> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://executivefunction.support/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Post 6: Discovering Your Values: Finding What Actually Matters Before You Prioritize - URL: https://executivefunction.support/post-6-discovering-your-values-finding-what-actually-matters-before-you-prioritize/ - Published: 2025-06-01T20:39:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-27T01:57:14.000Z - Description: The laddering technique lets you trace any resisted task back to the value underneath it, revealing whether that value is genuinely yours or one you've simply inherited. - Author: Mark Vigil Dombeck, PhD - Tags: series-1 #### QUICK GUIDE: DISCOVERING YOUR VALUES ****The core question this post answers**: How do you identify why a given task is valuable to you, beyond the simple fact that you have strong feelings about it, so that you can know why you're prioritizing that task? ****In this post, you'll learn:** - Why prioritization frameworks can sort your tasks well but can't tell you if they're the right tasks - Why values work better as something you construct than something you excavate - The laddering technique, a repeatable way to climb from a concrete task to the value underneath it - Four concrete tests for knowing when you've actually reached bedrock rather than just a higher rung - How to tell an intrinsic value apart from an introjected one, without treating either as more real than the other ****Read time**: 18-20 minutes ****Difficulty level**: Light (educational, no activation expected) ****Suggested stopping point**: After "How You Know You've Actually Arrived" — you'll have the complete laddering technique, Sarah's worked example, the four bedrock tests, and the intrinsic/introjected distinction. The section that follows covers a common trap people fall into with the technique, which is useful but not required to use it. ****What comes next**: Post 7 explores what happens once you realize you have more than one value, and they don't always agree. #### SUPPORT RESOURCES: IF YOU NEED THEM This post is educational rather than activating. That said, laddering asks you to sit with a task you've been avoiding and ask why it matters, which can surface more than you expect, sometimes including old memories or fears you weren't consciously thinking about. If that happens, that's a normal response to genuine self-reflection, not a sign anything has gone wrong, and it's also a signal to take a break if you need one. ****Quick grounding if you need it**: Notice your feet on the floor. Take three longer-exhale breaths. Return when you're ready. There's no pressure to finish the laddering exercise in one sitting, or to reach a tidy, comfortable conclusion. Understanding unfolds in layers, and you can return whenever you're ready. In previous posts, I introduced [the concept of executive function](https://executivefunction.support/post-1-understanding-executive-function-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/), explored how [separating planning from execution (the "Zoom Out, Zoom In Dance")](https://executivefunction.support/post-2-the-zoom-out-zoom-in-dance-a-foundation-for-better-productivity/) can dramatically improve productivity, and examined [the cognitive foundations of executive function](https://executivefunction.support/post-3-the-cognitive-foundations-of-executive-function/) including working memory and processing speed. From there, I discussed [how to break down complex projects into manageable tasks through Task Analysis](https://executivefunction.support/post-4-task-analysis-slicing-the-bread-loaf/), which is akin to slicing a large loaf of bread so you can eat it one slice at a time, and walked through [several frameworks for deciding which task to tackle first](https://executivefunction.support/post-5-the-art-of-prioritization-deciding-what-matters-now/): the Eisenhower Matrix, the value/effort filter, dependency mapping. Each one is genuinely useful for understanding the order in which to work on your tasks. However, an unspoken assumption was made in the prioritization post, namely that the tasks you prioritize are all valuable tasks that are worth your time to work on. I said as much at the end of that post. In the section on the limitations of task-level prioritization, I told you that prioritization frameworks work best within a single project, and that when you're weighing competing priorities across different domains of your life, for instance work, family, health, or community, you need something more than a matrix to help you decide how to allocate yourself. I promised a later post would explore how your deeper values can guide those decisions. This is that post. ## The Gap Prioritization Frameworks Can't Close Even the best prioritization framework has the same blind spot. It can tell you which of the tasks on your list to do first. It cannot tell you which tasks deserve to be on the list. Give the Eisenhower Matrix ten tasks and it will help you sort them beautifully into urgent-and-important, important-but-not-urgent, urgent-but-not-important, and neither. But the matrix has no opinion about whether those ten tasks are the right ten tasks you should be spending your life energy on right now. If you've filled your list with obligations that serve everyone's priorities except your own, you'll end up with a well-sorted list of things that don't really serve you. You could apply the value/effort filter with real precision and still end each day having efficiently completed things