You might believe purpose matters to you, but when you look at how you actually spend time and money, something doesn't add up. You're wondering whether purpose is truly one of your core values or whether you've adopted it because it sounds like the right answer.
Who This Is For (and Who It Is Not)
This is for someone who has felt the friction between what they say they value and what their life actually reflects. You're not looking for permission to care about purpose. You're looking for clarity about whether purpose is genuinely yours or whether you've inherited it from somewhere else — your parents, your profession, the culture around you. You suspect the two might be different, and that suspicion is worth taking seriously.
This is not for someone still in the phase of figuring out what purpose means to them. If you haven't yet articulated what a purposeful life would look like for you specifically, that's earlier work. This page assumes you've already asked yourself what purpose is and you're now asking a harder question: whether it's actually one of your core values or just something you think should be.
This is also not for someone satisfied that they already have this figured out. If you've examined your values against your actual life and the alignment is clear, you don't need this. The people who benefit most are caught between two stories about themselves, and they want to know which one is true.
What You Will Discover
Once you map your actual values against Schwartz's circumplex structure, you'll see why purpose either sits at the center of how you make decisions or why it keeps feeling like an obligation. Schwartz's research, tested across 80+ countries over three decades, shows that values exist in relationship to each other. Some values are naturally adjacent and compatible. Others sit directly opposite and create real tension. Purpose, in Schwartz's framework, sits in a particular location on this map. Where your other core values sit will tell you whether purpose is pulling you forward or pulling against something else that matters more to you.
What shifts is that you stop trying to force purpose into your life and instead see clearly whether it belongs there. Some people discover purpose is absolutely central to them, but they've been pursuing the wrong version of it. Others discover that other values — autonomy, security, creative expression, connection — actually rank higher, and that's not a failure. It's information. You can either build a life around that truth or make a conscious choice to prioritize purpose anyway. Both are legitimate. The clarity itself is what changes.
Common Reasons People Wait
The first hesitation is that you already took a values assessment once and it didn't stick. You might be thinking, "I've done this before. I know what I value." The problem is that most values assessments ask you to choose between values in abstract. They don't show you the structure, the tensions, or how your values interact. Schwartz's circumplex is different because it reveals that your values don't exist in isolation. It shows you why certain combinations feel unstable and certain others feel like home. A values assessment done this way is not something you consume once and move on. It's something you read against your actual decisions, which is why the second time through often reveals what you missed the first time.
The second hesitation is that purpose feels too important to get wrong, so maybe you need more time to think about it. This is honest caution, and it's misplaced. The longer you wait without clarity, the longer you continue making decisions as if purpose is central to you when it might not be, or vice versa. The cost of remaining unclear is not that you'll make one wrong choice. It's that the same pattern keeps running because it has never been named. Purpose might be driving decisions you don't even recognize as purpose-driven. Or you might be forcing yourself toward a sense of purpose that isn't authentically yours, year after year.
The third hesitation is that you're worried the assessment will tell you purpose doesn't matter to you, and that feels like a judgment. It's not. Schwartz's research shows that different cultures, different professions, and different personalities rank values differently. Someone whose core values cluster around autonomy, novelty, and pleasure is not less valuable or less whole than someone whose values cluster around purpose and tradition. They're just different. The assessment doesn't rank people. It ranks your values. And once you know what they actually are, you can stop performing the values that don't belong to you.
The Next Step
The My Values assessment surfaces your top values, shows you where they sit in Schwartz's structure, and reveals the gaps between what you value and how you're currently living. That clarity is what makes every other decision easier.
What if purpose shows up as a low value for me?
That's useful information. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It means you can stop organizing your life around an obligation and start making decisions based on what actually drives you. Some of the most satisfied people have discovered that purpose ranks lower than autonomy, security, or pleasure — and once they gave themselves permission to design around that, their lives made more sense.
How is Schwartz's framework different from other values systems?
Schwartz's circumplex is built on cross-cultural research across 80+ countries and decades of replication. Unlike frameworks that treat values as independent categories, Schwartz's shows how values relate to each other — which ones are compatible and which ones create natural tension. This relationship is what makes it useful for real decisions. It explains why pursuing two contradictory values simultaneously creates the friction you feel.
Can my core values change?
Yes, but not as often as you might think. Schwartz's research shows that core values tend to be stable in adulthood, though they can shift through significant life events or intentional work. What often changes is your behavior while your stated values stay the same. The assessment helps you see that distinction, which is why it's worth revisiting if your life has significantly changed.
Is purpose always in tension with other values?
Not always, but it can be, depending on what else you value. In Schwartz's structure, purpose sits adjacent to some values and opposite to others. If your core values include both purpose and security, that can work. If they include purpose and hedonism, that creates natural tension. The circumplex shows you exactly where the friction is, so you can make conscious choices instead of just feeling stuck.