How to Identify Your Values

A meaningful life requires more than goals

A few months into sobriety, I went to a Phillies baseball game. A lot of my drinking days had been filled with tailgating and sports, so I was looking forward to going with some of my sober friends. But as I sat there watching men I didn’t know run in a circle, I realized that I was bored out of my mind. I didn’t actually care about sports. I just liked drinking outside on a summer afternoon.

This experience caused me to have a bit of an identity crisis. Without alcohol, who was I? What did I like doing? What did I even care about?

Most of us face these questions eventually. When something — a divorce, a layoff, the kids leaving, a diagnosis, a move — shakes up the routine your life was organized around, you discover which parts of your life were freely chosen and which were just what you ended up with. You thought you loved your job, but you loved being needed. You thought you loved your spouse, but without kids in the house you see how little you have in common. Without the container, everything falls through.

That’s because very few of us take time to identify our values. What is a value? A value is a principle, like honesty or courage, that guides how you want to behave toward yourself, other people, and the world around you. Over the past few decades, politicians and corporations have corrupted the term, using it to look honorable while doing whatever is most convenient or self-serving. Values became performative, so no wonder we pick ones that sound good on paper, or ones we think will get us what we want.

People also misunderstand what values are. When I talk to my clients about values, they often say things like family, career, health. But these are just different domains of your life, so they can’t guide your behavior. Let me give you an example. If family is your most important domain and you’re the one paying the bills, do you take the job offer that means better pay but longer hours, or do you turn it down to spend more time at home? The word “family” is useless in helping you make this decision. A real value will show up in every domain of your life. You can be honest with your sister at Thanksgiving and honest in a performance review in March. (Though they may be different levels of honesty).

Values are also not goals. A goal is something you can finish — you complete it, cross it off your list, and then find a new one. But a value doesn’t work that way. There is no day when you can check off being honest and move on to something else. As if climbing a mountain without a top, we spend our lives working towards our values.

And this is actually good news. Almost everything you want depends on people and circumstances outside you. But you can lose the promotion or the relationship and still hold on to your values, because a value lives in your behavior. Nobody can take your behavior from you.

I like to think of values as like a compass. North is the same no matter where you are in the world. You can be somewhere you have never been, trying something new, and the compass still works. It won’t tell you where to go or promise you’ll like the destination when you get there, but it will always tell you which way is north. Without that, it’s easy to spend a decade building a life that you didn’t choose.

So how do you find your values? Ask yourself, what do I want my life to look like in 5, 10, 20 years? I don’t want you to focus on what you want to achieve, or the house you want, or even the specific family you want to have. Instead, ask yourself, how do I want people to remember me? Or, what traits do I most admire in the people I respect? What you admire in other people is usually a value you already have.

As for me, I don’t go to many sports games anymore. I still find them boring. But I do value connection with my friends and family, which sometimes looks like sitting in the stands and chatting through an entire inning without paying attention.