Alyson Smith
MA, CPC
Operations Director
Ask most people what they want out of life, and you’ll get an answer fast. A better job. To finally get organized. To stop disappointing their parents. To get fit, land the promotion, meet someone.
Ask them why (and keep asking) and something interesting happens. The confident answer starts to wobble. Underneath a lot of goals sits a quieter, less examined question: is this what I want, or what I’ve been trained to want?
The gap between authentic values and inherited “shoulds” is one of the most important things a coach helps a client find. It’s also one of the hardest things to find alone.
It’s easy to confuse the two. A goal is a destination: get the degree, get the job, get the apartment. A value is a direction: growth, connection, contribution, independence. Goals can be checked off. Values, on the other hand, cannot. You don’t ever finish “being a caring friend” or “living honestly.” You keep choosing it, day after day, as you live more and more into the type of person you value becoming.
This distinction matters enormously for coaching, especially with young adults and adults who are building independence for the first time. A goal borrowed from someone else can absolutely get accomplished, but it rarely stays motivating once no one’s watching to approve of it. A value that’s actually yours keeps working even on the hard days, because it isn’t dependent on anyone else’s applause.
The trouble is, most of us have never been asked to sort our goals into “mine” and “inherited.” We just absorb a lifetime of expectations from family, from culture, or from comparison and call the resulting pile “what I want.”
The “should” voice is loud because it’s often wrapped in love, fear, or both. A parent’s hope for a stable career. A culture that equates worth with productivity. A sibling’s success that quietly sets the bar. None of these are malicious. But they can crowd out a client’s own signal so completely that, when a coach finally asks “what do you want here,” the honest answer is: I don’t know. I’ve never checked.
This is where a lot of stuck-ness actually lives. Not in a lack of effort or discipline, but in chasing goals that were never fully chosen, which makes them exhausting to sustain and confusing to fail at. You can’t recover motivation for something you never wanted in the first place.
Values clarification isn’t a single conversation, it’s a set of exercises coaches return to throughout the coaching relationship, especially at the start of a new season or after a setback. A few examples of what this looks like in practice:
Separating the source. For a given goal, a coach might simply ask: whose voice is this? Client, parent, professor, Instagram. Naming the source alone often loosens the grip a “should” has.
The values card sort. Clients sort a set of value words (connection, achievement, adventure, security, creativity for example) from “not important” to “most important,” then narrow to a handful. The value of the exercise isn’t the final list; it’s the noticing that happens along the way, when a client hesitates over a card they expected to keep.
The body check. Genuine values tend to register somewhere physical, an internal settling or an opening up, while “shoulds” often show up as tightness or dread. Coaches will ask clients to notice what a goal feels like in the body before they analyze it, which can surface a values conflict that conversation alone would miss.
The long-view question. “If no one ever found out, would you still want this?” strips away the audience and gets closer to what’s actually motivating.
None of these exercises are about producing a perfect, permanent list of values. Values shift with age, context, and experience. The point is building a client’s own capacity to keep asking the question so that five years from now, they don’t need a coach in the room to check whether a goal is theirs.
For a client working on independence, values clarification isn’t a soft, feel-good detour before the “real” work of goal-setting. It is the real work. Skills like time management, follow-through, and self-advocacy are much easier to build and sustain in service of something a client actually cares about. Coaching someone to plan their week around a goal they secretly resent is teaching a skill that won’t outlast the coaching relationship.
Getting clear on values also changes how setbacks land. A client chasing an inherited goal experiences failure as proof they’re broken. A client working toward a value they’ve actually claimed experiences the same setback as information, not evidence to abandon the direction.
This is why values clarification tends to come early and often in coaching, and why it gets revisited at every transition. It’s less a single exercise than a compass a client learns to check again and again, in smaller and smaller ways until checking it becomes second nature.
That shift, from chasing what should matter to building toward what actually does, is often where the real change begins.
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