Learning Through Your Core Values
Just as each core value drives different contributions and motivations, each type has a distinct learning style rooted in their fundamental nature. Understanding these learning styles transforms education, training, and professional development by matching methods to natural preferences.
When learning environments honor core values, engagement skyrockets. When they conflict, even the brightest learners struggle and disengage. Here’s how each core value type learns best.
Builder: The Decide and Do Style
The Decide and Do style is the most challenging to accommodate in traditional classrooms. The drive of these individuals is to make gut-level decisions and take action immediately. They want to make things different—now. They want to experience their own power in real-life situations.
Effective learning for Builders requires contests involving dozens of quick decisions with limited information. Fast-action, physical contests create the sense of personal power and ability they crave. Team activities like stacking large blocks competitively—building the highest stack or the one that can hold the most weight—illustrate ideas through physical engagement.
The Builder learning style requires a connection to power—the application of personal energy for good effect. Whatever happens in the learning environment must either relate to a decision promising powerful effect or the direct application of personal power. Commands serve nicely.
Builders like to get up and move around and hate being hemmed in. They need personal space and can’t hear you if you sit too close. Leadership exercises that develop the ability to make clear commands and cause teams to work together toward short-term goals resonate deeply.
Their Catalytic Value of faith means they respond to situations requiring intuitive trust—knowing what to do now and trusting they’ll know what to do next. Putting Decide and Do people in situations requiring faith-based quick decisions with physical consequences satisfies their deepest drives.
Merchant: The Talk and Listen Style
The Talk and Listen style of learning is a high-energy, fun, and team-oriented experience. The most engaging methods involve games, situational dramas, and group and individual presentations. Personal sharing in small teams and one-on-one encounters relating to personal topics are important and desired.
Any method that uses love and truth—the core value and Catalytic Value of the Merchant—works best. Create exercises requiring face-to-face discussions, sharing personal stories, and brainstorming about future possibilities. Full group discussions and short presentations by each individual increase room energy and laughter.
Merchants learn by talking. They talk through their ideas, course-correcting as they go, always listening to their own words and evaluating each conclusion. They may drive others crazy with seeming inconsistency, but they’re not truly inconsistent—they’re constantly in process, modifying what they say as they speak.
Merchants, like Innovators, hate to finish a good idea or vision before perfecting it. To perfect, they keep talking. Brainstorming sessions with others—especially Innovators who add complexity to Merchant ideas—wonderfully extend the learning process.
Games, exercises, group projects, and dramatic presentations all appeal to Merchants. Like Builders, Merchants need high activity. Don’t leave them sitting too long—make time for them to talk.
Innovator: The Observe and Solve Style
Complex, difficult challenges must be the core of the Innovator learning experience. Situational stories with many possible outcomes, brainstorming, scheming, and gathering information using all five senses—these elements capture the observant, problem-solving mind.
Clever mysteries, puzzles, systems assessments, recommendations, and real-life hard-edged stories with complex interconnected strategies make the Observe and Solve style creative and engaging.
The core value that must be honored is wisdom. These people need complex situations to evaluate. Complex and difficult problems intrigue them, and their self-respect significantly depends on the size, importance, and difficulty of problems they solve.
Innovators must be asked to make individual assessments, developing their own intellectual powers. They must also be allowed to share observations—brainstorm and derive wise responses or solutions. They’re competitive with their ideas, enjoying having solutions accepted and put into practice, and they thrive on interactive “storm and solve” sessions.
Because of their Catalytic Value of compassion, Innovators can remain understanding with people, so discussions are generally high-energy and confrontational without being combative. All lessons requiring observation, understanding, and wisdom captivate this type of student.
Banker: The Read and Analyze Style
The Read and Analyze learning style is very straightforward. There should be almost no talking without details, information, charts, graphs, and statistics. If you don’t give this group something concrete to memorize, you won’t get high marks for teaching.
Reading materials offering hard evidence plus opportunity to analyze, dissect, and reorganize are core ingredients. Methodology, mathematics, historic proofs, and precise experimentation cause these individuals to engage and learn.
The core value that must be honored is knowledge—the how and why of things. Don’t bother trying to teach Bankers anything you can’t substantiate, or better yet, that they can’t substantiate themselves.
Read and Analyze people value justice. They like being asked to determine levels of justice and appropriate responses in situations. They also enjoy creating presentations of knowledge that others can easily understand. Give them opportunities to create their own demonstrations of knowledge or identify and prove injustices.
Bankers are highly visually oriented and like to sit, listen, and take notes. They enjoy recording facts and figures, seeing proofs actualized, hearing evidence supporting visual data, and being given opportunities to rearrange data more perfectly.
Give Bankers the task of recording all learning information, researching additional supporting or refuting information, and presenting results in visual form. Bankers learn by analyzing data from visual sources or formal presentations.
Designing Inclusive Learning Experiences
Effective training programs incorporate elements for all four learning styles:
- For Builders: Quick decisions, physical activity, leadership exercises, short focused sessions
- For Merchants: Group discussions, personal sharing, brainstorming, dramatic presentations
- For Innovators: Complex problems, mysteries to solve, individual assessments, strategy sessions
- For Bankers: Written materials, data analysis, research opportunities, visual presentations
When learning environments honor all four core values, every participant finds entry points for engagement, and the diversity of approaches reinforces learning for everyone.
Discover Your Learning Style
Understanding your Core Values Nature reveals your optimal learning style. Take the CVI to discover whether you’re a Decide and Do, Talk and Listen, Observe and Solve, or Read and Analyze learner—and how to leverage that knowledge for accelerated growth.