Finding What You Stand For

Your values aren't preferences you pick from a menu. They're patterns that have been driving your choices all along — especially under pressure. The problem is, you're too close to your own patterns to see them. In this episode, Sarah breaks down how to excavate your real core values and turn them into language precise enough to guide every career decision you make.

Sarah shares how she accidentally discovered her own values while writing a business plan for someone else's company, why generic values like "empowerment" and "integrity" aren't precise enough to protect you, and what it actually feels like when you're in a role that honors what you stand for versus one that violates it. This episode moves between the moments that break you down and the ones that light you up — because both are showing you exactly who you are.

In this episode:

• Why you can't find your values through reflection alone — and what to do instead
• The difference between surface-level values and precise values that actually guide decisions
• How to recognize value violations before they cost you your health, your confidence, or your time
• What alignment really feels like — and why more complexity with the right fit means less exhaustion
• Three practices to start this week: a fury log, energy tracking three layers deep, and testing one values-based boundary

If this episode resonates and you're ready for precision instead of guesswork, the RVA Blueprint is a fully customized strategic analysis where Sarah helps you identify your real core values with precise language, map where they've been violated or honored, and build a focused action plan. Special pricing to celebrate the podcast release, delivered within 30 days. 

New episodes weekly. Follow The Career Strategist wherever you listen.

Chapters

• 0:00 Burnout, Broken Promises & the Fury That Finally Spoke Up
• 1:06 Fury Isn’t a Flaw—It’s Data (and You Need the Language)
• 1:46 Why You Can’t See Your Own Values (and Why Most Books Won’t Help)
• 4:11 The Golden Rule Trap: Projecting Your Values onto Others
• 5:15 The Snake-Oil COO Offer: Finding Your Values in a Business Plan
• 7:25 From Generic Values to Precision: Sovereignty, Agency, Substance, Shared Power
• 9:30 When You Ignore the Signal: Misalignment, Stress, and Value Violations
• 12:31 The Other Side of the Data: What Alignment Feels Like in a Great Role
• 14:36 Values Don’t Clock Out: Boundaries, Relationships, and Your Kids Watching
• 17:17 Start Here: 3 Questions to Surface Your Core Values
• 18:35 How to Use the Data: Fury Log + 3-Layer Energy Tracking (Example Walkthrough)
• 20:43 This Week’s Action Plan: 3 Practices to Build Value Clarity
• 22:23 Why Most People Get Stuck + The RVA Blueprint (and What’s Next)
• 25:27 Closing: Choose Opportunities on Purpose, Not by Reaction

Transcript

I was on my couch, completely burned out, when my boss called. For months I'd been begging for help. I needed more people on my team. Every conversation ended the same way. "Soon. Let me see what I can do." But soon never came.

And then I dropped a ball. It was small, really. But it felt like a boulder. And I couldn't hold it in any longer.

I exploded. Not with screaming, but with this cold, calculated fury that I didn't even know I had inside of me. I laid out exactly what would happen if they didn't give me the resources I needed. I was precise about the risks they were creating.

I still didn't get the headcount. But that moment taught me something crucial. That fury wasn't a character flaw. It was precision. My internal system detecting value violations and trying to get my attention.

I'm Sarah Caminiti, and this is episode three of The Career Strategist.

Here's the thing that nobody tells you in those moments. When you get furious at work, when something happens and you can't think straight because your heart is racing — that's not a problem you need to fix. That's data. Data that you need to use.

But I didn't have language for what that fury was telling me. It took me years to figure this out. And today I'm going to show you how to start this work — because the cost of not having this language is higher than you think.

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Your values aren't preferences that you choose from a menu. They're the patterns that have been driving your choices all along, especially under pressure. But here's the problem. You can't see your own values because they're embedded in every choice you make. It's like asking a fish to describe water. You are too close to your own patterns to recognize them.

And nobody teaches you how to do this. There is no course in school that says "here's how to figure out what you value and how you move through the world." It's not in the curriculum. And I can tell you from years of searching — it's not in the books either.

I need to go here for a second because this one gets to me. I spent years reading career books, leadership books, self-help books, convinced that the next one was going to be the ticket. And here's what I realized. If a book just gives you high-level success stories with nothing you can try to do that day, it's not built to make you stronger. As much as it wants to be.

