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 worldview.
Througout my 20-year career as an executive and coach, I’ve been committed to lifting up the critical role played by defining one’s core values and engaging in values-setting processes. Core values are the qualities, beliefs, aspirations, and principles that guide one’s behavior and shape their worldview. 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, or vocation, core values are the concepts that must be (in)tangibly expressed in our work and relationships as service-providers. My work is one of the many ways through which I share the values and purpose at the core of my personhood. My values 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.
