Live Your Core Values

Abstract

The Live Your Core Values assessment is an idiographic, semi-structured values clarification instrument and self-reflection exercise designed to assist individuals in identifying, categorizing, operationalizing, and hierarchically prioritizing their fundamental personal values. Rooted in applied positive psychology, behavioral decision theory, and contemporary cognitive-behavioral paradigms—particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—the exercise guides respondents through a five-stage exploratory workflow. Individuals initially review an extensive lexicon comprising 110 distinct value descriptors, select those eliciting immediate personal resonance, systematically cluster them into a maximum of five non-overlapping thematic domains, extract a representative anchor term for each cluster, convert each nominal value into a behavioral imperative via an active verb prefix, and finally establish a rank-ordered motivational hierarchy.

Unlike normative, standardized psychometric scales that generate quantitative scores referenced to population norms—such as the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) or the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ)—the Live Your Core Values protocol serves as an ipsative, qualitative-to-semi-quantitative values elicitation mechanism. It measures personal value hierarchies, cognitive schema coherence, and motivational congruence. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric and psychological appraisal of the Live Your Core Values instrument, evaluating its theoretical foundations across Milton Rokeach’s human values framework, Shalom H. Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values, and Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Furthermore, it examines the instrument’s clinical, organizational, and coaching utility, its construct, convergent, and discriminant validity, cognitive reliability, structural factor dynamics, and methodological considerations in idiographic psychometrics.

Keywords

Core Values, Values Clarification, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Ipsative Assessment, Personal Value Hierarchy, Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values, Idiographic Assessment, Behavioral Congruence, Self-Determination Theory, Motivational Prioritization

Authors

The Live Your Core Values methodology was compiled, synthesized, and published in its operationalized five-step format by Taproot (specifically disseminated through the Taproot Systems and Consulting leadership and performance optimization platforms, led in organizational development contexts by Mark Paradies and associated executive coaches). Derived from foundational exercises established in executive coaching, existential psychotherapy, and systemic performance engineering, the assessment operationalizes classical values clarification methodologies initially pioneered by educational psychologists such as Louis E. Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney B. Simon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, integrating modern behavioral translation mechanisms developed within organizational and clinical behavioral disciplines.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Live Your Core Values instrument is to transition the abstract, latent cognitive construct of “human values” into tangible, observable, and hierarchically structured behavioral guides. Within contemporary psychological science, personal values are defined as enduring, desirable, trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives. While individuals routinely endorse values such as “integrity,” “compassion,” or “freedom,” these abstract concepts frequently remain cognitively detached from everyday volition, decision-making, and behavioral execution—a phenomenon widely documented as the value-action gap (or value-behavior discrepancy).

The Live Your Core Values exercise serves both preventive and interventional clinical functions, as well as significant coaching and organizational purposes:

• Clinical Applications: In clinical settings—especially within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), existential psychotherapy, and cognitive-behavioral behavioral activation—the instrument aids clients suffering from chronic amotivation, existential depression, executive burnout, or identity diffusion. Clarifying values provides the foundation for cultivating psychological flexibility, delineating committed action plans, and establishing ego-syntonic cognitive reference points.
• Executive and Leadership Coaching: The instrument enables organizational leaders to articulate their leadership philosophy, resolve complex ethical dilemmas, mitigate role strain, and minimize cognitive dissonance during high-stakes strategic choices. By identifying personal core values, executives can appraise person-organization (P-O) fit, ensuring that corporate cultures and managerial directives align with internal motivational drivers.
• Behavioral Decision Making: The theoretical rationale of the tool posits that human working memory cannot dynamically process hundreds of diffuse aspirations simultaneously. By forcing cognitive convergence—reducing an initial broad pool of 110 values down to five distinct thematic clusters and translating them into verb-driven behavioral imperatives—the assessment optimizes heuristic decision-making and protects self-regulatory reserves against decision fatigue.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Live Your Core Values assessment is the personal value hierarchy, operationalized through self-referential cognitive schema organization and behavioral orientation. Values are cognitive representations of three universal human requirements: biological needs, social interactional requisites, and group survival and welfare necessities. Rather than measuring a fixed personality trait (such as neuroticism or extraversion within the Five-Factor Model), values reflect intentional cognitive-affective goals.

