At certain points in life, we begin to sense that something is no longer fully aligned. It doesn’t always arrive as a crisis. More often, it shows up quietly as subtle pressure, restlessness, or the feeling that despite doing everything “right,” something still feels off. If you are doing well on paper but feel tired, restless, or quietly disconnected, this article is for you.

This awareness is often connected to the beginning of a new year, when we start setting New Year’s resolutions. But this feeling does not belong only to January. It can appear in June after an intense quarter at work. In September, when “back to work” routines become heavier and the plans we made during summer no longer feel realistic. Sometimes it shows up on an ordinary Sunday evening, when the weekend somehow slipped away. We don’t feel rested, and at the same time, we didn’t even manage to check all the boxes on our to-do list. It often shows up in small moments, like agreeing to one more meeting you already know you don’t have the energy for.

I know this feeling personally.

In 2015, I experienced it as a quiet but persistent inner signal. I was in a well-paid senior corporate role, leading a global team of 160 people and doing everything I was supposed to do. From the outside, my life looked successful. On the inside, something no longer felt true, and and with each passing day I felt more disconnected.

That moment became a turning point. I decided to leave my corporate career and build my own coaching business, with the intention of helping other people reconnect with themselves and activate their full potential. At the time, it did not feel brave or dramatic. It felt necessary.

At some point, sooner or later, most of us arrive at a similar realization. We need a change. But not just any change.

We want better work life balance, or what I prefer to call work life harmony. We want more joy, healthier relationships, and the feeling that our work and effort are connected to something meaningful. We want to feel grounded in our lives, not just efficient inside them.

So we set goals. We make plans. We promise ourselves that this time it will be different. And yet, very often, the change does not last.

Why Change Feels Harder Than It Should

For a long time, failed New Year’s resolutions and plans were explained as a lack of discipline or motivation. But human beings are not machines. How we feel, how we decide, and how we sustain effort depends far more on meaning than on pressure created by a calendar.

Maybe we are much more capable than we think. Maybe what we are missing is not discipline, but better tools, better frameworks, and a better understanding of how to apply them in our own lives.

Research supports this.

One of the largest studies[1] on New Year’s resolutions followed 1,066 adults over an entire year, tracking real attempts at change across health, work, productivity, and personal growth. This was not a short survey or a motivational snapshot. It was a long-term observation of everyday life.

The results challenge common assumptions:

• 55% of participants still considered themselves successful after one year
• Sustainable change is possible
• The issue is not that we don’t try hard enough, it’s that we often start in the wrong way.

This research matters because it shifts the conversation away from self-blame (and victimhood) toward something much more useful: how we approach change truly matters.

How You Approach Change Matters More Than the Goal

One of the most important findings from a large study on New Year’s resolutions was surprisingly simple. It wasn’t what people wanted to change that predicted success. It was how they framed the change.

Researchers distinguished between two orientations:

• Avoidance-oriented change – focused on stopping, reducing, or escaping.
• Approach-oriented change – focused on building or moving toward something.

The outcome from the study was clear. Participants with approach-oriented goals were significantly more successful than those focused on avoidance. In other words, moving toward something meaningful works better than running away from discomfort or pain.

This insight also explains why so much nowadays self-improvement advice feels exhausting. When your change is built on fixing what’s “wrong,” it drains your energy. When it’s built on meaning, it gives you better chances to sustain it.

Why Values-Based Change Is Especially Relevant for Women in Leadership

For many women I work with in leadership coaching, the challenge is not a lack of ambition. It is overload.

I know this personally. In 2015, I made the decision to leave a senior corporate role and step onto my own entrepreneurial path. And it didn’t come from a lack of drive. It came from carrying too much for too long for being there for everyone for too long.

Many female leaders are balancing:

• responsibility for a team at work
• emotional labor at home
• expectations from society that we rarely question (and probably should)

We try to optimize productivity without revisiting our priorities.
We look for career advice and mentors, when what we really need is clarity about what we truly want.
We chase balance without addressing what keeps pulling us out of it or which relationships no longer belong in this season of our lives.

