Why Are Values Important

Values are important because they function as your internal guidance system— shaping your decisions, forming your identity, and directly contributing to your psychological well-being. Research published in PubMed Central shows that people who live a value-based life experience greater well-being, better mental health, and higher life satisfaction. Without conscious awareness of your values, you’re still making value-driven choices— you’re just doing it on autopilot.

Key Takeaways:

• Values guide every decision you make. Whether you’re conscious of them or not, your values act as a compass filtering your choices about career, relationships, and life direction.
• Living by your values measurably improves well-being. Research links value congruence to reduced burnout, lower emotional exhaustion, and higher life satisfaction.
• Values are not goals. Values are ongoing directional principles (the compass); goals are specific destinations. Confusing them leads to chasing achievements that feel hollow.
• Your values change over time— and that’s normal. Longitudinal research shows values shift most between your mid-20s and mid-30s, reflecting the life stage you’re in.

Table of Contents

• What Are Values, Exactly?
• Values Are Your Decision-Making Compass
• The Research: Values and Your Well-Being
• Values Shape Who You Are
• Values as a Pathway to Meaning
• Your Values Aren’t Fixed— And That’s a Good Thing
• The Hard Part Nobody Talks About
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Why Values Clarification Is Worth the Work

What Are Values, Exactly?

Personal values are the principles and qualities that matter most to you— the things you’d fight for, sacrifice for, or rearrange your life around. They’re not aspirations or goals. They’re the bedrock of who you are.

But here’s what trips people up. Values aren’t the same as:

• Goals — Goals are destinations you reach and check off. Values are the compass pointing you in a direction. You can achieve a goal and still be guided by the same value forever.
• Morals — Morals are society’s rules about right and wrong. Values are personal. They’re yours.
• Personality traits — Your personality describes how you show up. Your values describe what matters to you when you do.

Shalom Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values identifies ten universal values grounded in three requirements of human existence— and they’ve been validated across 82 countries. That’s not a small dataset. As WorkLifePsych explains, “values are like a compass keeping us headed in a desired direction, and goals are the specific ways you intend to execute your values.”

Values aren’t aspirational wishlists— they’re what you actually prioritize, whether you like it or not. And most people can’t articulate theirs.

Values Are Your Decision-Making Compass

Values matter because they’re the filter you run every significant decision through— even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. When a job looks perfect on paper but feels wrong in your gut, that’s a values conflict.

I’ve worked with people who took the “perfect” job. Great salary. Impressive title. The kind of role that makes everyone at a dinner party nod approvingly. And they couldn’t figure out why they dreaded Monday mornings.

Here’s the thing. When someone values creativity but works in a rigid corporate structure, they feel that friction every single morning. When someone values autonomy but reports to a micromanager, no amount of compensation makes it feel right. The misalignment isn’t about the job. It’s about the values underneath.

Research on identity formation shows that personal values guide decision-making in career, religion, social circles, and self-identity— often without conscious awareness. Your brain is already running decisions through a values filter. The question is whether you know what that filter contains.

And the data backs up how central this is. According to the National Career Development Association, values clarification is addressed in 89% of career counseling processes. A meta-analysis found it’s one of the most effective intervention components for career satisfaction. Harvard Business Review calls values “your non-negotiable foundation” for career decisions.

Following someone else’s values leads to someone else’s life. Not yours.

The Research: Values and Your Well-Being

Research consistently shows that people who live according to their values experience greater psychological well-being, better mental health, and higher life satisfaction. This isn’t self-help fluff— it’s peer-reviewed science.

It’s easy to dismiss this as obvious. Of course living by your values feels good. But the research specificity matters, because it tells us exactly what’s at stake.

A 2022 study published in PubMed Central found that “individuals who live a value-based life experience greater well-being, better mental health, and higher levels of life satisfaction.” And it’s not just about feeling good in the moment. Research from Frontiers in Psychology shows that value congruence— the alignment between your values and how you actually live— supports well-being by facilitating goal attainment, increasing social support, and reducing internal conflict.

