How I Found My Values — And Why It Changed Everything

I was sitting in a work training session I hadn’t particularly wanted to attend when our guest speaker, a sports coach, said something that stopped me cold. It would take me down the path of how to find your values — and I was annoyed it had taken me this long.

The room was full of the senior team at the local office of the business I was working in, me being one of the more junior — and I remember noticing, not for the first time, how young most of us were. Our office had plenty of people in their twenties, fewer in their thirties, and maybe one person over fifty. The management team was no different. I’d already wondered about how telling that was of the industry I was in. Whether most people simply burned out and left before they reached middle age. Though that might have just been my brain looking for evidence to match how I was already feeling about the place. But it’s what I was sitting with when the coach walked in.

One of the topics discussed was something he called the life pie — the idea that your life is made up of different slices, and if the biggest slice was suddenly taken away, would you still feel whole? He asked us to draw it, and to draw it honestly.

Step one was simple enough — making the slices proportional to where I was actually spending my time. Not where I thought I was, or where I wanted to be. Just the truth of it. Beyond sleep, work was taking about 65% of my waking hours. Family was under 10%. Friends around 15%. Exercise barely 5%.

Step two was lining that up against what I actually valued — what would need to be true for me to feel balanced, happy and fulfilled. Family, health, friendship, creativity, achievement. Fine. I could name them. But I could already see the point before I’d finished writing. It hit like a smack in the face. It was upsetting.

Work was consuming everything. I knew it was getting bad but I don’t think I’d been given the perspective to really see it — or maybe I hadn’t let myself see it because I was someone who lived in the moment, or thought that this is what young people in their 20s should be doing to get ahead in their careers. Genuinely. That was my whole frame in my late twenties and I don’t entirely regret it. Not growing up too fast has its own kind of value. But there’s a difference between living in the moment and having no sense of the bigger picture at all. That morning, I realised I’d been doing the latter.

I don’t know if anyone else in that room felt the same way. When it comes to the workload, some didn’t mind giving up half of Sunday just to stay on top of things. Everyone runs their own race. And to think I thought I was setting boundaries by saying I wouldn’t work on weekends.

Something shifted for me that day.

Why most people skip this entirely

In my loose twenties, the word “values” would have meant nothing to me — or felt a bit too deep and meaningful. Too vague and intangible for someone who was far too busy living in the moment, which mostly meant working too hard and going out too much, to stop and ask what I actually wanted my life to look like. The question would have seemed a bit serious. Maybe even pretentious.

I think that’s a reasonable reaction, honestly. But here’s what I’ve come to understand: without any sense of your values or thought to what you want out of life, it can be like navigating without a map. Every decision gets made by default — whatever’s easiest, whatever’s expected, whatever makes sense at the time. Or to give myself some credit, I still made decisions by what felt right. But it certainly wasn’t by some grand design.

The result, for me, was a life that looked fine from the outside and felt increasingly hollow from the inside. I was ticking boxes I hadn’t purposefully chosen.

What values actually are

Fair to say this is a big topic. In my view, your values are the things that matter most to you. Less a list of ideals and more a quiet set of rules you’ve always been running on — whether you knew it or not. Not what you think you should care about, but what you actually care about when you’re being honest.

They’re not goals. Goals are things you achieve and move on from. Values are more like a compass — no finish line, just a direction.

They also change. The things that made sense at twenty-two probably aren’t identical to what makes sense at thirty-five. Life changes. You change. That’s not inconsistency. That’s just how it works. It would be strange if they didn’t evolve — your values at twenty and your values at forty with a child and a mortgage and a whole lot more lived experience are rarely the same list. Nor should they be.

When I resigned from that job — the one quietly consuming me — achievement through work had been a genuine value for years. It had served me well, right up until it started costing me everything else. Recognising that it had grown out of proportion, that it was crowding out things I cared about just as much, was what gave me permission to make a different choice. I still have achievement as a value, but I look at it differently and it holds a broader meaning for me now.

How to actually find yours

There’s no official process here in how to find your values. No right answer. But here’s the loose framework that worked for me.

Start with questions, not answers. Rather than trying to list your values cold, approach it through reflection first. What do you think about in genuine downtime? When have you felt most like yourself — most at ease, most proud of who you were being? What makes you quietly uncomfortable in your gut when you go against it? Not the discomfort of doing something hard. The discomfort of doing something that feels wrong. Are there things that you do that feel in line with how you see yourself deep inside?

Look at how you actually spend your time. This is usually more revealing than any amount of introspection. Where does your time actually go? Is it going to things that feel meaningful, or things that just fill space? Most people, when they look honestly, find a gap between where they want to be and where they actually are. That gap is telling you something.

Browse a list and see what resonates. There are plenty of values lists online — words like integrity, family, creativity, freedom, adventure, health, connection, learning. Go through one and notice which words create a small internal reaction — a quiet yes, that — versus the ones that feel like they should matter but don’t quite land. Trust the reaction more than the should.

Aim for five to ten. Not twenty-five. When everything is a value, nothing is. Narrow it down to the things that actually guide decisions, not just the things that sound good. Know that you can change these. The freedom to switch as time goes on helps to not over-think things here. You also don’t need to broadcast these to the world, so no one is judging.

One more thing — do this eventually with your partner

Here’s something I’d add from experience that doesn’t come up enough: once you know your own values, share them with your partner if you have one.

But — and this matters — do it separately first. Each of you writes yours down independently, without discussing it, without hearing the other person’s list first. The reason is simple: if you go in together, or if one person shares first, there’s a real risk that one set of values quietly dominates. The other person anchors on what they hear and settles or changes their own thinking that they got them wrong. Values are extremely personal, and it’s important to think it through yourself independently and without influence. Influence happens easily and without intent, especially if one in the relationship is more certain or more vocal.

Write them down separately. Then share.

It can feel vulnerable. Values are genuinely personal, and putting them on paper and then saying them aloud to someone, even someone you love and trust, takes a bit of courage. But embrace it. There’s no right or wrong here. No values are better than others. The point isn’t to agree. The point is to understand.

What you’ll often find is some overlap — values you share that you can really lean into together. And you’ll find differences too, which is fine. More than fine, actually. Understanding why your partner makes decisions the way they do, what’s driving them at a level they might not even articulate out loud — that changes things. It brings you closer. It makes the friction that comes from genuinely different priorities easier to navigate, because you can see where it’s coming from.

Don’t judge what you hear. Just listen. Take it in.

That’s the whole exercise. And it’s worth doing more than once, because as I said — values change. The list you share at thirty might look different at forty-five. That’s not a problem. That’s a conversation worth having.

Sit on it

Don’t expect to nail this in one sitting. Write something down, live with it for a week, and see what still resonates. Some things that felt important on day one will fade. Others will feel more true the longer you sit with them.

It’s not an exam. There’s no grade. You’re just trying to get a clearer picture of what you actually care about — so that the decisions you make, big and small, have a better chance of pointing somewhere you actually want to go.

That’s not abstract. That’s enormously practical.

Start with a question. See what comes up.

— Dave

If this resonated, the natural next read is Why I Stopped Trying to Optimise My Mornings — or if you want to go further on the money side of intentional living, start with The Slow Path to Financial Freedom.

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