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Five of the most commonly cited personal values are honesty, integrity, growth, family, and creativity. Listing them is easy. The harder question — and the more useful one — is which of these you’ve actually demonstrated this year.
What Are Personal Values?
A personal value is a guiding principle— not a goal with a finish line, but an orientation that shapes how you move through the world.
Psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s research, validated across 82+ countries, gives it a precise name: “a desirable, transsituational goal that varies in importance and serves as a guiding principle in the life of a person or other social entity.” Translation: a value applies across every context, not just at work or at home.
Values differ from goals and from beliefs. Goals have finish lines. Values don’t. (Which is why “growth” can be a value, but “get promoted by March” is a goal.)
Values are also distinct from beliefs— a belief is a claim about what’s true. A value is a motivational orientation that shapes every decision you face. Schwartz identified 10 universal value categories across cultures, suggesting core human motivations are broadly shared even when their expression varies. For a deeper look at what core values mean and how to identify yours, that’s its own conversation.
Five is a practical starting number, not a scientific mandate. Here are five values that come up across cultures, career conversations, and research, and what they actually mean in practice.
Honesty
Honesty is the commitment to truth-telling. Saying what’s real, even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient.
In practice— naming a problem instead of papering over it. Giving direct feedback instead of vague praise. Telling someone their plan won’t work instead of waiting to see it fail.
Telling the truth includes noticing when you’d rather not. Between what you believe and what you say— that’s where honesty actually lives.
For people whose work involves heavy spin or performative positivity, honesty as a held value creates real friction. The environment drains them, even when they can’t name why. According to BetterUp’s research on values and career satisfaction, values misalignment with work environments is a primary driver of chronic dissatisfaction. That friction is data.
Behavioral check: Have you told a hard truth this year when it cost you something? That’s the test.
Integrity
Integrity is consistency between your words and your actions, across contexts, audiences, and circumstances.
Honesty is about what you say. Integrity is about whether your behavior matches it.
But the person with integrity doesn’t just say the right things. They behave the same way when no one is watching. In career decisions, integrity gets tested hard— a promotion that requires acting against your stated principles is clarifying in a way that comfort never is.
James Clear does annual Integrity Reports: a deliberate check of whether behavior over the past year matched stated values. It’s a practice worth borrowing. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown frames integrity the same way. Behavior is the measure of values, not intention.
Behavioral check: Did you make a decision this year that was harder because you chose consistency over convenience?
Growth
Growth as a personal value is the commitment to learning, developing, and becoming. Choosing stretch over comfort when the choice matters.
People who hold growth as a value don’t need their work to be perfect. They need it to be moving.
In practice— seeking feedback rather than avoiding it, choosing projects at the edge of your competence, and reading for application rather than entertainment. The tell for growth as a genuine value is change, not consumption. Have you actually changed something real because you chose to?
People with growth as a core value often find repetitive, static roles suffocating, even well-paid ones. Schwartz’s framework categorizes growth motivations under Self-Direction and Stimulation— among the most cross-culturally documented human drives. And “stable and predictable” is a completely legitimate thing to want. It’s just a different value orientation.
Behavioral check: Have you actively changed something about how you work, think, or live in the last 12 months— by choice rather than necessity?
Family
Family as a personal value is a commitment to people and relationships that come before most other priorities. It shows up in your calendar and your career decisions as much as in how you feel about the people you love.
Family as a value shows up in what you actively protect. Whose time you guard, whose needs you let reshape your decisions.
If your stated value is family but you’ve worked 60-hour weeks for three years without questioning it, that’s data. Not judgment— data. What it looks like in practice: making career decisions through the lens of what they cost your relationships, and drawing boundaries around family time that hold even under pressure.
Many purpose-seekers and career transitioners describe achieving external goals only to discover a relational cost they hadn’t fully accounted for. Values misalignment is one of the most well-documented sources of chronic dissatisfaction.
Family here is broadly construed. It includes chosen family, close friendships, and community (not only biological family).
Behavioral check: What have you consistently protected this year, even when work pressure pushed back?