The workplace evidence is particularly striking. A study on value congruence and burnout found that when your work values align with your life values, you experience less emotional exhaustion and greater perceived accomplishment. When they don’t align, burnout follows.

And there’s an intervention angle too. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)— developed by Steven Hayes— identifies values clarification as one of six core therapeutic processes. Brief values interventions have been shown to increase task persistence, improve academic performance in minority students, and reduce physiological stress responses.

The research is clear. Living incongruently with your values has real costs— and they compound over time.

Values Shape Who You Are

Your values don’t just guide what you do— they shape who you are. Researchers define a strong sense of identity as having “a firm sense of who one is, a purpose in life, a clear set of personal values.”

That’s not coincidence.

Values sit at the center of your self-concept. There’s even neural evidence for this— your brain integrates values into decision-making at a neurological level, influencing which choices feel “like you” and which don’t. When you make a decision that aligns with your values, it doesn’t just feel right logically. It feels right in your body.

Think about what happens during a major career transition. When someone leaves a job they’ve held for a decade, the first thing that often unravels isn’t their schedule or their income. It’s their identity. “Who am I if I’m not a teacher?” “Who am I if I’m not the VP?”

That disorientation happens because they built an identity around a role instead of around their values. When the role disappears, everything feels unmoored. But people who know their values— who have done the work to name them— navigate those transitions with a different kind of steadiness. The role changes. The values don’t.

As Brené Brown’s research makes clear, authenticity requires knowing and acting on your values. You can’t be real if you don’t know what’s real to you.

You can’t know who you are without knowing what you value.

Values as a Pathway to Meaning

Viktor Frankl— the psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and founded logotherapy— identified values as one of three fundamental pathways to meaning in life. This isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s a framework born from the most extreme human experience imaginable.

Frankl’s central idea was that the primary human motivation is the search for meaning. Not pleasure (Freud). Not power (Adler). Meaning. And he argued we find it through three kinds of values:

• Creative values — meaning through what we accomplish and bring into the world
• Experiential values — meaning through what we receive from the world (love, beauty, truth)
• Attitudinal values — meaning through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering

That last one is what made Frankl’s framework extraordinary. He developed it while imprisoned in concentration camps, watching fellow prisoners find (or lose) their will to live based on whether they could locate meaning in their suffering. As one overview of logotherapy puts it, “we can discover meaning in life through creative values, experiential values, and attitudinal values.”

This connects directly to what we do at The Meaning Movement. (It’s literally in the name.) The search for purpose isn’t about finding a specific job title or career path. It’s about building a life that expresses what you value most deeply. Purpose isn’t something you stumble upon. It’s something you construct— and values are the raw material.

If you want to go deeper into Frankl’s framework, I’ve written about Viktor Frankl’s three pathways to meaning and explored his ideas in our guide to Man’s Search for Meaning. His work on Frankl’s insights on meaning remains some of the most powerful thinking on why values matter at all.

Schwartz’s research grounds this further— values aren’t just personal preferences. They’re rooted in universal requirements of human existence. Which means the search for meaning through values isn’t a luxury. It’s a fundamental human need.

Your Values Aren’t Fixed— And That’s a Good Thing

Your values aren’t carved in stone. Longitudinal research published in Nature shows that values change substantially throughout adulthood, with the greatest shifts happening between your mid-20s and mid-30s.

If that makes you anxious, take a breath.

Here’s what the research actually shows. As people age, self-transcendence values (caring about others, universalism) tend to increase, while self-enhancement values (achievement, power) tend to decrease. The researchers describe this as reflecting “the tasks people perform at different life stages.”

Think about it this way. The 27-year-old who valued ambition above everything— who worked 80-hour weeks and measured her worth by her title— might find herself at 35 valuing connection and stability in a way that surprises her. She didn’t fail. She grew. Her life asked different things of her, and her values responded.

