Navigating burnout without understanding your personal values is like trying to navigate an unfamiliar city without a plan. You can pick a direction and start walking, but without knowing your values, you won’t know which is the best route to take – or even where you want to go.

What are values?

In the unfamiliar city analogy, values are both your destination and the map you use to get there.

Values are what gives us our sense of which direction in life is best for us. They are what is behind our “gut” reaction – the automatic process of forming our opinions, beliefs, and decisions.

In the above unfamiliar city, no plan example, your values likely showed up. You may have had a light gut reaction when envisioning this scenario of anxiety, excitement, stress, curiosity, or confusion.

To name a few other examples, your personal values are also what give you a sense of:

• Whether or not to take a job offer
• Who to date
• How to respond when someone asks you “what do you do?”
• Who to stay friends with
• What to eat for lunch
• How to handle a stressful situation at work

In short – whether or not you are aware of their influence, values play a pretty big deal in what you decide to do and how you do it, by giving you a sense of why the decision matters.

Where do values come from?

While there is much debate about whether or not our core values can change over the course of our lives, there is no question that our life experiences in the years between childhood and early adulthood have a very formative effect on what values we initially form.

Two of the biggest ways this happens are:

1. Observation: especially as children, we tend to be very influenced by the values of the people we spent the most time with – primarily our parents or caregivers. While we take those values we observe as our own, we can also come to form an adverse reaction to the values we observe, and take values that are close to opposites as our own.
2. Experience: as we grow into adolescents and then adults, we experience more and more life, and make more and more decisions on our own. The outcomes of our decisions, in turn give us plenty of feedback (often, though not only in the form of rewards and punishments) on whether or not what we chose to do ended up being “good” or “bad.”

As our experiences layer on top of our observations, we gain more confidence of what makes sense to us to pursue, and what to avoid, which further molds and reinforces our values.

Our brains like to conserve energy used for thinking, and so not unlike how we form habits from repetitive types of actions, we form values from repetitive types of decisions. Eventually, we hardly have to think about our opinions or decisions at all in order to arrive to a conclusion. We “think” less about what to do in each situation, and “feel” more sure about what is best for us.

What are my values?

Values become ingrained into our subconscious over years and years, and so it can take a little effort to pull them to the surface. This means that the best way to do so is to tap into our feelings in reaction to certain situations, rather than to simply think “what are my values?”

You can use this feeling-based method of identifying your values using visualization exercises, word associations, or looking at a list of values, and picking those that seem to resonate most.

To help you identify your own personal values, we created this free values quiz, which draws out your values using your responses to situational questions.

From our research, we have found this quiz to be a more honest exercise than simply picking values from a list, and less time-consuming than a visualization exercise. After completing the quiz, you’ll receive a rank-ordered list of which values, from 16 common human values, resonate most with you.