Creativity
The final value in this list is also one of the most commonly suppressed in conventional corporate paths — and one of the hardest to name for people experiencing it.
Creativity as a personal value is the commitment to making, inventing, and expressing— to having your fingerprints on your work rather than only executing someone else’s instructions.
Creativity as a value means needing to make something that didn’t exist before.
And for people who hold creativity or autonomy as a core value, conventional execution roles are harder to sustain than they look from the outside. Being told exactly how to do work someone else defined is demoralizing over time— even if the pay is good. Schwartz’s research places both creativity and freedom under “Self-Direction” and “Stimulation”— two of the most universal motivational categories. If creativity doesn’t quite fit but freedom does, they share enough motivational DNA to function as the same diagnostic signal.
Creativity and autonomy are the values most commonly suppressed in conventional corporate paths. People often don’t realize it’s a values issue until the suppression becomes chronic.
Behavioral check: Have you made something original this year— a system, a piece of work, a solution that felt like yours? Or have you mostly executed someone else’s plan?
Demonstrated vs. Aspirational Values
Most people, when they list their values, pick the ones they aspire to— not the ones they’ve demonstrated. Brené Brown’s research found a different pattern: the people who act with the most courage tether their behavior to one or two core values, and those values show up in what they’ve done, not what they’d like to believe.
“The research participants who demonstrated the most willingness to rumble with vulnerability and practice courage tethered their behavior to one or two values, not ten.”
Brené Brown, Dare to Lead
Your demonstrated values show up when the choice costs you something. To find them, look here:
- Decisions that were hard: what did you protect when you could have backed down?
- What you’ve given up: what did you sacrifice this year for something you said mattered?
- What you’ve consistently chosen: again and again, across different circumstances
It’s possible you’ve been claiming a value you haven’t actually lived. That’s data, not judgment. But it’s also a place to start.
How Many Personal Values Should You Have?
Most practitioners recommend five to ten core values. Brené Brown advocates for one or two for maximum behavioral impact. James Clear suggests fewer than five. The honest answer is: fewer is almost always better.
| Expert | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Brené Brown | 1-2 for maximum impact |
| James Clear | Fewer than 5 |
| Most practitioners | 5-10 as starting range |
Clear puts it plainly: “If everything is a core value, then nothing is really a priority.”
Five is a practical starting number. (The five in this article are examples, not a mandate.) From a list of five, most people find they can narrow to two or three that actually govern their biggest decisions. That narrowing is the real work.
How to Find Your 5 Personal Values
Finding your personal values is a sorting exercise. Get your actual candidates on paper first, then narrow. That’s what requires a prompt or a process.
Three TMM tools that can help:
- Values list worksheet: for getting all your candidates in one place before you start narrowing
- Values card sort: a 20-minute process for working down to your top five
- Values assessment: a more guided process for discovery
If you want to explore beyond the five featured here, the list of core values covers 150+ values by category.
Brown’s behavioral check works too, and it’s low-tech: look at the past year’s hardest decisions and see what you were protecting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are personal values?
Personal values are the core principles and beliefs that guide your decisions and behavior. They define what matters most to you and serve as an internal compass for how you live and work.
Are personal values the same as core values?
Yes— these terms are used interchangeably. “Core values” tends to emphasize the central, non-negotiable ones that govern your biggest decisions.
Can personal values change over time?
Yes, especially through major life transitions. A 2022 systematic review published in PMC found that values can shift through intentional work and significant life events, though the broad motivational categories people care about tend to be stable across time.
What is the difference between honesty and integrity?
Honesty is about telling the truth— saying what’s real. Integrity is about consistency between your words and your actions across contexts and time. You can be honest in a single moment. Integrity is demonstrated over time.
How do I know what my personal values are?
Look at your behavior over the past year, especially the decisions that were hard. Your true values show up in what you’ve consistently chosen, particularly when it cost you something.
What You Actually Live By
The five values here— honesty, integrity, growth, family, and creativity— starting points, not the answer. The more useful question is which ones you actually live by.
Start there: think about the hardest decision you made in the last 12 months. What were you protecting? That’s your first value. The rest follow from it.
That’s the real work.
I believe you’ll find them.
