Everyone can name their values in about eight seconds, and almost nobody's list survives contact with their calendar. The words are easy: honesty, family, growth, freedom. The hard part is the gap between the words you choose and the choices you actually make, which is where the useful information lives. The list below is raw material. The exercise after it is the point.
What is a core value?
A value is not a thing you want or a goal you are pursuing. It is a criterion you use when choosing, and it shows up in trade-offs rather than in statements. If you have never given anything up for it, it is probably an aspiration rather than a value.
This distinction sounds pedantic and is the entire exercise. "Family" is a value if you have declined something you wanted in order to protect it. If you have not, it may be a value you admire in yourself rather than one you operate by, and knowing which is which is more useful than having a tidy list.
Values about how you treat people
Read these quickly and mark anything that produces a reaction. Do not evaluate yet.
- Honesty, directness, tact, discretion, loyalty
- Kindness, compassion, generosity, hospitality, warmth
- Fairness, justice, equality, integrity, accountability
- Respect, dignity, courtesy, humility, deference
- Service, contribution, usefulness, stewardship, care
- Forgiveness, patience, tolerance, open-mindedness
Values about how you work
This group tends to produce the most conflict when you get down to five, because several of them quietly oppose each other.
- Excellence, craftsmanship, precision, thoroughness, rigour
- Ambition, achievement, recognition, status, influence
- Discipline, consistency, reliability, follow-through, diligence
- Efficiency, pragmatism, resourcefulness, simplicity
- Creativity, originality, imagination, experimentation, play
- Learning, curiosity, mastery, growth, competence
- Collaboration, mentorship, leadership, independence
Values about how you live
The lifestyle group. These are the ones most likely to be inherited without examination, so read them slowly.
- Freedom, autonomy, flexibility, spontaneity, adventure
- Security, stability, order, predictability, preparedness
- Health, vitality, strength, rest, balance
- Comfort, beauty, aesthetics, pleasure, abundance
- Simplicity, frugality, minimalism, sustainability
- Tradition, heritage, continuity, belonging, community
- Solitude, privacy, quiet, space
Values about who you are
The internal group, and usually the hardest to verify from the outside.
- Authenticity, self-respect, self-knowledge, congruence
- Courage, boldness, resilience, perseverance, grit
- Calm, equanimity, presence, mindfulness, acceptance
- Purpose, meaning, faith, hope, wonder
- Optimism, humour, lightness, gratitude, joy
- Responsibility, maturity, self-control, restraint
The exercise: 122 down to five
Reading a list produces recognition, not clarity. The narrowing is what produces clarity, and it is uncomfortable by design, the discomfort is the information.
- 1. Mark everything that resonates. Do not restrain yourself; most people mark twenty-five to forty.
- 2. Cut to ten. Force it. If two words are close, keep the one you would defend in an argument.
- 3. Cut to five. This is the step that hurts and the step that matters. You are not saying the others are worthless; you are saying that when two conflict, these win.
- 4. For each of the five, write the last time it cost you something. If nothing comes to mind, mark it with a question mark.
- 5. Sit with the question marks. They are not failures. They are the gap between the self-image and the operating system, and that gap is the most useful thing this exercise produces.
Testing the list against last month
The second half of the exercise is the one people skip, and it is where the exercise stops being a personality quiz. Open your calendar for the past month and look at where the hours actually went. Then look at the money. Then look at what you said no to.
Compare that against the five. Some will be confirmed and it will be quietly satisfying. At least one will not be, and the question is not whether you are a hypocrite, everyone's list has a gap. The question is whether the gap is a season or a direction. A month where family lost to work during a launch is a season. Three years of that is a direction.
- Where did the hours go, honestly, including the ones you would not report?
- What did I decline, and what does the pattern of declines say?
- Which value am I performing rather than practicing?
- Which value did I never choose and inherited whole?
- Which of these would still be true if nobody could see?
Why do values drift over time?
Values are not permanent. They shift with circumstance, and a list from age twenty-four rarely describes age thirty-four. That is not inconsistency. But drift that happens without being noticed is how people end up several years into a life that was optimized for a version of themselves that no longer exists.
The fix is repetition rather than precision. Do this once a year, keep the old lists, and read them side by side. What changed, and did you choose the change? That comparison is only possible if the earlier answers still exist somewhere you will actually look, which is the whole reason Reflectize keeps your reflections connected instead of scattered across notebooks you will not reopen.
This piece is part of values and self-discovery. Values are easy to name and hard to verify. These pieces are about testing the words against how you actually spend a week.