The Values Gap
The distance between what you believe and how you're living might not be a crisis but it is an accumulation.
This is how it usually starts: something small.
You’re in a meeting and you say something you don’t quite mean. Or you don’t say something you do mean. Or you look at your calendar and realize you haven’t done the thing you’ve been saying matters to you in three weeks, or six, or since before the baby came.
The values gap isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t arrive with a crisis. It accumulates.
You say you value presence with your child. You look at your phone at dinner. You say you value your own health. You haven’t moved your body in two weeks because there’s been no time and no energy and something had to go. You say you value your work — the actual substance of it, not just the output. But you’re going through the motions more often than you’re actually there.
None of this makes you a bad person. It makes you a depleted person, which is different.
Values don’t stop mattering when we’re depleted. They just become harder to live by. The gap between what we believe and how we’re actually living widens in direct proportion to how much we’re running on empty. And the gap produces something specific: a low-grade feeling of not quite being yourself. Not quite occupying your own life.
Most people attribute this to stress, or to busyness, or to having a new baby. And those things are real contributors. But the feeling I’m pointing at is something more precise. It’s the feeling of acting in ways that don’t line up with what you believe about yourself — repeatedly, habitually, because the margin for anything else has disappeared.
The work of closing the values gap is not a productivity exercise. It doesn’t start with a better schedule or a more efficient morning. It starts with honesty.
What do you actually value? Not what you’re supposed to value, not what sounds good, not the version you put on your coaching intake form. What, when you are quiet enough to listen, actually matters to you?
And then: where is the gap? Not as self-criticism. As information.
Because you can’t close a gap you haven’t named. And most of us are living inside the gap while carefully not naming it — because naming it would require changing something, and changing something takes resources we’re not sure we have right now.
Here’s what I’ve learned from sitting with women in this place: they always have more resources than they think. Not to do everything. To do the one or two things that would shift the center of gravity enough that other things could follow.
The first step is almost always permission. Permission to say out loud: this is the gap. This is the distance between where I am and where I want to be. Permission to treat that distance as worth addressing — not later, not when things slow down, but now.
This is what coaching holds. Not the solution. The space to name it, and then the specific work of moving toward it.
If this is landing for you — the Chemistry Call is 45 minutes and free. It’s not a pitch. It’s a conversation about where you actually are.