evaluating our priorities and preferences to be sure that at any time in our lives, we are marching to our own drumbeats, empowered by the values we honor in our hearts at any given time.
A coach won’t necessarily know from casual conversation what values a client holds dear. The following questions for a coach to consider will help focus his or her approach to dealing with values:
Often clients are not sure how they feel about values. Following are questions pertaining to each of the six values that a coach could ask a client to consider. With each set of questions, I suggest some goals a coach might reach for in the questioning process.
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Increasing self-confidence or self-esteem | Improving personal performance |
| Developing better relationships | Managing conflict |
| Increasing trust in the future | Embracing the maturation process |
| Developing leadership and spiritual awareness | Wellness planning |
| Financial planning | Developing a career |
| Becoming more introspective | Deepening a sense of self |
| Increasing self-esteem and confidence | Maintaining clear boundaries |
| Becoming more assertive | Using solitude time creatively |
| Spending time alone in nature | Joining a vision quest |
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Promoting personal vision | Reaching goals |
| Getting results | Being dependable |
| Collaborating | Gaining leadership skills |
| Pursuing continuous training | Motivating others |
| Knowing how to make and conduct | Obtaining business skills |
| strategic plans | Learning time management skills |
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Maintaining healthy self-love | Sustaining affective bonds |
| Knowing how to maintain healthy love relationships | Investing in friendships |
| Succeeding in father-mother-helper roles | |
| Sustaining a high level of empathy for others |
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Eliciting intuition | Processing client dreams |
| Future visioning with clients | Indulging in nonsense |
| Laughing | Risk taking |
| Being playful | Allowing spontaneous laughing |
| Being inventive | Creating new forms of things or ideas |
| Being spontaneous | Having fun |
| Finding flow in everyday life |
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Looking for connections and unities | Purpose |
| Inner peace | Profound spirituality |
| Tapping the soulful part of a client (not the ego) |
Basic Questions
Possible Coaching Goals
| Finding meaningful ways to express social caring | Becoming compassionate |
| Wanting to leave a legacy | |
| Becoming concerned beyond oneself | Becoming socially active or politically connected |
| Seeking fairness in treatment of all people |