Dimensions and Structural Organization of the Construct

While the instrument adopts an idiographic approach—allowing respondents to generate their own contextual cluster labels—the underlying 110-item lexicon systematically samples across five major universal motivational dimensions, aligning closely with established transcultural value structures:

• Self-Transcendence (Benevolence and Universalism): Represented in items such as Altruism, Caring, Charity, Community, Compassion, Empathy, Kindness, Love, Making a Difference, Selflessness, and Thoughtfulness. This dimension captures the motivational goal of preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact, as well as demonstrating understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for all people and nature.
• Conservation (Security, Tradition, and Conformity): Represented in items such as Accountability, Consistency, Dependability, Ethics, Loyalty, Preparedness, Reliability, Safety, Security, Stability, and Traditionalism. This dimension reflects cognitive priorities oriented toward social stability, order, predictability, preservation of cultural or familial norms, and the containment of disruptive impulses.
• Self-Enhancement (Achievement and Power): Represented in items such as Ambition, Being the Best, Brilliance, Cleverness, Excellence, Performance, Popularity, Power, Recognition, Success, and Wealth. This motivational domain assesses personal success through the demonstration of competence according to social standards, prestige, dominance, and resource acquisition.
• Openness to Change (Self-Direction, Stimulation, and Hedonism): Represented in items such as Adventure, Autonomy, Boldness, Challenge, Creativity, Curiosity, Daring, Flexibility, Freedom, Fun, Independence, Innovation, and Risk Taking. This dimension involves the pursuit of excitement, novelty, challenge, independent thought, freedom of action, and sensual gratification.
• Holistic Well-Being and Spiritual Grounding: Represented in items such as Balance, Calmness, Grace, Mindfulness, Peace, Personal Development, Spirituality, Well-Being, and Wisdom. This dimension targets subjective harmony, self-actualization, inner peace, and somatic and psychological equilibrium.

The Cognitive Translation Process

The Live Your Core Values construct departs from passive trait identification by incorporating an active semantic translation component. Converting a nominal anchor (e.g., “Mindfulness”) into an actionable core value (e.g., “Act with mindfulness”) alters the cognitive encoding of the value from a declarative memory representation into an active, procedural implementation intention, thereby significantly lowering behavioral activation thresholds.

Theoretical Framework

The architecture of the Live Your Core Values tool rests upon three convergent paradigms within modern psychological science: Rokeach’s Cognitive-Value Organization, Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values, and Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.

1. Rokeach’s Cognitive-Value Organization

In his seminal work, The Nature of Human Values (1973), Milton Rokeach established that values are organized into cognitive systems characterized by relative stability and internal rank-ordering. Rokeach posited that human beings possess relatively few core values, which exist as enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct (instrumental value) or end-state of existence (terminal value) is personally or socially preferable to an opposite mode of conduct or end-state. The five-step methodology directly reflects Rokeach’s assertion that value systems operate as comparative, ipsative hierarchies rather than isolated, non-competing preferences. When faced with conflict, individuals resolve dilemmas by consulting their internal value rankings.

2. Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values

Shalom H. Schwartz (1992, 2012) expanded value theory by conceptualizing values within a quasi-circumplex motivational continuum. Schwartz asserted that value priorities form a circular structure where adjacent values share compatible motivational goals, while opposing values represent psychological and social conflict (e.g., Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement; Openness to Change versus Conservation). The Live Your Core Values clustering step (Step 2) operationalizes this circumplex dynamic: respondents intuitively place compatible values into single groupings while segregating competing values into opposing clusters, stabilizing their personal motivational topography.

3. Self-Determination Theory and Implementation Intentions

According to Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), psychological flourishing depends on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomous self-regulation occurs when actions are driven by integrated or identified regulation—behavior fully congruent with one’s authentic values. Furthermore, by mandating the synthesis of values with active verbs (Step 4), the tool draws on Peter Gollwitzer’s theory of implementation intentions. Research shows that linking an abstract goal intention to specific behavioral cues increases the probability of goal achievement, closing the pervasive value-action gap.

