Why Don’t I Know What I Want Anymore? How Core Values Can Help
Updated Aug 26
Someone asks you what you want.
Not what needs doing next. Not what would make the most sense for your career. Not what your family needs or what you should want at this stage of your life.
What you actually want.
And suddenly, the answer is much harder than it should be.
For many high-achieving women, not knowing what you want anymore does not mean you have lost your ambition or become indecisive. It often happens after years of becoming highly practised at responding to responsibility, expectation and what other people need, while having less and less space to notice what matters to you.
Your core values can help you find that internal compass again.
Why don’t I know what I want anymore?
You may have become very good at answering a different set of questions.
What needs to happen? What is the sensible decision? What will keep everyone happy?
What is expected of me? What is the next logical step? What can I fit in?
Those questions are useful. They help you lead, organise, parent, build careers and keep complicated lives moving.
But if they dominate for long enough, another question can become increasingly unfamiliar:
What do I want?
This is particularly common in high-achieving women because capability tends to attract more responsibility.
You become the one people trust. The one who remembers. The one who sorts things. The one who can handle it.
Gradually, life can become organised around what is required of you rather than what feels meaningful to you.
Nothing necessarily looks dramatically wrong. You may still be successful, functioning and grateful for much of your life.
But something feels slightly off.
You are doing everything “right” and yet feel increasingly disconnected from the person living inside it.
Why high-achieving women can lose touch with what they want
High-achieving women are usually not short of goals.
The problem is often that there has been very little space to question which goals, expectations and priorities still belong to them.
You may have spent years doing what made sense. Working hard because achievement mattered. Saying yes because you were capable.
Taking opportunities because they were good opportunities. Making choices based on what was responsible, impressive, practical or expected.
None of those choices were necessarily wrong.
But over time, your own preferences can become harder to hear beneath the noise.
This is one reason overwhelm can create such a strong sense of disconnection. When your attention is continually occupied by decisions, mental load, responsibility and unfinished tasks, there is very little spare capacity for reflection.
If that broader experience feels familiar, my guide to why you feel overwhelmed all the time explores why life can feel mentally full even when everything looks fine from the outside.
Sometimes “I don’t know what I want” is less about having no direction and more about having had too little space to hear yourself.
What are core values, and why do they help?
Core values are the deeply held principles that reflect what matters most to you. They are the why behind how you want to live, love and lead.
They are not goals.
A goal is something you can achieve or complete. A value is a direction you can continue living towards.
You might value:
Connection.
Freedom.
Growth.
Family.
Creativity.
Contribution.
Adventure.
Integrity.
Learning.
Calm.
Community.
None is inherently better than another.
What matters is whether the values shaping your life genuinely feel like yours.
Because it is possible to build a life around values you have absorbed rather than consciously chosen.
Achievement because achievement was rewarded.
Security because security mattered in your family.
Being useful because being needed made you feel valued.
Doing things properly because mistakes never felt particularly acceptable.
Your values are not simply the words you think sound important.
They are the deeper priorities you want your decisions and your life to reflect.
What does it mean to live out of alignment with your values?
Living out of alignment means that your everyday choices repeatedly prioritise pressures, expectations or demands that do not reflect what matters most to you.
It does not always create a dramatic crisis.
Often it shows up much more quietly.
You say yes and then feel resentful.
Your calendar is full but very little on it feels nourishing.
You find yourself second-guessing decisions you would once have made easily.
You are successful but rarely feel satisfied.
You keep doing things because you have always done them.
You cannot remember the last time you chose something simply because you wanted it.
You have lost touch with what excites you.
Or you have a persistent sense that the life you are living does not feel quite as much like yours as it used to.
This does not necessarily mean you need a different job, relationship, city or life.
It may simply mean that what matters to you has changed while the structure of your life has not caught up.
The difference between what you value and what you think you should value
This is where the work becomes more interesting. Many of the women I support realise they have become very skilled at pursuing what they should want.
The next level of success.
Being endlessly available to their family.
A certain version of motherhood.
Being easy to work with.
Always being reliable.
Making the sensible choice.
Being grateful for what they have rather than admitting something needs to change.
The difficulty is that “should” can sound very convincing. Sometimes it even sounds like your own voice.
So when you are trying to reconnect with what you want, a useful question is not only:
What matters to me?
But:
Where did I learn that this should matter to me?
And:
Does it still?
You are allowed to outgrow an old priority.
You are allowed to decide that something which once mattered deeply no longer needs to dominate your life.
You are allowed to want something that makes less sense on paper but feels more true.
Why knowing your values can make decisions easier
One reason decisions become exhausting is that you are trying to evaluate them against too many competing expectations.
What would be best for work? What will other people think? What is most responsible?
What if I regret it? What would the “successful” version of me do?
Values give you another reference point:
Which choice moves me closer to the way I actually want to live?
