This Values Quiz Explains Why You Feel Off Even When Your Life Looks Fine

You’ve done the Enneagram. You’ve memorized your birth chart. You know your attachment style, your love language, and which Gilmore Girl you are. But if you still can’t figure out why your life looks good on paper and feels weirdly hollow in practice, it might be because you’ve never actually named what you value. 

On What We Said, hosts Jaci Smith and Chelsey Curtis sit down with Dr. Suzy Welch, the NYU professor and three-time New York Times bestselling author who created the Values Bridge. Nearly a quarter million people have taken it and the reason it’s blown up is because it doesn’t just tell you who you are—it tells you why your life feels the way it does.

Your values are not what you think they are

When Welch was teaching her career development class at NYU, students kept describing their values in the most generic, bumper-sticker terms imaginable. Family. Achievement. Hard work. “People would start talking about values in this incredibly vague, platitudinal, generic way,” she says. “And I’d be like, actually, to understand what you should do with your life, you have to understand your values in gritty, bloody, sweaty detail. You can’t just be like family, achievement, whatever. You got to get really detailed about it.” So she built the Values Bridge, which measures 16 specific values including:

• Beholderism: how much you care about how things look, including yourself
• Scope: how big, chaotic, and adventurous a life you want
• Agency: how much you need to be the one making decisions
• Affluence: how much financial wealth matters to you
• Achievement: your desire for success other people can see and you can feel
• Belovedness: how much you value romantic love
• Belonging: how much you want community, friends, and your people around you
• Radius: your desire to change the world, not just help people but blow systems up
• Family centrism: how much you want to organize your life around family
• Work centrism: how central work is to your identity
• Udeimonia: self-care and personal wellbeing
• Cosmos: faith and spirituality
• Voice: how much you need to be heard and express yourself

The authenticity gap is probably why you feel off

Knowing your values is one thing. The real gut punch is finding out how much you’re not living them. The quiz measures both, and the gap between the life you want and the life you’re actually living is called the “authenticity gap”—and it’s usually the reason everything looks fine but feels wrong. “When I’m not living my values, my energy comes down,” Welch says. “I’m not mad. I’m not sad. I’m just a person who’s not living their values at this moment.” 

In all the years she’s been running this quiz, only one student has ever come back with zero gap —a 24-year-old engineer who walked up to her and asked if his results were broken. Turns out they weren’t. He was just genuinely, completely happy, which Welch says she’d never actually seen before in the wild.

Stop shaming yourself for what you value

“If you’re not hurting anybody, your values are your values,” Welch says. “A lot of pain happens when we try to deny or suppress them.” People often feel guilty about what ranked highest after taking the quiz because they’ve spent years being told that wanting money is shallow or caring about aesthetics is superficial. But that guilt? It’s not yours. You just absorbed it from everyone around you.

That said, Welch is very clear that values are not virtues. Virtues are the things everyone agrees on—honesty, kindness, respect, decency. “If you don’t want the virtue-y things, I don’t want to know you,” she says. But values are just choices about how you want to live. “A person who’s different than you is not a flawed version of you,” she says. A monk who chants all day and has absolutely no interest in family isn’t worse than someone who organizes their entire life around their kids. They just want different things. And the sooner you stop performing values that aren’t yours, the sooner everything starts to feel less exhausting.

Listen to the full episode on What We Said with Jaci Smith and Chelsey Curtis, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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