How do you find out what your values are?

Viktor Frankl tied values directly to responsibility: your values are what you are, or wish you were, responsible for. If you don't yet know, logotherapy names three paths to find out, called experiential, creative and attitudinal values. In plain terms: go on a journey to a person or a place, make something that wasn't there before, or take on a burden or needed role. Each one surfaces what you actually care about by testing it.

What are Viktor Frankl's three categories of values?

Logotherapy, founded by Viktor Frankl, describes three routes to meaning. Creative values come from what you give to the world, such as work or making something. Experiential values come from what you receive from the world, such as relationships, places and beauty. Attitudinal values come from the stand you take toward suffering that cannot be changed. Frankl described the third in the context of unavoidable suffering; it is not an argument for seeking out or remaining in suffering that can be reduced.

What is the existential vacuum?

The existential vacuum is Viktor Frankl's term for the sense of emptiness and drift that comes from having no clear sense of what you are living toward. It often shows up as waiting for a sign or for someone else to say what to do next. A practical first step is exposure rather than introspection: books, podcasts and rooms full of different kinds of people give you candidates for who you might want to become.

Is there a free exercise for identifying personal values?

Yes. The Personal Values Card Sort, developed by William R. Miller and colleagues at the University of New Mexico in 2001, is a free deck of about 80 value cards that you sort by importance and then narrow to a handful. It comes out of the motivational interviewing tradition and is available as a free PDF. Its main benefit is giving people vocabulary for values they already hold but have never named.

How to Find Your Values | Become The Way

By Carl Chinn, LMHC/LPC · Licensed therapist since 2012 · Reviewed September 2026

You’ve recognized that you’d like to be more value aligned, which is the whole formula from Part 1, and you’ve walked straight into the obvious wall. You don’t actually know what your values are. What to do?

The logotherapists, Viktor Frankl among them, answered this better than the usual exercise of picking five words off a list. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl ties values directly to responsibility. Your values are what you are, or wish you were, responsible for.

That definition does something a word list can’t. “Integrity” printed on a poster tells you nothing. What you would get out of bed at 3am for tells you quite a lot.

So what if you don’t have responsibilities yet, or don’t know where you’d take a stand? Frankl says there are three paths, and logotherapy names them experiential, creative, and attitudinal values. In plainer terms: go somewhere, make something, or carry something.

Path 1: go on a journey, to a person or a place

Throughout the adventure or quest, your values get tested. Your preferences get highlighted. The things you took for granted get examined. What you’re ultimately grateful for becomes apparent, and what you could actually do to change your life gets more obvious.

Going somewhere is the default way to explore your values, and in many ways it’s already built into every person’s experience. Childhood itself is one long adventure to find out what value you have to offer the people around you, and what values you have to offer yourself.

This doesn’t require a plane ticket. A journey toward a person counts. So does taking a job in a field you don’t understand yet, or moving in with someone, or sitting with a relative who’s dying. What makes something a journey is that it puts you somewhere your existing answers stop working.

Path 2: create something that wasn’t there before

The act of creation, by default, creates a sense of responsibility between creator and creation. Artistic, business, relationships, children, something abstract or something concrete: the category doesn’t matter much. The process of manifesting your values in a thing helps you recognize them in everything else.

Pay attention to what you find beautiful in what you make. Beauty is itself a lagging indicator of value (that was the whole of Part 1), so the choices you solve for intuitively inside a creation are your values showing their hand before you’ve managed to name them.

If you’ve made things before, you already have the data. Go look at what you fussed over. Nobody fusses at random.

Path 3: take on a burden

Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps, and he was right to point out that sometimes there is no journey available to you. You’re trapped. And there are no materials and no space to create anything either. Now what?

His answer was to find meaning in the suffering: that what we’re willing to give up points directly at the value in life we chose to stay living for.

