Here's a question you've probably been asked before. "What are your values?"
And here's what most people do when they hear it. They reach for the impressive-sounding answers. Integrity. Family. Growth. Hard work. Kindness.
Nothing wrong with any of those. But they're also the answers that sound right. Which isn't the same as the answers that are true.
The exercise that changes the conversation
Brené Brown developed a values exercise in her Dare to Lead work that I think is one of the most powerful tools in coaching. It starts with a list of over 100 values... words like creativity, adventure, security, belonging, courage, influence, justice, play.
And then it asks you to narrow them down.
Not to the ones that sound good. To the ones that are actually driving your decisions, your energy, your sense of when something feels deeply right or deeply wrong.
How the exercise works
Start with the full list. All 100+ values in front of you. Read through them slowly. Circle everything that resonates, even a little. Don't overthink it. You might end up with 20 or 30 circled. That's fine.
Narrow to ten. Look at what you circled and start grouping. "Loyalty" and "commitment" might be the same thing for you. "Adventure" and "freedom" might belong together. Let your instincts do the work here, not your logic. Notice what you keep and what you let go.
Then get to five. This is where it starts to feel uncomfortable. You have to make real choices. And uncomfortable is usually a sign you're doing it right.
The step most people skip
Before you go from five to three, there's something worth doing that most exercises miss entirely.
Write a short paragraph about each of your five values. Not a definition you found online. What it actually means to you. When it shows up in your life. What it feels like when it's missing. Why this one made the cut.
Then print it out and hang it somewhere you'll see it every day. A door. A mirror. The inside of a kitchen cupboard.
Live with it for a few days.
This isn't just a nice extra step. It's the whole point. When you have to put your values into your own words, you find out quickly which ones are real and which ones you picked because they sound like you. And when you see them every day, they start to reveal themselves. You notice when you're living them. You notice when you're not.
After a few days of that, narrowing from five to three becomes much easier. Some of the five will feel essential. Two will feel like supporting players. Let the supporting players go.
Why three?
I've thought about this. Why not five? Why not ten?
If you have ten core values, you have zero core values. They all become noise. You can't navigate with ten compass points. You can navigate with three.
Three values are specific enough to actually guide a decision. "Would this choice honor what I actually value?" is a useful question when the answer has somewhere to land.
Three is also honest. Most people, when they really excavate, find that a handful of things are driving almost everything. The rest are preferences, not principles.
The gap nobody talks about
Here's what I find in almost every coaching conversation that touches on values. There's a gap.
Between what someone says they value and how they actually spend their time, energy, and money.
Someone says they value family. But they're working 60-hour weeks and feel vaguely guilty about it every Sunday. Someone says they value health. But they haven't moved their body in months. Someone says they value creativity. But their days are full of meetings and none of it.
This isn't a moral failing. It's information. And it's usually the most useful information in a coaching conversation, because the gap is where the real work starts.
I wrote about this in why feeling stuck is rarely about your job. The job is usually a symptom. What's underneath is almost always a values misalignment... living in ways that don't match what actually matters to you.
Values evolve. Don't treat yours as permanent.
One more thing worth knowing before you do this exercise.
Your values now are not your values from ten years ago. And they probably shouldn't be.
I had a conversation with Antonio for my 50 Lunches project that stayed with me. He'd lived perfectly in line with his values for years. Adventure. Exploration. Intensity. And somewhere in his late 30s, he found himself quietly miserable. Not because he'd betrayed his values. Because he'd outgrown them.
The values that made sense at 28 (freedom, novelty, risk) had quietly been replaced by something different (contribution, connection, stability). But he was still running the old playbook. Same instincts, same choices... just now producing the wrong result.
So when you do this exercise, don't treat it as an excavation of some permanent truth. Treat it as a snapshot. Who are you now? What matters now? That's the useful question. And it's worth asking every few years, not just once.
Where to start
If you want to try this, Brené Brown's values list is the best starting point I've found. Print it out. Get a pen. Find somewhere quiet. Give it an honest hour.
And if you're not sure where to start with the self-reflection piece, the Life Report is a useful warm-up. It gives you a map of your life right now... which makes the values conversation sharper, because you can already see where the tensions are.
The goal isn't a beautiful-sounding list to put in a LinkedIn bio. The goal is three words that actually tell the truth about you. And then the much harder, more interesting work of figuring out how to live them.
If you want to explore this kind of work with some structure behind it, that's exactly what coaching is for. The values exercise is usually where we start.
