By Dr Jackie Le Fèvre, Director at Magma Effect
A question that has followed my every move. My parents, teachers, careers advisors and peers: no one understood my choices. I had a flair for languages yet opted for sciences.
I had a flair for languages yet opted for sciences. At university I defied my Zoology professor submitting photographs of primates rather than a display of deceased worms or butterflies for the mandatory ‘Collection’ assignment: … this was 1982 with scant nature conservation sensitivity and defiance cost me marks.
Inspired by the wonderful Dr Jane Goodall: after graduation, instead of taking a job I took flight to West Africa to help reintroduce chimpanzees to the wild. So began an unconventional 21 years in the not-for-profit sector including managing Employability projects for 18–24-year-olds under New Labour’s New Deal learning from others failed by ‘convention’.
In 2004, redundant, I started my specialist management consultancy focused on human values. On 1 March 2020, as COVID 19 spread, I enrolled on a PhD in Occupational Psychology. Three years and nine months later I held the title Doctor and empirical data showing what I had felt all along: when someone connects to their personal values then the land of uncertainty, ambiguity and hard choices can be more than just managed, it is a place where thriving can be found (Le Fèvre, Addicott & Slaski 2023).
What Are Values?
Ideas. Not just any old ideas but emotionally rich ideas about things that matter to us individually or collectively, matter enough to act upon (Schwartz 2012). A lovely idea such as ‘generosity’, for example, becomes a ‘value’ when it influences how you or I respond to a situation or opportunity. Our ‘valuing’ of that idea: treating it as more important in that moment than other possible ideas, is what brings the value to life and so we show up generously instead for example being competitive or playful.
Values are not morals, ethics, principles or standards but are often confused with them. Values are neither good nor bad: all values are equally valid. Take the example of ‘Social Status/Prestige’ from the Schwartz Quasi-circumplex model, the most widely cited and validated approach to values at this time. Someone with this value wants others to look up to them and will do things to try and make that happen. Let’s consider two people:
Person A – junior doctor interested in heart surgery aspiring to being at the top of their field. They dream of an office with walls covered in certificates and commendations where anyone who enters is deeply impressed by their prowess and ready to trust them with incredibly difficult surgery.
Person B – watching the rise of TikTok influencers thinks ‘how hard can it be?’. They dream of millions of followers and their friends boasting about knowing the celebrity behind each post and reel.
Same value, different people, different actions. What we do is rarely driven by a single one of our values in isolation as our values form a dynamic system. The way we live out the most important value in a given moment is often influenced by other priority values. In the case of the doctor priority placed on being highly skilled shapes the best way to pursue status, while for the would-be influencer being liked by friends pulls in a different direction.
It is how we live out our values: the actions we take and attitudes we display driven by our values; that is subject to judgement by ourselves and by others.
Who Has Values?
Everyone. You, me and every other human. Psychology reveals that values are closely linked to sense of self and perform important functions including helping us make sense of situations, come to decisions and find our way through life. Each of us has a unique pattern of personal high priority values, which is not surprising as they are part of who we are and none of us is exactly like anyone else. Remember our values are emotionally rich ideas; more heartfelt than ‘head thought’.
How Do Values Influence Us?
Usually unconsciously. Our values are part of a background ‘operating system’ if you like, working away below our conscious awareness to enable us to evaluate situations and select between options as quickly as possible drawing on past experiences and our sense of self. We tend to be attracted towards groups and forms of work which enable us to live out the values that matter most to us individually. When our relationships, whether inside or outside of work, align with our high priority values things feel more ‘right’ than wrong. While this might sound like an argument for some form of personal values to job matching algorithm, it is actually the opposite.
Thinking back to our doctor and would-be influencer the way their values play out is highly contextual and shaped by a sense of what might be possible for ‘someone like me’. I suggest a machine is no substitute for a conversation with a guidance professional who can share real life examples of individuals who overcame challenges, changed course successfully or found novel ways to bring experiences that mattered into their working lives. This is an argument for equipping advisers to connect through values to every individual they encounter.
Each of us has our own unique values landscape that has been the motivational engine behind the scenes that brought us to this point. That said, if a number of careers advisors undertook an inventory of their personal values and compared results, we would probably see a number of common threads or values themes emerging. This could include the importance of learning, of human dignity, or curiosity alongside relational features such as empathy and peer support.
When we join with others to work on a common cause we naturally lean into those values which matter to us which also matter to those we are with, this is one of the paths to a sense of belonging within a group. If there is a disconnect between our values and the values being practiced around us, we feel uncomfortable, cannot do our best work and become vulnerable to stress, even burnout in extreme situations (Prentice et al 2024).
Why Draw Upon Values in Guidance Work?
Values are universal: everyone has some. Values are also a feature of our individuality: everyone has their own personal landscape of values priorities. As an internal resource that we all have, values provide somewhere to start a conversation with anyone. By exploring what matters to someone we help them feel seen and heard at a deeper level than simply taking down a ‘history’ or doing a review of qualifications and experience to ‘match’ a person to a slot. By listening carefully to vocabulary and ideas that carry feeling about how someone talks about themselves or describe what they seek, we can appreciate what may be standing in their way and offer suggestions for ways forward that inspire hope. This is not about seeking to change the values that an individual holds but rather to explore various opportunities to put those values into practice. We might, for example, ask our would-be influencer about all the things their friends admire to explore whether that provides a different way of imagining where ‘status’ could come from.
