If you got a chance to read last week’s blog post, then you’ve hopefully spent some time recently thinking about isolating your core values, so that you can determine your unique “Why”. Now it’s time to take that exercise and apply it to your clients.
When you sit down to meet with a client, it can be useful to explore their core values with them. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: How can you possibly deliver any kind of meaningful advice, solutions or strategies, until you understand the client? And when we say, “understand the client”, we’re not talking about a surface-level understanding of what they like and don’t like; we mean that you need to understand them on a very deep level, and get at the intrinsic parts of who they are.
The trick with all of this is that people often don’t even understand their own core values. They think they do things for a certain reason, when in reality there is a motivator at play that they’re not even aware of.
The good news is that you can navigate all of this with a very simple exercise. It’s the same exercise we suggested that you undertake in our last blog. Have the client think back to peak experiences in both their personal and professional lives. These experiences should be times when they really feel like they “got it right”. Times when they felt extremely focused, unstoppable, and experienced a tremendous sense of fulfillment. They likely felt like that because they were honouring their core values in some way.
Those experiences, those times when they felt like they “really got it right”—that’s the good stuff. That’s where you can find their core values.