Sipping a meticulously pulled flat white at a quiet, minimalist roastery nestled along Kampong Bahru Road this morning, one cannot help but observe the morning commute with a sense of detached sociological intrigue. Outside the glass, the Singaporean workforce marches toward the central business district—a relentless, highly caffeinated procession of sharp tailoring and digital distraction. We are a metropolis that has engineered out inefficiency, a city that prizes velocity above almost all else. Yet, if you were to stop the average professional at the traffic light on Cecil Street and ask them where they are actually rushing to, the answer is often a variation of a prescribed societal goal: the next promotion, the larger flat, the accumulation of capital. We are moving incredibly fast, but how many of us are moving in the right direction?
This crisis of direction sits at the heart of the second critical pillar in Dr Kirren Schnack’s acclaimed book, Tools for Life: 10 Essential Therapy Skills Everyone Should Know. Before we can set boundaries or manage conflict, we must first establish the architecture of our own convictions: our core values. Without them, we are simply outsourcing our life’s trajectory to the loudest external demands. At Real Value SG, we maintain that the highest possible return on investment is not found in an equity portfolio, but in cognitive and behavioural alignment. Today, we continue our ten-part series on democratising mental well-being, exploring how you can utilise Generative AI as a sophisticated, private sounding board to define your values, translate them into action, and stay relentlessly on track.
The Ontology of Values: What Exactly Are They?
To begin this self-directed therapeutic journey, we must define our entities with absolute precision. In psychological terms, values are not goals. This is a common and destructive misconception. A goal is a destination you can reach and cross off a list—securing a Build-To-Order (BTO) flat in a mature estate, achieving a six-figure annual salary, or passing the bar exam.
Values, conversely, are the compass. They are the overarching principles that guide how you behave on the journey toward those goals. Values are ongoing, chosen qualities of action. If your goal is to become a senior director, your values dictate how you climb that ladder. Do you value ruthlessness and hyper-competitiveness, or do you value mentorship, integrity, and collaboration? You can never "complete" a value. You cannot wake up on a Tuesday, declare that you have successfully "achieved integrity," and never practice it again. Values require continuous, daily operationalisation.
In the context of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a framework deeply aligned with Dr Schnack's teachings, psychological distress often occurs when there is a chasm between what a person inherently values and how they are actually spending their time and energy.
The Cost of Misalignment: Why Values Matter in a Hyper-Optimised City
Why do values matter? Because they serve as the psychological shock absorbers for the inevitable turbulence of modern life. In a city-state like Singapore, where the cultural narrative is heavily skewed towards pragmatic economic survival, it is incredibly easy to adopt the values of the collective while suffocating the values of the individual.
When you do not know your own values, you default to the metrics of your environment. You begin to measure your self-worth by your Central Provident Fund (CPF) balances, your postal code, or your child's Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) scores. This is the root cause of the modern malaise—a quiet, gnawing emptiness that persists despite objective, on-paper success.
Values provide a definitive, intrinsic metric for success. When you are anchored in your values, you become highly resilient to the fear of missing out (Kiasuism). If you deeply value 'Creativity' and 'Autonomy', you will not feel inadequate when your peer purchases a luxury condominium funded by a high-stress, micro-managed corporate banking role. Your values act as a filter, allowing you to reject opportunities, relationships, and societal pressures that do not serve your authentic self.
Defining Your Values: Prompt Engineering for the Soul
Identifying your values sounds simple, but it is a notoriously difficult cognitive task. The human brain is clouded by ego, parental expectations, and societal conditioning. This is where Generative AI (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) becomes an invaluable therapeutic tool. AI provides a neutral, infinitely patient, and entirely objective mirror to reflect your thoughts, helping you categorise the noise and extract the signal.
Here is how you can use AI to conduct a comprehensive values audit, tailored to four distinct stages of the Singaporean experience. Ensure you are in a quiet environment, set aside forty-five minutes, and treat this digital interaction with the same gravity you would a clinical session.
