What Are Core Values? Definition, Examples and How to Find Yours

What are core values?

Core values are the few things that matter most to you, the principles and qualities you lean on when a decision is hard. They aren’t rules someone handed you or words that look good on a résumé. You can tell something is a core value because you’re willing to pay for it: with time, money, comfort or other people’s approval. Personal values work like a compass. They won’t plan the route for you, but they tell you which direction feels like yours.

The quickest way to spot a value is to look at a trade-off. Someone who puts freedom first might turn down a promotion because it comes with a rigid nine-to-five. Someone who puts security first might take that same job for the steady paycheck and the pension. Neither person is wrong. They’re steering by different values.

Everyone cares about dozens of things. Only a handful do the steering, and those are the ones worth knowing by name.

Values vs. goals, beliefs and personality traits

These get mixed up all the time, so here’s the short version.

A goal can be finished. A value can’t. “Pay off the credit card by June” is a goal. Behind it might sit financial independence: the wish that no boss or bank has a hold on your life. You’ll hit the goal one day and cross it off. The value keeps generating new goals for as long as it matters to you.

A belief is what you think is true. A value is what you think is important. “Most people will take advantage of you if you let them” is a belief. Kindness is a value. You can hold that cynical belief and still choose to be kind, because the alternative would make you someone you don’t want to be.

A trait describes how you tend to be. A value describes what you care about. Being organized is a trait. An organized person might care most about creativity and use their tidy habits to protect time for making things. Traits explain what comes easily to you. Values explain what you’ll put up with discomfort for.

Core values examples

Here are 15 examples from our list of personal values, one line each. Follow any link for a full definition and a real-life example.

• Freedom: deciding for yourself how you spend your time and where you go.
• Security: knowing you and your people are protected, with a safety net if things go wrong.
• Family: putting the people you live and grew up with first, as one team.
• Honesty: telling the truth, even when a lie would be easier or pay better.
• Loyalty: standing by your people and your word when walking away is tempting.
• Mastery: honing a craft for years until hard things feel almost effortless.
• Creativity: turning ideas into things that didn’t exist before you made them.
• Health: treating sleep, movement and food as the foundation for everything else.
• Financial independence: having enough set aside that work becomes a choice.
• Fairness: holding everyone to the same standard, insiders included.
• Kindness: noticing when someone’s worn out and doing small good turns without keeping score.
• Curiosity: wanting to know how things work, just because.
• Humor: finding what’s funny even in hard moments, starting with yourself.
• Meaning: knowing what you get up for and feeling part of something bigger.
• Adventure: reaching for the unknown and slightly risky, and coming back with a story.

There are no good or bad values on this list. Some of them do pull against each other, though. Freedom and stability rarely sit comfortably together, and the same goes for adventure and security. That’s normal. You don’t need to resolve the tension, but it helps to know where it lives, so you understand why the same decision can feel right on Monday and wrong on Friday.

Why your first answer is usually the polite one

Ask someone to name their core values on the spot and you’ll probably hear something like “family, health, honesty, growth.” It sounds right. That’s the problem.

When you list values from memory, you end up answering a slightly different question: what am I supposed to care about? The words that come first are the ones your parents, your workplace and your social feed reward. Few people will say out loud that recognition, status or money drive a lot of their choices, even when they do. Meanwhile “family” lands on almost everyone’s list, including people who see their relatives twice a year and are fine with that.

The second issue is that a list from your head costs nothing. You can write down twenty values and feel that every one of them is essential. Real values show up when two of them collide: the late meeting or your kid’s game, the honest feedback or the easy working relationship. A list with no trade-offs is like a menu where you get to order everything. Real life doesn’t work that way, so your list shouldn’t either.

How to find your core values: the elimination method

Flip the process around. Instead of trying to recall what matters, start with a long list and remove everything you could live without. Approaches like Miller’s Personal Values Card Sort, where you sort cards into piles by importance, and the values exercises used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) work on a similar idea. Ten Values turns it into one strict rule: start with about 150 values and keep removing until exactly 10 are left.

Here’s roughly how it goes:

1. Clear out what’s obviously not you. Plenty of the 150 will feel foreign right away. This part is quick.
2. Keep only what you can’t picture your life without. This is where it gets uncomfortable. Almost everything sounds nice, and you’ll be deleting things you genuinely like.
3. Work through the last thirty. This is the honest part. For each value, ask: would I defend this at the cost of time, money or approval? If the answer is a shrug, it’s probably a value you admire rather than one you live by.
4. Take a last look. When ten are left, look at them next to the ones you removed most recently. If something feels off, swap it.

A few things that help. Slow down at the end, because that’s where your real list takes shape. Don’t aim for an impressive set; nobody grades it, and it’s only useful if it’s true. And if one value keeps refusing to leave even though you didn’t expect to keep it, pay attention. That’s often the most useful thing you’ll learn.

You can take the free values test without signing up, and your progress is saved on your device. At the end you’ll see your 10 and one question: which of these are you living the least right now? That’s a good place to start.

FAQ

How many core values should a person have?

There’s no fixed number. If you have twenty “top” values, though, none of them will help you choose between options. Ten is enough to describe you without flattening you, and few enough that each one carries weight.

Do core values change over time?

They can, especially after big life events: a new child, an illness, a move, a career change. Some stay put for years while others drift up or down. Retaking the test once a year, or whenever life feels off course, is a simple way to check.

What if my values contradict each other?

That’s common. Freedom and family, or ambition and rest, often end up in the same top 10. You don’t have to pick a winner for good. It’s enough to notice where they clash and decide, case by case, which one gets to lead this time.