Clarifying My Values as a BCBA Without Faking It

The fastest way to clarify your values as a BCBA is to sit down for twenty quiet minutes and ask yourself, on paper, what you actually care about when nobody is watching. Not the company mission. Not the slide deck. The thing you would say to a parent at 8pm if you were just being honest.

If you cannot answer that yet, you are not alone, and you are not behind. You are just at the start of the work.

This page is the inward version of the values talk. Most resources teach you how to surface a client's values during intake. This one is for the BCBA who realizes she has never actually done that work on herself.

Why Most BCBAs Cannot List Their Values Cold#

Ask a room of BCBAs to drop their top three values into a chat box, and you will see two groups. One group fires off words like compassion, dignity, respect, curiosity, and advocacy before you finish the sentence. The other group goes quiet.

Both groups are giving you real information.

If your list comes fast, you have done this work before, probably more than once. If your list does not come at all, that is the first finding of the audit. You are not a bad clinician for blanking. You are a clinician who has spent the last few years memorizing protocols, learning ethics code citations, and writing treatment plans inside someone else's template. Values were not on the test.

In the talk, Megh Crowley names this directly when she watches the chat fill up:

These are coming out faster than I can read them. So this means that values are something that people have thought about before. And I would encourage you, if you're having a hard time listing a value in the chat, perhaps making some space for that and thinking about what your values are as a clinician.

That is the whole assignment. If you cannot list a value, the answer is not to look one up. The answer is to make space.

The Scan Your Own Print Trick#

Here is the method that actually works when you are blanking.

Open the documents you already use every day. Your intake packet. Your parent training handouts. The Slack channel where you talk to your team. The last three text threads with families. Read with a soft pen in your hand and underline any word that makes you pause, nod, or wince.

That is your list.

Megh gives the same instruction in the talk:

Take a look at the language that's being used. Look at any training materials that you have. Maybe taking a look at your intake packets and things like that. And seeing if you can find some words that really stand out to you that fall under the values umbrella.

A short worked example. A BCBA I know ran this on her own intake packet and underlined three words: trust, dignity, and assent. She then read her last five session notes and noticed she never used those words. Not once. The gap between the print and the practice was the finding. That gap is where the work lives.

This is not a worksheet. This is reading your own paper trail like a detective. Your values are already on the page. You just have not named them out loud.

The Four Buckets: Language, Information, Time, Presentation#

Once you have a few candidate words, you need a way to check whether you are actually living them. Megh offers four buckets near the end of her talk. They are simple, and you can audit each one in under five minutes.

The four buckets are the language you use, the information you consume, where you spend your time, and how you present yourself.

Here is how to run the audit.

Language. Read your last five session notes and your last ten Slack messages to RBTs. Are you using person-first or identity-first language consistent with how the families you serve actually talk? Are you saying things like "noncompliance" out of habit when the more honest description is "the kid asked for a break and we did not let him take one"?

Information. Look at your podcast queue, your saved articles, and your last three conference recordings. Who are you learning from? Are autistic adults on that list? Are clinicians who disagree with your default practice on that list? If everything you consume reinforces what you already do, that is a finding.

Time. Pull up your calendar from the last two weeks. Where did the hours actually go? If a value is "compassionate parent training" but no recurring slot exists for it, the calendar is telling the truth and the mission statement is not.

Presentation. Look at your professional bio, your email signature, the bio in your last conference handout. What do you claim to be? Then ask whether someone observing you for a day would see the same thing.

Bridge BCBAs feel this one most. You are usually the person being asked to model the values for a team that is still being trained. The four buckets give you something concrete to audit before you ask anyone else to audit themselves.

Values Are Revealed by Behavior, Not by Your About Page#

This is the part of the work that stings a little.

You can call yourself a neurodiversity-affirming clinician on LinkedIn. You can have the right words on your website. You can post the right articles. None of that is the value. The value is what shows up in your session notes, your goal selection, and the way you respond when a parent pushes back.

Megh names this directly:

Are you a neurodiverse affirming clinician? Have you personally taken action steps to change your own verbal behavior and how you present yourself? Are you centering autistic voices?

The test for any value is simple. Find one observable behavior in the last two weeks that you did because of that value, and that you would not have done without it. If you cannot find one, the value is aspirational, not active. That is fine. It just means you know what to work on.

What to Do If Your Personal Values Do Not Match the Company's#

This is the hardest part, and it is the reason a lot of clinicians never sit down to do this work in the first place. They are afraid of what they will find.

Start by writing both lists side by side. Your top five. The company's top five, pulled from the website, the mission statement, the onboarding deck, or whatever you can find. Where they overlap, you have a clear lane to work in. Where they do not, you have three real options.

You can adapt your practice inside your sphere of influence. Choose which assessments you reach for first. Choose how you write goals. Choose how you talk to RBTs in your supervision hours. Most BCBAs underestimate how much of the day they actually control.

You can advocate up. Bring the gap to your clinical director with a specific example, not a vibe. "Our intake packet does not ask about the family's values before assessment selection. Here is a one-page addition that takes five minutes." Specific beats philosophical every time.

You can leave. This is real, and sometimes it is the right answer. But do not skip the first two steps. Most of the time, the gap is workable. Sometimes it is not.

A 20-Minute Exercise to Do This Weekend#

Block twenty minutes. Phone in another room. Plain paper, not a Google Doc.

Minutes one through five. Write down ten words that describe how you want to show up with a client and a family. Do not edit. Do not rank yet.

Minutes six through ten. Cross out everything that feels borrowed. Anything that sounds like a slide. Anything you would not say to a friend. You should have five or six left.

Minutes eleven through fifteen. For each remaining word, write one sentence that names a behavior you did in the last two weeks that proves it. If you cannot name one, draw a line through the word. It is aspirational, not active. Note it for later.

Minutes sixteen through twenty. Of the words that survived, circle the top three. Write them on an index card. Put the card where you write session notes.

That is the starting list. It will change. Run the exercise again in three months and notice what shifts.

This is not a one-time worksheet. Megh closes with the bar set high:

Your values are not just something you add in at the end to make treatment sound nice. You need to live and breathe what your values are and be really mindful of the information that you're consuming.

That is the standard. The four buckets are how you keep yourself honest between exercises.

FAQ#

How do I figure out my values as a BCBA if I have never thought about them?

Start with the scan your own print method. Open your intake packet, your parent training handouts, and your last few session notes. Underline any word that makes you pause or nod. That underlined list is your starting set. Then run the twenty-minute exercise above to narrow it to three.

What is the difference between a value and a preference for a BCBA?

A preference is what you like. A value is what you defend when it costs you something. Liking play-based sessions is a preference. Refusing to run a program that violates assent withdrawal even when a parent requests it is a value. The test is whether the position holds when it is inconvenient.

Do I need to write down my values to use them clinically?

Yes. Not because the paper itself matters, but because unwritten values drift. The index card in your notes drawer is what keeps you from writing a goal at 9pm on a Wednesday that quietly contradicts what you said you stood for on Monday. Write them down. Reread them weekly for the first month.

Watch the full talk#

The exercise on this page comes from one section of Megh Crowley's talk. The full session also walks through how to use these values during intake, assessment selection, and parent training. It is worth the hour.