When Values and Actions Fall Out of Alignment

What happens when other people’s urgent needs begin to overwhelm our own?

In a recent Leadership Story Talks debrief, hosts Jerome Deroy and Julienne Ryan reflected on their conversation with Giovanna Rossi and the way urgency, responsibility, and values can collide in our work and lives. One idea stood out immediately: when other people’s urgent items continually take priority, we can find ourselves overwhelmed, depleted, and even burned out.

The conversation also returned to a deeper question. What happens when our values are no longer aligned with our actions? It is one thing to name our values when life is going smoothly. It is another to live by them when professional expectations, family responsibilities, cultural scripts, and other people’s demands begin to pull us in different directions.

That tension is where many people, especially women navigating multiple roles, find themselves asking: How did I get here, and what needs to change?

The Weight of Other People’s Urgency

Julienne noted that this topic is not exclusively gender-specific, but it often resonates strongly with women and female colleagues, particularly at pivotal points in life. Many are balancing professional responsibilities with caregiving, parenting, elder care, relationships, and the everyday work of keeping lives moving.

In those moments, it can become difficult to prioritize one’s own needs and values. The default may be to step back, absorb the pressure, and keep going. But that cost does not disappear. It often shows up in the body, in health, in exhaustion, and in the quiet sense that something is out of sync.

Giovanna’s work, as Jerome noted, focuses on women, workplace policy, families, and the systems that shape how people are expected to work and care at the same time. That experience gives weight to the conversation because these are not abstract issues. They show up in schedules, benefits, leave policies, leadership decisions, and the unspoken assumptions people carry about what a “good” employee, parent, partner, or leader is supposed to be able to handle.

Burnout does not happen only because there is too much to do. Sometimes it happens because what we are doing is no longer connected to what we say matters most.

Values Are Easy Until They Are Tested

Values can sound simple when we list them. Integrity. Trust. Family. Service. Excellence. Fairness. Health.

But as Jerome pointed out, it is easier to live by our values when everything is going well. The real test comes when life pushes against them. What happens when a workplace culture rewards constant availability, but one of your core values is family? What happens when you value honesty, but feel pressure to maintain a polished version of success? What happens when you say health matters, but your calendar says otherwise?

This is where values become more than words. They become decisions.

Jerome reflected that values can remain abstract unless we define them through experience. It is useful to ask not only, “What are my values?” but also, “When did I feel most aligned with them?” or “When did I feel the cost of betraying them?” Those moments often reveal more than any list could. A value becomes clearer when we can connect it to a lived experience, a pivotal moment, or a time when something inside us said, “This matters.”

The more specifically we can define our values, the easier it becomes to notice when we are drifting away from them.

The Stories Behind the Policies

Julienne made an important connection between personal values and structural change. Giovanna works with others to create policy, but before anyone can create meaningful policy, they need to collect stories. They need to understand what people are actually experiencing and what context informs those experiences.

Policies that do not account for lived reality can miss the point. They may look good on paper while failing to address the pressures people actually face. This is true in government, business, professional services, and organizations of every size. Before leaders can design better systems, they have to listen closely enough to understand the stories beneath the symptoms.

That also means questioning assumptions. Julienne described the “press release” many of us carry around: the polished version of how things are going, how well we are coping, and how much we can manage. But that press release rarely tells the full truth about what it takes to get things done.

If we want work to work better, we have to challenge the myths that keep people pretending.

Challenging the Scripts We Inherit

One of the most powerful parts of the debrief centered on the scripts people carry, especially the cultural myth that everything can happen all at once and happen perfectly. Julienne recalled conversations from years ago about how women are often fed stories that suggest they can build careers, raise children, sustain relationships, care for others, and maintain a full life without conflict, tradeoffs, or strain.

That is the Hollywood version of life. Real life rarely works that way.

Life has stages, conflicts, ebbs, and flows. There are seasons when caregiving takes more space, seasons when work expands, seasons when relationships need attention, and seasons when rest becomes non-negotiable. The danger comes when we pretend those realities do not exist and continue measuring ourselves against a fantasy of perfection.

The work, then, is not only to ask whether our values are aligned with our actions. It is also to ask whether the scripts we inherited are shaping what we think our values should be. Are we pursuing what matters to us, or are we performing what we think we are supposed to carry?

That question can open the door to a more honest kind of leadership.

The Greek Chorus in Our Heads

Julienne offered an image that captures the inner noise many people carry: the Greek chorus. These are the voices that follow us around, commenting on what we should do, how we should behave, what we should be able to handle, and where we are falling short.

Sometimes those voices come from family systems, workplaces, cultural expectations, past experiences, or internalized pressure. They may tell us to keep going, not complain, be grateful, stay available, say yes, look composed, or prove we can do it all.

But not every voice deserves the stage.

Part of the work of reconnecting with our values is deciding which voices need to be moved offstage. What is reality? What is actually doable? What matters now? What can be simplified? What expectation no longer belongs?

When we make space from the chorus, we can begin to hear our own voice more clearly.

From Burnout to Awareness

Jerome reflected that when we feel overwhelmed or burned out, there is often a need to pause and tend to the immediate exhaustion. But after that, there is also value in returning to the experience with curiosity. Why did this happen? What demands did I accept that I might have questioned? Where did I allow someone else’s urgency to become my own? What story was I telling myself about what I had to carry?

This is not about blame. It is about awareness.

Sometimes the pressure comes from outside us. Sometimes it comes from systems that need to change. And sometimes, once we have recovered enough to look closely, we can see the places where we participated in the pattern by saying yes when we meant no, staying silent when we needed support, or treating our own needs as less legitimate than everyone else’s.

That awareness creates the possibility of a course correction. It helps us move from reacting to choosing. It helps us return to what actually drives us and what matters enough to protect.

The Power of Telling the Truth

Julienne closed with a reminder that transparency can open doors. When we show our hands and tell people what is really going on, we often discover that we are not the only ones experiencing it.

That can be the hardest part. The facade is familiar. Many of us are trained to keep it in place, especially in professional environments. But when someone is willing to say, “This is what is happening,” or “This is not sustainable,” or “I need to make a different choice,” it can make room for others to tell the truth too.

That truth-telling is not only personal. It can become collective. It can inform better conversations, better policies, better leadership, and better support for people whose lives do not fit neatly into old assumptions about work and success.

Connection often begins when someone takes the risk of being honest.

Returning to What Matters

The debrief offered a simple but challenging invitation: look back at your own experiences and notice where your values were reinforced, where they were challenged, and what happened as a result.

Where did you feel most aligned? Where did you feel the strain of living out of alignment? Whose urgent needs have been taking over your time, energy, or attention? What myths or inherited scripts have you been trying to live up to? And what would it look like to course correct, even in a small way?

Values are not only things we believe. They are things we practice, protect, and return to when life gets complicated.

Because when our actions drift too far from what matters most, the cost eventually shows up. And when we are willing to listen to that signal, tell the truth, and realign, we create the possibility of living and leading with more clarity, honesty, and care.