Goals vs Values: Why Your Goals Keep Failing

You’ve been setting goals your whole life, and you’ve been breaking them your whole life. It’s not because you’re undisciplined, but it’s because you’ve been asking goals to do something they were never designed to do.

Think about your New Year’s resolutions cycle. Maybe you hold your fist against the sky like I do and say, this is going to be my year. But by February, the fizzle shows up. You haven’t stopped caring about the goal, but the struggle to stick with it has worn you out before the Super Bowl is even over.

The motivational internet will tell you that’s a discipline problem. You need more hustle. If you want it bad enough, you’ll work harder. But here’s what I’ve learned watching people in my therapy practice and my own experience. The struggle with your goals isn’t always a discipline problem. Sometimes it’s a direction problem. You’re trying to make goals do the work of values, and they weren’t designed for that.

Well, what’s the difference between goals and values? Goals are destinations. They’re time limited and measurable. You either achieve a goal or you don’t. They terminate. They end at some point. But values are direction. They’re about the kind of person you want to be. You’ll never complete your values as long as you’re alive. You’re always moving toward them or away from them.

Goals are fragile. You can have one bad week, one busy season, and one sickness, and you can break them. But your values are woven into your identity. They pull you back towards what you want.

So let me make this concrete. One of my values is to be a healthy, fit grandma who can get on the floor and play with my grandsons. I’ll always be working towards that as long as I’m alive, but I’ll have many goals along the way. I might need to eat more protein. I’ll certainly need to lift heavier weights and probably practice yoga for flexibility. And some of those things I’ll crush, but many of them I won’t. But my value remains the same.

So when a sleeve of Oreos presents itself on a stressful Friday afternoon, I have a choice. The goal of eat healthier is pretty fragile. I can talk myself out of that in two seconds. But when those Oreos are competing against a value like a healthy, fit GiGi who can get off the floor without grunting and making grunting noises, that’s a different fight. The value doesn’t break. It’s there for me every single time I have to choose it.

Here’s where this gets pretty practical. Picture yourself standing at a fork in the road. Behind you is everything that’s brought you to this moment. In front of you, the road splits in two directions. This is called the choice point. One direction is an arrow pointing towards what matters to you. This is towards your values, towards the person you want to become. At the end of that path is you moving through the world with integrity, purpose, intention.

The other direction has an arrow pointing away from what matters to you. On this path, you avoid what makes you uncomfortable. You move away from discomfort, fear. Anything that feels hard. At the end of that path is you moving through the world with broken commitments, poor habits, and abandoned dreams.

Here’s the thing. You’re standing at this choice point constantly, multiple times a day. Every choice takes you somewhere. When you choose to eat the donut instead of the mango, where did that move you, toward or away? When you left work early to get to your kid’s game on time, where did that move you? When you stayed in bed instead of going to the gym, where might that decision lead? When you worked on a side project after a long day at work, where could that go?

The question isn’t whether your choices are good or bad. That’s how we like to frame it. The question is, where are they taking you? Toward what you want? Or away from it?

Now here’s where most people get stuck. They skip the value step entirely and jump straight to goal setting. But if you don’t know what you want your life to look like, you can’t set goals that actually matter. I ask my therapy clients all the time, what do you want for your life? And a shocking number of them tell me no one has ever asked them that before. They know what they want to achieve. They just don’t know who they want to be.

So here’s the question. What kind of person do you want to be? Not what you think you should be or what other people want you to be. What do you want to stand for? Do you want to be someone who shows up for people? Someone who takes risks in their life. Someone who speaks the truth even when it costs them. Someone who built something that matters? You have to get specific. You can’t move towards something if you don’t know what that something is.

Once you know your values, your goals now have a job to do. Every goal on your list should move you toward one of your values. If you’ve got goals that don’t connect to any value, well, you may have found your problem.

When your goals connect to your values, discipline stops feeling like punishment because you’re not grinding through some random checklist. You’re building towards something specific. Decision making gets faster because you now have a framework. Is this choice moving me toward my values or away from them? Failed goals don’t destroy you because you just pivot to different tactics toward the same value. Your efforts start to feel less random and more intentional.

So why do those Oreo cookies keep winning? Well, because you’ve been asking them to compete against a goal. Eat healthier. Lose weight. Be disciplined. Goals are fragile. They break on a very bad day pretty easily. But when the Oreos are competing against a value, that’s a completely different fight.

So here’s what I want you to walk away with. Goals without values collapse under pressure. Values without goals are just good intentions that never become action. Values and goals work together. What do you want for your life? Not what do you want to achieve? What kind of person do you want to be standing at the end of your life? Start there. Then build goals that take you in that direction.