What I’ve learned over the past 20 years working with leaders is this: burnout is often not caused by too much work, but by values conflict.

When what you do every day no longer reflects what truly matters to you, even success can start to feel heavy or strangely empty.

Core Values: The Missing Layer Beneath Any Change

Core values are not abstract ideals. Goals describe what we want to achieve. Values describe how we want to live while we achieve it. They are not something we write down once a year and then forget. They are internal reference points that guide our daily decisions, protect our boundaries, and shape how we use our energy.

When values are unclear:

• work life balance feels unreachable
• finding purpose feels vague
• self-discovery feels like a luxury instead of a necessity
• there is little space for real joy in everyday life

Feeling misaligned does not mean something is wrong with you. It often means something important is trying to get your attention.

When values are clear:

• even big decisions feel lighter
• trade-offs make sense
• saying no feels grounded instead of guilty
• everyday alignment feels more natural

Values do not fail us. They evolve as our lives, roles, and responsibilities change. Once we start building our life around our values, we begin to understand something important: sustainable change is not about control, it is about alignment.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself at least one of these questions:

• Where in your life are you trying to fix something instead of understanding it?
• What are you currently working toward and why does it matter?
• Which parts of your life feel most misaligned with who you are becoming?

These questions are not meant to create pressure. They are meant to create clarity and to give you the confidence to move forward with your plans.

Because once you are clear about your direction, change no longer has to be forced.

When Core Values Become the Decision-Making Framework

Values can sound abstract until we look at moments in our lives where decisions truly mattered. Not decisions driven by comfort or external approval, but by clarity about what could not be compromised.

What connects the following stories is not success or heroism. In each case, values were used as a decision framework when the outcome was uncertain and the cost was high.

Viktor Frankl: Meaning as the Ultimate Choice

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, observed something deeply important under extreme conditions during WWII. Even when people had no control over their external circumstances, those who were able to connect their actions to a deeper sense of meaning were more likely to survive psychologically.

Frankl did not speak about optimism or positive thinking. He spoke about responsibility, dignity, and inner freedom. Values that could not be taken away, even when almost everything else was.

His work reminds us that values are not about comfort. They are about brave choices and clear direction, especially when life becomes difficult.

Much of Frankl’s life and work is connected to his old flat in Vienna. A nice place I visit at least twice a year. Sitting there and reflecting on my own choices in life is always a profound and deeply spiritual experience for me.

Simone Biles: Redefining Strength

When a 23-year-old Simone Biles stepped back from several events at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, many people in her home country were confused. From a results-only perspective, her decision looked like failure.

From a personal values perspective, it was clarity and strength.

She chose mental health, safety, and self-respect over external expectations and pressure. In doing so, she challenged deeply rooted ideas about strength, performance, and responsibility – not only in sports, but across many professions.

Her decision shows something important: values-based choices often feel uncomfortable from the outside, especially in high-performance environments. But very often, they are the only right choice to make.

Yvon Chouinard: Values at Scale

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the global brand Patagonia, is a strong example of what happens when values are not only personal but consistently applied in business.

From the very beginning, Patagonia was built around environmental responsibility, integrity, and long-term thinking. These values were not marketing slogans. They were decision filters, shaping everything from production choices to marketing messages and growth strategy.

When Chouinard later transferred ownership of the company to structures designed to protect the planet rather than maximize personal profit, the decision surprised many. Yet it made complete sense within the values that had guided Patagonia for decades.

This story shows that values do not limit possibilities, and they do not prevent you from building something big. When applied consistently, they create alignment between what we say, what we do, and what we build for future generations.

How Core Values Guide Decisions in Life, Leadership, and Business

These stories are not only about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, although Viktor, Simone, and Yvon certainly are. More importantly, they are about moments when values became clearer than fear, pressure, or external expectations.

We can observe the same pattern across very different contexts, from extreme survival during the Holocaust, to elite performance at the Olympic Games, to global business decisions impacting millions of customers. When values are clear, decisions stop being about approval or short-term results. They become about something deeper. Knowing what matters enough to be protected, even when the cost is high.

