Naming your Values - Words Matter.

Choose your words thoughtfully - when describing what you value (and what you feel.)

Happy, sad, angry.

Brené Brown’s, research revealed that the average person can only identify three emotions they’re feeling. In her book Atlas of the Heart, she maps 87 distinct emotional experiences that shape our lives.

Learning to describe and label our feelings with greater precision helps us regulate our emotions, manage our responses, and build deeper connections with others.

I see the parallell and the same limitation in how leaders describe their values.

Excellence, teamwork, trust.

Many Leaders will include one or all of these three words when asked what they value. Press them to choose between trust, loyalty, transparency, fairness, and honesty — or between collaboration, partnership, and teamwork — and they hesitate. These words share a common thread but aren’t interchangeable.

Taking the time and using your vocabulary to identify your personal values matters.

I made this connection while using Marc Brackett’s “How We Feel” tool — a digital mood meter developed at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence.

Brackett’s RULER framework — Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate — is used in schools worldwide and is credited with raising academic performance as classroom climate improves and teacher stress declines. The tool asked me to pinpoint exactly what I was feeling. Not just “good” — but was I feeling satisfied, fulfilled, or content?

I paused. Those words seem similar, but If asked whether you’re satisfied with, fulfilled by, or content in your job, you might give three different answers.

The importance of the words you use applies equally to feelings to values.

Achievement vs. Success

Choosing between “achievement” and “success” isn’t semantics. You can accumulate achievements without attaining what you define as success. A leader who values achievement wants roles where they can compete, advance, and hit measurable targets. A leader who values success might define winning entirely differently — building something sustainable for one, outpacing the competition for another. Same energy, different direction.

Balance vs. Harmony

These sound similar, but as values they guide different decisions. Balance suggests equal weight across domains — protecting boundaries, distributing workload equitably, keeping work and life in separate, defined spaces. Harmony suggests integration — blending work and life fluidly, finding rhythm rather than equality. A leader who values harmony may also be more inclined to compromise to preserve peace in relationships or on the team.

Trust, Loyalty, Transparency, Fairness, Honesty

All positive. All related. But which one guides you when a you’re struggling with a decision? The leader who values transparency communicates openly even when the news is difficult. The leader who values loyalty makes different calls about people, careers, and opportunities. The leader who values fairness approaches resource allocation and performance conversations through a different lens entirely.

Your personal values are the foundation of your leadership. They shape how you behave and by extension how others see you. When you can label your values with precision, you create clarity for yourself and predictability for those you lead.

The annual self-reflection of a values exercise I encourage isn’t navel-gazing — it’s foundation-building.

•       Take time to choose your words

•       Test them against your recent decisions

•       Notice where they showed up in how you prioritized, communicated, or led recently

That precision — knowing not just that you value integrity, but whether you mean honesty, transparency, fairness, or trust — creates the strong ground that supports everything else you do as a leader.

Team values? That’s a conversation for another day.

Reach out if you want more information on the values review or book a discovery call.