When Your Values Conflict: One Says Strive. The Other Says Surrender.

I found Suzy Welch the way I find most things that end up mattering: I was listening to someone else talk about their work and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It was Simon Sinek’s podcast. Suzy was his guest. She was talking about values – not in the way values are usually discussed in business spaces, as a list of aspirational words on a website, but as a genuine diagnostic. A framework for understanding why your life feels the way it does, and what to do about the distance between the life you’re living and the one you actually want.

I devoured everything she said.

I found her book, Becoming You, read it, then found The Values Bridge assessment. I took it.

I signed up for her online workshop. I seriously considered flying to New York for a weekend to take her in-person course at NYU.

That level of response to a framework tells you something.

It tells you that what she was describing matched something I already knew to be true, but hadn’t yet found the right container for.

The work with Alice Karolina had given me my first real experience of values excavation. It had surfaced Authenticity, Balance, Connection, and Empathy as my core values and shown me what it felt like to have them named through story rather than selected from a list.

That experience shaped how I came to Suzy’s work. I wasn’t coming to it cold. I was coming to it already knowing what good values work could feel like, and recognizing that this was more of it.

What The Values Bridge Actually Measures

Most values frameworks ask you to choose. Here are fifty words — pick the ten that resonate. Check the boxes. Walk away with a list.

The Values Bridge, developed by Suzy Welch, does something different.

It measures sixteen specific human motivations – not virtues, not aspirational qualities, but actual motivators – and ranks them in order of importance to you.

It also measures something most values assessments don’t touch: the Authenticity Gap. The distance between how much you hold a value in your heart and how fully you’re currently able to express it in your daily life.

The lower the gap, the more aligned your life is with what you actually value. The higher the gap, the more distance there is between who you are and how you’re living.

Think of it like cholesterol, Suzy says. The lower the better.

My five core values came back as: Cosmos. Workcentrism. Radius. Non Sibi. Voice.

Cosmos — The Anchor

Cosmos reflects how much you desire to find guidance and meaning from a higher spiritual power. For those with high Cosmos, faith isn’t a compartment of life, it’s the organizing principle underneath everything else.

My Authenticity Gap on Cosmos was zero. Which means I’m living this one fully.

That felt right. Faith has always been the anchor. Even when I couldn’t articulate it clearly, even in the seasons when I was most lost, there was something I kept returning to – a sense that I was not navigating alone, that my work had a source beyond just my own effort.

When I started Fresh Take Productions and didn’t know where clients would come from, I prayed.

When the path forward was unclear, I leaned into that anchor rather than away from it.

I’m not the most visibly devout person. I don’t wear it on my sleeve. But it is the foundation. Everything else sits on top of it.

Workcentrism — The Relief

Workcentrism reflects how much you want work to be the organizing principle of your life, by choice. Not because you have to. Because it genuinely is your preference.

My Authenticity Gap on Workcentrism was also zero.

And reading that – and the description that came with it – gave me something I hadn’t expected: relief.

The world has a word for people like me. Workaholic. It’s not a compliment. It implies dysfunction, imbalance, and an inability to be present for anything outside of work. And I’ve spent years navigating that label – defending myself against it, questioning myself because of it, wondering if something was wrong with me for genuinely loving the work.

The Values Bridge named it differently. Workcentrism isn’t dysfunction. It’s a motivator.

For some people, work is genuinely a source of identity, purpose, and fulfillment; not because they can’t stop, but because they don’t want to. Because the work itself is where they come alive.

I wrote about the chicken coop experience here, where, even at ten years old, Workcentrism showed up. My idea of fun was building a floor in an abandoned outbuilding. Work was play. It always has been. And seeing that named as a value — not a flaw, not a disorder, just a core motivator — felt like finally being understood.

Radius — The Tension

Radius reflects your authentic answer to the question: How much do I want to change the world?

Core Radius people aspire to be part of transformation on a systemic scale. Not just helping the individual in front of them. Shifting the culture, influencing the systems, making an impact that outlasts the moment.

My Authenticity Gap on Radius was 100 out of 100…. ya. Ooph.

That’s the highest possible gap. It means the distance between how deeply I hold this value and how fully I’m currently living it is as wide as it can be.

I sat with that for a long time.

Because it’s true. I want my work to matter beyond the individual client. I want the frameworks I’ve built to travel. I want the book to reach people I’ll never meet. I want Experience & Impact™ to do something in the world that outlasts me. That desire is real and deep and has been there for as long as I can remember.

And for years – beyond a decade, really – I was not living it at full capacity. The Valued Workforce® work started years before this assessment. The Experience & Impact™ philosophy existed as a domain I owned in 2021 but hadn’t yet fully inhabited. The book was always coming. The gap between who I wanted to be in the world and where I actually was felt like the biggest valley.

The Radius result didn’t shame me. It just named the gap honestly. And naming it was clarifying because once you can see the gap clearly, you can make intentional choices about closing it.

Closing that gap is, in no small part, why this series exists. Why Experience & Impact™ exists. Why I’m finally, fully here.

The Radius/Luminance Conflict

Here’s where The Values Bridge gets interesting in a way most assessments don’t.

Radius – the desire to change the world at a systemic level – has a natural tension with Luminance, which reflects how much you desire fame, public recognition, and visibility.

My Luminance score was low. Very low.

And The Values Bridge conflict analysis named this directly: high Radius requires visibility to have impact.

