Get Clear on Your Values Before You Set Goals

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

What Happens if You Don’t Get Clear on Your Values First?

If you set goals without being sure of your values first, there’s a danger that you put a load of effort into achieving something, only to realise once you get there that it wasn’t what you really wanted.

Alternatively, you might feel guilty about achieving your goal because something about it, or about the means you used to get there, didn’t sit well with your unconsciously held values.

A third possibility, because your values provide your motivation, might be that you give up before you get there.

For all these reasons, it’s a good idea to get clear on your values before you set your goals, to make disappointment, guilt, or failure less likely.

What Are Values?

Your values give you motivation for your actions. They get you out of bed in the morning, and determine how you spend your time. If something is not important to you, you are not going to spend any time in pursuit of it.

Your values are also the criteria that you use to decide whether a particular action is right or wrong. They guide your decisions and provide meaning in your life. This guidance usually happens at a more or less unconscious level – you usually know if something is right or wrong without having to think about it too much. If you follow the guidance in this series of articles to become explicitly aware of your values, you can use them as a checklist to evaluate any choices you are offered.

What’s more, reflecting on your core values and strengths (a process known as ‘self-affirmation’ in psychology) has been shown in various studies to increase your resilience, improve emotional resilience, and even motivate positive behavioural changes (summary here).

Where Do Your Values Come From?

You acquire your values in the course of our upbringing, from our parents, peer groups, education, and the information we take in from the media. We also modify our values in the light of the conclusions we draw for ourselves from the events of our lives.

Values are abstract concepts (like fun, integrity, learning, or security) rather than particular things or actions. This means that they can be fulfilled in many different ways – you are not tied to one particular career choice, for example, because there may be many different careers that fulfil your values.

The values that are important to you in your life as a whole may play out with some variations in different contexts of your life. What’s important to you in your career, for example, may be different from your priorities for relationships, or health and fitness.

Four Steps to Clarifying Your Values

1. First, find your values for a particular area of your life.
2. Then establish which values are most important to you.
3. Check for any clashes between conflicting values, and resolve them.
4. Check for ‘away from’ motivation in the final set of values.

Coming up next: A step by step guide to identifying your values, with essential tips for getting the best from the process

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© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.