“Our value is the sum of our values.” –Joe Batten In order to make an advancement in your ability to persuade, I believe it’s necessary to advance yourself. Personal advancement. Personal understanding. Personal growth. These are all incredibly powerful ways to increase every aspect of your life–business, personal and public. This article is about an amazing process that will help begin to accelerate your skills with my material. The goal is to rank our values. It’s fairly painless, and will take you to new levels of understanding and give you a little more insight into persuading your affluent clientиle. Future articles will get deeper into this, but feel free to check out other articles on criteria and values as they relate to influencing the affluent. The following is a list, albeit an incomplete list which you should feel free to add to, of some examples of core values. Please, add your own should they not appear. As you practice this with your clients, you’ll see this list grow. * Honesty * Freedom * Security * Passion * Freedom * Recognition * Integrity * Health * Family * Spouse * Friends * Spirituality * Money * Love * Success * Recognition * Education * Self improvement * Adventure * Fun * Financial independence * Variety * Knowledge * Self actualization * Wisdom * Accomplishment * Power You might notice that ‘happiness’ is not on the list. The reason for this omission is, ‘happiness’ is not a value. Happiness is what will occur once your core value is actualized. The next step is to put them in order. Start with your top ten from the above list. And this is how to determine your top five: As an example, your list may, in no particular order, start out with health, love, money, passion, freedom, knowledge, wisdom, friends, accomplishment, recognition. Start with health and make your way down the list. If you had to choose between perfect health and no love, or a perfect love, but poor health. . .which would you choose? For sake of this example, we’ll choose health. What if you could have amazing health OR all the money you wanted? Which would you choose? Perfect health and no freedom, or absolute freedom and poor health? Choose which better describes what you want. We go through the entire list this same way to determine the top five values. Why is this a valuable exercise? Well, I’ll answer that with another question. If a sales professional had the top values of security, wealth and family, do you think they might be able to effectively interweave security, wealth and family into a conversation about their product or service? We can’t elicit our prospect’s values in this way, but we are eliciting their criteria (which is really more of a context based value. . . i.e. their value about the given situation that we’re asking about). We need to make it relevant to them. As you begin to understand the value of this information, you may also want to check out www.maxpersuasion.com/blog for more articles on how values and criteria can affect the way you sell.