that don't mean anything to you and which leave you feeling strangely hollow. I see this happen routinely in my practice. A client and I discuss what they should be working on, and they produce a well prioritized list that they still have trouble feeling motivated to work on. The thought of working on the things they've prioritized leaves them uninspired and feeling a low hum of dread; they would rather be doing something else. When I ask what's wrong, the answer is rarely "I'm bad at prioritizing." Often it's closer to "I don't know why any of this matters." This issue isn't a task-analysis problem, and it isn't a prioritization-framework problem. It sits one level below where those frameworks operate, and it needs to be addressed with a different kind of tool; one that can help you know what you value. ## Values as Construction, Not Excavation Before I introduce this new tool, I want to head off a misunderstanding. I see trip people up constantly when they hear the word "values." There's a common assumption that your true values are buried somewhere inside you, fully formed, waiting to be discovered if only you dig deep enough, meditate hard enough, or ask the right therapist the right questions. Not only do I think this isn't quite right, I also believe thinking this is true can get in the way of you doing the work of figuring out what is actually valuable to you. Values aren't something you dig up. They're constructed. You're not an archaeologist uncovering a buried but hidden artifact that was always there. You're closer to a builder, working with real materials and real constraints, arriving at useful conclusions through an actual process of valuing. This matters practically because it changes what happens if your answers about what you value shift at some point. If values are unchanging buried treasure, then realizing that something felt valuable before but no longer does would mean you must have done something wrong to have deviated. However, if values are something you construct, then a changed answer just means you built something new with what you have now, where you are now. Your past answer and your current answer are both real, useful constructions. They were just built at different points in your life with different materials you had on hand. In short, I propose your values can change, that this is normal, and that it is useful for you to expect that you might want to update how you understand what you value every so often. This recognition that values can change reflects what is known as a constructivist framing that runs underneath most of what I teach in this Executive Function Support series and in my parallel work on trauma: meaning isn't something you passively discover, but instead it is something you actively build out of the raw materials of your experience. As you build anew, your understanding of what things mean can change. This means you don't need to find your one true set of values before you're allowed to proceed. You just need a process that reliably builds a useful, honest answer to what you value that you can use right now; one you can revise later on without shame should your situation change. Today's answer doesn't need to survive forever in order to be worth having today. And neither will the value you identify today be the only answer you might find. In the next post, we'll look at what happens when you've discovered that you have more than one value informing a task happening at once. ## Climbing the Ladder: A Technique for Finding What Actually Matters The values identification process I'll teach you next traces back to the psychologist George Kelly, whose Personal Construct Theory proposed that people make sense of their lives by building (or constructing) hierarchies of meaning, where some ideas are subordinate to others, and where more concrete preferences for how to do things sit towards the bottom of the hierarchy and more abstract ideas about what is valuable are positioned above. For instance, a concrete preference, like it being important to finish a report early rather than at the last minute, might sit towards the bottom of your meaning hierarchy. However, if you were to climb high enough in the hierarchy, asking why that concrete preference matters to you, you'd eventually arrive at something closer to an abstract core belief about who you are, eg., you value being a punctual person. Kelly didn't create a formal technique for making this hierarchical climb. About a decade after Kelly published his personal construct theory, Dennis Hinkle, working within Kelly's framework, developed what's now called laddering: a simple method of asking "why does that matter?" with reference to your own answers again and again, treating each answer as input for the next question. You start with something concrete, for instance, "why is it important to get your paper done on time?" You then climb up the meaning hierarchy, one rung at a time, by asking "why does that matter" over and over until your answer stops sounding like a strategy and instead starts sounding like you're describing your identity. Let me walk you through what this ladder climb looks like. To do so, we'll revisit Sarah, whom you may remember from an earlier post, as she struggles to start work on an important presentation. --- Sarah's task list has "finish the presentation" on it. She is already aware of the dread she's experiencing looking at this task. She knows that this dread feeling likely traces back to harsh feedback she once received from her boss. Let's use laddering to find out what's actually at stake underneath Sarah's experience of dread and avoidance. *Why does finishing this presentation matter to you?