Finding Your Values: What Actually Matters to You

October 15, 2026

Living with integrity starts with clarity about what really matters

Virtually every day of my childhood, I looked at a small blown-glass vase on a windowsill in our living room. We moved a lot, and no matter where we lived, it was on one of the windowsills. It was a silhouette of John F. Kennedy, and around his head was a quote from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

My mom talked about it a lot. Being of service to others and to your country was important, and she was proud that my dad had gone down to the Navy recruiting office the day after Pearl Harbor. She had very strong core values, and I was absolutely indoctrinated into them. Fortunately, many of them were awesome. Service has been a core value of mine my whole life, and it has always resonated with me.

Valuing service led me to the Foreign Service and a career as a US diplomat. It drove my work as an activist. And it shaped the way I saw teaching and, now, coaching.

That isn’t how it works out for everyone. If I asked you right now to name your top three core values, could you? A lot of people can’t. Many of us have never named them, ever. And some of the ones we live by, or think we live by, aren’t even ours. They were imposed on us, and they never quite fit.

We make decisions all day: what to say yes to, where we spend our time and money, how we treat people, what we tolerate and what we don’t. Those decisions should be based on our core values. For a lot of us, however, they’re based on habit, routine, pressure from other people, priorities other people try to set for us, or the loudest voice in the room. Then we wake up someday and think, this doesn’t feel like my life. This doesn’t feel like the life I thought I was going to have. Something doesn’t feel authentic here.

That’s when we need to take a step back, figure out what really matters to us, and start letting that steer the boat.

Your core values are what really matters to you, deep down inside. They should guide your decisions, your actions, and your words every day, the big things and the small things. For me, living in alignment with them is what integrity is all about. It’s the foundation you build your life on. Without it, everything is harder: more anxiety, more guilt, more shame, more stress, harder decisions.

Values are different from goals. “I want to get promoted next year” is a goal. Underneath it may be the value of growth, wanting to keep learning and taking on increasingly challenging opportunities. The promotion happens at some point, and then you ask, now what? Growth never ends. You don’t finish a value. It’s the point on your compass you’re constantly heading toward.

Where do our values come from? For a lot of us, we get indoctrinated at an early age. Family, obviously, and not just the explicit values our parents might have preached. We pick up what we were praised for or criticized for. If you never got any credit unless you came home with straight A’s, achievement gets wired in. It may not resonate with you as an adult, but you may still feel compelled to chase things that look like achievement, like the promotion, because of a family value that was embedded in you.

Culture shapes our values from a very young age. It tells us what counts as success, what makes a good life, what makes a good person, and unfortunately a lot of that is about status, appearance, body shaming, fame, and money. 

Many of us get values from faith communities, from schools — which send explicit and implicit messages about what should be valued even if they say they’ve dropped character education — and from workplaces. Even when a company doesn’t post its values on a website, you can work there for a bit and tell what’s valued and what’s not. 

In close relationships, we sometimes adopt other people’s values, consciously or subconsciously, to get close to them or stay close to them.

Some of these are genuinely ours. They resonate with us, we’ve tested them over time, and they’ve held true. But sometimes we adopt values at a young age that aren’t ours, and we keep living by them out of habit for years or even decades. That creates misalignment.

Here are four signs that a value may not be yours. If you try to honor it and it leaves you drained, empty, numb, or not alive, it’s probably not yours. If it constantly shows up as “I should” instead of “I want to” or “I need to, because it’s important to me,” it’s probably not yours. If you would drop it when nobody was watching, it’s not yours. And if you notice it becoming important to you, and you talk about it more, because you’re seeking someone else’s approval, that’s theirs. You’re trying to impress them or please them or not upset them somehow.

Figuring out your core values really matters, especially under stress. Values are a foundation that steadies us when the winds are blowing and we’re getting rattled. One study found that people who reflected on their core values before a stressful task produced less cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone — your values remind you, it seems, that your worth is not riding on any one moment. 

The opposite is true too. When we act against what matters to us (people-pleasing, for example), we feel an inner tension psychologists call cognitive dissonance. If you’re frequently living out of alignment, it can become a kind of low-level chronic stress on your brain and your nervous system.

We also can’t be truly whole as human beings if we aren’t living in alignment with our core values. A lot of our suffering comes from the gap between our values and our actions and words. That gap is where guilt comes from, and shame, and a lot of the anxiety about the future and worry about the past. Close the gap, and we can reduce a lot of that suffering.

