You cannot decide to value money

You cannot decide to value money more

One of the questions I hear most often when I take a client through their values profile goes something like this. I can see Economic is low for me, so how do I get it higher? It usually comes from someone running their own business who has decided the numbers would look after themselves if only they cared about money a bit more.

I understand why people ask it. It is also built on a misunderstanding of what values are and where they come from.

What sits under the waterline

I explain it with an iceberg. What you can see above the water is behaviour: how you speak, how quickly you move, how you run a meeting. Below the waterline, and far bigger, sit your values and your emotional intelligence. The CCR3 training material puts it plainly. Behaviour is the output. Values are the cause.

That hidden mass did not appear from nowhere. It was built over your whole life by your upbringing, your family, your faith or the absence of it, your history, the things you were drawn to as a child and the people who encouraged you or didn't. Values form through repeated experience. Every good encounter with something reinforces it as worth having, and every bad one does the opposite. Some of it you were born with and some of it life switched on, and the CCR3 material sits somewhere between the two.

Why wishing does not work

Because values come from experience, they do change. They are just very slow to change, and what moves them quickly is not ambition. It is a significant emotional event.

Icebergs change shape in two ways. Slowly, as they melt over a long time. And suddenly, when a great slab breaks away and the whole thing rolls over and settles into a new position. Neither happens because the iceberg wanted it to.

Your values work the same way. They drift over a lifetime, or they shift because something happened to you: a loss, a crisis, a moment that rearranged what matters. You cannot aspire your way into a new hierarchy.

I have my own evidence. I complete the Discovery Process on myself regularly and have done for six years. In that time my values have barely moved. The same values sit at the top in the same order, report after report. A lot of big, emotional events happened in my life before I found CCR3, and I suspect that is when my values were really shaped and reshaped. Since then, nothing I have hoped for or planned has shifted them.

My behaviour, on the other hand, has changed. And my emotional intelligence shifts every time I complete the profile. That is the iceberg again. The tip moves when you work on it, the layer underneath responds to whatever is going on in your life, and the great mass of your values stays where it is unless something big breaks it away.

There is a second thing worth knowing. Sometimes what a client is feeling is not a missing value at all, but a top value that is not being fed right now. The order barely moves, but whether your top value is being met can drop quickly after a lost contract or a role that stops giving you what you need, and it takes months to rebuild. That feels like something is wrong with you. Usually something is wrong with the fit.

What you can change

Behaviour is a different story. It is the tip, the part you can see and the part you can work on, and this is where CCR3 is especially useful, because it does not give you one picture of your behaviour. It gives you two. Your natural style is how you prefer to behave, and it is also where you go under pressure. Your adapted style is how you believe you need to change for the environment you are in right now.

The gap between the two is where the real conversation happens. Most people adapt without noticing they are doing it, and a wide gap usually means someone is performing a role that costs them something. So the question I ask is simple. Are you doing this deliberately, or are you trying to fit somewhere you do not feel you fit? Once a client can see their adaptation, it stops running them and becomes a choice.

That applies to money too. You can learn to have the money conversation sooner, invoice on time, price properly and hold your price, even with Economic well down your list. Just go in knowing that adapting takes energy. We say it often at the Academy: you can holiday in adapted behaviour, but you cannot live there. A business that only works while you are pretending will wear you out.

What I would not do is try to become someone motivated by money when you are not. If your strongest drive is helping people and your work only rewards you financially, you will find far less passion in it than you should.

So when a client asks how to raise their Economic score, my answer is to stop trying. Find out what does drive you, build your business around it, and treat money as a behaviour to manage rather than a value to manufacture. Someone high in Altruistic can price well because the fee is what lets them keep helping people. That is not pretending. That is working with your iceberg instead of against it.

Knowing what sits under your own waterline will not change its shape. It will stop you steering straight into it.