In case you missed the announcement in our last blog post, Sabrina and Eric Walters have launched a vlog series to help bring hope, healing, and growth to your relationship with your spouse. To learn more about what to expect from the series, check out this post that kicks it all off: What Does a Great Relationship Look Like?
This week, we’re going to walk you through how to use the Core Values Index™ (CVI™) to understand your partner more deeply.
Watch the video below to learn more (we’ll hit on the main points here in the blog, but for all the details directly from Sabrina and Eric, be sure to watch the full vlog).
Love Maps Evolve, but Core Values are Forever
When the Gottmans talk about knowing your partner really well, they talk about love maps. Building love maps is an approach to learning about and understanding your partner internally and externally (their inner world and their outer world). Love maps aren’t static; they need to be updated regularly. Some elements are constantly changing but some never change.
One of those things that never change are your partner’s core values. The Core Values Index™, developed by Lynn E. Taylor, helps you understand your partner’s innate, unchanging core — their beliefs — that remains the same throughout their entire life. Understanding your partner’s core values is like getting a PhD in your spouse. It’s deep, important work, and it can have an incredibly positive impact on your relationship.
Why the CVI™ Is So Important
The CVI™ helps couples better understand how they’re wired. It helps shed light on the lens through which they view life. Is that lens more relational? Is it more about facts and figures?
There are so many different aspects of why the CVI™ is a valuable tool. But what we use it for most often is in our work with couples. We feel like it offers a near-instantaneous deep-dive into your partner’s soul, the DNA of who they are from birth to the grave.
This is immensely helpful, not in trying to change your partner (because that’s basically impossible!) but in understanding their innate needs and becoming more attuned to their core values. How you and your partner interact can change and improve based upon the insight the CVI™ provides.
In being trained to use the CVI™ years ago, Lynn Taylor said something so profound that it has stuck with us to this day: “What you don’t know about yourself controls you.”
How We Use the CVI™ With Couples
The way we go about life and how we behave is a product of how we’re wired. If we know how we’re wired, we can better understand our triggers and make better choices — or even shift so that we can interact better with our partner.
One couple we recently worked with during our Art and Science of Love conference really struggled with day one of the conference which focuses on friendship. This couple really struggled with that aspect of their relationship. One partner was very emotionally and relationally-driven, the other was much more reserved and practical. Neither one of them felt seen or valued for who they were at their core, and using the CVI™ helped bring that to light so they could truly understand one another, reconnect, and rebuild those bonds of friendship and mutual admiration.
Learning to accept and embrace the idea that your partner is not like you — and is not going to be like you! — is a transformative and freeing experience for the couples we work with. You realize you’re a team and that you make one another better.
Knowing your partner’s core values also helps you to turn toward one another and build your love maps from a place of deep understanding. You’re better equipped to attune to their unique needs and ask questions — informed by your partner’s own core values — that help you both connect and meet one another’s deepest needs: to be seen and heard.
When you understand your partner’s core values, you’re also much better equipped to manage conflict in a healthy way. You know your partner’s triggers. Each couple has their own conflict dance. We coach couples on how to dance with one another according to their core values so that they can work through that conflict and get back to that place where they have each other’s back.
Get Started Today
Eager to learn more and energize your own relationship with your partner? You can start exploring and understand one another better with the help of the CVI™ today!
You can take the free CVI™ assessment here, though we highly recommend you invest in the full version when the system invites you to upgrade.
We also offer an online-self paced course, Unpacking of the CVI™, to help you and your partner do everything we talked about today. It includes a workbook and a follow-along video tutorial.
We can’t wait to hear how the CVI™ helps you learn more about yourself and your partner! And if you’d like someone to come alongside you in this, you can contact us here today; we’d love to connect with you.
