Values are a deep set of unconscious filters that let us know whether something is important or not. They are literally deciding if you should be motivated or disinterested in something. As in the case of metaprograms, you will need tools that elicit values from the unconscious, where they are programmed in.
On this 4 CD or MP3 set, you will learn about how values influence whole cultures and communities, outside of conscious awareness. Then you will learn how to find individual values in people and use simple conversational tools to get the most important information you can possibly have about them!
One of the great Hypnotherapists of all time, Milton Erickson used to ALWAYS find out what peoples values were before doing any kind of intervention with them. Whether you are in sales, in an HR environment or a therapist, how can you work with someone if you don’t know their deepest motivations? As values are a deeper unconscious filter even than beliefs, you must be able to find them out to have consistent results in your work or personally.
When someone says they ‘know’ you, do they mean that they remember memories of certain things that happened and how you reacted, or did they mean they understand your deepest motivation? When you learn about someone’s deepest motivation, you truly know him or her.
This CD set also allows you to understand a group set of values that a company or organisation may have, and therefore allow you to work with them inside this knowledge, gaining rapport at every stage.
Your presentations will improve once you find how much power there is in knowing the values systems of a group. Values also link in with metaprograms personality traits (the metaprograms sit inside the values).
This training is one of my favourites as it underpins all the techniques you may learn.
Before you journey into how to use values as you know them (money, relationships,honesty etc), you will learn about values through the Spiral Dynamics system.
Spiral Dynamics© is a way of thinking about the complexities of human existence and understanding the order and chaos in human affairs. It explains deep forces in human nature which shape our values, and lays out both a pattern and trajectory for change. SD will help you gain a greater understanding of how people, organizations and cultures function from the inside out – and will empower you to help them work, learn, and live better.
More about Spiral Dynamics
People think in different ways. A brother and sister, husband and wife, manager and employee, corporation and stakeholder, agency and client might have very different world views and values. People in adjoining cubicles or families living right next door to each other sometimes don’t seem to be dwelling in the same psychological neighborhood. Colleagues in an organization have wide ranging ideas about vision, mission, and purpose; most are doing their best. Countries sharing one planet often seem to be in totally different worlds with their policies while talking of peace, prosperity and freedom. Why?
Spiral Dynamics is concerned with why we cooperate, collaborate and come to conflict over differences in values and the deeper value systems that form them. It’s a map to the emerging nature of human nature. SD is a point of view and a way of thinking that provides a way to chart differences in leadership, learning, management, social structures, economics – and virtually every other area where human thinking has an impact. Moreover, it suggests how to cope with those differences more effectively.
“Spiral” captures how people develop diverse worldviews and the characteristics of those views. It’s a metaphor for the emergent, cyclical double-helix form envisioned by Dr. Clare W. Graves, the scholar whose elegant work forms the foundation of SD.
“Dynamics” explores the process of human emergence and how living systems evolve, grow and change. Graves called his a bio-psycho-social systems view; all four of those elements is a process.
Together, Spiral with Dynamics provides a framework for tracking the evolution of worldviews and a scaffold on which to stand while analyzing situations and planning the most appropriate actions. It allows us both to differentiate the things that make us diverse and to integrate the things which draw us together, thereby creating a fuller picture of who we, Homo sapiens, are as active participants in our world.
More about memes and Vmemes
English biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and many other works, proposed the idea of “memes” – self-replicating packages of information that propagate themselves across the ecologies of mind in a pattern of reproduction similar to viruses. The parallel structure in biology is the gene. In chaos theory, it is the fractal.
As Dawkins conceives of them, memes reproduce themselves; they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them; they mutate; they persist; and they defend themselves against each other. Memes evolve to fill the empty niches in their local environments, which are, in this case, the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their natural hosts, namely, us.
Memes are transmitted in conversation, via the mass media, in literature, religion and politics. They take the form of simple concepts and complicated social movements. The Internet is a meme transmitter on a grand scale; the entertainment industry is another.
Intriguing as they are, memes are subject to a still deeper set of organizing principles which attract and repel them. Memes float in the flow of evolving human consciousness – and there’s a broader pattern to the currents and eddies in this stream of conceptions and ideas. One tool for mapping that pattern is Spiral Dynamics. In the book, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, the authors, Chris Cowan and Don Beck, coined the term vMEME to help make sense of the migration of memes and their cultural impact.
The vMEME concept is an effort to show the connection between the ideas carried in memes and the underlying value systems (thus, the v), thinking structures, worldviews, coping strategies, or Gravesian levels of psychological existence. Cowan and Beck created the term because the then-popular label, “value system,” is so easily confused with values as contents – the beliefs and ethical frames that set priorities and express moralities. Values are formed and shaped by the thinking in underlying value systems (valuing systems is better). vMeme was an effort to bypass that confusion.
The systems in Spiral Dynamics can be thought of as vMEMEs – value-system or meme attractors – that frame life priorities, worldviews and vistas, and form the context for the individual memes that arise and circulate within them. These awakening vMEMEs establish the shape of deep mindsets and worldviews to which memes attach, or from which they are repelled. They are the scaffolding on which the constructs of the mind are built, the Velcro-like hooks to which the loops of memes attach and bond. We stand on our platforms of vMEMEs to observe the world and report the “reality” as we see it. Advertisers shoot memes at us, hoping they will be sticky and hold our attention.
An understanding of the deep vMEMEs helps explain why some memes that arise “take” and others drift into oblivion. A meme that does not fit the active vMEME is often ignored, sometimes fought like an invader. When a meme does fit the active vMEME, it becomes part of the memetic package and endures. It can even influence the milieu enough to cause a shift in the underlying vMEME as part of the spiral process to more complex and elaborated conceptions of being. The meme’s lifespan is a function of its own power and the forces at work in the vMEME.
At this level, Spiral Dynamics offers the memetic discussion something really quite new to think about. Just note that memes and vMEMEs are not at all the same thing, though many people seem unable to differentiate the two constructs, a confusion which diminishes both. Indeed, some of the ideas and terminology from SD theory such as the color code have been turned into memes, themselves.
Terry Elston is a qualified Trainer of Spiral Dynamics through Chris Cowan and Natasha Todorovic.