But that shift can feel disorienting. It can feel like betrayal— like you’ve wasted years building a life around values that suddenly don’t fit. That’s the grief nobody warns you about.

Changing values isn’t failure. It’s development. And the fact that your values at 25 won’t be identical to your values at 45 is actually good news. It means you’re paying attention to your life.

The Hard Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s what the self-help world glosses over. Knowing your values can be deeply uncomfortable. You might realize you’ve spent years chasing someone else’s priorities. You might discover your top values conflict with each other.

And nobody really prepares you for that.

Here’s the thing. Values work isn’t a quiz you take once and then you’re done. It’s an ongoing practice of paying attention to what matters and being honest— sometimes painfully honest— about the gap between who you are and how you’ve been living.

Common value conflicts that make this work hard:

• Freedom vs. security — You want the autonomy to build your own path, but you also want the stability of a steady paycheck.
• Ambition vs. family — You want to pour yourself into work that matters, but you also want to be present for the people you love.
• Authenticity vs. belonging — You want to be fully yourself, but you also want to fit in and be accepted.

These aren’t problems to solve. They’re tensions to hold.

And then there are the external constraints. Knowing your values doesn’t magically remove financial pressures, family obligations, or the reality that sometimes you need to pay rent before you can pursue meaning. Research on workplace burnout confirms that living incongruently with your values takes a real psychological toll— but that doesn’t mean full congruence is always possible.

I’ve watched people discover that the drive they thought was theirs was actually their parent’s value system running in the background. That’s not a fun realization. But it’s a necessary one.

Understanding your values sometimes means confronting the gap between who you are and how you’ve been living. And anyone who tells you that process is comfortable is selling something.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between values and goals?

Values are ongoing directional principles— like a compass pointing you in a direction. Goals are specific, achievable outcomes— destinations on that path. Values persist even after goals are achieved. You can finish a marathon (goal) and still value health and discipline (values) for the rest of your life. As WorkLifePsych explains, confusing the two leads to chasing achievements that feel hollow once you reach them.

Do values change over time?

Yes. Longitudinal research published in Nature Scientific Reports shows values change substantially throughout adulthood, with the greatest shifts happening between your mid-20s and mid-30s. Self-transcendence values tend to increase with age while self-enhancement values decrease. This reflects the different tasks and priorities at each life stage— and it’s completely normal.

How do values relate to meaning in life?

Viktor Frankl identified three pathways to meaning— creative values (through accomplishments), experiential values (through relationships), and attitudinal values (through your response to suffering). Values give your actions a “why” that connects to something larger than any single goal. Read more about Frankl’s framework and how it applies to finding meaning in life.

What happens when you don’t live according to your values?

Research shows incongruence between your values and your actions is linked to increased burnout, emotional exhaustion, reduced life satisfaction, and lower psychological well-being. In practical terms, it often shows up as a persistent feeling that something is “off” even when things look fine externally.

How do values affect mental health?

Living congruently with your values is associated with better mental health outcomes, including reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, lower burnout, and greater psychological flexibility. Values clarification is used as an evidence-based intervention in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes as one of six core therapeutic processes.

Why Values Clarification Is Worth the Work

You’re already making decisions based on your values— every day, in ways you don’t notice. The question isn’t whether values matter. It’s whether you’ll be conscious of the ones driving your life.

Think of it like this. Your values are the operating system running in the background of every choice you make. You can keep running on autopilot— letting unconscious values steer you toward someone else’s definition of a good life. Or you can open the hood, look at what’s actually driving you, and decide if that’s where you want to go.

That’s what values clarification is. Not a personality quiz. Not a one-time exercise. It’s an ongoing practice of paying attention— to what lights you up, to what drains you, to the gap between how you’re living and how you want to live.

The research says it’s worth the effort. And so does my experience working with hundreds of people navigating these exact questions.

If you’re ready to go deeper, start with finding your purpose. Values are the foundation. Purpose is what you build on top.

I believe in you.

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