Case Study 1: The Stressed Student (Separating Inherited vs. Authentic Values)
For the Singaporean student—whether navigating the brutal curve of junior college or the competitive faculties of the National University of Singapore (NUS)—values are often indistinguishable from the expectations of their parents.
The Objective: To use AI to disentangle what the student actually cares about from what they have been told to care about.
The AI Self-Therapy Prompt:
"Act as a specialist in developmental psychology and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I am a university student in a highly competitive academic environment in Singapore. I am feeling immense pressure and burnout, and I suspect my goals (e.g., getting a perfect GPA, securing a high-paying corporate internship) are actually my parents' values, not mine. I am going to list five things I currently spend most of my time doing, and how I feel while doing them. Please help me analyse this list to identify what my actual intrinsic values might be, based on where I find moments of flow or joy, versus the tasks that drain me completely. Ask me three follow-up questions to help me define my authentic values."
Case Study 2: The Early Workforce Entrant (The Burnout Buffer)
The fresh graduate entering the workforce at a multinational corporation in Marina Bay Financial Centre often falls prey to "hustle culture." They value 'Ambition' and 'Competence', but they lack the counter-balancing values required for sustainability.
The Objective: To use AI to identify missing values that can prevent early-career burnout.
The AI Self-Therapy Prompt:
"Act as an executive coach. I am in my first two years of corporate life in Singapore. I am working 60-hour weeks. I value 'Excellence' and 'Financial Independence', but I am beginning to experience severe physical and mental fatigue. I have abandoned my hobbies and my social life. Using a values-based framework, help me identify secondary or tertiary values (such as 'Health', 'Connection', or 'Leisure') that I am currently neglecting. Design a realistic, micro-habit framework that allows me to honour these neglected values without compromising my primary career ambitions."
Case Study 3: The Jaded PMET (The Mid-Life Values Audit)
This is the most common demographic to experience a values crisis. The mid-career Professional, Manager, Executive, or Technician (PMET) has achieved the Singaporean dream—the car, the condo, the title—but feels entirely hollow. They are climbing a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall.
The Objective: To use AI for a radical "Time and Money" audit to reveal true priorities.
The AI Self-Therapy Prompt:
"Act as a clinical psychologist focusing on mid-life transitions. I am a mid-career professional in Singapore. I have achieved societal success, but I feel empty and jaded. I want to conduct a 'Time and Financial Audit' to discover my stated values versus my lived values. I am going to paste my rough weekly calendar and a summary of my discretionary spending over the last month. Analyse this data objectively. Tell me what this data says my values actually are (based on where my resources go). Then, guide me through an exercise to redefine what I want my values to be for the next decade of my life."
Case Study 4: The Retiree (Transitioning Identity)
For the retiring generation, who spent their entire lives treating 'Hard Work' and 'Providing for Family' as their sole defining values, the sudden cessation of employment can trigger an existential crisis. Who are they when they are no longer producing economic value?
The Objective: To use AI to pivot from productivity-based values to meaning-based values.
The AI Self-Therapy Prompt:
"Act as a compassionate gerontological counsellor. I am a recently retired Singaporean. For forty years, my only core values were 'Hard Work' and 'Financial Provision' for my family. Now that I am retired, I feel lost, useless, and without purpose. I need help discovering new values for this chapter of my life—values that are not tied to economic productivity or my job title. Provide a structured, gentle reflection exercise, perhaps based on the concept of legacy, mentorship, or community connection, to help me build a new value system."
How to Live By Your Values: The Art of Operationalisation
Defining your values is merely the architectural blueprint; living by them requires daily construction. A value is utterly useless if it remains an abstract concept written in a digital notebook. It must be operationalised. To operationalise a value means to translate a noun (e.g., "Family") into a verb, a specific behaviour, and a boundary.
If you claim your core value is "Health," but you regularly consume supper at 2:00 AM at Swee Choon and sleep four hours a night to finish presentation decks, your stated value is a lie. Your lived value is actually "Work" or "Approval."
To bridge this gap using AI, you must practice the art of behavioural translation.
