Values & Motivators Worksheet

Under pressure you fall back on the values you really hold, not the ones on the wall. This page finds them in your own stories, forces a priority order and writes each one as behavior someone else could see.

The structure of human values is strong research (Schwartz, 1992; Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022). Starting from your own stories and turning values into behaviors and lines is practitioner craft. The number of values, stories and behaviors asked for here are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You face a career choice, a new role or an offer and want to know what you will not trade away.
• You lead others and want to explain your decisions by something steadier than mood.
• A decision keeps feeling wrong and you cannot say why.

Skip it when:

• You want to map what energizes and drains you in daily work: use 1.2 Strengths & Weaknesses Grid.
• You want a broader statement of what work and life are for: use 1.8 Workview and Lifeview.

Values research makes one of the firmer claims in psychology. People across cultures recognize the same basic values, and these sit in a circle: neighbors pull the same way, opposites compete (Schwartz, 1992). Later work refined the circle and confirmed it with data from many countries (Schwartz et al., 2012). So people differ less in which values they hold than in how they rank them, and the ranking shows when two values collide and you can serve only one.

The theory has limits. It describes and predicts broad patterns of choice. It does not tell you which values are right, and naming your priorities does not by itself change what you do under pressure.

That is why this page starts with stories rather than a word list, since what you did shows what decided. It then forces a ranking by cost, turns each value into behavior and a line, and names the collisions ahead.

Write a few lines on a high point, a hard test and a turning point: what happened, what you did and what it shows you cared about.

Strong answer: "Hard test: the plant manager asked me to hold back a delay from the customer until after the quarter. I told the customer that week. It shows I care more about straight dealing than about looking good upward." Not: "A tough project taught me resilience."

Illustrative example: the role, the company and the situations are made up.

A logistics manager at a food wholesaler in Denmark fills in the page before deciding whether to apply for a regional role.

Section 1: the high point was rebuilding the night picking shift with the team's own ideas. The hard test was being asked to keep a delivery delay from a large customer until after month end; she told the customer. The turning point was leaving a job where every change needed three approvals.

Section 2: nine values listed. Top three: transparency (cost paid: a cold month with her then manager), autonomy (cost paid: left a secure job), impact.

Section 3: autonomy means "give me the goal and let me find the route." Behaviors: she negotiates decision rights before taking a project; she hands her team problems, not solutions. Line: "I won't take high-stakes work without the authority to deliver it."

Section 4: the regional role reports to a director known for tight control. Decision: in the interview, she asks which decisions the role owns, and she declines if the answer is "few".