A values worksheet asks you to circle five words, and within a minute you have family, honesty, growth, health and freedom. The list looks right, and it looks like almost everyone else’s, so it rarely settles a hard decision. In studies of hundreds of samples from 82 countries, Shalom Schwartz’s research on basic values found that in most nations people, on average, rank benevolence, universalism and self-direction near the top, and power, tradition and stimulation near the bottom.¹ In plain terms, caring for the people around you, concern for everyone’s welfare and thinking for yourself make nearly everyone’s list.

So the useful part is the order, not the list: which value wins when two collide. To identify your core values, work from evidence in your own life to a short, ranked list you can act on:

1. Collect the hard choices you have already made
2. Name the values behind them
3. Rank your values by forcing trade-offs
4. Write down why each top value matters to you
5. Turn each top value into one goal for this month
6. Check the list against your week, and revisit it

A goal is an end point you can reach; a purpose is the long-term aim your goals serve, as set out in what psychologists mean by a sense of purpose; values are the standards you use to choose between options along the way.

What core values are, and why most lists look alike

Core values are the few values that rank highest for you and decide what you do when good options conflict. In Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic values, summarized in 2012, values are emotionally charged beliefs about desirable goals that apply across situations and serve as standards for judging actions, and it is their order of importance that guides behavior.¹

Schwartz adds why the exercise is harder than it sounds: values rarely enter awareness in everyday decisions; they surface when a choice has conflicting implications for two values you care about.¹ Ask in the abstract what you value and you reach for the admirable words everyone uses. Ask what you did when two good things could not both be had, and you get closer to the truth.

Picture two colleagues who both list family and achievement. One takes the promotion that means a month of travel each quarter; the other turns it down. Their lists match and their priorities do not. Schwartz’s theory models that difference by arranging ten broad values in a circle, where neighbors share motivations and opposites pull apart. Pursuing achievement typically conflicts with benevolence, the welfare of people close to you, while achievement and power usually go together.¹

The lesson for your first draft: expect it to look like everyone else’s, and treat it as raw material rather than the answer.

Further reading

• 

  A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

  by Steven C. Hayes

  Steven Hayes, a co-founder of ACT, on the values-versus-goals idea behind step 5, with values exercises of his own.

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How to identify your core values, step by step

Steps 1 to 4 rest on Schwartz’s value theory and small lab experiments, step 5 on one trial and step 6 on studies linking values to behavior, so treat the whole as a structured reflection, not a tested program.

1. Collect the hard choices you have already made

Your past decisions are better evidence than your hopes, because values come into view when they conflict. Write down five or six genuinely hard choices: a job you turned down, a time you spoke up or kept quiet, where your money or your weekend went when something had to give. Note what you chose and what you gave up.

Add moments of strong feeling. Schwartz describes values as charged with emotion once they are activated: people who prize independence become aroused when it is threatened and happy when they can enjoy it.¹ So irritation and pride are clues. If it bothers you every time a manager rewrites your work without asking, you may be looking at self-direction.

2. Name the values behind them

Next, name what the choices protected, using a ready-made vocabulary. The Personal Values Card Sort, a free, public-domain set of cards from the University of New Mexico, defines each value briefly and comes with header cards for sorting them into three piles: very important, important and not important to you.²

Then merge near-duplicates. Honesty, integrity and truthfulness may be one value for you, and that is allowed: Schwartz calls his own division into ten values an arbitrary convenience and says values can be divided more or less finely to suit the purpose.¹ Use his ten as a gap check. If nothing on your list touches a whole side of his circle, ask whether you left it out or whether it truly ranks low.

3. Rank your values by forcing trade-offs

In Schwartz’s theory it is the relative importance of competing values, not any single value, that guides what you do, so rank by trade-off rather than by rating each value on its own.¹ Put two values against each other and ask which you would honor if you could honor only one this year. The winner moves up.

1. Openness to change: self-direction and stimulation: independent thought, novelty, challenge (hedonism sits between this group and 4)
2. Self-transcendence: universalism and benevolence: the welfare of people close to you, of everyone and of nature
3. Conservation: security, conformity and tradition: safety, stability, restraint and respect for custom; pulls against 1
4. Self-enhancement: achievement and power: personal success, status and control over resources; pulls against 2

Pairs turn one abstract question into small, concrete decisions.

Stop when you have a clear top group. No study we found tests how many core values work best; we suggest three to five, few enough to recall in the middle of a decision.

4. Write down why each top value matters to you

Writing out your reasons turns a slogan into a commitment you can defend. Gregory Maio and James Olson argued in 1998 that many values work as truisms: widely shared, rarely questioned and held without much reasoning behind them. Experiments building on the idea found that people who thought through reasons for a value were then more likely to act in line with it.³

Johan Karremans of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands extended the idea in 2007. In his first study, undergraduates spent 10 minutes writing reasons for and against honesty and 10 more on loyalty. When they went next door to be paid, an experimenter knocked a cup of pencils to the floor. Students who had reasoned about honesty and loyalty were more likely to help pick them up than students who wrote about success and ambition or wrote nothing. A second study found a similar pattern for sharing points fairly between groups. Both were small lab studies with students, each measuring a single act right afterward: a short-term nudge, not a lasting change.³

For each top value, write why it matters to you, one time you lived by it and one time you did not, plus one honest reason against it, as the participants did. If the reasons against start to win, the value may belong lower on your list.