And I swear there is something sinister in those books. Because when you can't
achieve what this woman with generational wealth, a famous name, and nothing to lose achieved — or man, insert your flavor here — these success stories that don't disclose all the hands that helped them along the way, that lean so hard into "self-made" instead of leaning into the teachings of Ubuntu, which if you missed the essay on this in the newsletter means "I am because we are"  — that erasure of the collective, the gatekeeping of the secret sauce, it keeps people with real potential from succeeding. Because you're comparing your chapter one to someone else's chapter twenty and blaming yourself for the gap.

OK — tangent. But it matters. Because the point is this: I was not going to stumble onto my values through self-reflection or a self-help book. It came from the strangest possible place.

Let me show you what I mean.

For most of my career, I operated from the golden rule — treat others the way you want to be treated. Seems solid. Easy to navigate. But the golden rule has a fatal flaw. It assumes other people are paying attention to how you treat them and will reciprocate accordingly.

I was giving my all to be everything to everyone, because that's what I thought good leadership looked like. I was treating my team with transparency, investment in their growth, genuine care about their success. But they were giving me back nothing. A handful of bad hires later, I realized I was making massive assumptions about people. I was projecting my values onto them without ever making those values explicit. Treating them according to my internal compass and expecting them to respond to a compass they couldn't see.

That's when I started being explicit about my needs, my approach, my standards. But I still didn't have the language for what those standards actually were. I just knew something fundamental wasn't working. 

And then a tech founder approached me about taking over his company. I hated his product with a passion, having been forced to use it for years. I sent scathing emails detailing all the ways it was failing the user, and we got on a call and that turned into multiple calls and next thing I know we’re talking about introducing me to the company is the new COO. 

He'd brought on an investor, regretted it, and wanted me to step in and run things so he could go bootstrap something new. I was all in. I started building out a business plan — vision, strategy, and core values. What would guide this company's decisions? What would it stand for?

I started with values that felt right — empowerment, optimization, active listening, and the golden rule. Noble-sounding words. Important-seeming. The kind of values you see on corporate websites.

And then I found a Notion doc he forgot to change the permissions on. His actual plan — to work behind the scenes, undermine the company I'd be leading, tank it, and take all the customers for himself.

Snake oil wrapped in an opportunity.

But here's what stayed with me from that wreckage. Those values I'd been writing? I thought I was writing them for a company. I wasn't. They were mine. They were how I operate. They were what drives me. I never would have sat down on my own and asked "what do I actually value and how do I enter the world?" That's just not a question we think to ask ourselves. But I did it for a business plan, and in writing values for a company, I found myself on the page.

The problem was, those first values were still surface level. They weren't wrong — they weren't precise enough to actually guide difficult decisions. The more I worked with them, the more I saw gaps. Empowerment was too vague. Empowerment how? For what purpose? The golden rule had already failed me. What was I actually trying to protect?

Through systemic reflection — the kind I'll teach you the beginning of today —those generic values evolved into something much more precise.

Personal sovereignty. I don't outsource my voice. I move through work with full ownership of my choices, my impact, and my standards. It's not about control — it's about clarity.

Growth with agency. I've grown the most when I was trusted to lead, not told how. I refuse to be positioned as a passive recipient of change. I want transformation, but only when it comes with autonomy.

Substance first. I have deep respect for clarity, depth, and discernment. I can see right through surface-level thinking and empty rhetoric, and I have no patience for it anymore.

Shared power. I don't want to be the only one winning — that's lonely. I'm committed to building environments where leadership isn't gatekept and success doesn't require someone else's erasure.

This wasn't about becoming someone new. This was about recognizing who I'd always been. The bones were in those first four values, but I had to dig to find the real structure.

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But here's the thing about not having that language yet. It makes you vulnerable in ways you don't even realize.

After I started getting explicit about my standards — but before I had this precision — I entered a role that looked like everything I'd been waiting for. On paper, it checked every box. I convinced myself: this will be different. This is the one.

But the fury didn't come all at once. It crept in. Small things at first. Things I could explain away. I told myself I was being too sensitive. I told myself to give it more time. I was so desperate for this to be the right fit that I was actively minimizing what my gut was screaming at me.

And do you know what happens when you minimize your fury? Your body keeps score. I lost ten pounds in a month. Not from a diet. From stress. From the weight of pretending that what I was experiencing wasn't really happening.

