How to find your personal values: why the list is not enough

By watching what the body does when you say a word out loud, rather than by ticking boxes on a list. A value that genuinely belongs to you produces a physical reaction you can notice: the breath opens up a notch, the shoulders drop, something loosens around the breastbone. A borrowed word produces nothing at all. That nothing is the useful part.

The usual method works the other way round. You open a list of fifty words, highlight twelve, keep five, and close the document with the satisfaction of having tidied something away. Three weeks later nobody remembers the five words.

This is not a memory problem. The whole exercise took place in the head, on a playing field where the “right” word always beats the true one. Ask anyone whether honesty matters to them: the answer arrives before the question is finished. Saying yes costs nothing.

The body cannot lie that fast. It answers in a second or two, before the argument has time to assemble itself, and its answer discriminates far better: out of ten supposedly important words, two or three move something, the rest stay flat.

That asymmetry is the only reason the exercise is worth the detour. A test that validates everything tests nothing. This one eliminates, and it eliminates a lot, which is exactly what you want from a compass: it points one way only by ruling out the others.

This article looks at what we know about the mechanism, why the list falls short so often, and how to use it without turning the session into an interrogation. It is not a substitute for proper support: if the question “what actually matters to me” arrives in the middle of an upheaval, a psychologist is the right person to talk to.

It is a direction, not a destination. The distinction sounds academic. It changes everything that follows.

A goal gets reached: pass the driving test, finish the dissertation, ship the project. Once reached, it leaves the list. A value is never reached. You can be honest today and still have to be honest tomorrow, without the question ever closing. That is what makes it usable on days when nothing is moving forward: it gives you something to do even when no result is in sight.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) built one of its main working axes on this distinction, and produced the measurement instrument that spells it out best. The Valued Living Questionnaire, described by Kelly Wilson and colleagues in 2010, rates ten life domains (family, friendship, work, education, recreation, spirituality, physical self-care, citizenship, intimate relationships, parenting) on two deliberately separate scales: how important the domain is to you, and how consistent your past week’s actions were with that importance.

The separation is the heart of the instrument. It makes the gap visible. Someone can rate friendship 9 out of 10 for importance and 2 out of 10 for consistency, and that 7-point gap says infinitely more than the 9 on its own. This is the kind of result that never shows up in a list exercise, where only the first column gets filled in.

The two-column design also explains why older values questionnaires left clinicians unsatisfied: measuring importance alone measures verbal agreement, which almost everyone grants freely. Consistency is paid for in hours of the week.

One more practical consequence: a value that translates into no identifiable act is not yet a value, it is an opinion. The test is not “does this resonate”, it is “what did I do this week that went in this direction”. The answer is often disappointing. That is precisely what makes it useful.

Lists do have real merit: they supply vocabulary. Without one, most people stall at four or five words. The problem is not the list, it is what gets done with it.

Three things go wrong, fairly reliably.

The socially winning word always takes it. “Integrity” ticks easily, “quiet” much less so: the first flatters, the second sounds like an admission of laziness. You are choosing your image as much as your direction.

Then, fast reading flattens the differences. Fifty words in three minutes is three and a half seconds each: enough to recognise them, not enough to feel them.

Finally, the list encourages hoarding. You keep eight values, then ten, because giving up “generosity” leaves you feeling slightly less generous. But a compass pointing in ten directions points nowhere.

Quick test: name one thing you turned down this year because of one of those values. A project declined, an evening cut short, a conversation you had even though it cost you. If no example comes, the word has not entered your life yet. There is nothing shameful in that. It simply tells you where to start.

The idea that emotions have a bodily geography is not a magazine metaphor, it is a measured result.

In 2014, Lauri Nummenmaa’s team at Aalto University published a map of the bodily sensations associated with emotions in PNAS. The protocol is frugal and clever: show a participant two blank silhouettes, present a word, a story, a film or a face, then ask them to colour the regions where they feel activity increasing, and those where they feel it decreasing. Across five experiments and 701 participants, the resulting maps are statistically separable from one emotion to the next. A statistical classifier can recover the emotion from the map alone.

The most striking point lies elsewhere. The maps stay concordant across Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants, that is, across populations sharing neither language nor conventions for expressing emotion. The topography therefore does not look like a cultural artefact of how we talk about feelings.