It also makes decisions easier, big and small. Once you’ve named your core values and committed to living in alignment with them, you can ask of a hard choice: which option is more aligned with what really matters to me? How do you spend a free evening? Are you going to have the hard conversation you’ve been avoiding? Are you going to answer the email that made you uncomfortable? With clarity about your values, it’s easier to engage in those things.

This topic is near and dear to my heart, because one of the biggest turning points in my life, other than the birth of my kids, was quitting the State Department over Bosnia. In August of 1993, I was one of three people who quit publicly to protest our government’s policy and involvement in the genocide in Bosnia. For a few weeks I wrestled with it, because I’m such a cerebral person. But I had such clarity about my values, and a mom who had instilled in me that you help people who are the victims of terrible atrocities. She was Irish Catholic, and she talked about the Holocaust all the time, and about her guilt that our country hadn’t known earlier and, when we did know, hadn’t done more sooner to stop it. Never again really meant something to her.

So the decision, in the end, was so easy. My letter of resignation wrote itself, because I was so clear about my core values.

Living in alignment with your values sometimes costs you something. For me it cost my career, my financial stability, and my security — there were death threats. It didn’t matter. I became an activist and one of the people leading the Save Bosnia campaign, and no sacrifice was too great, because I had such clarity about my values and what I was willing to do for them. It was empowering, even at great cost. 

Even when it’s difficult, even when no one’s watching, your values can guide you and give you the confidence and courage to do the right thing. And the payoff is unbelievable. To look at yourself in the mirror and know you’re a person of integrity, who lives in alignment with your core values as best you can, is a profound gift to yourself. You sleep so well.

So how do we find our values? Here are six steps.

One: think about your peak moments, the times you felt most alive, most proud of yourself, most authentic. What value was being honored? For me, quitting in protest was about integrity, service, and justice. At other times, I focused on the value of health and becoming healthier and fitter. And three years ago, when I decided whether to take an early retirement from teaching and do life coaching full-time, and where to move to do it, the core value of family guided me. I wanted to live near family for the first time since college, so I moved back to Boston. The decision became easy because family was so important to me in that moment.

Two: be curious about your anger. When you’re furious or frustrated, that’s often telling you what really matters to you. Injustice makes me angry, so justice matters tremendously to me, and so does fairness. What does your anger tell you about what matters to you?

Three: activate the filter. Would I really act in accordance with this value if no one was looking? Is it really mine? Do I feel proud and energized when I live by it, or does it drain me?

Four: narrow your list. You can look at a list of values, and Brené Brown has a fantastic one on her website, but those lists are long and, if everything matters to you, what are you going to use to guide you day to day? Pick the three to five that really matter, the ones you’ll live by day in and day out. When I work with clients on this, I always say three to five, and usually it’s five.

Five: define each one in your own words. Take freedom, which people throw around all the time. What does it actually mean to you? I used to have this argument with kids about independence. They wouldn’t ask for help, and when I asked why, they’d say, “I’m trying to be independent.” I’d argue that real independence includes knowing when you need help, knowing where to get it, getting it, and putting it to good use. If you try to define a value and you think, “Eh, I don’t really know what that means,” it’s probably not one of your core values. With others you’ll think, boy, that really resonates.

Six: the alignment check. Look at your calendar and how you spend your time. Look at your bank statement and credit card statements and how you spend your money. Those are two finite resources that dictate a lot of what you do and don’t do. If they don’t reflect your core values, that’s a moment for reflection. What does this say my values are, and do I want to shift that? Maybe I’ve been living by values I don’t want to have going forward. Or maybe I have good values and I’m making crappy decisions every day about my time and money. Either way, that’s data.

Once you’ve named your values, think about how to make them visible to yourself every day. I journal about mine to some extent every day. One of my clients has hers on the wall of her living room.

Then take a moment and ask what’s one action you could take this week, even a small one, that is aligned with one of your core values. If your value is connection, don’t just say “I want to be more connected to people.” Who is the one person you’re going to call?

Experiencing the power of having clarity about your values and unlocking a new level of integrity as a result changed my life. For me, it made making decisions — big and small — easier, lowering my stress and improving my performance under pressure. In addition, by having such clarity around being of service, in particular, I discovered how being of service is one of the keys to living a good life and chose careers that brought more meaning and purpose throughout my life.

Shout out to mom and JFK.

I’m a life and leadership coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If you’d like some help moving through the six steps outlined above and putting them into action in your own life or as a leader, I’d love to connect — book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 or find me at https://www.integrityandjoy.com. Or just reach out — I’d love to hear what resonated with you.