Living Your Values: How Defining Your Motivation Drives Results
Read Time: 3.5 Minutes
Have you ever felt like your career, leadership, or even your life doesn’t quite “fit”??
Like no matter how much you achieve, something still feels off??
You’re not alone.
Many high-performing professionals: executives, HR leaders, and entrepreneurs, experience this quiet dissonance.?
On the surface, things look fine.?
But underneath??
There’s a nagging sense of dissatisfaction, burnout, or even disengagement.
Why does this happen?
Because when your values aren’t aligned with your daily decisions and behaviors, it creates friction. Over time, that friction leads to stress, lack of motivation, and even burnout.
The Science Behind Values and Motivation
Our values are the blueprint for fulfillment, they determine what intrinsically motivates us, what brings us joy, and how we measure success.
But here’s the mistake most people make:
They assume values are about what sounds good rather than what actually drives them.?
Many organizations and professionals define values as part of branding exercises, mission statements, or idealized traits rather than deeply ingrained motivators.
True values aren’t about what we think we should prioritize, they are about how our nervous system evaluates time well spent. When we operate in alignment with our values, we feel engaged, energized, and intrinsically motivated.
But when we violate our values, we experience emotional pain, stress, and a sense of being “stuck.”?
This misalignment is one of the leading causes of disengagement and burnout, in both individuals and entire organizations.
Identifying and Aligning Your Values
So, how do you ensure that your work and life align with your values??
It starts with eliciting your true values, not the ones you think you should have, but the ones that actually govern your decisions and fulfillment.
Try this exercise:
Step 1: Identify Your Core Values
Ask yourself: “What’s important to me in my career?”
Write down everything that comes to mind.
Empty out your thoughts at least three times, you’ll be surprised what surfaces.
Step 2: Identify Your Threshold Values
What violations would cause you to leave a role, company, or career?
What would need to change for you to stay?
Step 3: Prioritize and Sort
Arrange your values in order of importance.
Compare them one by one, which is more critical for your fulfillment?
Step 4: Define Your Values Clearly
For each of your top five values, ask:
When you go through this process, patterns emerge.?
What used to feel like confusion suddenly makes sense. You will see why certain jobs, projects, or leadership styles worked for you, and why others didn’t.
Aligning Work, Leadership, and Culture
For HR professionals and executives, this goes beyond personal fulfillment.?
Culture is just a collection of individual values in action. If employees aren’t engaged, it’s often because their day-to-day work doesn’t align with their intrinsic motivations.
As leaders, the question isn’t just: How do we motivate employees?
It’s: How do we create environments where people’s values are naturally engaged?
A values-driven culture doesn’t rely on extrinsic rewards like bonuses and promotions to drive engagement, it harnesses what intrinsically motivates people to bring their best selves to work.
If you’ve ever said, “I feel stuck,” “work feels soulless,” or “I’ve lost my passion,” values misalignment may be at the root.
When you align your work, leadership, and decisions with your values, engagement isn’t something you force, it happens naturally.
Until next issue,
Duncan
#KeepthePassionAlive
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About the Author
Duncan is an expert in workplace well-being and burnout recovery, delivering clinical burnout retreat experiences to help workplace leaders quickly recover from burnout and empower their careers.? Having been a child of corporate burnout has led him professionally into the field of human flourishing for over a decade working on systemic social change projects. He’s a social entrepreneur and change agent, on a mission to empower the way we work, grow, and live.
He’s a graduate of the University of Toronto in Engineering.? In private practice, he is a Board Certified Master Practitioner of NLP, MER, and Clinical Hypnotherapy with the Association of Integrative Psychology.