The power dynamics from episode two — they were working their magic. The gatekeeping, the subtle positioning, the slow erosion of autonomy. And for a time, they were winning. Because I was letting them. Because I wanted so badly to believe I was wrong about what I was feeling.

Until I was covered in too much blood from the barbed wire to pretend anymore. And I had to accept that yet again, I had been sold snake oil. A role that promised alignment and delivered violation after violation.

Looking back, I can map every moment of fury in that role to a specific value being violated. Working two full-time jobs without the resources I needed — personal sovereignty. Growth opportunities that came without real decision-making authority, just more responsibility — growth with agency. Meetings filled with surface-level conversations instead of actual problem
solving — substance first. Being excluded from decisions that affected my work — shared power.

But I couldn't see any of that while I was living it. All I felt was guilt. Shame. Rage. What I'm showing you now is the result of becoming a detective after the fact — connecting dots, testing theories, refining language until I could finally name what had been operating underneath every choice I'd ever made.

And that's when I understood something critical. Without precise language for what you stand for, you can't evaluate what you're walking into. You feel the misalignment, but you can't name it. So you explain it away. You accommodate. You shrink. And your body absorbs what your mind refuses to acknowledge.

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Now let me show you the other side. Because fury isn't the only data. Your values show up just as clearly — maybe even more clearly — in moments of alignment.

I'm in a role right now that is fundamentally different from anything I've experienced before. I'm building a function from scratch. Doing complex strategy work that actually leverages not just my skills but my values. I have autonomy. And here's what's wild — the work is a million times more complex than the babysitting I was doing in past roles. And I end my days more energized. Lighter. I'm not carrying emotional baggage I never needed in the first place.

Do you hear the difference? More complexity, less exhaustion. That's what alignment does. When your values are being honored, the difficulty of the work doesn't drain you — it fuels you. When I was misaligned, simple tasks felt crushing. When I'm aligned, hard problems feel like exactly what I was built for.

When someone comes to me with a problem they've already thought through — not just dumping it on my desk, but genuinely collaborating — that energizes me. That's shared power in action. When I get to redesign a process from the ground up instead of executing someone else's plan, I'm electric. That's growth with agency being honored.

The detective work isn't just about cataloging what went wrong. It's about recognizing the pattern in both directions. What violates your values and what honors them. Because if you only focus on the violations, you'll know what to avoid but not what to move toward. Strategic career decisions require both.

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And I want to take this further, because this work doesn't stay inside your career. It can't. Your values don't clock out at five o'clock.

When I finally had language for what I stood for, it changed how I showed up in every relationship. The way I explained my boundaries evolved. The way I articulated my needs evolved. The clarity around why those needs mattered — not just to me, but for the health of the relationship — that evolved too.

And it meant having difficult conversations with people who had been in my life for a long time. Because once you can see the pattern, you can't unsee it. I couldn't exist in spaces where my values were being violated over and over. Not at work. And not in my personal life either.

This work isn't easy. But when you do find alignment — when you assess how you feel with your people and it's real — you treasure it in a way you never could before. Because you know what the alternative feels like. You know what violation costs.

My best friend of twenty years — we don't always make sense on paper. We walked five hundred miles across a country together after knowing each other for mere weeks. We were working in a restaurant that was completely misaligned with who we were at our core. Waitressing, working twenty-hour days, banking insane money. And while everyone else was gossiping and partying, we were staying after to clean up, dancing like vultures to John Mayer songs, laughing until it hurt.

Alignment is peace. It is energy. It is warmth. She's my north star. She is alignment in its truest form.

And when you know what that feels like — when you have language for why certain people and certain roles and certain moments feel like home — you stop settling for anything less.

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So how do you actually begin this work? You start with the data that's been trying to get your attention all along.

Here are three questions that will give you the starting material.

First — what makes you furious at work? Not annoyed. Not frustrated. Furious. The kind of anger that makes you want to write emails you shouldn't send. Those reactions are not random. They're pointing to values violations.

Second — when do you feel the most authentically yourself at work? Not when you get praise, not when you get promoted. When does work feel effortless — because it's aligned with who you actually are?

Third — what do you judge other people for professionally? Yes, this one is uncomfortable. But if you give yourself permission to actually think about it, it's very revealing. Do you judge people who take credit for others' work? Who promise things they can't deliver? Who stay surface level all the time? Your judgments are mirrors of your own values.