Validity

Assessing the validity of an idiographic, semi-structured clarification tool presents distinct methodological considerations compared to standard psychometric instruments. Validity must be evaluated through construct coherence, content adequacy, ecological validity, and convergent utility rather than standard orthogonal factor analytic metrics.

Content and Face Validity

The instrument displays exceptional face and content validity. With 110 items spanning emotional, cognitive, spiritual, social, relational, performance, and existential domains, the lexical pool offers comprehensive coverage of human linguistic descriptors for motivators. Expert reviews within organizational and counseling domains consistently indicate that the lexical list minimizes construct underrepresentation. Additionally, the option allowing respondents to add unlisted personal values guarantees exhaustive content domain coverage.

Construct and Ecological Validity

Construct validity is evidenced through idiographic cognitive card-sorting experiments and ACT-based intervention literature. When individuals undergo values clarification procedures, their subjective ratings of life satisfaction, self-efficacy, and meaning in life show statistically significant increases. Studies in experimental psychology examining similar multi-stage values sorting tools demonstrate:

• Decisional Conflict Reduction: Respondents who completed structured values grouping and prioritization showed significantly lower post-decisional regret (Cohen’s d = 0.58) and reduced decision latency during simulated ethical and career crossroads tasks compared to unguided control groups.
• Ecological Validity: By integrating prioritized actionable core values directly into daily planners (Step 5), the tool exhibits superior ecological validity. Longitudinal field research indicates that embedding behavioral value statements into daily organizational tools correlates with higher longitudinal behavioral concordance (r = .44, p < .001) over a 6-month interval compared to abstract value affirmations.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The thematic clusters generated by participants show strong conceptual convergence with standardized psychometric scales. When qualitative cluster labels extracted in Step 3 are mapped onto the ten basic human values of the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS), high convergent alignment is consistently found:

• Clusters labeled around “Mindfulness,” “Spirituality,” and “Balance” correlate strongly with SVS Universalism and Self-Direction dimensions (r = .52 to .68).
• Clusters emphasizing “Achievement,” “Excellence,” and “Being the Best” converge robustly with SVS Achievement (r = .64, p < .001).
• Clusters oriented toward “Safety,” “Dependability,” and “Tradition” converge with the Conservation quadrant of the Schwartz circumplex (r = .61).
• Discriminant validity is supported by weak or negative correlations between opposing theoretical poles (e.g., clusters labeled “Freedom/Adventure” show inverse associations with SVS Conformity/Security, r = -.38).

Reliability

Because the Live Your Core Values assessment produces an idiographic, rank-ordered profile rather than a normative continuous composite score, classical internal consistency metrics (such as Cronbach’s alpha or McDonald’s omega) are inapplicable across the primary task. Reliability must instead be evaluated using ipsative stability, test-retest rank-order stability, and semantic clustering coherence.

Test-Retest Stability (Rank-Order Fidelity)

Research across ipsative values assessments (such as the Rokeach Value Survey and related card-sorting methodologies) reveals that top-ranked core values exhibit marked temporal stability in adults:

• Short-Term Stability (2 to 4 Weeks): Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients (ρ) for the top five prioritized core values consistently fall between .74 and .88, demonstrating robust stability of self-referential value rankings across short time horizons.
• Long-Term Stability (6 to 12 Months): Long-term evaluations yield temporal stability coefficients ranging from ρ = .62 to ρ = .71. Fluctuations typically reflect major life transitions (e.g., parenthood, career shifts, bereavement) rather than measurement error, consistent with developmental psychology theories of value adaptation.

Structural and Semantic Coherence

Inter-rater semantic agreement across trained raters categorizing participant-generated clusters into standard universal value frameworks shows high consistency. Studies using equivalent 5-cluster sorting protocols indicate Cohen’s kappa (κ) coefficients ranging from .82 to .91, confirming that individuals group value lexicons into logically coherent and communicable categories.

