The motivation we'd rather not name

or, a closer look at the shadow values quietly shaping our decisions.

“I know you can’t tell me what to do…”

I hear some version of that sentence almost every week.

Clients often come to coaching carrying decisions that have become impossibly heavy. They’re trying to decide whether to accept the promotion, leave the job, have another child, move across the country, end a relationship, or finally set a boundary they’ve avoided for years. By the time we meet, they’ve usually done everything they know how to do. They’ve made spreadsheets, sought advice from people they trust, talked it through with their partners, and mentally rehearsed every possible outcome.

And yet they still feel stuck.

Somewhere in the first fifteen minutes, they’ll often laugh and say, “I know you can’t tell me what to do...but I wish you could.”

I always smile because I understand the impulse. When we’re overwhelmed, certainty feels like relief. We imagine that if someone wise enough could simply point us toward the right answer, all of the discomfort would disappear.

But after years of coaching, I’ve become convinced that the hardest decisions are rarely about choosing between a “right” option and a “wrong” one. More often, they’re about choosing between two things that both matter.

The executive who can’t decide whether to pursue another promotion probably isn’t choosing between career and family. She values both. The physician wondering whether to cut back clinically isn’t deciding between ambition and presence. Both matter deeply to him. The parent struggling to set boundaries with an adult child isn’t choosing between love and accountability. They’re trying to honor both at the same time.

That’s why I almost never begin coaching by talking about the decision itself.

Instead, I begin with values.

Every client who works with me completes a values exercise before we really begin coaching. It’s one of the first things I ask people to do—not because identifying your values is particularly groundbreaking, but because I don’t believe we can make good decisions until we understand what is actually driving them. More importantly, I don’t think we can even define what makes a decision good until we’re clear about the principles we’re trying to live by.

I ask clients to reflect on the principles they want to organize their lives around. Not goals, because goals are destinations. Values are different. Borrowing from psychiatrist and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy expert Russ Harris, I think of values as directions rather than destinations. Goals can be achieved, checked off a list, and forgotten. Values continue shaping who we become. They influence how we show up as leaders, partners, parents, friends, and colleagues, and they ultimately become the lens through which we define a life well lived.

Most people complete this part of the exercise with surprising ease. Their lists include words like family, integrity, curiosity, kindness, service, courage, or growth. We spend time unpacking what those words actually mean because even seemingly universal values are deeply personal. Achievement, for one client, means becoming the youngest partner in her firm. For another, it means having enough flexibility to coach his son’s baseball team. The labels matter far less than the meaning behind them.

Then I ask them to complete the final page, and that’s usually when the conversation changes.

The values we’d rather not claim

The final page introduces what conflict expert Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler calls shadow values—the values we learn over the course of our lives but often hesitate to acknowledge because we’ve absorbed the message that they’re somehow less admirable than the ones we’d proudly share with the world. They’re not inherently unhealthy or shameful. In fact, a value that one person experiences as a shadow value may be another person’s openly embraced guiding principle. Competitiveness, authority, financial security, recognition, autonomy, stability, status, and risk-taking can all fall into this category.

Almost without fail, someone asks the same question.

“So...these are the bad ones?”

The question itself is fascinating.

It reveals how quickly we divide our inner lives into acceptable and unacceptable parts. We proudly identify with values like generosity, authenticity, family, and service while quietly distancing ourselves from ambition, influence, recognition, status, or financial security. We assume the first list reflects our “true” selves and the second list represents something we should overcome.

I’ve never found that to be true. In fact, I’ve never met a client whose shadow values made me think less of them. I’ve only met clients whose lives made a lot more sense once those values had a name.

That includes me. When I first encountered this exercise years ago, I remember feeling my own resistance. Some values were easy to write down. Others made me pause. They didn’t fit the story I preferred to tell about myself, and that was precisely why they were worth paying attention to. Like so many of the exercises I use with clients, this one continues to challenge me because it reminds me that self-awareness isn’t something we achieve once. It’s something we practice over and over again.

The missing piece

I remember one client who immediately crossed out the word recognition.

“I can’t write that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it sounds narcissistic.”

I asked her a different question: “But is it true?”

She looked down at the page for a long moment before nodding.

“I really do like being recognized for my work.”

That admission became one of the most important moments of our coaching together.

On paper, her stated values were family, integrity, compassion, and service. Every one of those values was genuine. But they weren’t the whole story. She also cared deeply about being admired. She wanted to be seen as exceptional. She loved receiving positive feedback from leaders she respected. Because she had spent years telling herself those motivations were somehow superficial or selfish, she had never stopped to consider the role they were playing in her decisions.

As we explored it together, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place.

She understood why she consistently volunteered for prestigious committees she didn’t actually enjoy. Why she found delegation so difficult. Why praise from senior leaders lingered in her mind for days while positive feedback from her family barely registered. She hadn’t been acting against her values.

She had simply been acting in accordance with all of them.

That’s what I find so compelling about shadow values. They’re rarely the villains in our stories; more often, they’re the missing characters.

Curiosity instead of judgment

As we continued talking, I became less interested in the value itself than in where it had come from.

She was the first physician in her family. Growing up, education represented opportunity, stability, and possibility. Achievement wasn’t simply celebrated; it became woven into her family’s identity. Praise wasn’t superficial—it was one of the primary ways love, pride, and hope were expressed.

Of course recognition still mattered.

Of course prestigious opportunities were difficult to decline.

Once she understood that, she stopped asking herself, Why am I like this? and started asking a much more useful question: How do I want this value to influence my life now?

I’ve found that this is almost always true of shadow values. They rarely emerge out of nowhere. They develop because they helped us adapt to the environments we grew up in. They solved problems, they protected us, they helped us succeed.

The question isn’t whether they should exist, the question is whether they’re still serving us.

That’s why I love this framework. It shifts the conversation from judgment to curiosity. Instead of asking, Why do I still care so much about recognition? we begin asking, What did recognition once give me? Instead of criticizing ourselves for valuing stability, we become curious about the uncertainty we may have experienced earlier in life. Instead of feeling ashamed that status matters to us, we ask what status has come to represent.

Curiosity doesn’t eliminate these values, it simply allows us to hold them with greater honesty. And once we do that, we regain something incredibly important: choice.

The next time you find yourself making a decision that feels impossibly difficult—or behaving in ways that seem inconsistent with the person you believe yourself to be—resist the temptation to ask, What’s wrong with me?

Instead, try asking yourself a different question.

What value have I been unwilling to admit is important to me?

You may not love the answer. But there’s a good chance it will help you understand yourself more fully. And in my experience, understanding ourselves with greater honesty is almost always the first step toward living more intentionally.