Now let me show you what it looks like to actually use this. Say you had a meeting today where your manager presented your project to leadership without including you. You're sitting at your desk afterward, jaw tight, replaying every word.

Your fury log entry might look like this. "Tuesday, 3pm. Project review meeting. Manager presented the rollout plan I built — used my slides, my data — to the leadership team. I wasn't invited. Found out from a colleague afterward. Felt rage, then something heavier. Like being erased."

Don't analyze it yet. Just capture it. Now imagine at the end of the week you've got five entries. And you notice something — three of the five aren't about workload or deadlines. They're about being excluded from rooms where decisions are being made about your work. That's not random frustration. That's a pattern. And that pattern is pointing at something.

Now do the energy tracking, but go three layers deep. Don't stop at "meetings drain me" — that drains everybody. Ask why. Say the answer is: "It's not meetings. It's meetings where I can see the decision was already made before we walked in." Layer two — why does that bother you specifically? "Because my expertise is irrelevant. I'm there for optics." Layer three: "I value being in environments where my contribution actually shapes the outcome. When that's taken away, it doesn't feel like a bad meeting — it feels like a fundamental violation."

Now you're getting somewhere. Now you have raw material that's specific enough to work with.

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Here are three practices to put this into action this week.

First — keep a fury log for the next seven days. Notice moments when you feel that flash of anger or frustration at work. Don't analyze it in the moment. Just capture it. What happened? Who was involved? What specifically triggered the reaction? At the end of the week, look for patterns. And you can write down things from your past too — you don't need all the details, just the high-level pattern so you can start seeing what's consistent.

Second — start energy tracking, three layers deep. Notice what gives you energy versus what drains it, and pay just as much attention to what energizes you. When did you lose track of time? When did work feel effortless? Those moments are showing you your values being honored, and that data is just as important as the fury.

Third — test one values-based boundary. Choose one small situation this week where you honor what you think might be the start of a value instead of defaulting to accommodation. If you suspect you value substance over performance, speak up when a conversation stays surface level. If you think you value shared power, ask to be included in a decision that affects your work. Start small. But start. Notice what happens when you align your actions with your actual standards instead of other people's comfort levels.

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Now I want to be honest with you about something. These practices will give you raw material, and raw material is valuable. But turning that raw material into the kind of precision I showed you — going from "empowerment" to "personal sovereignty" — that's where most people hit a wall.

You're too close to your own patterns to see them as patterns. They just feel like how you are. Your fury feels personal, not strategic — you've been trained to dismiss it. And when you first try to name your values, you land on things like integrity or collaboration or excellence, and they feel right enough that you stop digging. They're not precise enough to guide actual decisions.

I know this because I lived it. Do you know how many personality tests I've taken over the course of my life trying to make sense of me? That's why I eventually built something different.

All of this connects directly to the flattening work from episode one. When you don't have language for what you stand for, other people get to define not just how you're seen but what you should care about. They flatten not just your identity but your entire value system.

And it connects to the power dynamics from episode two. When you can't name what you won't compromise on, you end up compromising on everything. You can't navigate the cardigan or assess room colors strategically if you don't know what you're optimizing for.

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If this episode resonated and you're ready for precision instead of guesswork  — I created the RVA Blueprint to do this work with you. Reflect, Validate, Align. It's a fully customized strategic analysis. Not a personality test. Not a generic template. It's deliberate detective work where I help you identify your real core values with precise language, map where they've been violated or honored, and build a focused action plan so you can move forward with clarity. You get a comprehensive, polished PDF built around your lived experiences and patterns, delivered within thirty days of completing your intake. It's $197 and the link is directly in the show notes.

Whether you work with me or not — start gathering the data. Start treating your fury as information instead of a problem. Start paying attention to what energizes you. And start noticing when work feels effortless because you're in alignment.

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Next week we're taking this foundation into the real world. Strategic career decision making — how to evaluate opportunities when you're clear on your values, when to make your move versus when to wait, and how to say no without burning bridges. Because the thing about having clear values — they don't just tell you what to accept. They tell you what to walk away from. And knowing when to walk away and how to walk away strategically? That's how you stop reacting to opportunities and start choosing them.

I'm Sarah Caminiti, and this is The Career Strategist. Your values aren't preferences to be negotiated away. They're the foundation of a career that actually serves you. And you are capable of so much more than you realize. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.