Common Values Frameworks

When you sit down to figure out what actually matters to you, a blank page is intimidating. The good news is you don't have to invent your values from scratch. People have been organizing values into frameworks for a long time, and you can borrow from them.

A values framework is just a structured list of things people tend to care about — honesty, security, freedom, family, growth, fairness, creativity, service, and so on. Some come from philosophy, some from psychology, some from religious or cultural traditions, some from career and coaching tools. They differ in the details, but they all do the same job: they give you language for what you might otherwise only feel.

These frameworks are useful in two ways:

• As a menu. Reading a list of values helps you notice, "Yes, that one — that's me," and "No, that's not actually mine, I just thought it should be."
• As a mirror. Comparing different frameworks shows you where your priorities sit and where they clash, which is where the interesting self-knowledge lives.

Here's the important part: a framework is a starting point, not an authority. The goal isn't to adopt someone else's list wholesale. It's to use the list to surface, name, and prioritize your values — then build your own model from there. This is stewardship, not a personality quiz. Your values are what tell you which slips are serious and which trade-offs are worth making.

A practical move: skim a couple of frameworks, pull out the handful of values that genuinely resonate, and rank them. When two of your roles or responsibilities conflict, that ranking is what helps you decide.

Naming what matters connects directly to the QSM primer, which uses your values to judge what to defend, and We Don't Exist In A Vacuum is a reminder that some of your values came from the people around you.