How to Find Your Core Values (When You've Never Actually Defined Them)

Quick question: what are your top five core values? Not the ones that sound good, the real ones. Most people, asked that on the spot, go quiet. They've been running their whole life on values they've never once stopped to name.

That's not a small thing. When you don't know what you truly value, you drift, and you feel a low hum of "this isn't quite my life." When you do know, you have a compass. After twenty years of walking people through this, I've seen how much changes when someone finally gets clear. One of our students said it simply:

"It was interesting to set my core values and mission. I never really put any thought to it, so it's good to put them on paper." — Juvie D., Awakened Academy student

Let me show you how to find yours. First, what a core value even is, because most definitions miss it.

What are core values, really?

Your core values are the handful of things you most deeply care about, the states of being that, underneath everything, you're always reaching for. And here's the catch most people miss:

"Values are the things that you value. Not everyone values the same things, and what you really value is often not what you think you value. What we actually do is what we value. What we are willing to invest our time, money, and energy in, that is what we value."

Read that again, because it's the whole game. Your values aren't your nice ideas about yourself. They're revealed by where your time and energy actually go. There's often a gap between the two, and naming it honestly is where the real clarity starts.

Why does not knowing my values cost me so much?

Because when you're not living from your own values, you end up living from someone else's, and it quietly drains the meaning out of your days. You feel inauthentic without quite knowing why.

In the teaching I draw a hard line between two kinds of values:

"Your core values are your deepest values, things that are unique to you, the real you. Superficial values are things you've been programmed to believe. Moral values are not necessarily your values. We get guilt-tripped into believing certain things. Once we've abandoned our core values and we serve the programmed values, that's when we feel inauthentic and unsuccessful. It's like we're living someone else's life."

A student named exactly what it costs her:

"Much of our struggle comes from not staying true to our core values. Whether that's putting too much energy on things that don't matter, or feeding relationships that don't complement our core values, or simply not staying true to ourselves, we create our own struggle." — Mariella H., Awakened Academy student

This is why the work matters. Psychologist and researcher Brené Brown found the same thing in her own studies: when she asks people to name their values, most can't, and the ones who can, and who actually live by them, are far more grounded and resilient. Knowing your values isn't a nice extra. It's foundational.

How do I find my real core values?

You look at three honest signals: what you do, how you feel when you do it, and how you react when something threatens it. Here's each one.

1. Look at your actions. Where do your time, money, and energy actually go? That's your real value, whatever your head says. If you spend hours protecting your time, you value freedom. If you're always wondering what people think, you may value approval. No judgment, just data.

2. Notice how you feel living it out. This is the test that separates a true value from a programmed one.

"If it's a true core value, you'll feel light and good and happy. If it's a programmed value, you'll feel stressed and obsessed, and often you won't even get the results."

So if something dominates your time but leaves you tense and going nowhere, question where it's really coming from. It may be someone else's value wearing your name.

3. Watch your reactions. Your strongest reactions point straight at your values.

"If you value freedom, you'll be freaked out by anything that traps you. If you value justice, you'll feel hot under the collar whenever you see unfairness. If you value love, it will really bother you when a relationship goes cold."

One student saw it instantly: "Remembering my core values helped me realise why I was feeling down, and why I resonated with a certain path, certain people, certain relationships." — Randall S.

The "what next?" ladder: finding the value under the want

Most of what you think you want is really a doorway to a feeling. There's a simple way to find that feeling. You take something you want, and you keep asking what next?

"You get the book published. Great, what next? You write another book, it goes to number one. What next? You get the new car, the new house, the different relationship. What next? Keep going until you end up with the value, the thing you actually want on the far end of it, which is always some state of being."

Run it on money and it gets honest fast. I want money, so I can buy things, so people approve of me, so I feel I'm enough. The value at the bottom wasn't money. It was peace, or a sense of being enough. As I put it in the teaching: "behind all our actions is a drive to re-experience that which is already deep within us." That deep thing is your core value.