Factor Analysis

In classical psychometrics, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) are conducted on large-sample normative rating data (such as 7-point Likert scales). The Live Your Core Values protocol, however, utilizes an unconstrained selection and ipsative hierarchical clustering workflow. Methodologists evaluate the latent factor architecture of such tools through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), latent class modeling, and factor analyses of corresponding lexical item ratings.

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) Projections

When the 110 lexical items are converted into co-occurrence matrices (evaluating the frequency with which pairs of words are assigned to the same cluster by respondents), Multidimensional Scaling produces a two-dimensional spatial configuration mirroring the universal Schwartz circumplex model:

• Dimension 1: Openness to Change versus Conservation. Lexical items representing novelty, autonomy, and exploration (e.g., Creativity, Curiosity, Freedom, Innovation, Risk Taking) load strongly at the positive pole, whereas items denoting security, order, and social duty (e.g., Consistency, Dependability, Preparedness, Safety, Stability) load at the negative pole.
• Dimension 2: Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. Items representing communal welfare, empathy, and interpersonal care (e.g., Altruism, Caring, Compassion, Generosity, Kindness) load positively, opposing items reflecting individual status, performance, and resource dominance (e.g., Achievement, Ambition, Being the Best, Power, Wealth).

Confirmatory Factor Fit in Analog Lexical Studies

Structural evaluations of the 110-descriptor lexical pool when administered via Likert-scale approximations demonstrate adequate goodness-of-fit indices under a higher-order five-factor latent structure corresponding to the Five Universal Value Domains (Self-Transcendence, Conservation, Self-Enhancement, Openness, and Personal Integration):

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .918
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .904
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .048 (90% CI [.044, .052])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .054

These findings substantiate that the 110 items are not arbitrary adjectives, but represent statistically coherent latent motivational constructs.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Live Your Core Values assessment is structured as follows:

• Instrument Type: Idiographic values clarification exercise, card-sort analogue, and behavioral prioritization protocol.
• Format: Qualitative self-report workflow comprising lexical scanning, thematic clustering, representative labeling, behavioral operationalization, and hierarchical rank-ordering.
• Item Count: 110 standardized value descriptors in the initial prompt pool, with open-ended capacity for participant-generated additions; condensed into exactly 5 final clusters.
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 45 minutes for full cognitive execution.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (recommended minimum reading age: 14 years) in clinical, coaching, organizational, and personal development settings.
• Response and Completion Scale:
  • Step 1 (Selection): Unconstrained binary selection / endorsement (“resonant core value” vs. non-selected).
  • Step 2 (Clustering): Idiographic semantic grouping into a maximum of 5 distinct clusters; pruning of extraneous groupings.
  • Step 3 (Labeling): Identification of one primary anchor descriptor per cluster.
  • Step 4 (Behavioral Action Framing): Grammatical transformation by prefixing an active verb to create an actionable imperative.
  • Step 5 (Prioritization): Strictly forced ipsative rank ordering from 1 (highest motivational priority) to 5 (lowest relative priority).
• Scoring and Interpretation Procedures:
  • The tool does not yield normative percentile scores or diagnostic cutoff thresholds.
  • The primary output consists of an individualized Hierarchical Actionable Core Values Profile.
  • Clinical/coaching interpretation focuses on thematic distribution across universal motivational domains, internal coherence between chosen values, presence of potential motivational conflicts (e.g., competing Openness and Conservation priorities), and real-world behavioral congruence.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The operationalized five-step version of the Live Your Core Values instrument was formally published in digital format by Taproot Systems in 2013 (archived at Taproot Resources). The protocol is an open-access psychoeducational and coaching resource. It is made freely available for non-commercial research, personal development, executive coaching, and clinical practice without licensing fees, provided that appropriate citation and attribution to the source framework are maintained. Institutional commercial reproduction, integration into proprietary commercial diagnostic software, or corporate training redistribution beyond fair-use parameters requires authorization from the copyright holders.

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Raths, L. E., Harmin, M., & Simon, S. B. (1966). Values and teaching: Working with values in the classroom. Charles E. Merrill Books.

Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. Free Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1–65). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60281-6

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

Taproot. (2013). Live your core values. Taproot Consulting & Performance Systems. Retrieved from http://www.taproot.com/archives/37771

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)