(2026-07-13) Brodmerkel Why Most Values Exercises Don't Actually Help You Find Your Values

Sven Brodmerkel: Why Most Values Exercises Don't Actually Help You Find Your Values. A few years ago I sat down and tried to find my values with one of those lists. Forty-odd words in two columns. Integrity. Growth. Connection. Courage. Etc. Circle five.

I circled five. I read them back. They were good ones.
They were also, I slowly realised, completely useless to me.

I tried again a while later with a different list. Same result

No list in the history of these exercises has ever featured “Being Right In Meetings” or “Winning Arguments With My Father”. Not that these would be things I’d circle, but you get the idea. These lists only contains admirable words, which is the first problem. It was never testing what you value. It was testing what you’re willing to be seen valuing.

For most people that’s a minor design flaw. For those of us who spent decades reading a room before we spoke in it, it’s closer to a trap built specifically for our particular skill set.

Most values exercises assume you’re excavating. Somewhere under the compromises and the coping mechanisms is a Real You, buried like treasure, and enough of the right questions will dig it out. This is the same myth I’ve been arguing against throughout this series — the idea that authenticity is a fixed thing waiting under the performance, rather than something you actively steer.

Values aren’t buried. They’re chosen, and you keep choosing them, over and over, in ways too small to notice most of the time.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, this gets a useful reframe: a value is a direction, not a destination.

“Doing the work with integrity“ is a heading you keep travelling in, week after week, whether or not anyone’s watching you do it.

That distinction matters more than it might appear at first, because it changes what the list-and-circle exercise is actually measuring.

Anyone who’s spent years succeeding socially can identify a direction that sounds admirable. The hard part is knowing whether it’s your direction — or just the one that’s kept you safe.

It’s a two-part question the worksheet version skips entirely: what are your values, and how do you tell the ones you own from the ones you’ve just been rewarded for performing?

*You don’t need the full toolkit to try this once. Take whatever value you’d circle first off a list — say, “helpfulness” — and run it through one question: does it feel like moving toward something you want, or away from something you fear?

If underneath “I value being helpful” is actually “I’m afraid of being seen as difficult”, that doesn’t make it false. It might still be worth keeping. But it’s a different object than a value — it’s a threat response wearing a value’s clothes, and the two will make very different decisions for you under pressure.

That’s one test out of four. It’s the easy one.

Like the rest of this series, this isn’t really about finding another answer. It’s about learning to distinguish a comfortable answer from a truthful one.

That’s what the Values Clarity Tool is for. It’s the next piece in Dismantling Authenticity, and it’s for paid subscribers — partly because it’s substantial (a full worksheet, not a listicle), and partly because it’s the pillar the rest of the series’ diagnostic work quietly depends on. The previous tool, the Authenticity Alignment Audit, measures whether your adaptations are strategic or just masking with better production values; this tool is the only thing that can tell the two apart, because it gives the Audit something real to measure against.