The Importance of Defining Our Core Values

Posted on July 03, 2025 by Jackie Valle, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Core values are the qualities, beliefs, aspirations, and principles that guide one’s behavior and shape their worldview and aspirations. They might also be understood as one’s “non-negotiables,” i.e. the key principles that cannot be negotiated or compromised in any aspect of one’s life. In the context of an organization, business, career, or vocation, core values are the concepts that must be (in)tangibly expressed in our work and relationships as service-providers. They are also a tool for decision-making, time-management, and articulating ourselves to the world.

When I begin working with a new client, our relationship starts with a personal timeline and values-setting process. I move my clients through a values identification process that is organized by three segments designed to help them consider and identify their fundamental priorities. Our process first includes a consideration of your personal values and professional values before we arrive at the fundamental core values that overlap in these areas and infuse all aspects of one’s whole life. Your personal values describe what you prioritize as part of a healthy, fulfilled life. An example of a personal core value is solitude. In this case, one might highly value solitude because it allows the mental and emotional space to think creatively or “just be” free from external stimulation. The need for solitude would then inform the way you organize your time and activities you schedule into your day. As such, a conscious articulation of this value can help you carve out the time you need for yourself so that you can be your best self.

Professional values are your career and vocational priorities. They describe what you most care about in your work as well as the principles that are important to you in designing your career and putting it into action. They can also help you grow your career by steering the direction of your professional actions, boundaries, and relations. For example, if you value collaboration, you may choose to join teams and/or professional networks that provide new opportunities to build and share skills.

After identifying and setting your core values, they can be used as the foundation of our coaching partnership—guiding the conversations, decisions, goals, and actions that are authentic to you and aligned with your highest sense of self. This alignment can lead to greater motivation, fulfillment, and the creation of your ideal vision of the future.

My work is one of the many ways through which I share the values and purpose at the core of my personhood. My core values (outlined as follows) provide me the opportunity to practice integrity with myself and also serve as a tool for decision-making, time-management, and articulating myself to the world:

Abundance
Abundance is the capacity to give and receive which affords us the freedom to live by our values. As a self-directed creative entrepreneur, my business model is values-centered, works beyond existing markets, and creates new creative and financial resources for myself and the client-partners I serve.

Authenticity
Authenticity is one’s unique existence at a particular place and time; it can appear as the alignment of one’s actions and behavior with their truth. Authenticity can be noticed by others and appears in my work as the willingness to continually follow my inner compass and examine my values, world view, behavior, and creations, even at the risk of criticism.

Humor
Humor invites us to get out of our own way; it also provides one the opportunity to take a breath and process pain in a way that connects to others via the release of laughter. I infuse humor into as many of my interactions as possible, often reminding friends, partners, and others that “If we don’t laugh, all we will do is cry.”

Illumination
My overarching purpose is to illuminate the work created by those I serve. I do this by designing unique and personalized work experiences that bring to light the values at the heart of my clients’ practices–and then develop plans for putting those values into motion.

Imagination
As a creative steward, I support my partners in making the invisible visible by asking them to stretch their field of vision, imagining another world and other possible futures. The imagination is critical to all creative and cultural production. Imagining is a generative act with the power to catalyze change by conceiving new creations that move between slight and significant.