January can bring with it a familiar pressure to set goals, pick a theme for the new year, or declare intentions. 

The pressure to set goals can feel like another thing you have to do, especially if you’re ambitious.  After all, that’s what high achievers do!  We set goals and make things happen!  If you find yourself staring at a blank page, or a list that leaves you less than inspired, you might be burning out on goal setting.  

Goal setting works well when you have a stable internal reference point, which gets more challenging in midlife.  In this season, you aren’t just a student, or an employee – you are a leader, an employee, a parent, a caregiver to aging parents, a member of the community, an emotional support person at home and at work – in other words, you are wearing a lot of hats and there is constant competition for your attention.  

This article explores how shifting your reflections away from WHAT you want to achieve to WHY and HOW can get you refocused and re-energized, providing a critical filter for setting priorities and making decisions.  

Why Goal-Setting Alone Can Backfire for High Achievers

Setting — and crushing — goals has long been treated as proof of how serious, disciplined, and successful you are. Goals signal ambition and progress, especially in environments that reward output and visibility, like school and work.

But goals are often shaped from the outside in — by expectations, comparison, and inherited definitions of success. Over time, this can pull our attention outward, reinforcing a never ending approval-seeking loop at the expense of internal clarity.

For many people in midlife, goal burnout is less about ambition fading and more about losing a clear sense of identity or internal point of reference. 

Tired Of Setting Goals?

Pausing to define personal values can restore a sense of self, giving an anchor point for prioritization and decision making. 

Especially in seasons of life that are complex and fast-moving (midlife or otherwise), setting static goals doesn’t work like it does when we are facing less demands.  In midlife, defining personal values that articulate who we want to be and how we want to show up is the quickest path to clarity and impact.

This article explains why through a lens of cognitive science and business strategy and outlines a simple process for defining personal values. It is the first of two articles that will explore how to use personal values and vision to create capacity, protect your energy and make better decisions.

Understanding Vision, Values, and Goals

When I work with clients to develop business strategy, entire workshops are dedicated to clarifying values, vision, and goals. These are the cornerstones of strong strategy — and for good reason. 

Effective strategies start by defining guiding principles (values), articulating a clear long term direction (vision), and only THEN setting aligned goals.

Values

In a business context, values are closely linked to culture — or how we do things around here.
On a personal level, values are about identity and behavior. They answer questions like:

• Who do I want to be, or be known for?
• How do I want to show up, especially under pressure?
• What principles guide how I prioritize my time and make decisions?
  

Values act as internal guardrails. They filter out noise that comes from other’s view of what we ‘should’ be doing – or how we should be doing it, re-establishing an internal point of reference for prioritization and decision-making.

Choosing personal values is the subject of this post, and vision and goals will be covered in our next blog post.  Together, these posts give concrete and practical guidance that is especially important when life is complicated and we have a lot of competing demands.

Vision

Vision is directional and should be emotionally compelling and aspirational. 

In business strategy, vision paints a picture of the impact an organization aims to have over a longer time horizon — often five to ten years, and it elevates people’s thinking beyond the annual business planning cycle of one year, which gets so much time and attention. 

For individuals, zooming out and thinking over a long time frame is also a useful perspective.  Something that feels really critical today may not matter at all when we think about it over five or ten years.  

Goals

Goals are the key focus areas that will have the greatest impact in advancing your vision within a given timeframe.

For example, if a business’s vision is to become the provider of choice for a particular service, its goals might include building a client-centric culture or improving user experience.

At a personal level, goals answer a simple but powerful question:

What are the three to five things I need to stay focused on — no matter what else competes for my attention — if I want to make progress toward being the version of me I want to become?

Once those focus areas are clear, the specific actions and outcomes tend to follow naturally.

The challenge with how most of us approach personal goal setting is that we jump straight to tactics without pausing to think about the fundamentals. There’s a lot we can learn from business strategy about the value of first spending time getting clear on who we want to be, where we’re headed, and how we want to show up.

This makes it far easier to set meaningful goals — and to recalibrate anytime we feel pulled off center.

We’ll explore how to define a personal vision, and corresponding goals, in our next article. To make sure you don’t miss it, you can subscribe to our email list here.

Autopilot, “Shoulds,” and Why We Lose Our Sense of Self 

If you are feeling like your life is a never-ending list of tasks and “shoulds”, or like you don’t recognize yourself in this season – there is some important context I want you to know.

There are biological reasons for why we slip into autopilot. 

Our brain is wired for efficiency – and it is far more efficient for it to do things the way we always have, or the way that will create the least resistance, than it is to challenge the status quo.  This normally equates to doing what we think we “should”

High achievers slip into autopilot because it works — well, until it doesn’t.  

The Science That Explains Disconnection From Self

Cognitive dissonance is the mental and emotional discomfort that arises when your beliefs, values, or self-image don’t match your actions, decisions, or lived reality.

The concept comes from social psychologist Leon Festinger, who showed that humans are strongly motivated to reduce this discomfort — often not by changing behavior, but by rationalizing it. In other words, it is more efficient to rationalize the gap and to stay the course than it is to do something about it.  

There does, however, come a point where the balance tips and it becomes more uncomfortable to live with the dissonance than it is to challenge status quo and try something new. Some tell tale signs that you are at or near this tipping point include:

• Setting goals that look “right,” but feeling drained or resistant while pursuing them,
• Saying yes to things that you don’t want to do, then justifying why you “had to”,
• Feeling uneasy or irritable without being able to name why, or
• Doubling down on choices that don’t fit, because changing course feels threatening.

