Why do you sometimes resist doing things you know are good for you — and compulsively pursue others you know are destructive? Why do two people with identical goals sometimes take completely different paths? Why do you feel most alive in some situations and hollow in others? The answers to all these questions live in the same place: your values hierarchy.
In NLP, values elicitation is the process of identifying the unconscious hierarchy of criteria that drives your behaviour, filters your perception of the world, and determines what constitutes success, satisfaction, or failure for you specifically. It is one of the most powerful and under-utilised NLP processes — and one of the most transformative when done properly.
Values vs. Goals: A Critical Distinction
Goals are targets — specific outcomes you want to achieve. Values are the criteria by which you evaluate whether those outcomes (and every other experience in life) are worthwhile. You can achieve every goal you've set and still feel empty if your goals weren't aligned with your actual values. Conversely, a life that expresses your core values — even with modest external achievements — tends to generate a deep, sustainable sense of meaning and satisfaction. Values elicitation gives you the map of what truly matters to you.
Two Types of Values
Toward Values (Moving Toward)
These are the experiences, states, or outcomes you want to move toward — freedom, love, connection, achievement, creativity, security, adventure. They pull you forward and generate positive motivation when activated. When you're living in alignment with your toward values, you feel energised, purposeful and fulfilled.
Away-From Values (Moving Away From)
These are the experiences you want to avoid — failure, rejection, humiliation, conflict, poverty, boredom. They push you into action through negative motivation: avoiding the discomfort of violation. Away-from values are often more powerful short-term motivators than toward values — but they generate anxiety, avoidance behaviour, and chronic stress when over-dominant in a person's hierarchy.
A healthy values hierarchy typically has a balance of both, with toward values providing the primary direction and away-from values serving as safety checks. Problems arise when away-from values dominate (fear-based motivation) or when values conflict with each other (internal conflict producing procrastination, self-sabotage, or inexplicable resistance).
The Values Elicitation Process: Step by Step
This process works for any life domain — career, relationships, health, creativity, financial life. Choose one domain to work with at a time for maximum clarity.
Ask the Core Elicitation Question
For the domain you've chosen, ask yourself: "What is most important to me about [domain]?" Write down whatever comes immediately, without editing or judging. Then ask again: "What else is important to me about this?" Keep going until you have 8–15 responses. Don't stop at the obvious or socially acceptable answers — keep asking until you reach the values that feel genuinely charged, that light something up (or create genuine unease) when you say them out loud.
Common pitfall: confusing strategies (specific actions or outcomes) with values. "Having my own business" is a strategy. "Freedom" or "autonomy" might be the underlying value. When you notice a strategy, ask: "And if I had that, what would it give me that's important?" This drilling down reveals the actual value beneath the surface want.
Establish the Hierarchy
Once you have your raw list, you need to establish the priority order — because values don't carry equal weight, and understanding which ones dominate is the most important step. Take any two values from your list and ask: "If I could only have one of these but not the other, which would I choose?" This comparison reveals the true hierarchy, which often surprises people — they discover that what they say is most important to them and what actually is are frequently different.
Work through all your values this way until you have a ranked list. The top 3–5 values are your "core values" — the ones that, when violated, create the most distress, and when honoured, create the most satisfaction. These are your primary decision-making criteria, whether you're aware of them or not.
Check for Conflicts
Internal conflict — the experience of wanting to do something and simultaneously not wanting to — is almost always a sign of a values conflict. Look at your hierarchy and ask: "Are there any two values in this list that are difficult or impossible to satisfy simultaneously in my current life?" Common conflicts include: freedom vs. security, achievement vs. connection, adventure vs. stability. These conflicts are the root of much of the procrastination, ambivalence and "stuckness" that bring people to NLP coaching. Identifying them explicitly is the first step toward resolving them — often through reframing or values integration work. Explore this further in our guide to NLP and limiting beliefs, where values conflicts often show up as belief-level blocks.
Test Against Your Current Life
Now comes the most revealing part. Look at your top 5 values and honestly assess: on a scale of 1–10, how much does my current life allow me to express and experience each of these values? Write the numbers next to each value. Any value scoring below 5 is a source of chronic dissatisfaction in your life — even if you can't articulate why you feel unfulfilled. This gap analysis makes invisible sources of frustration visible and actionable.
The goal isn't to score 10/10 on every value — that's neither realistic nor necessary. The goal is to understand where the significant gaps are, and to begin making decisions and choices that move your scores in the right direction. This process pairs powerfully with NLP anchoring — once you know your core values, you can create resource anchors that give you instant access to the states associated with your highest values.
Using Values Elicitation in Practice
For Decision-Making
When facing a significant decision, run both options through your values hierarchy. Which option better honours your top 3 values? This doesn't automatically resolve every decision — practical constraints still apply — but it makes the values dimension of the choice explicit and prevents the common experience of making the "rational" choice and still feeling wrong about it.
For Understanding Others
Values elicitation is equally powerful applied to other people — in leadership, coaching, or relationships. When you understand someone's hierarchy of values, their behaviour becomes entirely predictable and comprehensible. The person who seems inexplicably resistant to a change you're proposing is almost certainly reacting to a values threat — identifying what value feels threatened transforms the conversation from confrontation to collaboration.
For Career Alignment
A significant proportion of career dissatisfaction has nothing to do with the work itself — it comes from a mismatch between what the role requires and what the person actually values. Values elicitation for your career domain, combined with an honest assessment of your current role, reveals whether the issue is skills (solvable through development), circumstances (solvable through environmental changes) or fundamental values misalignment (requiring a more significant career pivot).