* Sarah's first answer is the obvious one: "Because it's due Thursday, and I don't want to be scrambling." This truth sits at a low rung on Sarah's meaning hierarchy. While a true answer, she realizes her response is about time management which is a strategy, not what she values. Accordingly, she decides to climb again. *Why does not scrambling matter to you?* "Because when I scramble, the work I do becomes worse. I don't like turning in sloppy work." We're higher now, but Sarah's answer still refers to the quality of her work product, and not yet describing anything about her identity; who she is as a person. She recognizes she needs to climb again. *Why does it matter to you that your work isn't sloppy?* At this moment something shifts. Sarah pauses on this one longer than the first two. Her shoulders come up slightly and she experiences a small tightening around her jaw before she answers: "Because if my work is sloppy, people will think I don't know what I'm doing. They'll think I'm not competent." Now we're getting somewhere close to a value. Sarah's response isn't about her presentation anymore. It's about how she wants to be seen, and what she's afraid of if she isn't seen that way. She recognizes she needs to climb another rung. *Why does it matter to you to be seen as competent?* Sarah sits with this one even longer, and the quality of her pause changes. She feels herself becoming less tense and more thoughtful. "Because being good at what I do is part of how I know I'm someone people can rely on. It's part of who I am. If I can't trust myself to do good work, I don't know what I'm standing on. It's not just about the presentation. It's about whether I can count on myself at all." And now, as her answer describes something important about her identity, she realizes she has found something she values. We can call this bedrock. Bedrock is a word we use most frequently when we're describing something so solid and stable that we could anchor a building into it and expect that building to be well supported. But the image of bedrock usually implies something *underneath* a structure that is load bearing, not something above it. The image of Sarah *climbing up* to discover bedrock doesn't quite hold together if you look at it too closely. I recognize this is the case, but I decided to use the word anyway because it names the quality of what Sarah has found; something solid, unmoving, and unsupported by anything else holding it up. So, imperfectly, I'm asking you to hold two different images, each one doing a different job. Climbing describes how you get there, and bedrock describes what it feels like once you arrive. Notice the shift across four questions: from scheduling, to work quality, to social perception, to something Sarah is describing as foundational to who she is. You might notice that her first three answers have a slightly defensive quality, the tone of someone explaining herself. Her fourth, however, doesn't ask to be believed. It's self-evident to Sarah that this is the case of who and how she is. The question "why does this matter?" has run out of road here (as there is nowhere further to arrive), which is the signal to stop climbing. Sarah has arrived at an abstract principle that describes something she values in herself and in other people. She appreciates reliability, being someone whose word and work mean something, with this quality mattering to her more than almost anything else. That's a value. Notice that Sarah constructed rather than discovered this value through an actual conversation with herself, using a task she'd already been avoiding as her raw material and starting place. ### How You Know You've Actually Arrived You might reasonably ask how you can tell when you've arrived at a value and it's time to stop asking questions. The short answer is that you can stop when the answer describes your identity rather than a strategy that you employ. The trouble with this answer is that "identity" is itself a vague, slippery concept for a lot of people. Some people have a clear, ready sense of who they are they can recognize the moment it shows up. Many other people do not, and being told to stop climbing "when you hit your identity" is about as useful to them as being told to stop driving "when you feel like you've arrived," when you've never been to the destination before. It might comfort you to know that you don't need to have a settled sense of your own identity before laddering will work. What follows are several concrete tests you can use to evaluate each answer you produce to see if it is bedrock and it is time to stop asking questions or if you should continue. **First, notice whether the question and the answer both go quiet.** Ask yourself why does this matter one more time. If it feels almost redundant doing so, like the way it would feel to ask someone why do they love their child, then you've likely arrived. And notice how the answer itself lands. Task-level answers tend to carry a self-justification quality to them, as though a case is being built. A true bedrock answer doesn't argue for itself. It doesn't need to justify anything. It just *is* that way. Such answers *settle*, sometimes with some surprise at the unexpected way that the settling occurs, like Sarah's fourth answer did. The question running out of road and the answer settling down instead of continuing a justification are really the same signal seen from different sides. **Second, ask whether the answer would still be true if the specific task in front of you disappeared.