What Are Your Values, Really

If I asked you what you value, you might give me a quick list: family, health, honesty. These are good answers, and also, often, not quite yours. Many of us, when asked, recite the values we were handed down, the ones we are supposed to hold, rather than the ones that actually pull us or matter most to us. Getting underneath that is some of the most clarifying work there is, because your values, once you can feel them clearly, become a compass for a life that you want to live and not one that is run by fear, wanting to please others, or the weight of responsibility.

In acceptance and commitment therapy, values do a specific job. When you cannot control your thoughts and feelings, and you mostly cannot, values are the one thing that can help guide your actions in the most authentic ways. In doing so you begin to create the life that you want. Built around what is most important to you. Values are how you decide what to do when the anxiety is loud and the path is unclear.

What a value is not

A value is not a goal. A goal is something you can finish and check off. “Get married” is a goal. “Be a loving partner” is a value, and you never finish it. You can move toward it every day for the rest of your life. Goals are destinations; values are directions. This matters because a life built only on goals is a series of brief arrivals followed by “now what.” A life oriented by values has a direction to walk in no matter where you currently stand. A compass that follows you everywhere you go.

A value is also not a rule or a should. “I should call my mother more” is a rule, and rules tend to generate guilt and rebellion in equal measure. The value underneath might be something like wanting to be a caring, connected daughter. When you act from the value rather than the rule, the calling looks different, and so does the not-calling.

And a value is not a feeling. You do not have to feel loving to act on the value of love. In fact the whole usefulness of values is that they hold steady when feelings do not. You can be a devoted parent on the morning you feel resentful and depleted. The feeling is weather. The value is the ecosystem that can hold the storm.

How to actually find yours

You cannot reason your way to your values from a list. They tend to show up in experience, and there are a few doorways to explore them.

One is pain. We hurt most where we care most. The thing that devastates you points directly at something you value. If a friend’s distance wounds you, you likely value loyalty and closeness. The grief is the value, felt from the underside. When clients tell me what hurts, they are usually telling me, without realizing it, what matters to them.

Another doorway is admiration and envy. The people you admire embody something you want for yourself. The flash of envy you feel watching someone live a certain way is often a value waving at you, asking to be taken seriously.

A third is the eulogy question, uncomfortable but clarifying. If someone who truly knew you described how you lived, what would you want them to be able to say honestly? Not what you accomplished, but how you showed up. The answer is rarely about money or status. It is almost always about love, courage, contribution, integrity, presence. That is the territory of values.

The point is the gap

Once your values are clear, something slightly painful happens. You can see the gap between how you want to live and how you are currently living. The value of connection sits next to the fact that you have not called a friend in months. The value of creativity sits next to the side projects you keep abandoning.

That gap is not a problem to feel ashamed of. It is information, and it is the whole point. The gap tells you where committed action belongs. It shows you, specifically and without judgement, the next small step toward the life you actually want.

This is also where the fear usually lives. Moving toward what you value almost always means feeling something uncomfortable: the vulnerability of reaching out, the exposure of trying, the risk of caring openly. That is why values and acceptance work together. You make room for the fear so it does not get a veto, and you take the step in the direction that matters.

When your values are in conflict

Real lives contain real tensions. The value of being a present parent collides with the value of doing meaningful work. The value of honesty rubs against the value of kindness. People sometimes take this conflict as a sign they have not figured themselves out.

They have. Mature values are not a tidy hierarchy. They are a set of commitments you balance, imperfectly, in motion, choosing moment to moment which one this situation asks for. The work is not to resolve the conflict once and for all. It is to keep choosing with your eyes open and by using your compass.

If your sense of what matters to you has gone quiet, buried under obligation or noise or years of managing everyone else, that is worth tending to. Bringing it into a room with someone who can help you listen for it is often how the compass starts pointing again.

Dr. C. Julieta Aguilera Rice is a licensed psychologist at Coastal Therapy Group in Carlsbad, offering therapy in English, Spanish, and French. Book a free consultation.