Understanding and living in harmony with our core values can be thought of as our life’s work. Our values are our personal principles about what is good and right in the world. Living in harmony with them starts from the moment we become aware of our sense of right and wrong. Research indicates that when our principles motivate our actions, we are more likely to experience a sense of well being, greater life satisfaction, and reduced psychological distress.
In order to reap these rewards however, it is not enough to simply have values; you need to act on them regularly. If you value tradition, for example, then acting in line with the customs of your family and culture may well fit with your values and you will tend to feel good about doing so. Although most values-based actions will help you feel better, values that prioritize caring for others and for the world are noteworthy for their relationship with well-being. On the other hand, a large body of research shows that organizing your life around values related to money, image, and status is associated with less life satisfaction, and more psychological distress.
This article will focus on science-based ideas of how you can understand and clarify your personal values - a relatively ignored aspect of contemporary society. It will also offer suggestions for how you can personalize and use that understanding. It includes a four-step process for intentionally increasing the possibility of acting in accordance with your values.
Clarify and get to know your most important values.
Assess how well-integrated those values are in your life, currently.
Plan strategies to increase action in areas where your values are underused.
Address difficulties in motivation so that you can maintain consistency.
1. Clarify (Your Values)
Clarifying values is surprisingly rare. Most of us have the strong sense that we have good values, but at the same time, we can have difficulty in articulating them. That is because values are tacit; we have them but don’t necessarily think much about them. This first step of the process is about bringing them into awareness.
We often become aware of values when they are violated. If it offends us when a politician lies, honesty or integrity may be important values. If we worry that we may not be able to retire in comfort, security may be an important value. Notice these statements are framed as “may” be important. That is because people have many values, and different values are activated or brought to the forefront of awareness, in different contexts. For example, if someone asks you if you have a good pension plan, your security values may be activated by the question, but that does not necessarily mean that security is very important to you. Determining which values are important to you is a key step toward increasing intentional action. The clarification process needs not just to highlight values you endorse, but to help you rank them by importance so that the actions you plan address what is truly meaningful to you.
The values that are most important are often referred to as ‘intrinsic’ values. These are the things you value for their own sake, not because they lead to something else. So, if an experience is intrinsically valuable, you would want it even if it leads to nothing else. For a more thorough explanation of this idea and some help with the first of the four steps (i.e., clarifying your personal values) you can try our free Intrinsic Values Test:
The test presents a broad array of values that are intrinsic (according to this definition) and helps you rate them for salience and then prioritize the most important ones. Other research-based tools for clarifying values can be found here. The best tool for any step of this process is the one that you will use, so read the descriptions of different tools and choose one that makes it possible for you to engage.
2. Assess (How Integrated Your Values Are)
So, you’ve clarified your values – what next? It is possible to simply move from identifying your most important values (Step 1) to planning for action on them (Step 3), skipping the assessment step. This will work for many people. However, if you do the assessment step, you can evaluate what you are currently doing or what you have done in the past, relative to any value you choose. This will give you additional information to guide planning. The tools below offer two ways of assessing your current and past actions: by place or domain and by time.
1) Domain assessment. Values can be active in different places in our lives. The Values Bullseye exercise can help you examine where a core value is more and less active. Reflect on your actions that are related to your core values, and figure out where you’d place them on a bullseye like the one below - the closer to the center you place them, the more they are in line with your values:
The bullseye is divided into four different life domains: work, leisure, personal growth, or relationships. Perhaps you value openness-to-experience and are taking adventurous vacations every year. Your value is active in the leisure domain, so you would place a dot (representing openness-to-experience) near the center of the leisure quarter. But if you notice that you are less open to new things at work, you would place a dot closer to the outside edge. You might decide to focus your planning (Step 3) on your openness at work, perhaps taking on a new challenge that broadens your horizons.
Knowing the domains where the value is inactive can guide your planning.
2) Time assessment. Values can be active at different times in our lives. An approach for those who enjoy writing or journaling and that is well-suited to looking across time, is to write your values history. This is the story of times in your life when a core value was prominent, written in response to some guiding questions. The history allows you to compare what was then to what is now. For example, you may have been politically active at university around social justice causes. In writing your history you might realize that although social justice is still an important value, you have stopped being politically active. The reflection offers an opportunity to notice this and consider it in your planning.
3. Plan (More Values-Based Actions)
Planning is the step where it is possible to be more intentional about activating your important values. The purpose of planning is to go beyond contextual activation - just waiting for life to give you a chance to live your value - and to move toward action that is more deliberate, based on chosen values. Deliberate action will tend to increase consistency and the benefits that are realized when you live in line with your values.
In this phase, it is important to create clear links in your own mind between what you value and what you will do. As an example, someone who values the environment might volunteer to work for an organization dedicated to saving forests. The cause would be one that they clearly value. However, if they ended up doing office tasks for the group, the work itself might become disconnected from the value. This is highly individual so, in the planning phase, creating strong links between what you are doing and what you value is the most important part.
Once you can envision actions, the path may be straightforward such as volunteering for an existing organization, or it might be more complicated. For example, you might want to start your own organization or social media account for a cause that moves you. For actions that will have many steps accomplished over time, you might need a planning process. There are several planning tools that can help you through the process. There is a choice because again, the best tool is the one you will use.
4. Motivate (The Actions You’ve Planned)
Once you’ve got some actions planned, you may need help to foster conditions that will motivate you to persevere in performing those actions. You might wonder: If values motivate action, then why should acting on your values be challenging at all? Shouldn’t you simply want to do what will bring you satisfaction and increase the sense that your life is meaningful?
