The Merchant’s Primary Core Value: Love
The Merchant’s core value is Love. Love is working toward an inspired vision of what can be, by nurturing the core values in yourself and in others. Nurturing core values in yourself includes making a connection with people, certainly, but it also includes a feeling of connectedness with the universe and with the natural world.
Love sees the truth about the way things are and visualizes the possibilities for the individual and the community. To truly nurture the core value of love in yourself requires acknowledging your need for solitude and for silent appreciation of beauty. Love encompasses your desire for being touched and for touching. It includes the sense of being moved emotionally by a good movie or a sweet song or a grand orchestra.
What Love Is NOT
Understanding the Merchant’s core value of love requires understanding what love specifically is not:
- Being a door-mat — Love does not mean letting others walk over you
- Touchy feely stuff — Love is not superficial emotional display
- Caretaking — Love is not enabling or doing for others what they should do themselves
- Excessive emotion — Love is not over-the-top sentimentality
- Pure nostalgia — Love is grounded in truth, not nostalgic fantasy
The nature of the core value Love might best be illustrated by the executive coach who is committed to learning who you truly are and helping you become a mature and contributing, fully developed version of yourself.
The Full Scope of Merchant Love
Love-based people relish each new experience of art and music. They remember stories about people sharing life with others. Love creates our need for human history and for an optimistic view of the future. Love-based people foster relationships with others by accepting and placing importance on their core values and catalytic values.
The Merchant love value is not just about people. It consists of love of all things: music, ideas, stories, poetry, the Earth, beauty, and culture. Merchants look for opportunities to connect with other people. They desire openness and closeness with their fellow workers. They put themselves out for others and take social and emotional risks to build good relationships.
Love-based individuals are people who see and understand the importance of relationships with all things. They work to gain and hold a vision of what can be, how things, people, societies, art, and music can be made better. Love is the highest form of abstraction. It requires perception, aesthetic appreciation, and awe in the presence of beauty. Love is the glue that holds people together when everything else deserts them.
Truth: The Merchant’s Catalytic Value
The Catalytic Value of a Merchant is Truth. Truth is the way things are. For the Merchant, truth is having a clear view of what is real, an intuitive and rational understanding of the way things are.
Merchants can help the person who is not being true to themselves by making them feel confident of who they really are. This is the path of the mature Merchant. As long as the Merchant remains surrounded by and committed to truth, they will follow a positive cycle.
This need to cultivate as many relationships as possible, as deeply and completely as possible, influences every decision, judgment, and action. The love that a Merchant possesses allows them to make important contributions to their teams.
Merchants as Relationship People
Merchants are relationship people. They value relationships with other people and with all things. This causes them to pay attention to the way people feel and think and talk and act. It also causes them to be attuned to beauty, to words, poetry, and music.
But more than this, Merchants are the risk takers, visionaries, and the traders opening new markets and all kinds of exchanges between individuals and societies. They see endless opportunity and constant possibilities. They foster the pursuit of wealth, art, and beauty.
Merchants motivate and inspire Builders, Innovators, and Bankers. They are team builders and deal makers. They lead through inspiration and excitement. They ask others to help them achieve their unique vision. Their strategy is to attract others to their visions and to nurture the core values in themselves and in others.
Merchant Contributions to the Team
A Merchant’s love makes them an unstoppable force in business. Without them, meaningful contacts wouldn’t be made, visions couldn’t be put in place, and employee relations would suffer. The inspiration that the Merchant provides through nurturing the competencies of others is invaluable.
Merchants will place themselves in whatever role is necessary to help build bridges, decrease conflict, and improve the nature of relationships. Their nurturing builds dynamic teams. Their appreciation for beauty helps them create outstanding presentations.
Some Merchants tend to be very gregarious, constantly mixing and meshing with dozens or even hundreds of persons. Other Merchants tend to be more introspective, focusing on deep intimate relationships, one person at a time. Some of this difference in range of perspective comes from secondary and tertiary values, but the nature of love itself covers this entire spectrum of social interaction.
Building Merchant Self-Respect
In order to build their self-respect, Merchants need to feel appreciated in return for their love. Being perceived as a loving person is also extremely important to the Merchant. They spend many hours trying to cultivate their relationships. When this effort is discounted, their sense of self-worth deflates.
Merchants work best in teams, especially when new ideas for future opportunities are encouraged and they are allowed to float free form for a while. This gives them the chance to visualize the future without fear of harsh criticism, increasing their willingness to think “outside the box.”
Merchants will generally participate well with their team as one idea after the other is left for future evaluation, as long as they are appreciated for their participation. They will even participate in eliminating their own ideas from the table in an effective strategy meeting, as long as they are respected members of the team.
Discover Your Merchant Score
Understanding how much Merchant energy you possess is the first step to harnessing your natural ability to nurture and inspire. Take the Core Values Index to receive your comprehensive 17-page report revealing your unique core value profile.