Living Into Your Values
Who are you becoming?
It’s not only in the big decisions where you need to apply an ethical framework. It’s in the day to day where you implement acting like the kind of person you want to be. This takes intention. Together we’ll walk through three steps to help shape your intentions:
Getting Started
Thinking about a person you admire and the values they display can be a helpful practice when determining the values that you want to exhibit in your life.
Take a minute to picture a person who you feel is the most admirable person you know.
- What is it like to be around them?
- What is it about them that you admire?
- What elements of their character would you describe as Christlike or inspirational?
- What values do they display that you would like to adopt?
In early August 2026, Brené Brown and Adam Grant interviewed Rebecca Lowe on their podcast The Curiosity Shop. Rebecca Lowe is a Premier League and World Cup broadcast journalist. She was asked about how she does so well in an often chaotic work setting. She talked about being over prepared so that she doesn’t have to think – she has so much to draw from that she’s ready for whatever.
- What if we thought of virtues that way?
- What if we prepped for how we want to show up in the various setting of our lives?
- Who do you owe when preparing yourself for a life of virtue?
Humans are inherently social. We tend to live and work in groups. Virtues make being in groups safe and effective. This goes way back. An oversimplification of some of what Aristotle mused could be summarized as – laws punish behaviors after they happen. Virtues train the heart and mind before. We’ll be looking at north stars to orient your heart and mind toward. To do so will require:
- knowing what your values are
- intentionally practicing them
Knowing who you are
You started to identify what you value when you thought about someone you most admired.
Imagine you are at your 100th birthday party. There are people from different aspects of your life there to celebrate you. Some are offering toasts, others are saying kind things and telling stories about you.
Often at monumental occasions like a milestone birthday celebration, the type of person one is gets emphasized far more than what one accomplished. While we focus so much of our energy on our accomplishments, what people really remember is how we treated them, how we made them feel, and what character traits we displayed.
At your 100th birthday party, what do you hope people say about you?
Sit with that a minute.
Even write some things down.
If you need vocabulary for what values/strengths may be possible, the VIA Institute on Character provides many resources. And Lee C. Camp regularly centers discussions around pursuing truth, beauty, and goodness as cardinal virtues on his podcast, No Small Endeavor.
External Factors
We’ve discussed ways of knowing what you value. It’s also important to look at what is shaping you. What are your ordering principles? Jesus had wisdom to share on what happens when you follow societal values (e.g. power, wealth).
Listen to a short section of a sermon Tim Keller gave at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on Luke 6:20-26.
The clip discusses Jesus’ words from The Sermon on the Mount – where he was teaching his disciples, and a large crowd gathered around them. The main takeaway is to ask the question – are you ordering your life around temporal or lasting values? Money, status, and power or something larger?
Think back to the beginning – being a social creature, what ordering principles would further group effectiveness and safety?
Building moral character requires intentional thinking about how we want to shape our lives. Yegor Zhukov, who at the time was a 21 year old Russian college student and radio host arrested for criticizing the government, lives a life characterized by responsibility and love. In his sentencing hearing he said:
We are told that the state devotes a lot of resources to protecting the institution of the family, and to patriotism. We are also told that the most important traditional value is the Christian faith. Your Honor, I think this may actually be a good thing. The Christian ethic includes two values that I consider central for myself. First, responsibility. Christianity is based on the story of a person who dared to take up the burden of the world. It’s the story of a person who accepted responsibility in the greatest possible sense of that word.
The second value is love. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is the most important sentence of the Christian faith. Love is trust, empathy, humanity, mutual aid, and care. A society built on such love is a strong society—probably the strongest of all possible societies.
Once we’ve clarified the values we want to demonstrate, we must consistently act on them so that our behavior naturally aligns with and reflects those values.
It takes practice and intentionality to prevail over some of our instincts and nature.
Bryan Stevenson, public interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, recalls (in his book Just Mercy) an encounter that he had with civil rights icon Rosa Parks where she asked him, “What do you do?”
Imagine having one of your heroes ask you that question. Answering that will be a lot easier if you are doing something that aligns with your values.
Putting it together
You’ve identified a person you think is admirable. You’ve also identified qualities about your future self that you would like spoken at your 100th birthday. This activity is for you to document some tangible habits you will implement so that there isn’t dissonance between who you are and who you want to become. This is bigger than New Year’s resolutions. This is formative.
The format is up to you. Write an list or an essay, make a poster, make a web page – it’s your choice, just make something visual. Make sure you indicate a future state of yourself you’d like to get to, and daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly steps you plan on taking to get there. Try to include at least 4 values you are striving to live out. Then sign in and upload a pdf of your final product.
Sorry. You must be logged in to view this form.
There are two approaches to living out virtues – living into who you want to be or not being who you don’t want to be. Think of exercising – one person may work out because they think of themselves as an athlete. Another person may work out because they don’t want to think of themselves as a person who is out of shape. This module is about who you want to be. If the other way of thinking stands out to you more, we suggest working through Prof. Konyndyk DeYoung’s book Glittering Vices.