You can’t shift systems from the shadows. At some point, the world needs to hear your message, see your work, and engage with your ideas. And if you’re not drawn to the spotlight, if visibility feels more like a burden than a goal, you have a real tension on your hands.

This conflict has followed me for years.

I want the work to matter. I don’t want to be the one standing at the front of the room making it matter. I’d rather the framework be the thing that gets known, not me. I’d rather the book speak than the author.

But I’ve been learning… slowly, honestly, that I am the vehicle by which the work gets seen. And that means getting over myself, at least partially. Showing up. Being willing to be visible in service of the impact, rather than staying comfortable in the quiet.

I’m still working on that. But I understand the tension now in a way I didn’t before this assessment.

Interestingly, the Fascination Advantage piece pointed to the same conflict – Prestige as my dormant trigger, the one that costs the most energy.

Two different frameworks, the same honest truth about where I live in relation to the spotlight.

Non Sibi — The Authenticity Gap That Makes Sense

Non Sibi is Latin for “not for oneself.” It reflects how much you need to help others; not on a systemic scale like Radius, but directly, personally, in the lives of individual people.

My Non Sibi score was high. My Authenticity Gap was -50, which means I have too much of this value showing up in my life relative to what’s sustainable.

That negative gap – more of a value expressed than what’s healthy – is rare on core values. But it made complete sense when I saw it.

The Helper instinct. The knee-jerk yes. The giving that happens before I check my own capacity. The Enneagram Type 2 material I wrote about – all of it was already showing up in the data. The Non Sibi score was just another way of the assessments saying the same thing: you give more than you can sustain, and that gap is costing you.

The ongoing work is discernment. Not stopping the giving – the Non Sibi is real, and it’s mine, and I don’t want to lose it. But learning to give from capacity rather than from depletion. Learning that Non Sibi and self-care are not opposites. They’re partners.

Voice – Still Closing

Voice reflects the desire to express your authentic self – mind, body, and soul – without constraint. Those with core Voice want to be seen and known as they actually are, not as a role or a performance.

My Authenticity Gap on Voice was -35. Another negative – meaning more Voice is showing up than what feels comfortable or fully owned yet.

I think about that, and I think about the recent incident on the boardwalk with my sister in Australia. I was visiting my baby sister and her new son. He was only 6 months old, and she was giving me a lovely day out at the beach. It had been raining a lot, and we were both happy to be outside.

After spending some time on the beach, she asked me what I wanted to do next – keep walking the boardwalk, or go back towards town and look at the shops… and I froze. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t choose. I couldn’t even determine if I had a preference! I was so used to checking in with everyone else first that I’d lost the reflex to consult myself.

That’s a Voice gap. Not because the value isn’t there –  it’s clearly there, and it’s asserting itself more than I’ve historically been comfortable with. But because taking up space has been a practice, not a default, because learning to say this is what I want, this is who I am, this is the space I occupy, has required deliberate work.

Experience & Impact™, this series, the upcoming book – they’re part of closing that gap. Not performatively, but as an act of genuine self-expression after a long time of making myself smaller than I was.

The Values That Conflict – And What They Reveal

The Values Bridge also maps your top conflicts – the places where your core values pull against each other.

Mine: Workcentrism and Cosmos. Workcentrism and Voice. Radius and Luminance.

On the first: one says strive, the other says surrender. Work wants to organize my life. Faith reminds me that my life is not entirely mine to steer. I’ve been navigating that tension my whole adult life — the drive to build alongside the conviction that what gets built isn’t solely up to me.

On the second: work is central, but Voice wants full self-expression. Some environments punish individuality. The answer isn’t to choose one over the other — it’s to build environments where both can breathe. Which is, in some ways, exactly what I’ve been doing.

And on the third: I want to change things at scale. But the spotlight is not my natural language. The resolution, I’ve come to believe, is strategic visibility — showing up where it serves the mission, not where it serves the ego. Selective engagement. The work out front, and me alongside it.

The Values Sheet – And Why This Work Matters

Around the time I found Suzy’s work, my husband did a values exercise through his therapist’s office. It wasn’t The Values Bridge. It was a simple worksheet with two columns. Check the boxes that matter to you. Have your spouse do the same. Bring the sheets back at your next session.

We each completed it separately, and he brought them back.

His top values were almost entirely about calm. Steadiness. Rest. Ease. Taking it slow.

Mine were almost entirely the opposite.

The therapist glanced at the sheets, said something like “yes, that makes sense,” and moved on. The sheets were set aside. The conversation moved elsewhere.

I remember thinking: this is exactly the problem.

Not that our values were different – of course they’re different. Two people will always have different motivators. But that difference is information. It’s important information. And in that moment, it was treated like a footnote.

Real values work doesn’t set the sheet aside.

It asks what those differences mean.

It explores where the friction lives.

It helps two people – or a person and their own life – understand the gap between what they actually value and how they’re currently living.

That moment was part of what drew me so deeply into Suzy’s framework because she takes this seriously in a way I hadn’t seen before. The Values Bridge isn’t a list you check. It’s a mirror you sit with. And sitting with it changes things.

What I’m Still Learning

The Values Bridge is the most recent formal assessment in this series. And in some ways, it’s the most complete picture – not because it covers everything the others don’t, but because it measures the gap between the ideal and the actual in a way that makes the work feel genuinely urgent.

My Radius gap keeps me honest. The distance between who I want to be in the world and where I currently am is real – and visible – and motivating in a way that a zero gap wouldn’t be. I’m closing it.

That’s the point of all of this. Not the assessments, but the closing of a gap.