Core Values: What they are, What they mean, and Why we need to know our own

So… What Are Core Values, Really?

Let’s start simple.
Core values are the handful of principles that matter most to us—they are the things that make
us feel like us. They’re the inner “rules” we live by, even if we’ve never said them out loud or
written them down.

Think of core values as the quiet forces that shape the decisions we make, our relationships,
our boundaries, our sense of purpose, and even our emotional reactions. They’re not goals.
They’re not personality traits. They’re not things we wish we cared about. They’re the things we
actually care about—deeply, consistently, and often feel almost instinctively.

For example, someone might highly value character traits such as these:
1. Honesty
2. Freedom
3. Integrity
4. Compassion
5. Respect

These aren’t just nice words. They’re the underlying “why” behind so many of their choices.
If you’ve ever said, “I don’t know why, but this just doesn’t feel right,” that’s usually the sign
that a core value is tapping you on the shoulder, one that is not willing to be ignored. If you’ve
ever felt unexpectedly energized or fulfilled, that’s the sign that one of your core values is being
met and honored.

Most people walk around with these values inside them, but seldom take the time to identify
them. It’s like having a map in your pocket but never unfolding it. They’re navigating life by
instinct instead of intention.

And honestly? That’s exhausting.


What Core Values Mean in Everyday Life:

Here’s where things get interesting. Core values aren’t abstract concepts floating around in our
minds. They show up everywhere—in tiny moments and big decisions and everywhere in
between.

They shape our decisions.

Ever notice how some choices feel easy, and others feel like a mental tug-of-war?
That’s our values at work.
If you value stability, a risky career move might feel terrifying.
If you value growth, staying in the same role for too long might feel suffocating.

The tug-of-war doesn’t only happen when we become stagnant, but that sense of inner conflict
will absolutely become known to us when we even contemplate doing something oppositional
to those values we treasure.

As an example, golf is considered a “gentleman’s game” – not because only gentlemen play it,
but because it is a game that relies nearly solely on the integrity and trustworthiness of the
players.

Golf is a sport that is really easy to cheat in, and often players do. But it is an example of having
the opportunity to cheat in the game to gain a benefit or to honor the rules – and the only
reason a person would honor the rules over cheating is due to the presence and importance of
the core values each player has within them.

It’s really a fascinating study in sociology because the concepts of the core values of an
individual are truly based on each individual – and to the levels each individual interprets and
maintains their own definitions of those words representing the core values.

If we to ask 100 random people whether they would ever rob a bank, you’d find that likely 98-
100 would answer, “absolutely not”. But follow that question with whether they would notify
the bank teller that $100 too much was given while cashing a check and an entirely different
number would arise.

Core values are sensitive and often are fluid when unevaluated, meaning that unless we truly
consider them and determine what they mean for us and our personal value, they have the
tendency to be malleable depending on the circumstance. So while core values are absolutely
inherent to every individual, whether they have none or 100 of them, they do not have a
universal definition among all individuals.


They influence our relationships.

Values determine what we feel we need from people and what we offer in return.
For example, if you value honesty, you’ll struggle with people who sugarcoat or avoid the truth.
If you value connection, emotionally distant relationships will feel draining or simply not worth
the effort to continue.


They determine what we tolerate

This is a big one. When something violates our values, we will react emotionally and usually
even before our intellect has processed the circumstance, because it’s so inherent to us. Our
unconscious emotional mind is triggered on the most basic level to understand we’ve entered a
situation of threat and or conflict, simply by the action of another individual; and the greater
the violation, the greater level of emotional reaction.

Depending on the circumstances of the violation, we might feel resentment, tension, guilt, or
even shame toward the other; and if it was a great enough violation, anger to the point of
violence can ensue – that is how intrinsic core values are to our emotional being.

Those resulting emotions aren’t random—they’re signals.

They guide your sense of fulfillment

Fulfillment isn’t luck. It’s alignment. When our actions match our values, life feels meaningful.

When they don’t, life feels off—even if everything “looks good” from the outside.

Consider the following: You volunteer at a soup kitchen on Wednesdays, and you’ve been doing it
for a couple of years, but this one Wednesday, you are tired after a day at your job, and while on
the way home from work, you decide you are not going to work at the soup kitchen that
evening. In this situation, we would feel relieved as a result of making the decision, and we look
forward to the free evening.

