IPA Core Values

Value analysis: When coaching goes deep.

Value analysis – from unconscious patterns to conscious actions

Norm driven
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Authoritative
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Dialogue
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Opinion makers
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IPA Core – Values

Value analysis is a unique tool that delves into an individual’s fundamental values and creates a deeper understanding of how these shape our thoughts, feelings and actions. In a coaching context, the analysis acts as a catalyst for personal development and insight as it brings unconscious value patterns to the surface and helps create conscious choices.

Coaching is about unlocking potential and creating direction, and values are a crucial key. Often challenges arise when our outer life is not in harmony with the values we deeply live by. Values analysis makes it possible to identify these tensions and clarify what values drive us and how they can be applied more consciously in our professional and personal lives.

The main purpose of IPA Values Analysis is to bring inner values to light and reflect on whether the time is ripe to unlearn the values that are inappropriate for the life that is being lived now and to raise awareness of the benchmarks that will help the individual into the future.

The values analysis is therefore an indispensable tool for anyone working with coaching and personal development – whether in a leadership development process, career counselling or personal transformation.

Value analysis – that’s why!

Through a structured process, the Value Analysis provides insight into the individual’s development level and mental platform, enabling the coach to customise their approach precisely to the individual’s needs. The analysis helps clarify questions such as:

  • Which values are most crucial to my decisions?
  • Are there values that limit my development?
  • How can I strengthen my relationships through a deeper understanding of my own and others’ values?
  • Which values do I need to be more true to in order to create meaning and balance in my life?

Authentic change

Values analysis is not just a tool for self-awareness – it’s a path to transformation. It supports a process of not only understanding your values, but also learning to act in accordance with them so that they become a strength in everyday life.

For coaches, the tool provides an in-depth understanding of the client’s mental model and developmental journey, making it possible to facilitate conversations that go far beyond superficial goals. It creates a foundation for authentic change, where the client can navigate their life with greater clarity, agency and meaning.

Researcher’s corner

Evolution is a qualitative change of consciousness. Old assumptions and truths are rejected in favour of new truths. The key is also that you take the old assumptions with you into the new phase, but now consciously so that you can reflect on them. A given phase thus contains all previous phases.

Central to any phase is the relationship between the self and others. Thus, a greater understanding of the people around us is the central point of conflict and the crucial development path.

/Flemming Olsen

Flemming Olsen talks about Value Analysis

Greater maturity means greater awareness and understanding of the relationship between me and others. Maturity in this context is, among other things, a question of deepening already existing relationships, feeling greater responsibility towards the other, knowing how I affect others, increasingly understanding others’ ways of reacting, etc.

/Flemming Olsen

Elaboration of the basis for IPA Core – Values (Value Analysis)

Through our upbringing, and thus through our parents, family, environment, time and place, our personal values are imprinted in us as deeply rooted settings in our mental universe. They are the foundation of the way we interpret ourselves in the world.

Our highest and most important values hold the deepest life force and energy in our lives. They are the basis on which we create meaning and coherence in life. Our values determine what is IMPORTANT to us, what MOTIVATES and steers us in a certain direction.

In relation to WORK LIFE, our highest and most important values motivate the jobs we apply for and the direction of the career we choose. The value analysis is a starting point for reflection and personal development. In the process, we identify and unfold your 3-4 most important personal values. When you know your values, you can target the areas where you can most benefit from further development as a leader. And you can release bound energy.

Research shows that the more self-awareness a leader has – including the ability to reflect and learn – the more successful they are in their leadership. The Values Assessment captures your values based on 4 different mental platforms. Each platform is defined by the way we understand and interpret ourselves in the world.

It also captures the fundamental values that lie on each platform. All of this can be seen in the example below of the result of a Values Analysis.

Read also about IPA’s classic personality analysis

IPA Core

In Value Analysis, we work with personal values that are linked to and shaped in the individual through their upbringing and the influences they have received from outside. From the surroundings, from the social environment. This means that it is the parents, family, place, time, upbringing, etc. that together shape the individual’s values. Values are thus created by the human community, by the relationships we enter into, and cannot be opted out of. They meet the individual as something external.

Values are therefore deep traces that are left in the individual through the imprinting and upbringing they have had. Thus, values are part of the signals that come from within and tell the individual whether there is meaning and coherence in the way life is lived. Values thus constitute a kind of “backdrop” against which the individual interprets themselves and the life they live. Figuratively speaking, values are the inner alphabet that enables you to put together words that create meaning and coherence in your life. Values are what give our actions and behavior MEANING and purpose.

Below are definitions of the 8 sub-typologies defined and operationalized from the 4 basic platforms.

