Accelerate Your Purpose – Values and Beliefs

By Teresa Peters

There are two types of people in this world. The one who goes out and gets what they want. They set goals and believe anything is achievable or possible if they put their mind to it. The other type of person meanders through life and reacts to their circle of influence (see my article on the circle on the CEO Business Accelerator page). They stay in their comfort zone and plod along. If they’ve told themselves they’ll never be confident, they won’t be. Eliciting our values enables us to design our perfect roadmap.

If you set a goal and ask yourself: ‘If I could have this goal right now, how much on a scale of 1-10 would I want it?’ and you find that your answer elicits a lower score out of 10, then it could be that you aren’t aligning your life goals with your values, or that you need to reframe your beliefs.

WHAT ARE VALUES?

Your values represent your core beliefs. Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work. They determine your priorities and deep down they are probably the measures you use to tell if your life is turning out the way you want it to. 

A good coach helps to build that clarity around values and to work with people to help them to really understand what their needs are and to gain that clarity in order for them to set goals. A big part of the work that coaches do with clients is about exploration and illuminating that awareness, before you can move into setting goals.

Of course, there are common values among people, however the first thing to remember are the following:

1. Values are not what we like but what is important to us
2. Every person has values
3. Every individual’s set of values is different from another individual’s
4. There are no right or wrong values
5. Each value has a different meaning to each of us

Values are really crucial in coaching because in order to set those goals or to make decisions, you need to know what’s important to you and what you need in order to feel fulfilled. That’s where your coach comes in to help. Frequently, we’ll set goals and make decisions based on everything but our values, so things such as what we think is expected of us. We are surrounded by people who have expectations of us, and often we set goals in order to meet their expectations. 

When entrepreneurs or teams come to me for coaching, they often want to know: ‘What’s my purpose? How do I find meaning in my life?’

The impact that increased personal awareness has on your business can be ten-fold. Once you elicit your values and limiting beliefs with a highly trained coach who explores with you on a deeper level, there’s no stopping you!

A VALUES ELICITATION EXERCISE

You can try this exercise at home. Grab a pen and paper. To elicit your values, choose a topic then ask yourself: ‘What’s important to me about my business/health/relationship/career?’

Keep repeating the question over and over again until you exhaust your list. Take each word on your list, then ask: ‘What actions should I take in order to fulfil this for me?’

WHAT ARE BELIEFS?

Essentially, beliefs are rules that we live our life by. They are things that we perceive as facts, and they are things that will either empower us or liberate us. Beliefs are stories we tell ourselves within our minds. If you have an empowering belief, this will generate positive behaviours and if you have a belief that limits you, you're going to generate behaviours that limit you.

In coaching, we identify beliefs with our clients and then work with them to shift beliefs that limit them to beliefs that empower them. And in turn, what you get is the transformation of their behaviour.

Working with a coach about beliefs helps you to raise awareness, and it’s through this awareness that you get more choices. Through raising awareness, you also get to challenge long held beliefs that no longer serve you. That leads to changes in behaviour and changes in your decision making, enabling you to achieve much greater things.

As humans we are destined to perpetually develop and there is no end to human perfection. However, if we align our lives and work with our empowering beliefs and core values, we can find our purpose and feel truly fulfilled.

Teresa Peters is accredited at Senior Practitioner level with the EMCC, as an Executive Coach and Personal Performance Coach. She is also highly trained in managing teams effectively in a virtual world. She empowers Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and Teams to find clarity, focus and transformation, both professionally and personally, using a solution- focused approach and DiSC profiling.

Accelerator Coaching offers a range of online and face to face support services using an empathic, human centred approach combined with Teresa's corporate experience, 20 years in sales development and business acumen. She also cofounded another successful business where they've published 32 recipe books. She is an ethical coach who has 500+ hours coaching individuals and she has regular coaching herself. You can find out more about Teresa and her brilliant Accelerator Coaching here.