If you have spent any time in the personal development space, you have almost certainly come across advice like this.
Define your core values. Align your actions with your values. Check for value conflicts. Live in accordance with what matters most to you.
Good advice. Genuinely useful. But also advice that assumes you already know what your values are.
If you have never done this work before, that assumption is a significant gap. Where do you even start when the concept of core values feels abstract and the idea of defining yours feels like being handed a blank canvas with no paintbrush?
I have been exactly there. And this post is the guide I wish I had found when I was.
Why this matters before we start.
Understanding your core values is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of almost every meaningful change you can make in your life.
When I was younger I often struggled to stay motivated at work. Getting out of the door in the morning felt more effortful than it should. Completing tasks felt heavy and slow in a way I could not explain. I assumed the problem was me, my attitude, my discipline, my qualifications.
It was not. It was a value conflict I had not yet named.
Once I identified that one of my core values is freedom, everything made sense. I had been operating in an environment with strict timetables, rigid processes and a manager who monitored every move. Of course it felt wrong. I was acting in direct opposition to something fundamental to who I am, every single day, without knowing it.
With that understanding, I started making different choices. More deliberate ones. Environments that gave me the autonomy and flexibility I need to actually thrive.
Here is a smaller example that will probably feel familiar. For years I attended every team dinner and Christmas party because it seemed like the responsible, collegial thing to do. And I would enjoy the first hour. Then my social battery would drain completely and I would spend the rest of the evening waiting for an acceptable moment to leave, smiling through the depletion.
What I did not recognise at the time was that I was acting against another core value, my own wellbeing. Not dramatically. Just consistently. And consistently acting against a value, even in small ways, accumulates into friction you carry everywhere.
That is what unexamined value conflicts do. They create a low-level resistance to your own life that is hard to name but impossible to ignore.
Defining your values gives you the language for what has been quietly bothering you. And once you have the language, you can start doing something about it.
I wrote about what that recalibration felt like in Why Achieving Your Goals Makes You Feel Empty.
How to recognise a value from the inside.
Before you can define your values, you need to know what you are looking for. And values are not primarily intellectual things. They are felt things.
When you are living in alignment with a core value, something in you relaxes. There is a sense of ease, of flow, of being exactly where you are supposed to be. You are energised rather than depleted. You might be deeply focused or quietly content or genuinely excited, but underneath all of it there is no urge to be somewhere else or doing something different. The moment feels right in a way that does not need explaining.
It shows up in flow states when you lose track of time. In the project that pulls you in without effort. In a Saturday morning doing something you love when the worries of the week simply do not follow you there.
When you are acting against a value, the signal is different. Something feels harder than it should. There is friction where there should be ease. Frustration arrives faster than the situation warrants. Motivation disappears. Sometimes there is a gut feeling pointing one direction while your logical mind argues for another, more sensible, more responsible option.
It also shows up in decision making. When you are trying to decide something that conflicts with a core value, the decision feels genuinely hard to make. You find yourself reasoning back and forth, weighing pros and cons, asking everyone around you for their opinion, because something does not feel right but you cannot name what. The logic points one way. Something deeper points another.
When you decide in alignment with a value, the experience is completely different. There is no prolonged deliberation. No lingering doubt after the decision is made. Just a quiet, clear sense of: yes, this is right. The decision does not need defending because it does not feel like a choice between options. It feels like a recognition of what was already true.
That clarity is one of the most useful things values give you. Not a rule to follow but a compass that makes the hard choices easier.
I often notice a value conflict through a specific thought. This is harder than it should be. Or: this should not feel this difficult.
Those thoughts are not complaints. They are information. They are your values signalling that something is misaligned.
Learning to notice both signals, the ease and the friction, is the first skill. The exercise that follows will help you identify the values those signals are pointing toward.
The exercise — five steps.
For this exercise, you’ll need approximately 20 minutes, a little bit of curiosity, and a way to take notes. Pen and paper, notes app on the phone, or a document on your laptop. They all work.
Step one. Start with a list.
When you have no idea where to start, start with inspiration rather than invention. You do not need to generate your values from scratch. You need to recognise them when you see them.
Use the Thrive Wave Core Values List below to get started. It contains 80 values across six categories: Freedom and Autonomy, Growth and Achievement, Connection and Belonging, Integrity and Character, Wellbeing and Balance, and Success and Security.
Read through the full list slowly. Do not analyse. Just notice which words produce a response. A quiet yes. A feeling of recognition. A sense of this matters to me.
Step two. Select your resonant values.
From the full list, choose between five and twenty values that feel meaningful to you. Not aspirational, genuinely resonant. Not the values you think you should have or the ones that sound impressive. The ones that feel true.
Write them down. A piece of paper works well for this. So does a note on your phone. The format does not matter. Getting them out of your head and onto something visible does.
A useful signal at this stage: if a value makes you feel slightly vulnerable to claim it, if part of you thinks I am not sure I am allowed to want this, that is often a sign it is genuine.
Step three. Narrow to your top three.
This is where the work deepens. You now need to find the values that are most core, the ones that, if consistently violated, would make your life feel fundamentally wrong.
Use a simple tournament method. Take two values from your list and place them side by side. Ask yourself: if I could only honour one of these, which would I choose? The one you are more drawn to, the one that creates a stronger pull, wins the round.
Work through all your values this way until three emerge as the consistent winners. These are your core values. Not a complete picture of who you are, just the three that function as the deepest anchors.
If two values feel genuinely inseparable, keep them together. Some people end up with four. The point is not the number. It is the clarity.
Step four. Test them against your life.
A value is only useful if it is true. So test yours.
Think of a recent moment when you felt genuinely at ease, in flow, energised, not wanting to be anywhere else. Which of your three values was being honoured in that moment?
Now think of a recent moment of friction, something that felt harder than it should, or that left you depleted or quietly resentful. Which of your values was being compromised?
If your identified values show up consistently in both tests, present in the good moments and absent or violated in the difficult ones, you have found something real.
If they do not quite fit, go back to your longer list. The right values will pass this test clearly.
Step five. Ask the one question that makes it practical.
Knowing your values is the beginning. Understanding what they actually require of your life is what makes the work useful.
For each of your three core values, ask yourself this:
What would my average day look and feel like if I were genuinely living in alignment with this value? And what is one small thing I could do today to move closer to that?
Not a complete life overhaul. One small thing. One shift that reflects the value in the context of your actual current life.
Freedom might mean protecting one hour in your week where nobody gets to direct your attention. Wellbeing might mean leaving one team dinner earlier than feels polite. Growth might mean spending twenty minutes on something that challenges you rather than scrolling.
Small. Specific. Yours.
A note on values changing over time.
Your core values are not fixed for life. As you grow, experience new things and move through different seasons of life, what matters most to you may shift.
If at any point your identified values start to feel like they no longer fit, if the ease and flow signals are not showing up where they should, repeat this exercise. It takes twenty minutes and the clarity it produces is worth far more than that.
Where this connects to everything else.
Your core values are not a standalone discovery. They are the foundation that makes the other personal development work you do more grounded and more effective. When you know what you value, the reflection questions in the Redesign Loop have somewhere real to land. The habits you are trying to build have a reason behind them that goes deeper than discipline. The boundaries you are working to set have a value underneath them worth protecting.
Defining your values does not solve everything. But it gives you a lens through which everything else becomes clearer.
If you want to go deeper on what value alignment actually looks like in practice, the Redesign Loop Step-by-Step Guide is a useful companion to this exercise.
And if you want support working through what you find, what the values mean for your specific life and how to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, that is exactly what coaching is for.
(Filling out this form is simply to start an open, no-obligation conversation.)
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