How do I figure out my core values?
You figure out your core values by watching what you defend when it costs you something, not by brainstorming a list of nice-sounding words. The words come easy. The evidence is harder to fake.
Why the list-making exercise fails
Ask most people their values and they'll say honesty, family, growth. Those aren't wrong, they're just untested. A value you haven't paid for isn't a value yet, it's a preference. The real test is what you kept doing when it was inconvenient: the phone call you made even though it made you look weak, the deal you walked away from even though you needed the money, the thing you said in the meeting even though everyone went quiet. Those moments are the actual data. The whiteboard list is usually just what you wish were true about yourself.
What's actually happening when you feel unclear
Feeling unclear about your values almost never means you have none. It usually means two or three of them are in conflict and you haven't noticed the collision yet. Wanting to be loyal to a friend and wanting to be honest with them can pull in opposite directions in the same conversation. Wanting security and wanting to build something risky can both be true and still fight each other every Sunday night. The fog isn't absence, it's two real things arguing. That's why values work feels harder in your late twenties and thirties: you finally have enough competing commitments for the argument to get loud.
Why this makes sense and isn't a character flaw
You inherited most of your early values from people who needed you to hold them for reasons that had nothing to do with you, a parent's anxiety, a church's rules, a culture's idea of a good kid. Confusion now is just the sorting process finally happening in daylight instead of underground. It's not that you're rudderless. It's that you're doing, at thirty, the sorting most people avoid doing ever. That takes longer and feels worse in the middle than just keeping the inherited list and never checking it.
A better way to find out
Instead of asking what you value, go find three decisions from the last two years that actually cost you something, a job you left, a relationship you ended or stayed in, a fight you picked or refused to pick. For each one, write down what you were protecting when you made that call. Not what sounded good afterward. What you were actually protecting in the moment, even if it's unflattering, like being right, or not being controlled, or not disappointing one specific person. Do this for real decisions, not hypotheticals, and the pattern that repeats across all three is closer to your actual value than anything you'd generate by imagining your own eulogy.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Keeper rhythm, the thing under the behavior.