# Changing Values in the Hierarchy — Full 4-MAT Presentation Script **Presenter:** Dustin **Has Demo:** Yes (say "demo goes here" during presentation) **Level:** Master Practitioner (Course 6 — Values 2.0) --- *Last updated: March 16, 2026 at 03:18 PM MT* ## 1. WHY — Motivation (~3-4 min) *Goal: Motivational opener that stands alone (opening metaphors handle the personal stories). Get the audience to feel the problem in their own life, then reveal the insight — it's not discipline, it's values — and raise the stakes for coaching and teams.* *Note: The "New Year's Kitchen Mirror" metaphor pairs well as a nested loop opener for this topic — see metaphors list.* --- Have you ever set a goal — been really motivated at first — and then slowly, almost without noticing, drifted right back to where you started? A fitness goal, a financial goal, a career goal. You started strong. And three months later you're right back where you began. Show of hands — who's had that? *(look around, acknowledge)* Yeah. All of us. And I know what you were thinking when that happened — you thought you failed. You thought you lacked discipline. You didn't have enough willpower. You weren't committed enough. And so you beat yourself up. Or you set the same goal again next year and try harder. And the same thing happens. And the worst part isn't the failure itself. It's that you can't explain it. You had the plan. You had the motivation. You knew exactly what to do. And you still ended up right back where you started. That's the part that eats at people. Not that they failed — that they don't know *why*. But it's not discipline. It's not willpower. It's something deeper — something most people have never examined consciously. Something that was running the show the entire time, underneath all of that motivation. And as you **begin to understand** what it is, you can **start to see** why everything played out the way it did. Here's what's actually happening. Inside every person, there's an internal order — a hierarchy of what matters most. And when two things on that list compete, the one that's higher always wins. Always. So when someone says they want to get healthy, but comfort and connection are sitting higher on the list — the outcome is inevitable, isn't it? They didn't lack discipline. The internal order was organized in a way that made that result unavoidable. And part of you already recognizes that pattern in your own life, don't you? And think about what that means. If you don't know the order — if you've never actually looked at how that hierarchy is organized inside you — then you're flying blind. You're setting goals that your own internal system is designed to override. And you'll keep doing that. Over and over. Until something changes at that level. Now here's what makes this really powerful for you as a coach. Imagine someone comes to you and says, "I keep setting this goal and I keep falling short." You could give them a better plan. A better system. More accountability. More structure. But because that internal hierarchy is working against them — because what they say they want is lower on the list than what they're actually organized around — no plan in the world is going to stick. The system will win every time. And I know you've seen that with clients, haven't you? Most coaches never get to this level. They stay at the surface — goals, habits, accountability. And they wonder why their clients keep cycling back to the same patterns. It's because nobody ever went underneath the goals and looked at what was actually driving the bus. And it's the same with teams. When that internal order is out of alignment across a team — half the team is on the gas pedal and half the team is on the brake. Everyone's working hard. Everyone's frustrated. And nobody can figure out why things aren't moving. They try better communication. They try new project management tools. They do team-building retreats. And nothing changes. Because the answer is almost always something nobody's looking at. What we're talking about is **values**. Not the motivational poster version — the real version. The hierarchy of what actually matters to someone — and the ability to change it. > "I'm going to go and make a bold statement and say most teams are out of values alignment." Can you imagine what it would mean to actually know how to fix that? To be the coach who doesn't just help someone set a goal, but actually reorganizes the internal structure so that the goal becomes *inevitable* instead of a battle? Whether you fully grasp that now or begin to see it as we go deeper today, this changes everything. So what we're building toward is understanding how to get someone's values, how to determine if they're in the right order, how to change their position in the hierarchy, and how to implement that — both one-on-one and in a group setting. Because when values are in conflict or in the wrong order, people feel stuck. And when you know how to shift them, you give people real clarity and real power. --- ## 2. WHAT — Teaching (~15 min) *Goal: The main teaching block. Cover the full values framework using Gina's actual words wherever possible.