And then the guilt comes – and as I teach my coaching clients, guilt merely is the internal
emotional conflict between what we want to do and what we feel we are supposed to do. So
perhaps we then decide to go volunteer because we had committed to being there, that
evening you see 10 needy families come in, and they are so appreciative for what you and the
volunteers do for them that it lifts your spirits to that wonderful sense of fulfillment. On the
way home from the kitchen, you are tired, but you are on cloud 9 because you remembered
what you do matters. It reminded you that your core values of charity, sacrifice, and
compassion are so important to you that you feel reinvigorated.

Core values don’t only require us to act almost instinctively, but they can, at times, help us really
evaluate why we do what we do – whether we want to at that moment or not.


They help you understand yourself.

Values give language to your identity – they really help describe ourselves in the mirror to self.
They help you understand how and why certain experiences shaped you, why certain
environments drained you, and why certain dreams keep calling your name. They can be the
reason you do what you do for others when the only benefit to you is the sense of goodness
you provided to others.

And when those values are not present in someone, it explains why they seem not to care
about the harm they cause to others. When one person with core values encounters a person
without any, it becomes apparent relatively quickly that there is a lack of commonality, almost
a case of oil and water attempting to mix together.

Basically, core values are the invisible architect of our emotional lives; and while it is extremely
important to become aware of this realization, it is equally important to know when others are
devoid of any core values to know when our values will conflict with the lack in another.

The vast majority reading this not only have core values but those core values include
benefiting your world – I state this because, in my coaching, I really only seek to empower those
who are good-hearted, so since you have core values that benefit you and your world, we need
to be aware:

You’re already living by them—whether you know them or not.


Why It Actually Matters to Know Your Core Values

Here’s the part most people underestimate: Naming your values changes everything.

It’s like turning on the lights in a room you’ve been stumbling through in the dark.

1. You gain clarity

When you know what matters most, decisions become easier.
You stop overthinking.
You stop second-guessing.
You stop chasing things that don’t fit you.

2. You reduce guilt

A lot of people feel guilty for setting boundaries or making choices others don’t understand.
But when you can say, “This is important to me because it aligns with my values,” the guilt
softens, and when we become proficient and comfortable in saying it, the guilt becomes non-
existent. Your choices feel grounded in healthy personal benefit and self-care instead of
unhealthy selfishness.

3. You strengthen your boundaries

Boundaries aren’t about pushing people away; they’re about protecting what you value.
If you value peace, you’ll guard your time. If you value respect, you’ll speak up when something
feels off or inappropriate. And it’s important to know that setting and holding to your
boundaries never harms a relationship – they merely reveal what the relationship is; we may not want to see the reality of what the relationship is but it is always better to know whether
our emotional investment within any relationship is of a healthy one or an unhealthy one.

4. You build emotional resilience

Life often gets messy, there is pain, there is conflict and there is loss that often we don’t want
but when we know, embrace and stay true to our values they act like anchors – keeping us
pinned to our safety of who we are; that anchor keeps us from deviating when it might be so
easy to do. Thus, they keep us from regret.

They help you stay steady when circumstances are chaotic. They remind you who you are
when everything around you feel uncertain, unstable and even unsafe. Knowing our core
values and committing to holding them dear provides a lifetime of certainty of never being that
individual who on their death bed has a lifetime of regret.

I’ve coached many millionaires who in their later years want to give back because they are
afraid of being at the end of their life knowing they had betrayed the values they once thought
were fundamental to their existence. But without evaluation and conviction toward our values,
black and white can lead to many gray areas.

5. You understand conflict more clearly

Most interpersonal conflicts are actually a conflict of values. We tend to easily discuss and
compromise in circumstances of conflict when we share core values with another but that
conflict can become antagonistic and contentious when the values between two parties vary
greatly, so it’s imperative that we come to know whether our adversary in the conflict has any
core values to which we can relate.

It is often nearly impossible to have a peaceful and resent-free resolution when either of the
parties feel their core values have been betrayed by an agreement they feel forced to accept. It
is because of this fact that we often hear about negotiations with the Japanese in that they
work diligently to ensure neither party feels they have “lost face”, meaning feeling demeaned
or humbled in the process.

“Losing face” is the sense of someone’s values being dismissed and thus feeling degraded and
this knowledge is integral for every business owner or business leader to understand and
integrate into their business model to ensure the greatest likelihood of empowered and
engaged personnel. It is equally important to integrate this knowledge and premise into every
romantic relationship as well.

When you understand your own values, you can navigate disagreements with more empathy
and less defensiveness and when we seek to understand those of another and honor those to
the best of our abilities, our conflicts can feel merely like conversations.

6. You create a life that feels like yours.

This is the heart of it.

