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Working with Belief Clusters – Part 1: Beliefs and Values
Beliefs aren’t isolated things, so they shouldn’t be worked with in isolation. This is the first in a series about working with beliefs as clusters. Part 1 describes how beliefs and values are connected.
Working with Belief Clusters – Part 1: Beliefs and Values
Many people talk about beliefs and how they form into ‘clusters’, yet they only work with single beliefs when they want to create change.
They don’t describe:
- how beliefs cluster,
- why that is important,
- how to identify the beliefs in a cluster,
- or how they are interconnected.
I’m going to answer some of those questions in this series of videos, so when I’m finished, you’ll have some simple theory and some actionable knowledge too.
Values are an interesting place to begin, because
- they’re easy to identify
- they’re interlinked
- they relate directly to beliefs
- they focus you on the areas which are most important
Again, many people elicit values in a particular way that imposes order on them and will prevent you from seeing how values interlink.
So before we get into values, let’s look at how they’re related to beliefs.
Values and Beliefs – Relationship
First, some basic information about how a belief is structured:
It can be useful to look at a belief as a meaningful system of cause and effect.
Robert Dilts* uses this useful structure to map beliefs onto:
if X then Y means Z
where X is the cause
where Y is the effect
and Z is a value judgement
How is this useful?
Firstly, you can also use the ‘If – Then – Means’ structure to make sure you have identified all the elements relevant to the belief you’re examining.
For example: (If I try then I’ll fail, which means I’m a failure)
‘trying’ is the cause.
‘failing’ is the effect.
‘failure’ is the value.
So we can use this structure to identify values from looking directly at beliefs.
If we’re already working with beliefs, why bother with values?
Well, we can backtrack from a value to identify a belief, or set of related beliefs.
How?
In this case, we ask about the rules surrounding a value.
Suppose, for example, we elicited the value ‘failure’.
You can ask:
“How do you know when you have failure?”
and
“How do you know when you haven’t failure?”
You might get the answers: “I know I have failure when I try something and fail (don’t succeed)” and “I know when I don’t have failure when I try something and I succeed (don’t fail)”.
Again, it helps to use the ‘If – Then – Means’ structure to make sure you have the structure of the whole belief.
So that is how values and beliefs are connected.
To summarise:
Working between beliefs and values is useful.
From beliefs to values:
- What does it mean when X causes Y?
- If X leads to Y, what does that mean?
- If you Y because X, what does that mean?
From values to beliefs:
- How do you know when you have Z?
- How do you know when you don’t have Z?
- What makes you Z?
Access the next part of this series to find out:
- How to identify and elicit belief chains
- how belief chains can branch and loop
*Dilts, R., Sleight of Mouth, (1999)
