Back in September, Advita Patel sat down with Debra and me on Corey-osity Unleashed. She told us about the first exercise she gives every coaching client. Before confidence. Before boldness. Before any of the seven habits in her new book, Decoding Confidence. You write down your values.
Not the ones you recite in job interviews. The deep ones. The ones you'd defend when it costs you something.
I agreed with her. Then I pushed back a little.
My values in my twenties weren't my values in my forties. They aren't my values today. Life keeps rearranging the list. You lose a parent. You gain a child. You raise a puppy. Any one of those events reshuffles what matters to you, and most of us never go back and redo the exercise.
Advita went further than me. With the state of the world right now, she said, don't wait five years between checks. Do it every year. Every other year at the outside.
She's right. And I think I know why most of us skip it.
You Think You're Finished
In 2013, three psychologists, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, published a paper in Science called "The End of History Illusion". They measured the personalities, values and preferences of more than 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68.
They asked one group how much they'd changed over the past ten years. They asked another group how much they expected to change over the next ten.
Every age group gave the same answer. I've changed a lot. I'm done now.
A 30-year-old remembers big changes between 20 and 30. A 20-year-old predicts small changes over the same decade. The researchers ran the same test on ten basic values, and the illusion showed up in every age group they studied. It shrank with age. It never went away. (Wikipedia has a readable summary of all six studies.)
Gilbert put it well in his TED talk on the psychology of your future self. Human beings are works in progress who wrongly believe they're finished.
Fair warning. The study has critics. It compared different people at different ages instead of following the same people for ten years, and some mathematicians argue the method inflates the gap. I still buy the core idea, because it matches my own life. Every version of me believed he'd arrived.
The Big Moves Rewrite You Most
I've been a soldier in the US Army. A software engineer. An American who moved to England and stayed. A dad. A grandad. And as of this year, the owner of a puppy who needs to go out at six in the morning whether it's raining or not.
Each of those chapters moved my list around. I didn't notice most of the moving while it happened. I noticed it years later, when I looked back and wondered who the guy in the old photos was.
One piece of research made me sit up. Anat Bardi and colleagues followed people through three life transitions over time: police recruits starting training, students starting psychology or business degrees, and Polish migrants moving to Britain. In most cases, people's values already fit their new life on day one. They'd picked the path because of who they were.
The exception was migration. The more of your life a transition changes, the more your values shift to fit it. Moving country changes almost everything at once.
I didn't need a study to tell me this, but I'm glad to have one. Leaving America rearranged me in ways I'm still finding.
I'll be honest about the other side too. A 2021 study by Caroline Wehner, Manon van Scheppingen and Wiebke Bleidorn compared 248 new parents with 294 people in relationships without children. On average, their major life goals stayed stable through the arrival of a first child.
On average. You aren't an average. Some people come through a new baby with the same priorities. Some come out the other side unrecognisable. The only way to know which one you are is to sit down and check.
Your Old List Is Still Running the Show
Here's why this matters beyond your own head.
If you lead people, your values drive your decisions. Which project gets the good engineer. Whether you stay late or go home. Whether you say the hard thing in the meeting or wait for a better moment.
If the list in your head is ten years old, you're making today's calls with yesterday's priorities. Your team feels the mismatch before you do. You say family matters, then book a Friday 5pm call. You say growth matters, then hoard the interesting work. You aren't lying. You're running an old version of the software.
I wrote about catching this gap in Your Calendar Is the Real Values Statement. Two weeks of tagging my own diary showed me the distance between what I said and what I did. Part of the gap was poor discipline. Part of it, looking back, was a values list I'd stopped updating.
How to Redo the Exercise
Here's the version I've settled on. Steal it.
1. Put it in the diary
Once a year, on a fixed date. Your birthday works. So does the first week of January. Advita's annual or biennial rhythm is the floor, not the ceiling.
Then add a trigger. Any big life event earns an extra review. A death. A birth. A move. A new job. A diagnosis. A puppy. Give it a few months to settle, then sit down again.
2. Write the new list first
Don't open last year's list. Start from a blank page. Ask yourself what you'd defend if it cost you money, time or a relationship. Write five things, no more.
3. Then compare
Now pull out the old list. Look at what dropped off and what appeared. The crossings out are the interesting part. Each one marks a chapter of your life.
Don't judge the old list. It wasn't wrong. It belonged to someone you used to be.
4. Put them in order
Five values with no ranking leave you guessing every time two of them collide. I made this case for teams in Your Values Need a Pecking Order, and it applies to you as much as to any company.
5. Check the list against your week
Open your calendar. Look at the last fourteen days. Does the time match the list? Where it doesn't, decide which one is telling the truth.
6. Say it out loud to somebody
Advita talks about building a personal board of directors. Believers who back you, and mirror-holders who tell you the truth. Read your new list to one of the mirror-holders. Ask them where they've seen you live it and where they haven't. Brace yourself.
Meet the Current You
Values feel permanent because they feel like who you are. And they are who you are. Today.
The person who wrote your last list had a different job, a different family, perhaps a different country. You've changed more than you think. Gilbert's research says you'll change more in the next ten years than you expect, too.
So here's my question. When did you last write your values down? If the honest answer is "when I got this job," or "never," the list driving your decisions belongs to somebody else.
Book an hour this week. Blank page. Five values. Then go and meet the person you are now.
Your Values Aren't a Democracy will help you sort the real ones from the poster ones once you've got a draft.