Some years ago I began coaching the founder and CEO of a medium-sized engineering company, and part of our work was to help him fully live his values.

One day he came to a session with an issue that was troubling him deeply. He was on the verge of having to let go his sales director, who was also a close childhood friend, and who had been a part of the company since its inception.

The issue was one of performance: over the past year, despite numerous interventions and conversations, the sales director’s performance continued to lag, and despite numerous commitments and attempts to change on his part, there were no signs that things were actually going to change permanently.

The CEO came to our session knowing that he was going to have one of the most difficult conversations he’d ever had with an employee, and he wanted to reflect on and discuss how he would approach it.

Now, in the months prior to this session we’d worked on defining his core values. Value identification is common enough in coaching, but what made this process unique was the dedication he had to live his values. They had become a luminous signpost to guide his life by, with a deep commitment to the embodiment of those values in life and in business. No separation of the two (which is all too common).

As we began to discuss the difficult conversation to come with his sales director, he shared a number of strategies he had been mulling over. All of them were plausible, but they all seemed to lack that feeling you get when you know what you need to do. So after a while I asked him to recall his core values—love, integrity, and transparency—and to show me how each of these was being demonstrated in his ideas for how to proceed in the meeting.

Transparency and integrity were easy enough to discern, and he was confident that his approach embodied these two. But the core value of love…that one he was not so sure of. He loved the sales director as a lifelong friend, but when it came to this meeting, he was actually experiencing a great deal of fear. He was afraid of how his words would be taken, and of the backlash and emotional reaction. And so while he was preparing in his mind to be honest and transparent, he was also preparing to defend and protect himself from a potentially explosive reaction.

He was operating from fear, not love.

Once we begin to look at how he would show up as love in that meeting, everything fell into place. The fear he held dissipated as he saw a way forward that would allow him to embody all three of his core values.

The day after the meeting took place I receive a long email from my client. The meeting had gone as he had thought it would, including the huge emotional reaction and backlash from the sales director. It had been extremely tough embodying love through it all, as the director had attacked him on a number of fronts. The meeting had ended with the sales director actually storming out of the building. ‘But,’ my client wrote, ‘I stayed in my values.’

He went on to write that later that same evening there had been a knock on the door of his home. He opened the door to find his sales director and friend standing on the step. Without saying a word, the man stepped into the house and gave my client a huge hug, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It was an emotional exchange for both of them. And although it didn’t change what had to happen on a business level, it completely altered the dynamic of their relationship through that difficult time.

My client felt incredibly good about it all. He said, ‘That may have been one of the toughest conversations I’ve ever had, but I felt so strong within myself when I anchored into my values and lived from that place. And to stay anchored in love when I was being attacked was such a validation of the power I have within me. I do not need to operate outside my values at any time.’

How many of us think this way? How many of us even know what our core values are, what our lives actually stand for in this world? How many of us take the time each day to notice how we are living fully into those core values? And how many of us are known this way—known by others for our core values?

When working with your clients on their values, remember that it is always about more than value identification, that’s only a starting point. The real journey is into becoming the living embodiment of those values – to LIVE your values in each moment – and that is a journey coaching is well positioned to support.