The AI Translation Protocol:
Once you have identified your top three core values from the exercises above, you can use the AI to turn them into a concrete action plan.
"I have identified my top three core values as: 1. Intellectual Growth, 2. Authentic Connection, and 3. Physical Vitality. However, my current lifestyle is sedentary and highly reactive to emails and urgent work demands. Act as a behavioural designer. Translate each of these three abstract values into two specific, measurable, and realistic daily behaviours I can execute within a busy Singaporean context. Furthermore, help me script a polite but firm 'boundary statement' I can use when my workplace attempts to infringe upon the time I have allocated for these values."
The AI might respond by translating "Physical Vitality" into a non-negotiable 30-minute brisk walk through the Botanic Gardens before opening any digital devices. It might translate "Authentic Connection" into a rule of having dinner with a spouse with phones entirely removed from the dining room. By using the AI to dictate the specifics, you remove the cognitive load of planning and move directly into execution.
Staying on Track: The Architecture of Maintenance
Dr Schnack emphasises that values are not a set-and-forget mechanism. The gravitational pull of modern life is immense. Without regular maintenance, you will invariably experience "values drift," slowly being pulled back into the rat race, adopting the anxieties and priorities of the people around you.
In the corporate world, we have quarterly business reviews to ensure KPIs are being met. Why do we not apply the same rigour to our own psychological infrastructure?
The Weekly AI Check-In:
You can train a specific chat thread within your preferred AI tool to act as your weekly accountability partner. By maintaining the same chat thread, the AI retains the context of your stated values.
Every Sunday evening, before the manic energy of Monday morning takes hold, sit down with your AI and execute the following prompt:
"This is my weekly values check-in. As a reminder, my core values are [Insert Values]. I am going to reflect on my past week. I will tell you about one decision I made that felt highly aligned with my values, and one situation where I felt I compromised my values to please others or out of sheer convenience. Please provide a brief, non-judgmental analysis of my week. Then, help me look at my calendar for the upcoming week, and suggest one specific action I can take to proactively ensure I live in alignment with [Insert Value 1] on Wednesday, which is usually my most stressful day."
This practice transforms AI from a passive search engine into an active participant in your psychological hygiene. It forces you to pause, reflect, and course-correct before a bad week turns into a bad decade.
The Real Value of Knowing Thyself
As the afternoon sun dips low over the shophouses of Tanjong Pagar, the frenetic energy of the city begins to shift. The same professionals who rushed to their desks are now rushing to bars, to gyms, or to the MRT for the long commute back to the heartlands. We live in a profoundly impressive, beautifully orchestrated city that offers every conceivable modern comfort. Yet, a city’s infrastructure can only provide the setting; it cannot provide the meaning.
The real value of defining your core values is the acquisition of a psychological anchor. When you know precisely what matters to you, the cacophony of societal expectations is immediately muted. You stop competing in races you have no desire to win. You gain the quiet, sophisticated confidence that comes from moving through the world on your own terms.
Generative AI, properly harnessed, is the most powerful tool available today for this introspective heavy lifting. It allows you to untangle your authentic desires from your cultural conditioning with privacy, precision, and zero judgment. As we prepare to tackle the third skill in Dr Schnack’s framework—freedom from the fear of rejection—remember that a person deeply rooted in their values is a person who is exceptionally difficult to manipulate, and nearly impossible to break.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a goal and a core value?
A goal is a finite destination you achieve and cross off (e.g., getting promoted, buying a house). A core value is an ongoing direction and principle of behaviour (e.g., integrity, curiosity, compassion) that guides how you pursue your goals; it can never be "completed."
Can my core values change over time?
Yes, values are fluid. While foundational values often remain stable, the hierarchy of your values will naturally shift during major life transitions, such as entering the workforce, becoming a parent, or entering retirement. Regular self-audits are essential.
How do I know if I am not living by my values?
The most common symptoms of value misalignment are chronic burnout, a persistent feeling of emptiness despite achieving external success, and regular feelings of resentment toward your daily obligations or the people in your life.
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