* --- ### Values Aren't What You Like Before we get into the mechanics, let's get something straight about what values actually are. People hear "values" and they think of nice words on a poster. Gina is very clear on this: > "Values aren't just nice, fluffy words like integrity or honesty or love or results or money. They're not just words we all like. Values are the content of our mind that determines our choices for behaviors. And then those behaviors, those actions that we take, they determine our results." We always confuse what we value with what we like. As Gina says: > "We always mix up what we value and what we like. Value isn't something that we like. It's what dictates our choices for behavior." That's why you can have values like fear or disrespect show up on someone's list. It doesn't mean they like those things — it means those things drive their behavior. > "Values determines what we pay attention to. Values determines what we discard. Values determines what we think is good or bad or right or wrong." ### Values Are Contextual So what are values in NLP? The first thing to understand is that values are **contextual**. You have different values depending on which area of life you're looking at. We break life into six segments: career, family, relationships (intimate), personal growth and development, health and fitness, and spirituality. > "If you just say, 'I want to elicit your values,' and you're doing that in terms of life, that's too chunked up. It's just not enough context. You've got to define the context before you go down the values road." For today, we focus on career because that's relevant to everyone here. ### Values Are Nominalizations Values tend to be **nominalizations** — high-level abstractions. Values are more abstract than beliefs, which are more abstract than attitudes. If someone gives you something too chunked down — like "going out for lunch with my coworkers" — you chunk them up: "What's important to you about that?" Until you get to the nominalization level. Teamwork. Growth. Freedom. As Gina put it in the training: > "If it's not high enough, you got to chunk them up a bit because otherwise you're going to get 77,000 values." ### Three Elicitation Methods There are three methods for getting someone's values out of their mouth and onto a piece of paper. **Method 1 — Standard NLP Elicitation.** Ask "What's important to you about your career?" three times, emptying the buffer each time. The first pass gets the obvious values. The second pass digs a little deeper. The third pass catches what's left. Three times through the buffer gives you a comprehensive starting list. **Method 2 — Motivation Strategy.** This one is more subtle. Right before someone feels totally motivated, there's a V-K synesthesia — a picture-feeling that happens completely out of awareness. The label of that feeling is a value. You ask: *"In the context of your career, can you remember a time when you were totally motivated? Can you remember a specific time? As you remember that time, what was the very last thing you felt just before feeling totally motivated?"* They might say "excitement." You add it to the list, then repeat the process. Keep going until you get a repeated word. Usually one to three values come out of the motivation strategy. **Method 3 — Threshold Values.** These are the line-in-the-sand values — deeply unconscious. You show them the full list and ask: "All of these being present, is there anything that would cause you to leave?" Then: "Is there anything that would cause you to stay?" You oscillate back and forth — leave, stay, leave, stay — until you get repeat words or a blank. > "All of those values could be present in your career, and yet you still quit. So these are very, very deeply held values." Between the three methods, you get the full picture — surface values, motivational values, and threshold values. ### Hierarchy and Ranking Having the list is one thing. Knowing the **order** is everything. Your number one value drives the majority of your behavior. It's the most important thing in your life. You rank them from one to whatever — one to ten, one to fifteen. Then you rewrite them in order. Then you test them. Testing is simple: read the values back in reverse order (bottom to top). You'll get a flat, dead response. Then read them forward — top to bottom. Watch their nervous system light up. The difference is unmistakable. ### Using Values in Proposals and Sales Here's a practical application that shows why this matters beyond coaching. Once you know someone's values, you can use them in how you communicate with that person — proposals, pitches, ideas. Gina demonstrated this live with a student's values list: > "Let's say I wanted to make a proposal to Liliana. I might say, okay, here's this product and it's going to provide you with a lot of growth. You know that when you're growing, what you're really doing is helping and leading others. I want you to get enthusiastic about how much money you're going to make with this product. Really, at the end of the day, get excited for the impact that you're going to make. You make your proposal using the words of their values set." And it applies to any professional relationship: > "You could go and do this exercise with someone that you know or even a client that you serve and say, listen, I'm going to ask you some questions about the context of whatever we work in. Let's say you work with a client in the context of your business relationship. You might say, in the context of our business relationship, what's important to you and get five or six values. Then when you go to deliver a proposal to them or an idea to them, you utilize their actual words from their actual values list when you're making the paragraph of your proposal. By using people's values words, you light them up a little bit like a Christmas tree." ### Toward vs. Away-From Values This is critical. Someone might say "money" but the real question is: are they moving **toward money** or **away from poverty**? Both produce action, but the focus determines the result. > "You get what you focus on. If you are focused away from poverty, then ultimately what you're going to do is bring yourself back to poverty over and over and over again." That's the **yo-yo effect**. Let me walk you through it. Imagine "money" at one end of the room and "poverty" at the other. If your focus is away from poverty, you're going to put a lot of energy into solving the problem while the pain is close. You stop spending, you budget, you grind. And it works — you start moving toward money. But the further you get from what you