The problem with living with cognitive dissonance is that it slowly erodes self-trust. When misalignment persists, it increases stress, keeps the nervous system on alert, and can lead to burnout — not because you’re doing too much, but because you’re doing things that don’t align with who you want to be or how you actually want to live.

How Dissonance Undermines Goal Setting

If you find yourself struggling with setting or achieving goals, spotting cognitive dissonance is useful information. 

It’s a signal that something needs attention — not more effort, but reflection and reconnection to a deeper sense of who you want to be and what your dream life would look like if you were free of the “shoulds” that can make us feel shackled.

If your goals don’t align with your values or reinforce an identity that you desire to embody, there is no productivity hack or amount of willpower that will sustain energy towards meeting those goals. 

Starting with defining your values gives you the anchor point you need to be able to spot cognitive dissonance.  If you aren’t aware of your own beliefs and values, you simply can’t spot the gap!   

After all, we can’t solve a problem we can’t see.

What Business Strategy Can Teach Us About Values

This shift away from rigid goals isn’t happening only in personal development – it’s also happening in the business world.

In today’s VUCA environment — high on volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — traditional linear planning often fails. Modern strategy setting increasingly emphasizes principles-led and adaptive decision-making, where shared values guide action when conditions change faster than plans can keep up.

The same logic applies at the individual level.

Values outperform goals when:

• Conditions are changing
• Trade-offs are constant
• Capacity is limited
• Uncertainty is high

This isn’t “soft” work – it’s a leading edge approach to better handling complexity and limited capacity that also applies to individuals.  

Choosing Personal Values 

Values-based decision making isn’t about lofty ideals or aspirational traits. It’s about making choices and behaving in alignment with your values.

Researcher and author Brené Brown defines values as “ways of being or believing that we hold most important”.

One of the most practical applications of her work is the insistence on narrowing your values to a relatively small number. Not ten or fifteen. At least and no more than five.  This is also consistent with the way businesses approach defining values – and it makes sense.

After all – if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing, right?

This doesn’t mean that these values are the only things that matter to you – but they should be the things that matter most.

How To Choose Personal Values

It can be daunting the first time you sit down to do this work.  I know, because two years ago, when I sat down to do it, I spent a lot of time staring at a blank sheet of paper!  

What eventually got me unstuck was doing the work in a supportive community of other people – and using Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead List of Values as a starting point.  

Brown offers a free, publicly available values list to support this reflection, which you can find here.

The list is long, but if you follow these simple guidelines, you can come up with an initial list for yourself quickly.  My suggestions for doing this work follow:

• Read through the entire list at least once.
• Go back and circle (or highlight) all of the values that resonate with you.
• Step away.

You could grab a sandwich, or leave it for a couple of days – that is entirely up to you.  When you are ready to come back to your list:

• Focus only on the values you selected and notice if some stand out more than others.
• If so, circle these to create a short list (Tip:  I found it helpful to write my short list down on a separate piece of paper so I wasn’t distracted).
• If you have 3-5 potential values on your list – congratulations!  You now have a powerful tool for filtering priorities, making decisions, and setting goals.
• If you have more than five – simply step away and repeat until you can narrow it down.

This is about sensing and feeling, which for high achievers who are used to operating from logic and rational thought, can feel a bit strange.  Try not to overthink it – nothing is carved in stone and values are dynamic and can be adjusted.

Unlike a business, you aren’t going to broadcast them, so there is no need to feel pressure to “get it right”.

If You Struggle To Choose Values

That’s okay!  I did too. This work is more about the process than the destination.

When I run value workshops with organizations, it takes us a half to a full day to get an initial list of values and we often bring people back together a number of times to refine before we finalize.  

If you find yourself with a long list, or spinning your wheels, this might help:

1. Identify a decision you are facing and all possible choices you could make.  

Look at each choice in terms of whether it aligns with your list of values.  Notice if there are certain values that you feel more drawn to.  That can be valuable feedback to help narrow down your list.

2. Find a supportive community of people who are defining personal values.

We naturally tend to normalize our patterns, justify our “shoulds”, and keep going in the well worn grooves we have created.  Values work deepens in conversations where blind spots can surface and we can be held and supported to challenge our assumptions.

This is the intention behind our initial Vision & Values Workshop — we want to create a grounded, supportive space for anyone who is interested in exploring this further.

This was particularly helpful for me when I did this work for the first time and now, I am excited to facilitate the process for others.  

We intend to hold our first Vision & Values Workshops in January – let us know here if you would like additional information and we will be in touch when we iron out the details.

THE BOTTOM LINE

When you are clear about your personal values, they can:

• Reduce the mental load of constant decision-making,
• Clarify how to focus your time and energy on what’s important to you,
• Pull you out of autopilot and back into conscious choice, and
• Re-establish internal authority and self-trust.

A new year is like a blank sheet of paper.  This year, instead of asking, “What do I want to achieve?”, why not with a different question: “Who do I want to become, and how do I need to show up in my life to move towards being that version of myself?”.

THE GOOD NEWS

This simple, practical approach to planning your year can immediately start to pay dividends.  Even small, values based choices feel good and start to rebuild self-trust and create momentum.

This is your invitation to reflect about who you want to become and how you want to show up in your day to day life.  Spending time getting clear about this first will ensure that any goals you set for yourself are anchored in a strong sense of self – which is the most effective way to get re-energized about going after them!

With love,
Angelina