Your ideal client’s deepest values have a huge impact on their motivations, priorities and view of the world.
Values guide how people make big life decisions. When surroundings go against strongly held beliefs, unhappiness follows, feeling untrue to oneself.

By identifying values showing what matters most, we better understand pain points emerging when those core principles get disrespected. Then, we’ll highlight proposals that respect people’s inner truths by creating more empowering circumstances. Messages that speak to people’s inner motivations and values tend to connect with them.Let’s take a look at some widespread core values that influence mindsets. Sometimes life gets in the way of fully living according to those values, which can create conflict.

Values Reveal How Your Ideal Client Thinks and What Drives Them

At first glance, demographics can show some patterns about an ideal customer. But by digging deeper to uncover their most important values, we reveal the inner compasses that truly drive their decisions. This opens up pathways to connect through shared principles.

For example, a real estate agent might categorize a prospective client by apparent factors like age, location and browsing history to get hints about what they may want to buy. This steers the agent toward advertising certain market reports and financing options.

However, by asking thoughtful questions, the agent realizes this young family cares more about fostering community and relationships within a neighborhood than any specific housing details. Suddenly, showcasing local events, partnerships and ways to get involved builds trust and rapport, accelerating sales in family-friendly areas.

In essence, identifying someone’s value hierarchy uncovers the psychological motivators that determine behavior far beyond surface qualities. Now engagement can activate decision-making by precisely upholding those sacred, guiding causes through messaging that aligns.

This concept translates across industries and contexts. Values reveal the “why” so solutions can directly align. Transformation requires first attracting internal commitment through shared belief in uplifting ideals that add meaning, before tactical improvements. To convey change, appeal to higher aspirations.

Defining the Top 5 Decision-Driving Values

What exactly makes someone tick? When you think about what drives your decisions small and large every single day, what rings truest in your heart? Chances are, a set of core personal values shape your motivations, whether conscious or not.

Values are our highest priorities – they make up the very essence of who we are and what has meaning to us based on our upbringing, culture, and life experiences.

Values are principles that guide us.

While many values exist, a few critical ones lead the pack nearly universally in their profound influence on mindset and actions. These powerhouse values must align in our lives for us to feel fulfilled. Let’s explore the top 5:

Community

Pros: Encourages empathy and cooperation.

Cons: Potential for conformity and loss of individuality.

We unpack each of these Top 5 values in more granular detail here.

Those Driven by Achievement Seek Accomplishment and Success

People who place a high priority on achievement and accomplishment feel pride in setting ambitious goals, then tenaciously working toward tangible markers of success, outperforming rivals or topping their own previous records. An obsession with competition can either motivate or hinder them. But at their core lies an inner drive to master skills and improve, benchmarking competency through metrics. This value often correlates with a tendency to overwork. But it also fuels entrepreneurial upside.

Those Who Value Influence and Recognition Want to Hold Sway

People who are strongly driven by influence put a premium on visibility, leadership, and public recognition for their role in shaping group success or championing causes. Striving to direct others’ behavior often means having thick skin to handle critics. The positives include leading change through persuasion. Potential downsides involve ego, but most feel self-assured when their progress receives praise.

Those Who Prioritize Security Seek the Comfort of Predictability

For people who place the highest priority on security and stability, their comfort zone revolves around minimizing risk and depending on continuity through routines and duty fulfillment. Gradual, incremental growth feels safest to them, since they fear volatility disrupting hard-earned order. They tend to avoid uncertainty early on, but become loyalists over time, preferring depth over breadth once trust builds.

Those Who Value Autonomy Seek Personal Freedom and Independence
For those who value autonomy more than anything, what matters most is having full control and flexible options over their limited time. They want to define productivity and leisure in their own way, without external constraints imposed on them. They don’t do well with bureaucracies and restrictive rules. Having variety across different pursuits balances out their tendency to isolate. The main upside for them is total freedom to chase what they find meaningful. A potential difficulty is impatience when managing external expectations and obligations.

People Who Value Community Seek Connection and Dependability
People who embrace community values define themselves by cooperative interdependence and vulnerability-building bonds. These connections uplift individual wellness through supportive relationships, especially during difficult times. While they may initially struggle with independence, they find great meaning, purpose and enrichment in reciprocity.

The key idea is that people’s professed values (what they say matters most) tend to remain steady over time, even when external environments change and new options emerge. Values provide internal continuity and consistency.

For example, someone who deeply values achievement and mastery for its own sake carries that same drive into unfamiliar settings, seeking ways to quantify small competency gains by building new skills. This persists whether they stay in their career or discover a new industry better aligned with their values.

