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NLP Knowledge Base — NLP for Professionals by Wisdomtree Solutions

Glossary · Foundations

Values

In NLP, values are treated as criteria — what a person treats as important when choosing — rather than as a validated list of virtues or a personality test.

Also called criteria, NLP values.

NLP Knowledge Base Editorial · Reviewed 9 September 2026

What values mean in NLP

NLP practitioner literature often talks about values as criteria: the standards a person uses to decide that something is worth doing, avoiding, or finishing. “Honesty,” “freedom,” “being useful,” “not looking foolish” can all function as criteria in that sense. They are closer to a ranking of what matters than to a moral philosophy.

That is a coaching frame. It is not a claim that NLP has measured human values, and it is not a substitute for ethics.

How they are used

Practitioners may ask what would have to be true for an outcome to feel worth pursuing, or what a person is moving toward and away from. Beliefs often show up as sentences about how the world is; values show up as sentences about what counts. A state can make one criterion louder than another for an afternoon.

The Meta Model can unpack a slogan (“Important how, specifically? Compared with what?”). That can be useful. It can also become an interrogation of someone’s priorities.

Example

Someone says they want a new role but “it has to feel right.” A values-informed question might be: What would you see or hear that would tell you it feels right? What would be a deal-breaker? The person might name “time with family” and “not being asked to sell.” Those are criteria. They still do not prove that NLP can rank a life correctly.

Values sit next to beliefs and well-formed outcomes. They are not the same as presuppositions of NLP, which are working assumptions offered to practitioners, not the client’s own criteria.

Limits

Lists of “NLP values” in popular training rooms are teaching devices. They are not a scientific inventory, and they are not a licence to tell someone what they ought to want. See Evidence and criticism.

Related terms

  • Beliefs

    In NLP, beliefs are treated as generalisations a person lives by — descriptions that organise attention and behaviour — rather than as proven statements about the world.

  • Well-Formed Outcomes

    In NLP, a well-formed outcome is a desired result stated so that it can be tested — in context, in sensory evidence, and with a look at what else the change would affect.

  • States

    In NLP, a state is a person’s current organisation of physiology, attention and feeling — the condition in which a behaviour is more or less available.

  • Meta Model

    The Meta Model is an NLP questioning pattern that challenges deletions, distortions and generalisations in speech so that a vaguer statement can be recovered as a more specific description.

  • NLP Presuppositions

    NLP presuppositions are working assumptions used in practitioner training — useful as attitudes for practice, not as proven laws of mind.

See also

Other terms in foundations

Beliefs · Modeling · Neuro-Linguistic Programming · NLP Presuppositions · Reframing · Representational Systems · States · Strategies · Submodalities · Well-Formed Outcomes