That does not magically make every decision easy.
Sometimes two important values conflict.
You might value both ambition and presence.
Security and freedom.
Family and independence.
Contribution and rest.
The answer is not always choosing one permanently over the other.
It is becoming more intentional about the balance you are creating.
That is very different from automatically letting whichever demand is loudest make the decision for you.
Core values can also make boundaries easier
Boundaries are often talked about as though they are simply a communication skill: Say no; Be clear; Protect your time.
But boundaries are much easier to hold when you understand what they are protecting.
If you value presence with your family, a boundary around evening work has a purpose.
If you value health, protecting time for recovery is not an indulgence.
If you value creativity, leaving some unscheduled space is not wasted time.
If you value meaningful work, saying no to an opportunity that pulls you away from that direction can become easier to understand.
Values turn boundaries from arbitrary restrictions into choices about what you want your life to contain.
They can also help you let go of what is no longer working without automatically interpreting that change as failure or as letting someone down.
How to find your core values when you don’t know what you want
You do not need to choose five impressive words from a list and redesign your life around them.
Start with your actual experience.
Notice what you resent
Resentment can point towards something that matters but is being repeatedly overridden.
Perhaps you resent always being available. Maybe autonomy matters.
Perhaps you resent never having time to yourself. Maybe space or solitude matters.
Perhaps you resent giving everything to work and having very little left at home. Maybe presence or family connection matters.
Resentment is not always proof that something must change, but it can be useful information.
Notice what gives you energy
Think about moments when you feel more like yourself.
Not necessarily productive or impressive.
More you.
Who are you with? What are you doing? What part of yourself gets to exist there?
Perhaps you feel energised when you are learning, creating, leading, helping, exploring, connecting deeply with people or having quiet time alone.
Values often reveal themselves through the experiences that make us feel more alive.
Notice what you admire in other people
Sometimes what draws you to someone else is a clue.
Their courage. Freedom. Warmth.
Creativity. Conviction. Generosity. Calm.
It may be something you value deeply but have not been giving much room in your own life.
Look at the life you are already living
Your calendar, spending, commitments and attention tell a story about what your life currently prioritises.
The question is not whether that story is good or bad.
It is:
Does it reflect what I say matters to me?
If family matters enormously but work receives almost every piece of available energy, there is useful information there.
If creativity matters but has had no place in your life for five years, notice that.
The aim is not judgement.
It is clarity.
A useful tool for exploring what matters to you
The VIA Character Strengths Survey can be a helpful reflection tool if you are trying to reconnect with the qualities that feel most natural and meaningful to you.
Character strengths and core values are not exactly the same thing, so I would not treat the results as a definitive list of your values.
But they can give you useful language and prompts for thinking about how you naturally want to show up in the world.
Use the results as a conversation starter with yourself, not a prescription.
How core values connect to meaning and fulfilment
There is a reason this matters beyond making decisions more easily.
A fulfilling life needs more than accomplishment.
You can achieve many of the things you once wanted and still feel as though something is missing if there is too little room for meaning, connection, enjoyment or engagement.
This is something the PERMA model explores particularly well.
Meaning is one of its five elements of flourishing, alongside Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships and Accomplishment.
If you have built a successful life but are beginning to question why it does not feel as fulfilling as you expected, you may find it helpful to read From Burnout to Flourishing: How the PERMA Model Can Transform Your Wellbeing.
Your values help make “meaning” personal.
They help answer:
What does a good life actually mean to me?
Not to your profession.
Not to your parents.
Not to Instagram.
Not to the version of you who made decisions ten years ago.
To you now.
You don’t need to change your whole life to reconnect with yourself
Realising that parts of your life no longer reflect your values can feel uncomfortable, especially when you have worked hard to build them.
But reconnecting with yourself does not require an immediate life overhaul.
Often it begins with smaller course corrections.
One evening you protect.
One thing you stop automatically saying yes to.
One conversation you finally have.
One part of yourself you make room for again.
One decision made because it feels right, not simply because it looks right.
Over time, those choices begin to create a life that feels more like yours.
If you don’t know what you want anymore
You do not need to force yourself to come up with a five-year plan.
You may not need another goal at all.
You may simply need enough space to hear yourself again.
Your values can help with that, not by giving you a perfect answer to every decision, but by helping you notice what you want your choices, relationships, work and everyday life to stand for.
Living in alignment with your values is not about burning everything down.
It is about coming home to yourself, one small shift at a time.
You may have spent a long time following every signal except your own.
Finding your way back can begin much more gently than you think.
A gentle place to begin
And if you know life has become so full that it is difficult to hear what you need or want beneath everything you are carrying, my free guide 5 Ways to Beat Overwhelm is a supportive place to begin.
It will help you create a little more space and steadiness, without turning reconnecting with yourself into another thing you need to get right.
