Leading with Your Values
A Rebel Leaders guide to figuring out what REALLY matters
In 2017, I lost myself. At the time, I had three young children, was working full-time in a high-pressure job, and my husband was traveling a lot for work. We were both running on empty: working too hard, drinking too much coffee, eating too much takeout, and completely neglecting our health and well-being. It all caught up with me in the form of emotional numbness. I couldn’t cry at sad commercials, I couldn’t feel joy when my favorite song came on the radio, I was just going through the motions.
I didn’t crash…I eroded. Slowly, over time, until one day, I realized I felt nothing at all.
After months of feeling completely numb and overwhelmed, my husband’s company offered him a promotion, but it required a move to Indiana, across the country from where we were living in Arizona. We decided this might be the change I needed. So in 2018, we packed up our little house and our three children and moved to Fort Wayne. And about a month after landing in Indiana, I had a sinking realization: I might have made the worst decision of my life.
I’d left everything behind - my career, my friends, my family, the sunshine and mountains, my cute little house - to start over in a big house that backed up to a corn field. And while I knew I didn’t want to return to the way I had been working before, becoming a stay-at-home mom after identifying so solidly with my career made me feel suddenly invisible, isolated, and like nothing I was doing mattered.
Everyone kept telling me that being a mom was “the most important job in the world.” But it didn’t feel like that when everyone else left in the morning and I was alone, folding laundry for the millionth time, cleaning the kitchen counters, waiting for the repairman, or taking the dog to the vet. My days felt like an endless loop of chores, and I started questioning everything.
That’s when I began digging into the larger questions about work, women, and motherhood. Why do we place so little value on caregiving? Why did my sense of self-worth feel so entangled with productivity and external validation? And, most importantly, what really mattered to ME?
Why Values Matter for Rebel Leaders
One of the most powerful exercises I did at that time was getting crystal clear on my personal values. This process was transformative because it helped me distinguish between what society was telling me I should do and what was actually important to me. My whole life I had placed so much emphasis on doing everything RIGHT. Finally, I realized that I had checked all the boxes on what I “should” do with my life…but maybe I was focusing on all the wrong things.
When we focus on what truly matters, we reduce overwhelm. We can let go of the things that drain our energy and don’t serve us. Instead of feeling pressure to do it all, we can prioritize what aligns with our values and drop the rest.
Because here’s the thing: When you’re heading toward burnout, everything feels urgent. Every undone task feels like proof that you’re failing. It’s a vicious cycle - the more overwhelmed you feel, the less energy you have to do anything, which just makes the stress spiral faster.
But when you get clear on your values, you have a powerful decision-making tool. You know where to invest your time and energy, and you also know what to let go of.
For example, over time I’ve clarified that my top values include:
Cultivating a loving, friendly, and fun relationship with my husband
Raising smart, conscious, kind kids
Creating a body of work that uplifts women and mothers
So now, when I’m overwhelmed, I ask myself: Which of these tasks actually align with my priorities? If something nurtures my family relationships or contributes to my work uplifting women and mothers, it stays. If not, I look for ways to outsource it, ask for help, do it imperfectly, or just let it go entirely.
A Simple Exercise to Identify Your Core Values
Have you done a values exercise recently? With my coaching clients, I often use Brené Brown’s list of values as a resource—her work in Dare to Lead instructs people to narrow down their values to just two core guiding principles. Getting clear on these values can serve as a helpful tool for decision-making and accountability.
Her framework is incredibly helpful, and it’s important to have some overall guiding principles. But for day-to-day decisions, I sometimes find it hard to connect with these universal values. I needed something a little more personal and actionable.
A quick values exercise that I use with my coaching clients is called the “Ideal Day” exercise, and it’s a simple way to tap into what truly matters to you on a personal and actionable level.
Ideal Day Exercise
Take a moment to imagine your ideal day. You can close your eyes and picture it, or write down key elements as they come to you. Here are some questions to guide you:
How does your day start? (This can be a day in your current life or a totally imagined day in the future.)
Who do you spend time with? How do they make you feel?
What are you doing throughout the day? How does that make you feel?
Just as importantly, what are you not doing?
Once you’ve reflected on this, look for patterns. What themes emerge? What experiences bring you the most joy and meaning? These are clues to your core values.
Leading with Your Values
Remember, real leadership comes from aligning our actions to our values. But not only does values-based leadership make you a better leader, it also reduces overwhelm and stress when we figure out what really matters to us. We can make decisions more confidently because we know that our actions are rooted in our priorities.
And it’s an act of resistance, too. Instead of acting in accordance with what society expects of us, values-based leadership is about reclaiming self-worth, making intentional choices in the face of societal expectations, and redefining what leadership looks like.
At the end of the day, it’s not about doing more, it’s about doing what matters. It’s about shedding the weight of expectations that don’t serve us and stepping fully into the life and leadership that align with our deepest truths.
These days, I feel more balanced than ever. Because I know that whether I’m doing work in my home, with my family, or in my career, it’s aligned with my true values. And that makes all the difference.