** Sarah's early answers, about the deadline, about not liking sloppy work, wouldn't survive that test. If her presentation vanished from her calendar tomorrow, those answers would simply stop mattering. However, "I need to be someone people can rely on" doesn't depend on her presentation existing at all. It would still be true of Sarah if she didn't have a presentation to prepare. Encountering this sort of portability in your answer is a strong sign that you've reached something foundational rather than merely instrumental. **Third, ask whether the answer would continue to be correct if nothing changed externally; if you received no praise, no recognition, and no reward.** Bedrock values don't need an audience to be true. If part of your honest answer is quietly "and then people would notice and approve of me," you might not have arrived at bedrock, still standing on a proxy for something underneath it that really matters and forms a part of your identity. If that is the case, keep climbing the ladder. **Fourth, notice what the answer produces within you when you say it out loud.** It's often the case that bedrock value answers will arrive accompanied by a felt sense that reinforces their quality of truth. Some bedrock answers carry warmth, urgency, a lump in the throat, a leaning-forward pull. Others carry something else entirely: guilt, obligation, a quiet sense of duty, a flatness and absence of something felt that highlights what was there previously. Whether the felt sense feels positive or negative doesn't matter so much, as both directions indicate a real value. The flavor might differ but not the authenticity. There are names for these two emotional flavors. Psychologists call the warm, forward-pulling kind an *intrinsic value*, something you want for its own sake. They call the dutiful, guilt-flavored kind an *introjected value*, something you've taken as your own but that feels more like an obligation than a desire. Neither of these emotional flavors is superior to the other, even though you might prefer to experience one more than the other. It's tempting to hear warmth vs. guilt and quietly conclude that the warm kind of value is the real prize and the guilt-flavored kind is inferior. I don't think that's true. Working from Tory Higgins's self-discrepancy theory, psychologists have described two internalized 'self-guides' that people might aspirationally experience: the person you hope to become and the person you feel a duty to become. Neither of these self-guides is treated as more authentic than the other in Higgins's framework. However, they do feel different. Falling short of the hoped-for self produces something closer to longing, whereas falling short of the dutiful self produces something closer to guilt or anxiety. Knowing which one you've connected with is useful information. What you do with that knowledge is genuinely up to you. I'll walk through the actual choices available to you in the next post, as we look at what happens when a second or third value enters the picture. 💡 **This is a natural stopping point. If you understand the laddering technique itself, have seen how Sarah used it to reach bedrock, and can tell an intrinsic value from an introjected one without ranking them, you have what matters most from this post. The section that follows covers a common trap people fall into when climbing the ladder, which sharpens the technique but isn't required to start using it. Return when ready.*\*This is a natural stopping point. If you understand the laddering technique itself, have seen how Sarah used it to reach bedrock, and can tell an intrinsic value from an introjected one without ranking them, you have what matters most from this post. The section that follows covers a common trap people fall into when climbing the ladder, which sharpens the technique but isn't required to start using it. Return when ready.\* In teaching laddering to people, I've watched a few stop a rung too early and fail to get down to their bedrock value. I think there is a common trap that people fall into when doing laddering that is worth naming here so that you can hopefully avoid it yourself. To appreciate the trap, look at this example. Imagine someone climbing the ladder with regard to their habit of chronically over-preparing for every meeting. Let's say after a few cycles of asking "why does this matter?" they arrive at: "because I want to be respected." Is this statement a value? It sure looks like it might be one, because it appears to describe something about the person's identity rather than simply describing a strategy they use. Here, looks can be deceiving. And if you aren't sure, you can continue asking "why does this matter?" to see if the answer settles. If further answers keeps coming, for instance, if asking again yields something like "because respect is how I know I belong somewhere," then wanting to be respected wasn't really a bedrock value after all. In this example, it is a fairly high rung on the ladder, but not the top rung. The actual top answer that really does point to the bedrock value might be more like, "Because I want to belong". To avoid the trap of stopping before reaching the top of the values hierarchy, simply keep climbing until the next "why" produces nothing further, just a settled quiet, perhaps accompanied by one or the other emotional flavors. Once nothing further sits above the response you've arrived. ## Practicing This Yourself Here's how you can run this laddering technique against your own task list, rather than just reading about Sarah running it on hers. 1. **Pick one task that you've been resisting.