Generalized past his extreme case, the third path is to take on a burden or a struggle of some kind. To take a needed role somewhere, even if the person who needs it is you. Caregiving. Being the one who shows up for the group when nobody else will. Carrying something you didn’t choose without setting it down on somebody else.

One thing about this path matters enough to say plainly. Frankl was describing suffering that was already there and could not be removed. He was not recommending that anyone go find some. If suffering can be reduced, reduce it. That isn’t a failure of meaning, it’s good sense. This path describes what’s still available when a burden genuinely can’t be put down, and it is not a reason to stay in a situation you could leave.

When you’re doing all three and still can’t name them

Perhaps you’re already doing many of these things and your values still aren’t clear to you. There are some older techniques that have fallen out of the field over the years, and they’re worth bringing back.

Role models, with one correction

The people we look up to and aspire to be similar to usually capture the values we’re solving for underneath the surface. The correction matters though: see them as an aspirational version of you, someone you could become, rather than sliding into envy and simply wanting what someone else has.

To get around that, shift from what they have to what they do. Switch nouns to verbs. Not “she has a practice she built,” but “she spends her mornings on work nobody is watching.”

Then run the test. If you wouldn’t want to live their life doing what they’re doing, even if you never got the results they got, that’s the wrong person. The verbs are the value. The results are just the results. It’s the same reason aiming at the process beats aiming at the outcome.

If you can’t name a single one

It’s often the case that people who are suffering don’t know who these people are, and haven’t considered who they might be. Part of the “lost” feeling may be precisely that: there isn’t a goal for who they want to be.

Frankl had a name for it. The existential vacuum: wandering through life waiting for a sign, or for someone to come tell you what to do next, when the only person positioned to do that is you, and you never made a decision about who to follow.

If that’s you, the answer is exposure, not more introspection. Podcasts, books, networking functions, meetups, anywhere you’ll run into different kinds of people with different voices. You can’t pick a direction off a menu you’ve never read.

Principles and virtues

If “values” isn’t a word that means much to you, use the words that do. Your honor code. Your virtues. Your principles. They’re usually the same thing wearing different clothes.

If you consider it honorable to be a straight shooter who always tells the unmitigated truth, you probably value truth or transparency. In contrast, someone who values community, being team oriented, or togetherness will light up differently: they may value alignment more than rigid truth, and they’ll make a different call in the same room. Neither one is the correct answer. They’re different ingredient lists.

If you want something structured

There’s a free tool worth knowing about. The Personal Values Card Sort, developed by William R. Miller and colleagues at the University of New Mexico in 2001, is a deck of roughly 80 value cards you sort into “very important to me,” “important to me,” and “not important to me,” then narrow down to a handful. It comes out of the motivational interviewing tradition, Miller being one of that method’s originators, and you can download it for nothing.

It won’t tell you anything the three paths won’t. What it gives you is vocabulary, and vocabulary is usually the actual bottleneck. Plenty of people know exactly what they care about and have never had a word for it.

How you know you found a real one

Whichever route you take, watch for the readout from Part 1. When you act on a real value, the good feeling shows up afterward, on its own, without you arranging it.

That’s your confirmation. A value you think you’re supposed to have won’t produce it. A value that’s actually yours will, quietly, every time, and often at moments that make no sense to anyone watching.

If none of this is moving and the whole question stays foggy, it’s a reasonable thing to bring into a therapy room. Working out what you’re actually aiming at is a good chunk of what therapy does.

The next article covers how to apply your values more practically once you have them: the taco rule, SMART objectives, and if-then plans.

About the author
Carl Chinn, LMHC/LPC is a licensed therapist who has practiced since 2012. He writes about therapy, attention, and decision-making at Become The Way. Read Carl’s full bio.

Become The Way is a directory of independent licensed therapists. If you want a second set of eyes while you work out which values are yours, you can browse therapists and book directly.

This article is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health care, and reading it does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US, 24/7 by call or text), your local crisis line if outside the US, or call 911 if in immediate danger.