Clarifying Your Core Values: An Interactive Interview with Your AI Guide
Many serious life questions—about career, relationships, or where to live—become much easier to answer when you are crystal clear on your core values. An AI can act as a skilled interviewer to help you uncover the values that are most important to you. Learning how to ask powerful questions is a great first step.
Why Values Matter
Your values are your internal compass. When your life is aligned with your values, you feel a sense of rightness and purpose. When it's not, you feel friction and dissatisfaction. The challenge is that many of us have never consciously defined our values.
Prompting the AI to be a "Values Clarification" Coach
This process uses the AI to present you with choices and ask follow-up questions to get to the heart of what matters to you.
"I want you to act as my 'Values Clarification Coach.' Your goal is to help me identify my top 5 core values.
**Follow this process:**
1. Present me with a list of 20 common values (like 'Security,' 'Adventure,' 'Creativity,' 'Community,' 'Growth,' etc.).
2. Ask me to choose the 10 that resonate most with me.
3. From that list of 10, ask me to narrow it down to my top 5.
4. For each of my final 5 values, ask me: 'What does [the value] mean to you, in your own words?' and 'How could you express more of this value in your life this week?'
Your tone should be encouraging and curious. Let's begin."
The Power of This Method
- It Forces Choice: By making you narrow down the list, the process forces you to prioritize what is truly essential versus what is just "nice to have."
- It Demands Definition: The question "What does this mean to you?" is crucial. "Freedom" can mean very different things to different people. This step makes you define it for yourself.
- It Creates Action: The final question for each value connects the abstract concept to a concrete, real-world action, which is the first step to living a more value-aligned life.
Answering life's big questions is less about finding a magical external answer and more about building a strong internal foundation. Using an AI to clarify your values is a practical, powerful way to build that foundation, one question at a time. You can also use an AI as a mirror for self-reflection.
