Discover your core values and your value.


By Alice Alessandri and Alberto Aleo

Welcome back to “Diario di un Consulente”! 2025 marks the thirteenth year of our blog. During this journey together, we’ve established some habits with you, our readers, such as publishing articles on Mondays and many other traditions that characterise our “little” community. One of these is our Christmas tradition of sending a notebook (or diary, if you prefer) to those who have taken part in a Passodue training program. This notebook is designed to help you face the new year with a constructive mindset. The 2024/25 edition is dedicated to discovering your core values and understanding your own value.

In the following article, we wanted to include further reflections on this topic, sharing our insights and advice with those who haven’t received the notebook. Values have the magical power to guide us toward choices in line with our true essence, directing us during hard times and through the various challenges we all end up facing.

What Are Values, and Why Do They Matter?

As we discussed in an article exploring the difference between Business Ethics and Business Morality, the set of core values we believe in defines our moral compass, which in turn shapes our actions and behaviors. Values are guiding principles that consciously or unconsciously direct our actions. While they can be openly stated, what we say about ourselves doesn’t necessarily match with what we are trying to achieve, as we’ll explore in the next section. Nonetheless, it’s clear that our behaviors are driven by deep-seated values, which we want to protect or embody, whether we like it or not.

To have a better understanding of their nature, it’s helpful to distinguish between values and goals. We set ourselves goals in order to achieve a specific result. For instance, you might focus on your career because of your ambitions or to be wealthy. Values, on the other hand, are significant in and of themselves. They inherently embody the result. Specific goals can stem from these values, with their ultimate purpose being the realization of that value. For example, if self-determination and personal fulfillment are important values to me, one of my goals might be to achieve professional success. Values, therefore, help us define our goals and outline the actions we need to achieve them.

How to Discover Your Core Values.

If you’ve ever tried to define your goals, perhaps following advice from our article on wording objectives correctly, you’ll know it’s easier said than done. It is clear, therefore, that understanding our core values, which are hypothetically placed at a higher point in our consciousness, must be much harder! In fact, we are often unaware of our core values, and while they inspire our actions, they may remain hidden from us.

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Discovering your core values can be a complex and even unpleasant process as you might realize that some values don’t coincide with your personal image of yourself.

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In the notebook mentioned earlier, we provided several tips which can be summarized as follows:

• The Importance of Travelling: Getting away from your routine and looking at things from a distance is a great way to self-reflect. Humans often learn and understand through contrast, defining things by their differences. That’s why immersing yourself in new cultures or alternative environments, even for a short period, can help you understand your values better. At Passodue, we strongly believe in the transformative power of travelling, which we’ve discussed in articles like this one.
• The Role of Stories: Our “moral education,” or the shaping of our values, often depends on the stories we grew up with, such as books, films, or family anecdotes, which are deeply significant to us. A great exercise to discover your values is to deconstruct these stories and uncover their moral lessons. For inspiration, consider the work of Prof. Leigh Hafrey.
• The People Who Inspire Us: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” said Jim Rohn. Relationships play a huge role in shaping and influencing our lives. The people we’re drawn to and the ones we avoid possess values we either find attractive or repellent. As Mary Gentile, a leading expert in this field, teaches us, similarities and contrasts in values can be incredibly revealing.

Once you’ve drafted a list of your values, the next step is to rank them and identify connections or conflicts among them. This is because in our “moral map,” values aren’t all equivalent. Some are primary, others instrumental for other values, and some may even appear contradictory because they manifest in behaviors that seem opposite to the value itself. By analyzing these contradictions, you can define your values more effectively and understand how they relate to each other.

How to Tap into Your Core Values and Turn Them Into Value.

Why is understanding our core values important, and what practical benefits can it bring? First, it offers a renewed sense of self-awareness, and it later serves as a guide when we need to make tough decisions, but not only…

There are moments in life when we face conflicts with others or with ourselves. Many of these stem from ethical dilemmas which reflect behaviors based on different values or clashing goals. To support this, here’s an example from a previous article on conflicts that arise in sales. When you realise that your customer’s interests or goals contrast with yours, and you can’t find the right way or the right topics to persuade them, it’s likely that this conflict stems from a much deeper conflict within you. Deep down, you might even think that the customer is right in not purchasing a product, in asking for a discount, or in disagreeing with you.

How often have we felt pressured to act against our core values to close a deal, achieve a professional goal, or gain personal benefit?

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The ability to achieve your goals is directly proportional to how well they align with your core values. When your objectives are consistent with your values, your effectiveness increases exponentially.

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This means that core values are directly linked to the results and the value that we can generate for ourselves and for others, even in a broader sense. Our value is correlated to the core values that we can inspire in others through our actions, our way of communicating with others, and the stories we generate and share. A person’s charisma is, in essence, an expression of their values.

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Like our talents, our core values represent the most noble things we can offer to others.

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When shared through mutually beneficial relationships, our values are enhanced and then given back to us.

A good exercise you can start from is to ask yourself: “In what way can my core values be applied to my relationships? How can I make use of them in my professional life?

As we’ve explored in this short article, becoming aware of your values and taking responsibility for them requires intentional and sometimes extreme effort. We often claim to have core values that, in everyday life, we don’t fully live up to, but, as the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words,” and it’s through our actions that our true beliefs take shape.

Discovering and living by your values makes you honest and effective, helping you align with your true mission. 

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