** Do not attempt to ladder your whole task list. Just choose one of your tasks that keeps sitting there unfinished, or one you dread working on. 2. **Ask why does it matters to complete the task, and keep asking.** Start at the first rung and climb it: Write down your first answer. Ask why that answer matters. Keep climbing, one rung at a time, until an answer arrives that doesn't feel like it needs defending. Sit with each question for a moment before answering, in the manner Sarah did. 3. **Check your answer against the bedrock tests.** Does asking "why" one more time feel almost redundant? Does the answer settle rather than continue to justify? Would it survive if the specific task disappeared? Would it still be the case if it earned you no external reward? If none of this lands, and the answer still feels like an argument, you likely have another rung to climb. 4. **Notice which flavor you found, and don't rank it.** If what you found feels more dutiful than warm, that's not an indication that you've identified a lesser result. It's simply information about your value. We'll walk through what to actually do with such information in the next post. ## Bringing the Ladder Down to the Ground Actual ladders are useful because you can both climb them and then come back down. This is also true of the laddering method for identifying values. The point of climbing up to a bedrock value isn't so that you can live permanently at altitude. You do not need to contemplate your identity before you're allowed to execute your task! With the laddering method the point of climbing up is to identify your value, and then to climb back down to appreciate that your value is *why* you are doing that task. The process of laddering to a value only ever hands you one of two things. Either the climb confirms that the task genuinely connects to something you value, in which case you come down charged with real motivational fuel to help you get that task done. Not a slogan telling you to want it more, but an honest, specific reason this particular task matters to you that you didn't quite see clearly before the climb. That's what happened for Sarah. Her dread didn't disappear once she named reliability as what was actually at stake, but she now had something more solidly motivational to use while working on her presentation than "because it's due Thursday." Alternatively, the climb comes up empty. You reach the top rung and find nothing underneath the task except empty habit, someone else's expectation, or a "should" you don't actually care about because you never really examined it before. That's just as useful an outcome, arguably even more useful, because it answers the question this whole post opened with: whether your task deserves to be on your task list in the first place. Finding no solid values bedrock connected to a task doesn't always mean you get to immediately discard it. Sometimes life genuinely requires things of you that don't trace back to anything you'd choose for yourself if you were free to choose. But it does mean you now get to make the choice to continue doing the task with your eyes open, instead of quietly assuming that the task must matter because it's been sitting on your list so long. Either way, it is the intelligence about your values that you discover that is the actual payoff of climbing the values ladder: not a mystical encounter with your true self, but a clear answer to one practical question. Is this task worth the resistance it's costing you, and if so, why? You don't need to do laddering for every task! Most of the tasks on your list will be self-evident and won't require it. Reserve the technique for those tasks that keep resisting your best prioritization efforts, the ones that stay on your list undone week after week no matter how technically urgent or important they are. Those are usually the tasks where something deeper than scheduling is at stake. It's worth the few minutes it takes to climb to identify the value at stake in such cases. You now have a technique for climbing up from a task you keep avoiding or do with dread, towards identifying the value that task is actually connected to, along with concrete tests for knowing when you've actually identified your true value. That's a genuinely useful method to have in your repertoire, even if you only use it occasionally to better figure out why you avoid certain tasks. But know this: each climb up the ladder only ever helps you identify one value. As you start using this technique on the tasks you avoid, you'll likely discover that you're often dealing with several values in conflict at once, not just one. In the next post, I'll show you what happens when a second value pulls in a different direction from your first, and how to keep several real values in some kind of working balance rather than finding yourself mired in ambivalence, or letting one value quietly dominate and suppress the other. ## Continuing Your Journey [**Back to Post 5**: The Art of Prioritization](https://executivefunction.support/post-5-the-art-of-prioritization-deciding-what-matters-now/), where I introduced the frameworks this post now grounds in something deeper. **Forward to Post 7**: Balancing Multiple Values, where we'll look at what happens once you realize one value was never the whole story.