Sort Values by Action-Guidingness

a wide-angle view of a warmly lit café interior with empty tables and two men hugging, looking in from the dark outside
Your best values are the ones you actually live by. Break your values (like “having and enjoying love”) down
  1. into concrete states, like being present with your loved ones,
  2. into concrete activities, like putting your phone into the drawer each day from 5pm to 8pm to be with family.
Values are things you care about in life, both about how you want yourself to be and how you want your life to be. What is it you’re willing to fight and struggle for? This might be “having and enjoying love”, as above. 
 
Values are not tacky decoration (wall tattoos). They are not personal PR precautions (200-page Company Values documents written by the legal team at your workplace). They are things you can actually observe yourself caring about in life.
 
But sometimes you can also observe yourself not living by them enough. In the past I have felt “I want to be an honest person”. But I thought I was not living by that value quite enough. To fulfill my value of honesty, I had to become more open: not only mean what I say, but say more of what I think.
 
It may make sense to admit “I don’t actually care about this”, and drop the value. Even if you feel like a good person should have that value! Maybe later, you will return to it with more intrinsic motivation, precisely because you stopped treating it as an obligation.

But usually, I think the right move is to say, “then I must not have broken down that value into something that can guide my action”. If you list all your values and sort them by their current action-guidingness, this may be true for the lower ones. You only need to make them detailed enough to guide your action. Doing more may turn it into a wall tattoo or a personal PR document.