So You Think You Know Your Values?
What matters most to you?
It's a simple question. Most people answer it in about three seconds. Family. Health. Freedom. Creativity.
But having done this work myself and watching others try one thing seems clear: the fast answer is almost never the real one. Fair warning — the video and the article aren't the same thing. The article gets into the why. The video gets personal.
Watch first or read first — up to you.
Wanna look into the why and what of this? Keep reading...
If you are really living your values, I could look at your life and I would see it. If you skip meals and don’t get enough sleep or drink a large pumpkin spiced latte every day, I would push on whether health is really a value to you.
If you don’t say no to your boss and never turn off your laptop, I would push that freedom or family is a value. It’s like that saying: show me where you spend your money, and I will show you what matters to you. Show me where you spend your time…
The impact of not knowing what your values are, or worse, knowing them but not integrating them, is enormous. To understand how big you need to know what it does to you neurologically. I believe that when we understand what is happening in our brains, we are better equipped to live the life we actually want to live. Despite all our complexity, we are in large part still animals responding to chemical signals in the brain.
We just have the added benefit of overriding those signals because of our HUGE prefrontal cortex. But in order to do that, we have to know what’s happening under the hood, so to speak.
When we live integrated lives, that is to say, when we make value-based decisions, the brain's reward systems light up. We get hit with dopamine, serotonin, and even oxytocin. That helps lead to greater emotional stability and long-term planning. We become less reactive and impulsive because of that stability. It helps build confidence, self-esteem increases, and feelings of motivation and satisfaction. And all of this feeds into itself, creating a cycle that reinforces those feelings day after day, month after month, year after year.
Conversely, when we aren’t living from our values, we get hit with higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline. It literally triggers a stress response in the brain. It creates mental fatigue and friction that eventually drains the prefrontal cortex (there it is again, that big part of the brain that helps us be human and not just an animal) and leads to burnout, overwhelm, and hits motivation hard. If we live this way too long, it creates anxiety and symptoms of depression.
See? It’s a huge deal and probably why coaches and therapists keep talking about it. In fact, some say we’ve been talking about the importance of values as far back as Nietzsche in the 1880s, though from a modern perspective it’s been around in psychology since the 1970s.
And we get that it’s important. It’s not generally something you need to convince people about; it’s logical. What isn’t understood as well is that we could have unconscious thoughts or beliefs that are in direct opposition to what we say our values are. This is how people say they value something but don’t actually live it. There is an underbelly that we rarely look at, and if we don’t, I can guarantee it’s influencing your life way more than you probably want it to.
Figuring out what our values are is fortunately not hard. It takes focus and time. But it’s not hard. In fact, in my opinion, it only gets hard if we judge ourselves for what we discover. So that judging piece is where I want to spend some time.
You can do a quick search and find several different processes for uncovering your values. You might already have a strategy. I’m not sure the strategy matters too much. I think what matters more is what you do with what you uncover. Often, I think people judge what they really find important because they think their values should be something different.
Here’s an example. One of my values is connection. Family isn’t a formal value for me. Which sounds wrong because so much of what I do in my life is for my children. I sat with that for a few days while I was doing this work because I thought, as a mother, family, or my children were supposed to be a value. But when I dug into it, I realized my children matter to me because of connection.
Value work only benefits you if you are honest about what matters. This can work in the reverse direction too. Another example: if I say that connection and growth are values and that being there to support my son for as long as possible is a priority, then health almost has to be a value. Like it HAS to be important if the other things in my life are important. So I made health a value, even though it did not come up naturally.
It’s an important part of value work that a value doesn’t have to be something you naturally find fun or exciting; it can be a decision you make because of what you want for your life. It’s also important to understand the difference between values and priorities. There are lots of ways to define them, but to me, values are about the big compass point for my life. They are about the direction or the foundation for what I want in my life. Priorities are about the level of importance something has.
It sounds similar (and they are close), but even my values have priority levels. Some values are more important to me than others. They are another way to build clarity around how I make decisions.
Regardless of how you personally define them, integrating the values and priorities into your day is the first step in living from them. And doing that supports your ability to make decisions and show up in your day how YOU want to. Every decision you make that is aligned makes it literally easier to make the next decision.
Here's why this matters if you're running your own lane.
Real estate agents and sales reps make dozens of decisions every day. What to prioritize. Who to call. What to say yes to and what to let go of. How to respond when a deal falls through or a client pushes back.
Most of those decisions happen fast. And if you don't actually know what you value — not what you think you're supposed to value, but what genuinely drives you — you're making those calls on autopilot. Reacting to whatever's loudest instead of choosing from something solid underneath.
That's the difference between surviving your day and leading yourself through it.
Value work isn't sexy, but it is foundational. It's the thing that makes every other decision easier — even the hard ones.
And it starts with being honest enough to look at what you really care about and actually spend your time. Not where you say you do. Or where you think you're supposed to, and then digging into that 100%.
So I’m really curious - What matters most to you?
Consider your life. Be on purpose.
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