Common Questions About Core Values

What are core values, exactly?
Core values are the handful of principles that actually govern how you decide things when every option in front of you is reasonable. They’re not the same as goals, which are things you want to reach, or interests, which are things you enjoy. A value is the thing you keep choosing even when it costs you something — the reason you took the lower-paying job, or stayed in the harder conversation, or turned down an opportunity that would have worked out perfectly fine. Researchers who study values tend to describe them as relatively stable motivational priorities: they don’t tell you what to do in a specific situation, they tell you what to weigh most heavily when two good options collide. That’s why people are so often surprised by their own results. The values you’d list from memory are usually the ones you admire. The values that show up in your actual decisions are the ones running the show.

What are some examples of core values?
Most values lists run to fifty or a hundred words — compassion, adventure, craftsmanship, fairness, loyalty, curiosity, order, recognition, faith, autonomy, stability — but nearly all of them cluster into a much smaller number of families: connection, growth, integrity, freedom, security and contribution cover most of the ground. The useful exercise isn’t picking your favourites off a list, because almost everything on a values list sounds good when you read it in isolation. It’s noticing which ones you’d defend when they conflict with each other. Freedom and security both sound appealing until you have to choose between the flexible job and the stable one. Connection and growth both sound appealing until the move that would stretch you takes you three time zones from people you love. The conflicts are where your real ranking lives, and they’re the only place it shows up honestly.

How do I figure out my core values?
Three methods work considerably better than staring at a list of words. First, look at your calendar and your bank statement rather than your intentions — where your time and money actually go is the most honest record you have of what you prioritise. Second, look at your regrets and your resentments. A regret usually marks a value you didn’t honour; a resentment usually marks one that somebody else stepped on. Third, look at the decisions other people found strange — the times you turned down something that looked obviously good on paper. Those are the moments where a value overrode ordinary self-interest, which makes it unusually visible. A structured set of forced-choice questions speeds all of this up, because it makes you choose between two things you genuinely want instead of nodding along to a list of nice-sounding words.

Can your core values change over time?
Yes, though usually more slowly than personality quizzes imply. Studies of values across the lifespan find that most people’s rankings stay fairly steady from one year to the next, but shift meaningfully across decades and around major transitions: becoming a parent, a serious illness, losing a job, leaving home, a bereavement. Security often climbs after a stretch of instability. Freedom often climbs after a long season of obligation. Contribution tends to rise with age. What rarely happens is a value vanishing altogether — it’s more that the order rearranges, and something that used to sit third quietly moves to first. That’s worth remembering if your result surprises you. It may be describing who you’ve become in the last few years rather than who you’ve always been, and both of those are real, useful things to know.

How accurate is a core values quiz?
A short quiz can’t measure a value the way a lab measures reaction time, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling itself. What a well-built one does is force trade-offs — making you choose between four things you genuinely want — which surfaces the ranking your everyday self-description tends to hide. Treat the result as a well-informed first draft rather than a verdict. The real test is the one that happens afterwards: over the next week, notice whether the value it named actually shows up in the small decisions you make without thinking about them. If it does, you’ve learned something useful about why certain choices feel easy and others feel like a quiet betrayal. If it doesn’t, the runner-up on your chart is worth a second look. Take the free 2-minute assessment above to see your own ranking.