5. Turn each top value into one goal for this month

A value you never act on stays a word on a page. Give each top value one concrete goal with an end point: “learning” might become “finish the introductory statistics course by the 30th”, and “fairness” might become “share the credit for the product launch in the team update”. The goal will end and the value will still be there to act on; pairing the two is what the 2013 trial described below tested.⁴ Planning, obstacles and follow-through for the goal itself are covered in how to set goals you can reach.

6. Check the list against your week, and revisit it

Some values show up in behavior far more clearly than others. In three studies, Anat Bardi and Shalom Schwartz found that stimulation and tradition values related strongly to the behaviors that express them, while benevolence, achievement, security and conformity related only marginally; the authors suggest that social pressure to behave in certain ways may partly hide the link.⁵

In our reading, behavior that most people feel expected to show, such as being considerate and reliable at work, may say little about your own ranking. Look instead at the choices only you make: what you do with a free evening, which requests you refuse, where unplanned money goes. In a month, compare your ranking with your calendar and spending. A value that never appears either ranks lower than you thought or is being crowded out; both answers are useful.

WiserHours

Your core values exercise

• Five or six hard choices written down, with what I gave up
• Values named from a list, near-duplicates merged
• Values ranked by trade-offs, top three to five kept
• A few sentences on why each top value matters, plus one reason against
• One goal with an end date for each top value
• A reminder set to compare the list with my calendar and spending in a month

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/purpose/core-values/#checklist-core-values-steps

Why name your values before setting goals?

Exploring your values before you set goals may add to what goal setting achieves on its own, according to a 2013 randomized trialrandomized controlled trial: A study that assigns participants to the treatment or the comparison group at random, so the groups start out alike and a difference in what happens next can be put down to the treatment. Random assignment makes the two groups comparable; it does not make the people in the trial representative of anyone else.Full entry in the glossary led by Jared Chase at a US university. Students who explored and wrote about their values before an online goal-setting program earned better grades the next semester, while students given goal setting alone did no better than a waitlist.⁴

The study

Limited evidence

Values first, then goals: a 2013 trial with psychology students

Students were randomly assigned to online goal-setting training, the same training preceded by a values module in which they wrote for several minutes about what mattered to them as students, or a waitlist. Over the next semester, the values-plus-goals group’s grade point average rose by about a tenth of a grade point relative to the waitlist, which the authors rate a medium effect; its edge over goal setting alone was small. When the waitlist group later received the values-plus-goals program, its grades rose too.⁴

A tenth of a grade point is small for any one student, and the sample was psychology majors at one university: a promising sign, not a promise. The authors do not know why the values module helped; they suggest values may give a goal a larger reason, so that a test becomes less about a grade and more about learning.⁴ If they are right, the same quarterly report can feel less like a hurdle and more like a chance to act on something you chose.

The values module came from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which separates goals, outcomes you can reach and finish, from values, qualities of action you can express but never complete. Chase’s team makes the point with a 1999 quotation from Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson.⁴

values can never be fully satisfied, permanently achieved, or held like an object

The practical lesson: if a value on your list reads like an outcome (“get promoted”), rewrite it as a way of acting (“to do work I can stand behind”, “to keep learning”). The outcome is a goal; the value is the reason you want it, and it outlasts the goal.

How far the research supports a values exercise

Schwartz’s value theory is better supported than the exercises built on it. His structure holds across many countries, but values exercises have mostly been tested with students, often in small trials, and the best-studied version, a short essay about your most important value, shows small effects for some groups and none for others.

That essay, called values affirmation, resembles steps 2 and 4: students pick their most important value from a list and write briefly about it. A 2021 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary of 58 classroom studies of the method by Wu, Spreckelsen and Geoffrey Cohen found a small benefit to grades and other school results for students facing negative stereotypes about their group, which the authors note is sizable by the standards of school programs, and essentially none for other students. Cohen co-authored early studies of the method, which readers should weigh, though the team found little sign of publication bias.⁶ Either way, do not expect naming your values to lift your performance on its own.

A 2020 systematic review of values work in ACT found that its studies mostly reported the hoped-for effects but relied heavily on self-reported outcomes, in a mix of clinical and non-clinical samples, many of them students.⁷ Goal-setting exercises have a mixed record too: a 2019 trial with about 1,400 first-year students at a Canadian university found no evidence that either of two online goal-setting exercises, one related to the program the 2013 trial built on, changed grades.⁸ Evidence from ordinary adults doing the exercise on their own, at work or at home, is a gap.

So use the exercise for what the evidence fits: clarifying a choice between two good options, such as a side project that would eat your evenings, not raising your performance.

The bottom line

Finding your core values is ranking, not listing: the values that count win when two good things collide, and your past hard choices reveal them better than a worksheet. Rank by trade-offs, write why each top value matters, and give each a goal with an end date this month. The research backs Schwartz’s theory more firmly than the exercise, so treat it as a way to decide more clearly.