don't want, the less danger you feel, so the less motivation you have. Someone offers you a vacation you can't afford. You say, "I deserve it." You blow through your savings and end up right back against poverty. Energy spikes again. That's the yo-yo. Toward values don't yo-yo. The trajectory is slower, steadier, but you never bounce back — because you're always moving toward something, not running from something. > "We are very tricky, conniving little creatures and we will use fancy words to sound like we're thinking positively when the truth is we're moving away from what we don't want." You determine the toward/away-from percentage by asking "why is that important to you?" five times, tracking whether each answer sounds toward or away-from, and then asking the person to trust their unconscious mind and give you a percentage. The results are usually staggering. Even values that sound positive on the surface can be 60%, 70%, 80% away-from at the unconscious level. And that explains the incongruent behavior. > "Every time, incongruent behavior is a result of conflict in the values." ### Three Types of Conflicts There are three types of values conflicts: **1. Toward vs. Away-From (Sequential Incongruence).** The value sounds positive but is driven by what you don't want. Money that's really "away from poverty." Resolved with timeline therapy. **2. Toward vs. Toward (Simultaneous Conflict).** Two values compete — you can express one but not the other. Money vs. freedom. In the person's mind, if they pursue money they lose freedom, and if they pursue freedom they can't earn money. Resolved with parts integration. **3. Away-From vs. Away-From (Simultaneous Incongruence).** Both values are avoidance-based and in conflict. Resolved with both timeline therapy and parts integration. Here's the good news: after timeline therapy — clearing the five major negative emotions and one limiting decision — 50% of people lose ALL away-from focus in their values. The other 50% see it decrease significantly. Parts integration resolves the direct conflicts. And that cleanup often changes the hierarchy naturally. ### The Technique: Changing a Value in Hierarchy So you've done a full breakthrough with someone. Timeline therapy, parts integration, the works. You re-rank their values. And let's say money is still sitting at number four. For someone trying to become an entrepreneur, that's not high enough. What do you do? > "If the client needs a value that's either missing or too low in the hierarchy, if they need that for their goals, then we can do this. It can be done. And when you change a value, you change its impact on behavior." The technique uses **submodalities** — because submodalities are how we encode meaning. Values are ultimate meaning. Change the submodalities, change the position in the hierarchy. **Critical rule:** > "I would never change the number one value ever. I would always leave the number one value where it is under any circumstances." The number one value impacts behavior more than any other. If you put something in its place, their whole life changes. If you move money from number ten to number one, they become a crazy obsessed person whose entire life revolves around money. So: never change number one. Number two, number three — fair game. **Here are the steps.** Let's say we want to move the number four value (money) into the number two position. **Step 1 — Elicit submodalities of the value you want to move (value #4).** Say: *"In the context of your career, when you think about how important money is to you, do you have a picture?"* Then go through the submodalities checklist (page 36): Black and white or color? Near or far? Bright or dim? Location? Size? Associated or dissociated? Focused or defocused? Changing or steady? Framed or panoramic? Movie or still? Any important sounds? Any important feelings? (If yes: location, size, shape, intensity.) Break state. Clear the screen. **Step 2 — Elicit submodalities of the number one value.** Say: *"In the context of your career, when you think about how important [value #1] is to you, do you have a picture?"* Same checklist. Record everything. Break state. Clear the screen. **Step 3 — Contrastive analysis.** Compare the two sets of submodalities. Draw a line between everything that's different. Those are your potential drivers. **Step 4 — Pick one driver to back off on.** > "Pick one driver that you're not going to change completely, just one. And I'll give you a clue — it's either the location or it's association/dissociation." Location is always the first choice. If value #1 is right in front of their nose and value #4 is up to the left, you move #4 to halfway — maybe in front of the left eye, not all the way to center. If location is identical, use association/dissociation. If you need a backup: size works too, because size and location are analog (you can do 50%, 80%). > "Visual submodalities have the most impact on meaning." Always back off a visual submodality, not a kinesthetic one. As Gina said when a student asked about backing off on feelings: "How do you back off a feeling in the head and a feeling in the heart? Like, I don't know how to put it in the neck. That doesn't make sense." **Step 5 — Map across.** Go back to value #4. Say: *"In the context of your career, when you think about how important [value #4] is, do you have a picture?"* Change everything to match value #1 — except the one driver you're backing off on. Move that one partially. Change everything else to match. Lock it in: *"You know that sound Tupperware makes? Lock it in."* What happens: value #4 pops up to almost #1 but not quite, drops just below it, and becomes the new #2. Everything else shifts down. **Step 6 — Test.** Hand them their values list WITHOUT numbers. Ask them to re-rank as quickly as possible. What you should see: number one stays number one, the value you moved becomes the new number two, and everything else falls down. **Important note on timing.