Most of us will, thankfully, never face decisions of this scale. But we face smaller versions of them every day. In our work. In our relationships. In how we use our time and energy. In what we tolerate, what we postpone, and what we keep saying yes to even when it no longer feels „like us “.

Values do not remove difficulty from life. But they remove confusion. They help us understand which compromises are still acceptable, and which ones slowly pull us away from ourselves.

Before values can guide our everyday decisions, however, they need to be visible. And that starts with learning how to name what truly matters to you, maybe right now.

How to Reconnect with Your Core Values

Many high-performing women struggle with this quietly, precisely because they are capable and responsible. Core values are rarely lost. More often, they are covered by noise in the world, expectations from our environment, and everyday work pressure.

Over time, we adapt. We take on different roles and responsibilities and build routines. We learn how to function, perform, and deliver. Sometimes it already feels like a success just to make it through the day without harming ourselves or somebody else.

Somewhere along the way, what once felt obvious becomes quieter. Not because it disappeared, but because we stopped listening to our inner voice (and our soul).

Reconnecting with your core values is not about creating something new. It is about bringing clarity back to what already matters to you. About reconnecting with what feels familiar.

Reconnect with Your Core Values in Four Steps

Step one: Find a values list

There are many available online, usually with 50 to 100 common values such as freedom, stability, growth, honesty, creativity, calm, impact, connection, or simplicity. Brené Brown has a solid list which you can download here.

Read through the list slowly. Not with the question “Which values should I have?” but with a much softer one: Which of these still feels true for me right now?

Step two: Notice what attracts you

Choose around five values that stand out to you. Do not overthink this. Often, the values that attract us are either the ones we already live by, or the ones we deeply miss in our current life.

Your values do not describe who you should be. They reflect where you are now.

Step three: Reduce to what really matters

From those five, choose three values that feel most important in this phase of your life.

This third step can feel a little uncomfortable. That is normal. Choosing values also means accepting that not everything in your life can be a priority at the same time. Clarity often comes from narrowing down, not from adding more.

There are no better or worse values. Wanting calm does not mean you lack ambition. Choosing growth does not mean you do not value stability.

Step four: Look at your next week

Take a look at your calendar or your to-do list for the coming week. Based on your values, what still feels right to do? What are you ready to cancel? What would you like to add? Who do you want to meet or talk to?

This step is very important, because most people stop at step three. Values need to become practical. They need to show up in your calendar – whether in the next seven days, the next month, or the next quarter.

Why Reconnecting With Your Core Values Changes How You Decide

Once your values and how you actually live them become clearer, many everyday struggles start to make more sense. This is not about doing more or being more productive. It is about how your life feels when your energy is aligned with what matters to you.

You begin to understand:

• why certain decisions feel heavy
• why work life balance feels difficult in specific areas
• why some commitments drain you more than others
• why some relationships feel toxic, while others nourish you

Values give words to feelings you already carry. They help you see where your time, energy, and expectations are no longer aligned.

This does not remove complexity from your life. But it reduces your inner conflict.

Going Deeper: Support for Reconnecting With Your Core Values

This simple reflection is not the full process. Core values can be explored much more deeply, across different areas of life, with structured questions and regular reflection.

I have been working with values in leadership and coaching since 2012. They have been a strong guide in my own journey, first in corporate life, and later while building and leading my own coaching and consulting business.

If you want a guided approach that helps you reconnect with yourself step by step, including deeper exercises and real-life examples, you can explore my 7-day journey, where core values are one of the foundations.

I created this 7-day reset for women in leadership who want to reclaim clarity, protect their energy, and lead from a grounded place again, without changing their whole life.

But even without that, reconnecting with three core values is enough to begin changing how you make decisions, how you prioritize, and how you shape your work and life.

Because when values are clear again, you know what to do.
We all know this once we are truly ourselves.

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[1] Oscarsson, M., Carlbring, P., Andersson, G., & Rozental, A. (2020). A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. PLoS ONE, 15. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234097.

Brené Brown, List of Dare to Lead Core Values, https://brenebrown.com/resources/dare-to-lead-list-of-values/