There is a question most people spend their entire lives avoiding, not because they lack the intelligence to answer it, but because they lack the willingness to look. The question is simple: What is actually driving you?
Not what you say drives you. Not what sounds good when someone asks at a dinner party or in a job interview. What is actually, currently, today shaping your decisions, your reactions, and the direction of your life.
I have come to believe this is the most important question a person can ask themselves, and almost no one asks it honestly. We are far more comfortable listing our values than examining them. Honesty, family, integrity, growth. These words roll off the tongue easily because they cost us nothing to say. The real test is not what we claim. It is what our lives reveal when no one is watching and nothing is convenient.
This gap between what we say we value and what we actually live from is the subject of my book, Hypocrisy, Hedonism, Hope & Healing, and it is the subject of one of the more practical chapters in it: a six-step process I call the Value Audit. I did not build this framework in a classroom. I built it by living through the consequences of not knowing my own answer for most of my life, and by watching that same blindness play out in the people I have coached and mentored for over two decades.
Here is what I have learned. You cannot change what you are unwilling to confront, and most people are not stuck because they lack information. They are stuck because they have never gotten honest enough to see what is actually moving them.
Why This Matters More Than Most People Think
Every one of us is already living from something. There is no such thing as a person without values, only people who have not examined which values are actually in charge. Some of what drives you was inherited from your family or your upbringing. Some of it was shaped through pain you have not fully looked at. Some of it was formed in seasons of your life you would rather not revisit. None of that makes you broken. It makes you human. But if you never take the time to separate what you were given from what you have actually chosen, you will spend your life being driven by forces you never agreed to.
That is what I mean when I talk about the difference between inherited values and animating values. Inherited values are the beliefs we absorb from our environment, the things we were told mattered. Animating values are the beliefs that actually move us into action, the things we are willing to sacrifice for. For most people, these two categories do not match, and that mismatch is where a quiet kind of dishonesty takes root. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that
lets you say you value discipline while your habits say otherwise. The kind that lets you say you value honesty while you consistently avoid the hard conversation.
The Value Audit exists to close that gap, and it works in six steps.
Step One: What Do You Say You Value?
Start here, and start honestly. Write down what you would tell someone if they asked you directly what matters to you. Most people produce a familiar list: honesty, family, health, faith, growth. This is your starting point, not your finish line. The goal is not to impress anyone with this list, including yourself. When I did this exercise for myself, one value that surfaced was efficiency. It is not a value that sounds particularly noble, but it is true. I do not function well inside systems that waste time and fail to produce results. Naming it honestly told me something real about myself that a more polished answer would have hidden.
Step Two: What Does Your Life Actually Reflect?
This is where the exercise stops being comfortable. Set aside your intentions and your stated goals, and look at your patterns instead. Where does your time actually go? Where does your energy actually go? Your life is already telling the truth, whether or not you are paying attention to it. If you say you value discipline but your actions consistently show avoidance, your life is telling you the truth. If you say you value honesty but you keep sidestepping difficult conversations, your life is telling you the truth. It is never your words that reveal what you value. It is always your pattern of behavior.
Step Three: Identify the Gap
Now place what you say you value next to what you actually live, and look at where they disagree. That gap is not a sign of failure. It is information. Most people stop here because the discomfort feels like too much, but discomfort is where clarity begins, not where it ends.
Step Four: What Is Actually Driving You?
If your life does not match what you claim to value, something else is in the driver’s seat. This step asks you to name it without flinching. Is it fear of failure? A need for approval? A desire for comfort? A need for control? The answer to this question is where your animating values actually show up, and it is rarely flattering on the first pass. That is fine. The goal was never flattery. It was clarity.
Step Five: The Friction Test
Here is where the truth becomes undeniable. Anyone can claim to value something when it costs them nothing. The real test is what you do when it requires sacrifice, when it threatens your comfort, or when it challenges the identity you have built. Your real values do not show up in ease. They show up under pressure.
Step Six: Choose What You Will Live From
This is the step that turns an exercise in self-reflection into an act of transformation. You now have a decision in front of you, not based on what sounds right, but based on what you have actually seen about yourself. You can continue living from whatever has been driving you, or
you can begin intentionally aligning your life with what is true. This does not happen in one dramatic moment. It happens through small, consistent choices: truth over comfort, honesty over image, alignment over approval, repeated until they become who you are.
What This Process Actually Gives You
If you walk through this honestly, you will likely discover something uncomfortable and freeing at the same time: you have always had values, but you have not always chosen them. Some were inherited without your consent. Some were formed by pain you did not ask for. The Value Audit does not hand you a new life. It hands you a clear view of the one you are already living, and with that clarity comes something you did not have before. Choice.
I wrote this framework into Hypocrisy, Hedonism, Hope & Healing because I needed it myself before I could offer it to anyone else. The book is not a theoretical exploration of values from a safe distance. It is the record of what happened in my own life when I refused to keep performing beliefs I was not actually living, and what it cost, and what it gave back. I think that is what makes it different from most books in this category. It does not ask you to take a concept on faith. It shows you, in detail, what it looks like to apply it to a real life that did not go according to plan.
If you have ever sensed a gap between the person you present and the person your daily choices reveal, this exercise is where I would tell you to start. Not because it is comfortable, but because, as I have come to learn the hard way, you do not need a new life. You need a clear enough view of the one you already have to choose differently.
