Climber
The one you work on today. Choose whoever's willing to share a personal and professional tension they're comfortable with. Keep it light — nothing raw.
Before you climb
Pick your crew roles
Three of you. Choose a Primary and a Secondary for each role so everyone stays involved.
Guide
You ask the questions and run the climb, camp by camp, keeping the Climber moving upward.
Scribe
You keep to time and capture everything. You build the Summit Report the crew delivers at the end.
The map
The ladder you'll climb
▲ Summit — plant your flag here
PurposeFor what larger reason?
IdentityWho are you?
Beliefs & ValuesWhy — what matters?
CapabilitiesHow — what skills?
BehaviourWhat do you do?
EnvironmentWhere & when?
Base camp — start here ▼
Your values live near the top of that ladder. Your identity sits higher still.
Today you climb all the way to the top — past what you do and even past what you believe — to who you are. That's where the real change is waiting.
The climb
Five camps to the summit
1
Guide — ask your Climber
Surface the values
⏱ 6 min"In your work, what's truly important to you? What has to be there for it to feel like it's going well?" — and — "Personally, what matters most in how you live?"
ScribeList every value named, personal and professional, in the Climber's own words.
2
Guide — ask
Rank the ladder
⏱ 4 min"Of all these, which one matters most? If you could keep only that, which comes next? And after that?"
ScribePush for a clear order, top to bottom. Record the ranked hierarchy.
3
Guide — ask
Find the valley
⏱ 5 min"Look at your top values. Where do two of them pull against each other? When does honouring one cost you the other?"
ScribeName the conflict in a single sentence — "My freedom fights my security," "Achievement pulls against family." Write it down.
4
Guide — ask
Locate it on the ladder
⏱ 5 min"Which level is this conflict really living on — is it about what you do, what you believe, or who you think you are?"
TogetherClimb the levels out loud until you find where the tension actually sits.
5
Guide — ask
Plant the flag: identity
⏱ 5 min"Finish this line: 'I am someone who…' — said in a way that lets both values live together. Who would you have to be for this conflict to simply dissolve?"
ScribeLand one clean identity statement that resolves the conflict. Write the final version for your report.
Back in the main room
Your Summit Report — 2 minutes
Present your climb to the whole group:
- Your Climber's top values.
- The ranked hierarchy.
- The conflict you found.
- The level it was really living on.
- The new "I am someone who…" identity statement.
🏔️ The group flags the most transformational identity statement of the day.
The reveal
What really happened on your climb
You didn't just list values. You ran a powerful model — the Neurological Levels — and something important happened while you weren't looking. Notice where the change actually landed. You probably tried to solve the conflict lower down — in what your Climber does, or in their values — and it wouldn't budge. It only dissolved when they shifted who they are.
Change cascades down
Shift identity, and behaviour, capability, and even environment reorganise to match it.
Conflicts resolve one step up
A values conflict almost never resolves at the values level — it resolves at identity.
Transformational, not incremental
You're not changing what someone does — you're changing who's doing it.
The move you'll use with a client
When they're stuck despite trying everything, they're working at the wrong level. Climb.
Rewire Your Thinking. Redefine Your Results.
Covered as a part of NLP Course
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The Neurological Levels — and much more
The Identity Climb is one model from the NLP toolkit. Learn the full framework — and how to run change work like this with clients — on our Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) training.