Likewise, someone who really values security and stability tends to stick with what feels familiar and safe. Even when things seem unpredictable, they still favor low-risk choices, gradual adjustments, and holding onto what works. When considering something new, their mindset instinctively focuses first on factors like reliability, steadiness and preservation.

Observing Values Predicts Future Decisions

The choices a person makes over time reveal what they value most through consistent patterns. And when their situation changes down the road, future decisions also typically uphold those deep-rooted value rankings. Their values shape choices more than immediate circumstances do.

For example, when someone reaches a major new life stage like changing careers or entering retirement, their options might change. But their viewpoint still follows long-held values, tracing back to inner motivations. Free-spirited independent types begin new phases in life centered on personal freedom and choice. As people get older, those focused on family tend to settle down closer to relatives.

Basically, keeping an eye on what someone values gives clues for predicting their future decisions. Specific situations might alter options, but core values are what steer the ship. Tracking past choices shows value priorities that reveal motivations yet to come. Those deeper preferences will stick around as the compass for navigating new stages, even if ideals stay the same.

Values-Aligned Messaging Resonates

It’s key that messaging supports your ideal client’s known values. That way it strikes a chord by linking to beliefs they already feel deep down. Even unfamiliar offerings can resonate if shown to match up with ideals someone sees as part of their identity.Instead of just guessing how someone may act, truly understanding their deeper motivations lets us imagine how to meet their future, less obvious needs. We can speak to their core truths that tend to guide what they do when the timing is right. Someone’s actions typically flow from who they really are on the inside.

In essence, values lay the foundation that future decisions grow from, when the time is right. We want to nurture these core motivators so that behavior organically aligns. By genuinely understanding what’s most important to people, we can reasonably anticipate important choices they’ll make down the road – flowing as they do from their long-held values.

Key Values and How They Present

Let’s unpack a few common values that we find in a lot of people’s ideal clients, to help put into perspective how they show up.

People Who Value Growth Want Forward Momentum

Folks focused on growth strive for steady improvement across things like job titles, expertise, money or creative outlets. Treading water stresses them out big time. Tracking gains and seeing progress gives them a sense of purpose and direction. When their progress stalls, it can spur an identity crisis.Motivation is the why of change, momentum is the how.

People Who Love Freedom Resist External Rules and Constraints

People who value freedom highly see having options as sacred – it means they can steer their own path. Rules and limits that box them in can cause massive stress by chipping away their feeling of agency in choices. Few things upset them more than barriers to trailblazing on their own terms.

People Who Value Justice Advocate for Fairness

People who really care about justice tend to act from a place of strong moral ethics and equal rights. They get outraged when they encounter mistreatment through exploitation or discrimination. They believe all groups deserve dignity without judgment.

People Who Value Relationships Put Connections First
A lot of people prioritize community over their own interests – relationships and connecting matter more to them than going it alone. They feel isolation painfully because they find meaning through opening up about vulnerabilities and being there for each other.

People Who Care About Status Seek External Validation
Those who place major importance on status long for influence and fame, in order to achieve external benchmarks of prestige compared to their rivals. They feel overwhelmed with anxiety when passed over or outranked. What they desire most are major public wins that reinforce a sense of significance and identity by saying, “I matter!”

Understanding what people value most also reveals their pain points – when their environment conflicts with what matters most to them. We need to start by genuinely understanding someone’s inner truths first. Then we can make positive changes by shaping situations to better fit what someone cares about deeply.

What We Value Most Shapes Who We Are

Our deepest personal values have an enormous influence over our sense of identity and purpose. Values reflect our highest priorities – the principles and causes we believe matter most beyond temporary interests that fade. Values indicate what provides our lives with meaning, direction and motivation to evolve.  

For example, if someone highly cherishes community, relationships may sit at the heart of major life choices, personal growth, and their vision for fulfillment based on that utmost value. Their self-image flows from dedicating themselves to causes they see as profoundly significant. 

Values also guide the path someone takes in bettering themselves, by focusing efforts on ideals they already view as supremely important. If someone highly values achievement and mastery, their choices will lead more toward quantifiable increases in skills over time. This allows them to gauge their competency level against past benchmarks.

Similarly, our top values materialize through personality and actions aligning with the virtues we find most important. Someone who places high value on generosity naturally trends toward a community-minded spirit. When confidence is a priority, the ability to take risks empowers. The ethics we most align with shape who we become and what we do.

Gradually, our values serve as an inner compass steering our identity, growth trajectory, becoming what gives life purpose and meaning down the road we pave toward well-lived, purposeful lives. Our identity relies on being true to our highest-order priorities that we identify as our core essence.