The typologies below should be seen as 4 different basic platforms and developmental stages in human development. From these platforms, a number of sub-typologies are further defined that more concretely describe the behavior that develops from each of these basic platforms.
The subtypologies are defined based on how the individual integrates the different platforms into a more concrete behavior. Thus, all subtypologies are operationalized so that you have to say yes to a number of statements from the basic platform that determines the subtypology AND yes or no to a number of statements from one or more of the other basic platforms.

And the determination of these subtypologies is further enabled by the fact that the statements on the basic platforms contain both statements pointing towards Integration/adaptation/suppressing one’s own emotions, as well as statements pointing towards Differentiation/recognition of one’s own emotions. For example, the Duty person is defined based on the platform called the Conformist. The Duty-Driven Person will say yes to statements that are about suppressing your emotions, accepting things as they are and knowing what you can and cannot do. At the same time, the Dutiful Man will say no to statements that are about recognizing yourself and your rights, and recognizing and acting on your feelings.

Much of the stress we experience in people today is triggered by external factors – work pressures, etc. – but the root cause is often that the “background noise” has become too dominant, the noise that occurs when our external existence no longer harmonizes with the internal values on which we interpret the world. People today experience an enormous tension between the old and the new, between work and private life, between opportunities and limitations, between the need for peace and the constant demand for adaptation and change, between being yourself and being like others, about identity from within and without, between life as a quality and life as a project. And much more.

The zeitgeist today is dominated by the fact that we have lost our collective innocence and have yet to find a new position and standpoint in terms of values. We have become alone in the world, each with our own personal project, and we can no longer hide among the others. We need to use this as knowledge in our value analysis.

For many people, this increased alienation creates a life filled with projects that only move around on the outside. And not a coherent, understandable rhythm of life that – consciously or unconsciously – is based on some deep and shared inner values that are rooted in both the individual and the group with which the individual identifies. So we change our actions and behaviors, but not our personal values! We don’t replace the old with something new.
There is only one path we can take. And that is to find our way back to and into the values we already have deep within us.

And maybe develop and change some of these values because they no longer harmonize with the life we live now. Values have become an obstacle to the new interpretation of the world and the new self-image we need to develop in order to move forward in our lives. As an adult, reflective, decisive and responsible human being, we can develop and change some of our values. This requires, among other things, that we bring the unconscious values into consciousness. And that takes time!

Many life crises are about letting go of old values and patterns and replacing them with new interpretations of yourself and life. New interpretations of yourself in the world, new ways of perceiving yourself. This often means saying goodbye to old values, old thought patterns, inappropriate self-perceptions and developing new ones.

The theoretical background and inspiration for Value Analysis lies primarily with a group of American psychologists who work with an INTEGRAL developmental model of consciousness. The best known of these psychologists is Ken Wilber.

Ken Wilber developed a 4-quadrant model that in its totality encompasses all the dimensions in which consciousness develops.

Central to Ken Wilber’s theoretical universe is the notion that consciousness, as determined by the way we think (knowledge and attention), our values (what we consider most important in life) and our identity (self-perception from the inside out and the outside in), develops in stages, each stage characterized by the way we understand the world around us.

Each stage of human development is characterized by qualitatively different ways of experiencing ourselves in the world. This applies to the way we think, feel and act in the world, the way we perceive the limits and possibilities of reality, the way we create relationships with other people and much more.

On a more concrete level in relation to the development of the actual model behind the Value Analysis, we are inspired by the American psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter, who has developed a model for The Leadership Development Framework. Here she focuses on the upper left quadrant of Ken Wilbert’s model, the development of the self from within. The self contains a cognitive, an emotional and an action dimension. It is the self as this self interprets the world from within on the basis of thoughts, feelings and experiences/actions.

While Ken Wilber is the foremost developer of integral theories and models, another American psychologist, Robert Kegan, is the one who has most thoroughly developed a modern theory of the development of consciousness and personality, where he, like Ken Wilber, delineates and determines a number of stages in the individual’s personal development. Robert Kegan is inspired by Piaget, Erikson and Maslow, and continues their work in developmental psychology.

Robert Kegan is thus, as well as Ken Wilber, part of the origin of the more concrete model that Cook-Greuter develops. And common to all these theorists is, as mentioned, THAT THEY CREATE A THEORY OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT THAT INCLUDES STAGES IN THIS DEVELOPMENT.

It is also important to note with Robert Kegan that…”We are not our stages, we are not the self who hangs in the balance at this moment in our evolution. We are the activity of this evolution. We compose our stages, and we experience this composing.” (Robert Kegan: “The Evolving self” page 169)

Similarly, values are not something static and unchanging when we consider the adult individual, the object of Cook-Greuter’s models. We evolve throughout our adult life and therefore move through several stages of personal development.

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