A few years ago, I sat across from a therapist for the first time in my life.
I was raised to believe you suffer in silence, that asking for help is what weak men do. But my marriage was struggling, I was unhappy at work, and pretending had stopped working.
Her first question wasn’t about any of that. She asked, “What are your values?”
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I’d spent more than a decade guiding people through life’s biggest financial decisions, and I couldn’t answer. She told me most people can’t.
Learning to answer that question changed my life, and it became the foundation of my practice, Narativ Retirement in Bellevue, Washington: Values first, portfolio second.
Nowhere has that approach resonated more than with the women I serve, who now make up more than half my clients.
They’ve taught me something the industry rarely says out loud: Most women are better investors than they’ve been led to believe.
That likely includes you. The research backs it up, and the reason comes down to something you can put to work deliberately: Knowing what you value.
Your instincts are better than the industry credits them
The financial world has spent decades talking to women as if they need to be taught how to invest. The data disagrees.
Research keeps finding that women’s returns tend to match or slightly outperform men’s. Fidelity research analyzing 5.2 million accounts found women outperformed men by about 0.4% annually and a 2025 Wells Fargo Investment Institute report found women’s risk-adjusted returns came out ahead, as well. The edge is behavioral:
- Less impulse trading
- Less chasing the hot stock
- More due diligence
- More patience to buy and hold
- A healthy respect for risk
If you recognize yourself in that list, there’s a reason. Women tend to be more naturally in touch with what they value than anyone else I work with, and they carry that clarity into their money decisions.
When your investments reflect what you care about, patience becomes your natural state.
You might already be doing this instinctively. What follows is how to do it on purpose.
A simple exercise for naming your values
My therapist gave me an exercise adapted from Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead, and I now use it with every client before any paperwork.
Ask yourself one question: What would I keep working toward if no one else ever knew about it? No audience, no credit, just you.
One rule makes the exercise work: You can’t define yourself by your roles. Not “I’m a mother,” not “I’m a nurse.” Roles describe who you are to other people, and every one of them comes with expectations someone else wrote. Your values are what remain when nothing is expected of you.
With the roles set aside, sit with the question and write down every answer that surfaces. If you’re staring at a blank page, a published values list, such as the one Brown offers, gives you raw material to react to.
Narrow the list to five. Take your time; I spent a week. Mine are curiosity, achievement, fortitude, adventure and authenticity. Yours will be different, and that’s the point.
When you’re weighing any significant decision, run it through your five. If it doesn’t satisfy at least three, it’s probably wrong for you. Leaving my old firm to start my own practice checked all five boxes, which told me everything I needed to know.
The reverse is just as useful: When a decision feels persistently uncomfortable, you’re probably going against your own grain.
That applies to portfolios as much as careers. All the exercise really does is put language to the instinct you might have been investing with all along.
How your values become your financial plan
In my practice, the values conversation happens before any paperwork. I ask every new client for a moment of vulnerability: Tell me your five core values. We return to them in our planning conversations afterward because values help predict fit.
If your values center on security and protecting what you’ve built, an aggressive portfolio will feel like a constant low-grade violation. Protection-oriented strategies might serve you far better.
If you’re wired for adventure and comfortable with risk, you need a different path entirely.
Neither answer is wrong, but a plan that ignores who you are is one you’ll eventually abandon, and abandoning a plan midjourney is where real damage can happen.
If a recommendation has ever sat wrong with you and you couldn’t articulate why, that was likely your values flagging a mismatch, and the feeling deserved more credit than it got. There is no one-size-fits-all financial plan.
The part of your plan that outlives you
A pattern among my female clients has changed how I think about what a financial plan is for. They introduce me to their kids and grandkids years, sometimes decades, before any wealth would change hands, because they want the people they love to know the person who will help carry things forward.
If that impulse sounds familiar, honor it. It’s one more instinct the industry rarely gives you credit for, and it’s values-based planning at its endpoint: Your plan covers more than your retirement. It’s about the people and things you love most.
It’s also a useful test: An adviser willing to invest real time in your next generation, knowing that money might not be under their care for 10 or 15 years, is showing you they value the relationship above the transaction.
Choosing an adviser is a values decision, too
Once you can name your five core values, you also have a filter for one of the biggest money decisions you’ll make: Who to trust with them.
Many women tell me past experiences with financial professionals left them feeling talked over or treated like an afterthought. You don’t have to settle for that.
An adviser worth keeping should hold up to the same three-of-five scrutiny as any other decision:
They ask who you are before they ask what you have. If the first meeting opens with your account statements, keep looking.
They listen more than they present. You should leave every meeting feeling heard.
They translate your values into a concrete, written plan, then meet the expectations they set consistently.
They make room for your family, opening the door to your children and beneficiaries without being asked.
They hold credentials that back up the discipline. The CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® (CFP®) certification, for example, requires rigorous education, examination, experience and a commitment to ethical standards.
I pursued that certification for one reason: A values conversation only helps you if the person across the table has the training to act on it across income planning, tax efficiency, insurance and legacy decisions. Credentials aren’t everything, but they’re evidence that someone chose the harder path on purpose.
Try it this week
All you need to start is an hour.
1. Ask yourself: What would I keep working toward if no one knew?
2. Write down every value that surfaces, then cut the list to five
3. Run your next money decision through the three-of-five test — a purchase, an investment, even the decision to hire or keep an adviser
Spend that hour, and you should start to feel it everywhere money touches: Decisions come easier, doubt gets quieter, and the plan you build is one that reflects who you are and what actually matters in your life.
The story your money tells
Your net worth is a number. Your values are the story your money is meant to tell.
You’ve spent much of your life stewarding other people’s stories.
A plan aligned with your values is how your own gets told and, eventually, handed to the people you love. And you were never starting from behind: You’ve probably been investing this way by instinct all along.
Now you have the language and the test to do it on purpose.