Researchers observe the questions that AI struggles with are those centred on ‘why’ and ‘for what purpose’ (Mazurek 2025). To me, this suggests AI cannot empathetically connect to the values held by a human nor nurture a trustworthy connection through those values. This is important as the current values of those we seek to support are playing an active part of holding them where they are. It takes a human adviser to use the language of values to show that what ‘is’ right now is not the same as what ‘could be’ and that there is a path from here to there which is possible.
Research also suggests that those individuals who work in ways that are perceived as congruent with their personal values are experienced by others as more credible, and trustworthy, than other folk who we sense may be putting on an act (Peyton et al 2023).
What Does ‘Data’ Say About Connecting to Values?
My data (collected over three different years) suggests that typically less than 30% of the UK workforce have deliberately explored their values: so, this is something that will potentially be new to around 70% of people (Le Fevre 2023).
Both experiments and school/workplace studies have shown that when individuals consciously connect to their personal values, they are better able to use those values to deliberately direct their efforts. In the short-term greater connection to values strengthens wellbeing and reduces vulnerability to stress (Luo & Willroth 2024).
Over the longer term, it appears that living a consciously values-based life may inoculate us for future setbacks by building greater capacity for self-reliance and agency. Conscious connection to values has three components. First to ‘Know’ what our values are, have a concrete sense of the big ideas that drive us, and help us to make sense of our world. Second to ‘Hold’ on to those values, especially in tough times, and thirdly to ‘Live’ those values, put them into practice deliberately in how we make decisions and select our actions (Le Fèvre, Addicott & Slaski 2023).
Supporting people to connect with their values is not about building dependency on the advisor for insights. It is about enabling individuals, both advisors and clients, to have a practical clarity about what matters most to them, thereby increasing consistency of decision making and providing a framework for making sense of events and options with less second guessing and more self-compassion.
Adopting consciously values based practice has the potential to be both nurturing to the advisor enabling alignment between work and sense of self, and generative for the individuals supported, as they become clearer about who they are now and who they want to be which acts as the catalyst for constructive action (Heblich et al 2023).
How to Start with Values?
Your choice. There is no consensus on a single best method or tool to explore values even in well-developed fields such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Barrett, O’Connor & McHugh 2019). Some tools contain lists of words and invite the individual to select a small number they feel capture the most important values in their life. Various inventory tools also exist taking either a ranking or rating approach to descriptions of values. Other approaches encourage reflecting on key questions about your life and writing down the thoughts and ideas associated with the answers. This can be as simple as asking ‘what makes my heart sing’ – who am I with, what am I doing, where am I, what is the outcome. Also, conversely, ‘what makes my heart sink’ as those are the moments when our values are absent (or worse under threat).
Edinburgh University has a guide to identifying values through reflection at www.reflection.ed.ac.uk. and there are card sorting activities alongside quite a range of ‘self-help’ books. It should be noted that a common limitation of all these approaches is that they use predominantly conscious, language based, processes. Trying to surface ideas that are abstract in nature and exist in the unconscious in the land of emotion, no matter which approach is adopted, takes time.
My experience in this field also suggests it benefits from helping individuals notice how they feel about the ideas that they are trying to put into words (often for the first time), and this is where drawing on examples of values contained within published models can help.
In my practice, if a detailed and finely grained picture of the potential priority values for an individual or a group is required, I will tend towards using an inventory such as Hall-Tonna (Hall 1995) or Minessence (Lynn Fitzpatrick 2007). Each contains over 100 different and distinct values which have been identified through extensive exploration with adults who vary widely in age and life experience. Introducing people to new ideas, which have been found to be present in different cultures around the world, can open up the values landscape beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of Respect, Integrity and Family. Here is one example of what a mid-career, professional reported during my doctoral research:
Truly understanding your own values, what drives you and understanding there are no ‘wrong’ values is quite enlightening. This work directly influenced my decision to move into a different field of work and gave me the confidence to live more aligned to my values. This has reduced so much stress and frustration and has genuinely improved my life (p2, Le Fèvre 2023).
So What? Why Bother?
My career journey was neither conventional nor linear. Advisers did their best at the time to provide guidance but there was a gap between us that could not be bridged by rationality, reason or the experience of others. There was no holistic connection.
Approaching 30 years ago Professor Mark Savickas proposed effective career counselling help individuals “to look ahead and to look around, to develop the self” with a view to choosing “suitable and viable opportunities to become the person she or he wants to be.” (p257 Savickas 1997). Popular headlines like ‘Jobs for life are a thing of the past’ (The Guardian May 2016) arguably amplified the importance of person-centred guidance because the straight lines between one role and the next (if they ever had existed) were no more.
Add to which rising interest in the importance of meaningful work which can significantly predict happiness at work (Charles-Leija et al 2023). In my view it all points to the importance of values being a deliberate feature of guidance in the future, at any age or stage of the journey.
Bibliography
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