The simple answer to this question is that values are not the only source of motivation for human beings. We are complex creatures, and, at any given moment, you can have two or more desires that compete for attention and action. Imagine you’re trying to prepare for an important presentation at work and you receive a text inviting you out to a fun night out with friends. Even if values are clear and plans are made, there will be challenges and missteps.
One of the most difficult challenges is simply procrastination. You can combat the tendency to put off things you have planned by understanding the procrastination equation based on the work of Piers Steel. The equation looks like this:
The terms in the numerator are elements that decrease the tendency to procrastinate. You will be more motivated to act if the value of the action is high and if you expect you can achieve it. You will tend to be less motivated, and procrastination will increase, to the extent that the terms in denominator increase. If you are easily distracted from your action plan or impulsive, or if you have no deadline and you can delay action, then procrastination will increase. Adjusting each of these elements in the right direction can increase your motivation for values-based action. Let’s talk about how to do that.
How to Increase Value
The good news about the value element of the equation is that clarifying your values gives you a set of personally important principles that clearly establish value. By completing Step 1 (clarifying), you will be clear about the character strengths you hope to further develop and that is a great start. But principles are not actions. If you also complete Step 3 (planning) and make a clear link between your values and your goals, it will give you a further boost. Together, these two steps will increase the value portion of the equation and (other things being equal) improve motivation.
How to Increase Expectancy
‘Expectancy’ refers to both how challenging an action is and how confident we feel in our ability to perform it. If we believe an action is going to be too challenging, we will not expect to be able to complete it.
You can address the difficulty of the actions you’ve chosen in the planning step, where you break complex goals down into doable steps.
We have said that values that transcend the self – such as caring for others and for the world - are noteworthy for their relationship with the sense that life is better. Confidence in our personal ability to do something for others can be increased by overcoming emotional obstacles. The tool Overcoming Your Emotional Obstacles to Doing Good can help. This tool reviews four emotion-based cognitive biases that get in the way of helping others and how to overcome them as well as ideas about what might prevent you from acting. If you want to realize the increased benefit of values that prioritize caring but keep getting stuck, this tool could help.
You can also increase your expectation that you too can do good by listening to stories of others who do the same. The podcast Hero Next Door features interviews of ordinary people who take action to make the world a better place. In each episode, a hero tells their own inspiring story. Then, an expert offers science-based ideas and strategies to help you develop your inner hero. Listening to the stories may help to increase your expectation that you too can live your caring values.
How to Decrease Impulsiveness
This element of procrastination is in some ways trait-like. Some people are more impulsive than others. If you find yourself easily distracted, switching tasks when you need to stay with one thing, you may be one of those people. This does not however doom you to a life of procrastination. The opposite of impulsiveness is mindfulness and mindfulness can be cultivated. Although we often associate mindfulness with meditation, meditation simply develops the skill of sustaining awareness of our own thoughts, feelings and actions. Mindful reflection is a powerful tool for reducing impulsiveness.
Research done by Clearer Thinking examining successful habit change tested 22 factors that were supposed to help with habit change. The results indicated that mindful reflection was the most powerful strategy for increasing good habits. The process involves simply reviewing a previous successful change, identifying the factors and techniques that led to success, and devising a way to implement those same factors in the present. This is mindfulness without the meditation, a process that calls us to be aware of what we are doing.
A tool for increasing awareness of the gap between where we are and where we hope to go in terms of our values is writing your own eulogy. This exercise is a journey into the future where you imagine how you want your life to be remembered. It asks you to write two eulogies: one that makes you proud and one that outlines who you will be if you do not change to follow your values. Motivation for change is increased by making immediate the sense that our lives are finite. The time for values-based action is already here.
How to Decrease Delay
If living according to your values is a lifetime endeavor, then it has no end. A corollary of having no end is having no deadlines. Deadlines tend to push us to act now, so a process that is without a deadline is a possible sinkhole of procrastination. Of course, there always will be context-driven values opportunities. When the waiter forgets to include the bottle of wine on my check, I can decide to bring this to his attention, if honesty is an important value. That process requires little in the way of intentionality. But intentional values-based action is easy to postpone.
To increase motivation for action today, it is helpful to tie behaviors that are already well-established in our daily routine to a new value-based behavior. An implementation intentions tool can help. Implementation intentions are sometimes called if/then rules. For example, if I want to increase my caring actions with friends and family, then I can use the fact that I make myself a cup of coffee in the morning to anchor the new behavior. While my coffee is brewing each day, I can send a caring text to someone in my circle. If you have identified values-consistent behaviors and are having trouble remembering to act on them, if/then rules can help to remind you what you want to do.
The Values-Based Life
Clarifying important values, assessing how well you are currently living those values, and setting goals and plans to increase action on those values are powerful ways to increase the values-base of your life. The process is challenging and changes as we go through life. The ways of living a value that are useful when you are 30 will probably look different than the way you live that same value when you are 65. The actions will change but if you become clear on your values today, they can be yours for life. You can start any time. If you choose to act on values that transcend the self - caring for others and for the world – evidence suggests you could reap rich rewards in well-being, life satisfaction, and creating a life of meaning.
Marilyn Fitzpatrick, PhD, is a Professor Emerita at McGill University, where she led the Counselling Psychology Program for many years. She is an internationally recognized researcher, author, and speaker, with a focus on values and their critical role in supporting mental health. Currently, Dr. Fitzpatrick serves as the Clinical Director of Medipsy Psychological Services, where she provides clinical services, training, and supervision, including specialized guidance on integrating values work into psychotherapy. She is also the founder of Becoming Your Best Self, a platform dedicated to helping individuals align their lives with their values, and the host of Hero Next Door, a podcast available on Spotify and YouTube that offers expert insights and inspiration to empower listeners in understanding and strengthening their values.