These results concern emotions, not values, and that needs saying plainly: no study maps “loyalty” or “fairness” onto the body. What Nummenmaa’s work establishes is the precondition. Emotionally loaded mental content produces a bodily signature the person can detect themselves. That precondition is what the exercise exploits.

The ability to read those signals has a name: interoception, the perception of the body’s internal states. In their 2017 review, Hugo Critchley and Sarah Garfinkel treat it as one of the raw materials of emotional experience, and note that how precisely each person reads those signals varies a great deal.

That variation matters here. If you feel nothing the first time, the likeliest explanation is not that you have no values: it is that your reading is still coarse. It sharpens with practice, and that is roughly the only thing a regular body scan (in French) really trains.

Most guides answer somewhere between five and ten. For everyday use, that is still a lot.

A value exists to settle a choice, and you do not settle anything with ten criteria. The format that survives a real day is a single value, chosen in the morning and dropped in the evening. It commits you to nothing for next week. It only has to get through a meeting, a commute, a difficult conversation.

The long list stays useful elsewhere: an annual review, a change of job, a decision that binds years. But it is not the same tool. One helps you read the map, the other picks the next street.

Here is the protocol as it works in practice. Allow two to three minutes, no more, and one word per session.

1. Place the word

Sit down, close your eyes if that is comfortable, and say the word internally, once. Just one: “peace”, “courage”, “fairness”, “gentleness”. Then stop. Do not comment on it, do not explain it, do not look for an example. The urge to build a story around the word is immediate, and it is what ruins the exercise.

2. Wait

Five to ten seconds of silence. This is the hardest pass, because ten seconds of doing nothing are very long. Often nothing happens at all, and that is a valid result.

3. Sweep three areas

Throat, breastbone, belly. Those three are enough, not because a study singles them out, but because they are the areas people describe most spontaneously when something moves. You are looking for a change, not a spectacular sensation. A slight widening. Warmth. Half a millimetre of release around the throat. Or nothing.

4. Write it down in three words

Open your eyes and write what you noticed, with no style: “nothing”, “throat a bit tight”, “opens in the middle”. Writing matters, because an unrecorded sensation gets reinterpreted within ten minutes.

Repeat with another word the next day. After a week you have seven lines, and the sorting has done itself: two words produced something, five produced nothing. Those two are the ones you then test in real life.

One common case is worth flagging. Some words trigger a distinct, frankly unpleasant contraction. “Ambition” clenches the jaw, “family” knots the stomach. That reaction does not mean the value is bad, nor that it is yours: it flags a loaded spot, often a gap between what you would want and what is happening. It is a signal to handle carefully, and closer to welcoming what comes up (in French) than to making a decision.

A word you have spotted is worth nothing until it costs something. This is the part introspection exercises politely avoid.

Acting on it does have a documented payoff. In work that has become a classic, Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot set out the self-concordance model in 1999: goals pursued for reasons that genuinely belong to the person, rather than to meet an expectation, receive more sustained effort over time, are therefore reached more often, and yield more benefit once reached. In other words, alignment is not only comfortable, it is economical: it lowers the amount of willpower you have to spend.

In practice this plays out in micro-decisions. Take a typical case: you test “candour” for a week and change nothing about your job or your relationships, except one thing. You stop answering “fine” on autopilot. Two colleagues ask a second question, and the day grows by two conversations you had not planned. It is tiring. It is also clearly preferable.

That is the realistic format. Not a life reorganisation, one sentence changed three times in a week. A value does not prove itself in the big decisions, which are rare, but in the small ones, which never stop.

Then there is what the method does not solve. It says nothing about what to do when two values collide, which happens constantly: loyalty against honesty, security against nerve. No compass settles that trade-off for you. It also does not suit a gap that is structural rather than behavioural: a job that flatly contradicts what matters to you is not repaired by a two-minute practice, and suggesting otherwise would be dishonest.

Finally, this work goes better when you are not putting yourself on trial at the same time. The session turns into a prosecution fast if the word being tested becomes a reminder of everything you are not doing. We covered that mechanism separately, in being too hard on yourself (in French), and it is worth a look before you start. A more narrative take on the same subject is told in this account of a practice born from a single word.

Start with one word. Tomorrow morning, two minutes.