Values help you build a life that fits you—not the version of you that others expect, not the
version you “should” be, but the version that feels true and authentic. When we are true to
ourselves, authenticity feels like a warm blanket on a crisp day; it’s like the sense of always
having been there and it feels natural and safe within you. The other thing that comes from
being authentically ourselves is that others sense the authenticity and they truly come to
understand who we are because it is riddled through the energy we exude.

When we are authentic, others see our truth, they believe our integrity, they trust without
history and really without understanding why and they follow us when the values mesh. It’s
quite common for those who truly become authentic in everything they do, to develop quite a
following from those who unconsciously want to be the same.


How to Start Identifying Your Own Core Values:

You don’t discover your values by picking from a list of “good qualities.”

You discover them by paying attention to your life.

Here are a few simple ways to start:

1. Look at your peak moments

Think of times when you felt proud, alive, or deeply fulfilled. What values were being honored?
Connection? Courage? Creativity? Service?

Think of a time you stood up and defended someone, what was the thing you were seeking for
that person? Justice? Fairness? Compassion?

I would comfortably guarantee that everyone reading this article has many core values – but as
you evaluate those values, consider this: They aren’t Core Values if they don’t apply to
everyone.

If they include some and exclude others, they aren’t values – they are biases. As an example, if
respect is a requirement for men but we don’t require respect for women, then that is not a
Core Value – it’s not even a value, it is merely a bias. If we expect compassion from others for
our loved ones but strangers get none, that’s not a Core Value.

That’s the difficulty and the beauty of Core Values, within the individual they either are or they
aren’t but we can only know our Core Values when we stop, sit and evaluate what truly matters
to us and drives our emotional existence for self and for our world.

2. Look at your painful moments

Pain is a powerful teacher. When were you most hurt, frustrated, or disappointed? What value
was being violated? Trust? Respect? Safety? Loyalty?

How about when we hurt another? Did we regret? Did we atone and do we understand we
felt we needed to? Did that harm that we caused alter how we acted in our future so we’d
have different outcomes? All of the answers to these questions require evaluation that results
in our ability to discover what are the most inherent and important values we honor to our
Core (hence the term Core Values).

3. Notice your emotional reactions

Your emotions are messengers. If something consistently triggers anger or resentment, it might
be clashing with a core value. Look for the emotions in others because that can often reveal
what they haven’t disclosed and perhaps what they haven’t discovered. Knowing the resulting
emotions within ourselves and others is paramount to becoming a student of our own values
and understanding those of others.

Becoming aware of the values and the emotional triggers in others can present you with a
significant advantage in business relationships and can be one of the most important
ingredients of making a healthy and long-lasting romantic relationship.

4. Look for patterns

What themes show up across your relationships, jobs, hobbies, and dreams? Patterns can point
to values.

Humans tend to repeat steps over and over, in relationships and in business. We tend to
repeat different scenarios and the resulting emotional outcomes – in my coaching I call this the
barometer of comfort. Our unconscious emotional mind seeks only that which it has
experienced before because it knows it can survive the experience since it has in the past.

If our patterns have been advantageous, we have a beneficial pattern. But if those patterns
have not benefited us and we feel the need to create new patterns, we first must become
consciously aware of the pattern and the reason for the pattern and then we can embark upon
the path to take different paths and create new patterns if the previous patterns were riddled
with pain.

5. Narrow it down

Most people have dozens of values, but only a few are truly core. Aim for three to five that feel
essential to your wellbeing. Then determine what you believe 2-3 of the core values for those
people in your life. Have you been present enough in these relationships to really be able to
ascertain their values? I bet you have and I bet you’ll find it easier to determine their values
than it is to narrow your own values down to those 3-5.

We often know the values of our loved ones more than our own, we also know their emotional
triggers and they know ours.

6. Define them in your own words.

“Integrity” means different things to different people.
So does “freedom,” “family,” or “success.”

Make your definitions personal to you but able to be defined as yours and yours alone. And
realize that your definitions will be different than those of others.

7. Practice living them

Values aren’t just ideas—they’re behaviors.

Ask yourself:
What does this value look like in action?
What choices support it?
What boundaries protect it?

The more you practice, the more natural it becomes to live in alignment with who you truly are.

Final Thought:

Core values aren’t about becoming someone new.
They’re about finally understanding the person you’ve been all along.

When you know your values, you stop drifting.
You start choosing.
You start leading yourself.
You start building a life that feels honest, grounded, and deeply your own.

-Dave Jones