core values: the secret to career fulfillment
In the quest for career success, we often focus on external metrics – salary, title, or status. Trust us - we’ve been there, striving for the next role or the next raise, sure that once we achieve the next level things will feel better. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. True professional fulfillment runs deeper, rooted in something more fundamental: our core values. Understanding and honoring these personal principles and learning to align your daily activities to your core values are essential for long-term career satisfaction and success.
Why Values Alignment Matters in Your Professional Life
Core values are like your internal compass. Whether you’re aware or not, they guide our decisions, shape our interactions, and influence our definition of success. When your work aligns with your values, you're more likely to feel energized, motivated, and authentic in your role. When you’re out of alignment you’ll often feel stressed, tense, and even burnt out - even if you ‘look’ successful on the outside. Imagine a person who values creativity and innovation working in a highly rigid, process-driven environment with no ability to impact their own or their team’s processes. Or someone who really values structure and clarity working in a fast-paced startup environment where the strategic plan changes daily. No amount of career advancement will help these people feel better every morning when they log in to work.
Quick Exercises to Uncover Your Core Values
If you know you’re feeling misaligned but struggling to understand why, start by trying some of our favorite quick independent exercises to start uncovering the roots of your own misalignment:
the peak experience analysis
Take a few minutes to write down 3-4 peak experiences in your career – moments when you felt most alive and fulfilled. For each experience, ask yourself:
What made this moment meaningful?
What values were being honored?
What principles were you living by?
the admiration exercise
Think about three people you deeply admire. These don’t even need to be people you know very well - use the first people who come to mind. List what you respect most about them. Often, the qualities we admire in others reflect our own core values.
the anger audit
Kind of a reverse on the peak experience analysis above. Reflect on times you've felt angry or frustrated at work. Strong negative reactions often indicate when our values are being violated. What boundaries or principles were being crossed in these scenarios?
putting values into action
Once you understand your values, you can make more intentional career choices. This is a step many career coaches skip in getting right to the job search - the inner work is so critical in finding not just the next role, but the right role for you. This is even more important in service-based professions like healthcare, since many of us have formed our identities around our career as clinicians or other helpers. Many of our clients even find that their current roles fit the bill with a few simple tweaks. Regardless of whether you find you need small shifts or big leaps, digging deeper on your core values will help you find answers that will lead to more effective shifts in the future.