** You don't typically change values during the breakthrough itself. You let the person integrate for a month or two after timeline therapy and parts integration. If they come back and still haven't "popped," then you change the value. > "When you do a full breakthrough, that might be all they need. They might not need you to change the value. So this is kind of like one of those things that's a judgment call." ### Team Values Alignment Process Now, all of this individual work leads to the big application: team values alignment. Gina calls this "a career right here" and walks through a full methodology. > "The number one problem in executive leadership teams and teams in general is a misalignment of values." The format is a day-meeting, and here's the process Gina lays out: **Before the meeting:** > "Prior to the meeting in the company, you meet with the stakeholder, the highest member of the team or whoever's hiring you to do the project. You elicit and do a hierarchy of their values. Their own personal values in the context of this team." Then get the leader's ideal team values: > "Then elicit and hierarchy the suggested values for the team. They should be the same, just so we're clear. I mean, not always, but, you know, you say to them, okay, in the context of this team, what are the ideal values?" Then meet each team member individually: > "Meet with each member of the team individually and find out what problems they have with the team. How's it going with the team? What's going on? What are some of the challenges you're facing on the team? You can do this on Zoom or virtually or whatever. Just get a little bit of their pain on the surface because that's gonna become the motivation for the meeting." > "Build motivation for the future alignment meeting by showing how the meeting is going to solve some of the problems they just talked about." While you have them on the phone, elicit their individual values too. **During the meeting:** > "You do a little bit of teaching. Because what I find to be more effective, now you could do this totally top down, but actually what I find a little bit more effective is if you do a little values teaching and then you have them elicit their values and hierarchy them. So you guide them." > "Then have everybody review their own values that you just elicited. Now, using the hierarchy of ideas, so chunking up and chunking down only as you can maintain agreement, have the team discuss and negotiate and agree upon the team values." Then lock it in: > "Then type them up fancily and in color, frame them and distribute them to everybody on the team." **After the meeting:** > "You're gonna need to meet with individual team members and adjust their own personal values using the changing values and hierarchy. Now, in this situation, because it's so tightly contextualized, you can move values all over the place because it's only in the context of the team. It's not in their health, their family relationships. It's very tightly contextualized." And close the loop: > "Meet with the key stakeholder or whoever hired you and make sure that they got what they think they hired you for." --- ## 3. HOW — Exercise (~2-3 min) *Goal: Read the exercise steps. Demo placeholder. Set up the practice.* --- So here are the steps for the exercise. You're going to practice the contrastive analysis portion of this technique — the diagnostic part, not the actual change. **Exercise Steps:** 1. Take out your values list (from the earlier elicitation exercise) 2. Elicit the submodalities of your **value #1** using the checklist on page 36 3. Break state. Clear the screen. 4. Elicit the submodalities of your **value #4** using the same checklist 5. Break state. Clear the screen. 6. Do a contrastive analysis — compare the two, mark everything that's different 7. Identify which driver you would back off on (location first, then association/dissociation, then size) 8. **Stop there. Do NOT make the actual change.** It's not ecological without a full breakthrough and integration time. The script for each elicitation is: *"In the context of your career, when you think about how important the value of [blank] is to you, do you have a picture?"* Then work through the submodalities checklist. --- **"Demo goes here."** *(On Demo Day, Dustin will demonstrate the full submodalities elicitation and contrastive analysis live — eliciting submodalities for two values, performing contrastive analysis, and walking through exactly how the mapping across would work.)* --- **Exercise Setup:** - Groups of 2 — same partner you've been working with - Do the contrastive analysis only (no actual change) - About 10-12 minutes per person, then switch roles - ~30 minutes total practice time --- **"Exercise goes here."** --- ## 4. WHAT IF — Future Pace (~2-3 min) *Goal: Self-discovery. Three questions.* --- **1. What questions do you have?** **2. What did you learn?** **3. What do I need to know?** --- ## Metaphor Themes (5 personal stories, ~2 min each) *Each metaphor should be a personal story that illustrates one of these lessons. Stories will be developed separately.* 1. **The hierarchy always wins** — A time you said you valued something but your behavior told a different story (and when you realized why) 2. **Away-from yo-yo** — A time you or someone you know kept cycling back to the same problem because the motivation was away-from, not toward 3. **Values in conflict** — A time two things you wanted were pulling you in opposite directions and you felt stuck 4. **One shift, everything changed** — A time a single change in priority or focus reorganized how you made decisions across your whole life 5. **Team misalignment** — A time a team or partnership was struggling not because of ability but because people were pulling in different directions on what mattered