What is reflective practice values?

Reflective practice values is a concept in personal epistemology: Values are not invented — they are discovered through careful reflection on what has consistently mattered to you across different contexts and life stages.

Example: A product manager spends a weekend doing a structured reflection exercise after leaving a job she thought she loved. She writes about the moments in the last five years when she felt most alive — and discovers a pattern she had never named. Every peak moment involved teaching someone a concept they had struggled with. Not shipping features, not hitting metrics, not the promotions. Teaching. She had spent a decade optimizing for career advancement while the thing that actually mattered to her — enabling understanding in others — ran as a background process she never examined. The value was always there, embedded in her behavior. She volunteered to onboard every new hire. She spent hours writing documentation nobody asked for. She chose lunch with junior engineers over lunch with directors. Her calendar revealed it. Her emotional responses confirmed it. But she had never articulated it as a value because she had never sat down and asked the right questions about the right evidence. The reflection did not create the value. It made it visible.

This concept is part of Phase 32 (Value Identification) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for value identification.