What Matters—and What Gets in the Way?

For much of my life, I thought that knowing what mattered should be enough. If I could become clear about my values, make good choices, and set meaningful intentions, surely my life would begin to align around them. And sometimes it did.

But over the years, both in my own life and in working with others, I began noticing something curious. We can know what matters deeply to us and still behave in ways that seem to contradict it. We may value intimacy and keep people at a distance, value freedom and remain in situations that constrain us, or value authenticity while continuing to seek the approval of others. We may genuinely value peace and yet find ourselves repeatedly caught in conflict.

This raises a question that I have become increasingly interested in. Perhaps it isn't enough simply to ask:

What matters to me?

We might also need to ask:

What gets in the way of living what matters?

Knowing What Matters

I've spent many years exploring values, both my own and those of the people I've worked with. Values can act like an inner compass. Becoming clearer about what genuinely matters to us can help us make choices, establish priorities, and orient our lives toward something that feels meaningful.

This was part of what originally drew me to values work. There is something powerful about stepping back from the demands and expectations of everyday life and asking ourselves what actually matters. So much of our lives can be shaped by what we think we should want, what others expect of us, or what our culture defines as success. Clarifying our values can help us separate some of that noise from what feels genuinely important.

Over time, however, I've come to see that identifying our values is only part of the journey. Our values don't exist in isolation. They live alongside everything else we've accumulated along the way: our beliefs, conditioning, fears, emotional wounds, expectations, protective strategies, and the parts of ourselves we've learned to hide.

Sometimes these different aspects of ourselves work together beautifully. Sometimes they don't.

I might genuinely value authenticity, for example, while also carrying a deeply held belief that I need other people's approval in order to belong. I may value intimacy while another part of me has learned that vulnerability isn't safe. I may value contribution while having learned somewhere along the way that my worth depends upon how useful I am to others. I may value excellence while carrying an old fear that I'm never quite good enough.

In each case, the value itself may be very real. But something has become wrapped around it.

When Our Values Become Entangled

This is one of the things that has become increasingly interesting to me in my work. What looks like living our values can sometimes be partly driven by something else.

Service, for example, can become entangled with self-sacrifice. Excellence can become perfectionism. Harmony can become avoidance of conflict. Independence can become difficulty receiving support. Responsibility can gradually become a need for control.

This doesn't make the underlying value false, nor does it mean there is something wrong with us. In fact, these patterns often made very good sense when they developed. Perhaps being helpful brought us approval or belonging. Perhaps being quiet prevented conflict. Perhaps achievement brought recognition from someone whose approval mattered deeply to us. Perhaps learning to be independent protected us from the disappointment of relying on people who weren't reliably there.

These strategies may have served us remarkably well. The difficulty is that, over time, the protective strategy and the value can become so intertwined that we no longer distinguish between them. We may believe we are freely choosing how we live when, beneath the surface, an old pattern is doing at least some of the choosing for us.

This has led me to think about values somewhat differently. The question isn't only whether a value is important to us. It is also whether we are free in the way we express it.

From Changing Beliefs to Looking Deeper

Much of my earlier work focused on beliefs, and beliefs still matter enormously to me. The beliefs we hold about ourselves, other people, and life influence what we perceive, what we expect, and what possibilities we allow ourselves to consider. I've seen significant changes occur when a limiting belief is recognized and transformed.

But I've also learned that sometimes changing the belief isn't enough.

A belief may be connected to an emotional wound, an experience that was never fully processed, or a younger part of ourselves that still doesn't feel safe. It may be protecting something vulnerable within us, or keeping us from expressing a quality that at some point in our lives didn't feel acceptable. We can change the words of the belief and still discover that something deeper continues to pull us toward the old pattern.

This is one of the places where my exploration of shadow has taken me deeper. Rather than asking only what belief needs to change, I've become more interested in what lies beneath the belief. What has this pattern been protecting? What might I have learned to reject or hide? What part of me is involved here? What might happen if, instead of immediately trying to change this part of myself, I became curious about it?

For me, this represents an important shift in the way I understand personal transformation. We move from continually trying to correct ourselves toward learning to understand ourselves more deeply.

Freeing What Matters

This is also part of what I mean by Living From What Matters. It isn't simply about creating a list of values and then trying harder to live according to them. It is about becoming curious about the inner landscape from which those values are being expressed.

Imagine someone who deeply values caring for others. That caring may be one of their greatest gifts. But if it has become entangled with a belief that my needs don't matter, or I am worthy when I am needed, then caring can gradually become exhaustion, resentment, or self-abandonment. The answer isn't necessarily to care less. It may be to explore what has become attached to caring so that the value itself can be expressed more freely.

The same can be true of achievement. There is nothing inherently problematic about wanting to create something meaningful or do something exceptionally well. But the experience is very different when that desire arises from inspiration rather than from an unconscious need to prove our worth. Independence can be a wonderful expression of self-reliance, but it becomes something different when receiving help feels threatening. Harmony can create beautiful relationships, but not when maintaining harmony requires us to silence what is true for us.

The work, then, isn't necessarily about changing what matters to us. Sometimes it is about freeing what matters from the fears, beliefs, and protective patterns that have become intertwined with it.

It is one thing to know what matters. It is another to become free enough to live it.

What Gets in the Way?

Perhaps there is something you already know matters deeply to you: connection, freedom, creativity, honesty, peace, adventure, contribution, love, or something entirely your own. And perhaps there is also some part of your life that doesn't quite reflect it.

Our usual response may be to assume that we need more discipline, greater motivation, a better plan, or simply more effort. Sometimes we do. But there is another possibility. Instead of immediately trying harder, we can become curious about what happens inside us when we move toward what matters.

What am I afraid might happen if I express this more fully? What belief or familiar story appears? Is there some part of me that doesn't yet feel safe? What might I be protecting? What did I once learn about what happens when I show up this way?

These aren't questions that necessarily need immediate answers. In fact, I increasingly appreciate questions that we can live with for a while. Simply becoming curious can begin to reveal connections that we couldn't see while we were focused on trying to change ourselves.

And sometimes what appears to be standing in our way isn't really an obstacle at all. It may be a part of ourselves that has been trying, in the only way it knows how, to take care of us. Perhaps it doesn't need to be defeated or pushed aside. Perhaps it needs to be understood, listened to, and eventually welcomed into a larger experience of who we are.

As that happens, something else may become possible. The values that matter most to us no longer have to carry quite so much of our past.

They become freer.

And perhaps so do we.

A question to sit with:

What matters deeply to you—and what seems to get in the way of living it more fully?

If you'd like to explore this inquiry more deeply, my eBook, Living From What Matters, explores how our values are shaped, what can constrain their expression, and what it might mean to live more freely from what genuinely matters to us.