How to Live According to Your Values (When It's Hard)

Living with Purpose: Part 3 of 4 | By Dr. Jonathan Marion

← Part 2: The Practice of Purposeful Living

The first two posts in this series addressed what intentional living is and how its practices are built. Both conversations focused largely on structure and habit, the architecture of conscious living. This third post addresses the dimension that neither structure nor habit can fully account for: the internal resistance that reliably arises when someone begins to act more deliberately in accordance with their actual values rather than from accumulated obligation.

That resistance is not incidental to the work of intentional living. In many ways, it is its defining feature. Understanding what produces it, what it protects, and how to work with it rather than against it distinguishes sustainable intentional living from another self-improvement cycle that runs its course and fades away.

Acting in accordance with your values, rather than out of obligation or habit, is not primarily a skill problem. It is an identity problem, and identity resists change with considerable force.

Why Acting from Values Is Harder Than It Sounds

Values clarification exercises, which identify what truly matters to you and distinguish your values from inherited or socially imposed ones, yield useful insights. What they often fail to produce, at least immediately, is behavioral change. The person who completes a values clarification process and identifies authenticity, meaningful work, and genuine connection as their core values frequently continues, in daily choices, to prioritize approval, efficiency, and avoiding conflict.

This persistence is not hypocrisy. It reflects something more fundamental: the gap between espoused values (what someone believes they value) and values-in-use (what their behavior reveals they are actually organizing around) (Argyris & Schön, 1974). That gap is often maintained not by a lack of insight but by competing psychological needs, including the need to maintain a consistent self-concept, to preserve existing relationships, and to avoid the anxiety that accompanies real change.

Self-determination theory research identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as fundamental psychological needs whose satisfaction is essential to well-being (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Acting from one's own values supports autonomy, the experience of being the origin rather than the pawn of one's behavior. But it can also threaten competence (in domains where those values are less developed than socially rewarded skills) and relatedness (when the people in one's relational environment have organized around the previous version of the self).

The Specific Resistance of High Achievers

For accomplished professionals, resistance to values-based action has a distinct texture. The skills, behaviors, and self-presentation strategies that produced success have been refined over years and are deeply integrated into professional identity. Acting from one's own values in contexts where different values have been rewarded requires not only behavioral change but also a willingness to be seen differently, at least temporarily, as less expert and less reliably productive.

This is the territory Steven Pressfield described as the Resistance (Pressfield, 2002). Researchers in adult development have mapped the same terrain more precisely, finding that the primary obstacle to sustained transformation is rarely the absence of motivation. It is the presence of hidden competing commitments that actively maintain the status quo, often outside conscious awareness (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Research on implementation intentions is relevant here because it addresses this resistance at the architectural level, creating behavioral plans that engage before the habitual competing response can take over. However, architecture alone cannot address the deeper identity-level resistance that arises when the values being acted upon challenge the self-concept built around different ones.

Working With Rather Than Against Resistance

The most effective way to respond to the resistance that values-based action produces is neither suppression nor capitulation but curiosity. The resistance is information: about what the old behavior was protecting, which relationships or self-concepts feel threatened by the change, and what the actual cost of acting from different values is, rather than what it is feared to be.

Research on psychological flexibility, developed by Steven Hayes and colleagues in the context of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, shows that the capacity to hold difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them, to notice resistance, understand its function, and choose behavior based on values anyway is more strongly associated with behavioral change and well-being than suppressing or avoiding resistance (Hayes et al., 2006). Psychological flexibility does not require resistance to disappear before values-based action becomes available. It requires only that resistance be recognized as information rather than instruction.

In practice, this often means asking a different set of questions than those resistance typically prompts. Not, "How do I get rid of this discomfort?" but, "What is this discomfort pointing toward?" Not, "Why can't I just do what I know I should?" but, "What is the behavior I'm avoiding actually in service of, and is that service still needed?"

The Role of Meaning

Meaningful action, action that connects to something truly important rather than merely being demanded, is among the most reliable antidotes to the depletion caused over time by habitual, obligation-driven behavior. Research on eudaimonic well-being consistently shows that activities experienced as meaningful produce a qualitatively different kind of vitality than those experienced as merely pleasurable or merely productive (Waterman, 1993).

The depth dimension of intentional living, which this third post has been exploring, ultimately comes down to whether the actions that constitute a given life are connected to what truly matters or are primarily the products of habit, obligation, and the path of least resistance. That question is uncomfortable to examine honestly because the answer is often more nuanced than most people would like. It is also among the most generative questions an accomplished person can examine honestly, not as an indictment but as an orientation toward what more deliberately chosen living might look like.

The fourth post in this series addresses how to integrate all of this into something sustainable: not the permanent vigilance that effortful intentionality implies, but the quality of lived alignment that emerges when intentional practice has been sustained long enough to become genuinely characteristic.

→ Continue to Part 4: The Mastery of Conscious Living

← Part 2: The Practice of Purposeful Living

If this series is raising questions worth exploring

The Your Next Step clarity call is a good place to start an honest conversation about what you're navigating and whether coaching is the right fit. Visit stepstochat.com

Prefer to begin on your own? The free Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook is available at beginnoticing.com

References

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The 'what' and 'why' of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25.

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.

Pressfield, S. (2002). The war of art. Black Irish Entertainment.

Waterman, A. S. (1993). Two conceptions of happiness: Contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia) and hedonic enjoyment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(4), 678–691.