Values › Leadership › Significance
Core value · Leadership family
Significance
Mattering in the world
What does significance mean as a core value?
Significance as a core value means wanting your life and work to make a real difference, so that the people and places around you would be noticeably poorer without you.
At some point most people wonder whether their life makes a difference. If significance is one of your core values, you wonder it more often, and the answer matters more. You want to leave a mark on your work, your community and the people who come after you. Ordinary busyness can feel hollow if it doesn’t add up to something. Mostly it comes down to knowing that if you weren’t here, something real would be missing.
What does significance look like in practice?
- You choose the role with more impact over the one with the better title or pay.
- You ask what difference a project will make before asking how much effort it will take.
- You keep some record of the people you’ve helped and the things you’ve built.
- You feel restless in work that’s comfortable but doesn’t seem to matter to anyone.
- You think about what your children, or the next generation, will inherit from what you do.
When is significance overplayed?
A quiet year can start to feel like failure. A supporting role or a job that simply pays the bills looks like wasted time, and you can chase ever bigger gestures to feel that you count. It can also tip into needing to be the one who made the difference, when being one of many is often plenty. Mattering is usually local and unglamorous. One thing you could try is to name the three people who would ring you first in a crisis, and notice how much that already counts.
Often confused with
Significance vs Purpose
Purpose is having a reason that guides what you do. Significance is the sense that what you do counts, and you can feel purposeful long before you feel significant.
Significance vs Recognition
Recognition needs other people to notice. Significance is about the difference itself, whether or not anyone ever connects it to you.
Significance vs Contribution
Contribution is giving your part to something bigger. Significance adds the wish for that part to matter, and to be felt.
Questions to sit with
- If you stopped doing your current work tomorrow, who would genuinely notice the difference?
- What would you need to have done by the end of your life to feel it had counted?
- Which small, unseen thing you already do matters more than you give it credit for?
More values in Leadership
Standing, influence and setting direction.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
Find your own
Is Significance one of your core values?
Choose from 155 values, narrow them down to the few that matter most, and get a personal report to keep. Free, and it takes about 15 minutes.
Find your core values