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Ada Chen Rekhi's Inner Scorecard framework helps us map and live our authentic values rather than chasing external validation, providing a compass for making intentional decisions about our careers and lives.
What’s The Inner Scorecard?
CMO turned leadership coach Ada Chen Rekhi created The Inner Scorecard as a map for building our life around the values that truly matter to us, not what others think should matter.
The framework aims to avoid the common trap: pursuing achievements that leave us feeling overworked and unfulfilled because we built our life around an outer scorecard - what others value - rather than what actually matters to us.
The Inner Scorecard exercise takes just 10-15 minutes and follows these steps:
Start with Values: Review a comprehensive list of value-based adjectives (e.g., community, unity, equality, growth) and highlight those that resonate most strongly with us personally and professionally. The list of values that Ada put together is HERE.
Group Them: Organize the highlighted values into 3-5 thematic groupings based on how they naturally fit together. There's no single "right" way to group them.
Create Verb-Value Actions: From each group, select one dominant word and pair it with an action verb. For example, "accelerate growth" or "build community."
Prioritize: Stack rank these verb-value combinations based on their relative importance to you.
Here’s an example of a final product from Ada herself:
- Build strong bonds with my chosen family
- Nurture happiness
- Seek growth opportunities
- Grow in wisdom
- Realize meaningful achievements
When to use The Inner Scorecard?
Here are three times the Inner Scorecard can be helpful:
- Taking Stock: At the end of each year (or during a career break), we can ask ourselves if we're spending our time and energy on what matters most to us. If not, something needs to change.
- Making Moves: When we’re weighing a new job or role, let’s not just look at the usual stuff - salary, title, brand name. Let’s check if the opportunity fits what we deeply care about.
- Building Teams: Our values shape whom we click with at work. Where, funnily enough, the traits that drive us nuts in others might be exactly what our team needs for balance.
We don’t need to update our scorecard every month or even every quarter - that's overkill. But whether it’s annually or every few years, it’s worth pulling it out to make sure we’re headed in the right direction, aligned with our core values.
How do we use The Inner Scorecard?
James:
The Inner Scorecard is so appealing because the value to effort required ratio is so high: in <30 minutes of thinking, we can outline what makes us tick and then compare that to our current situation.
I especially like that it spans across personal and professional because while we can talk about work-life balance - or work-life harmony - ideally, whatever is important to us spans across our lives.
John:
I went through a very similar exercise during a career transition and worked with Blueprints contributor Jenna Buffaloe - of 5 Steps for Speaking Up fame - to put my values in writing. Shortly after, opportunities to pursue things aligned to those values seemed to appear magically. I asked ChatGPT for some help describing my experience: ”The psychological effect you're describing is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, also known as the Frequency Illusion. It occurs when something you've recently learned about or mentioned suddenly seems to appear everywhere.
Here's how it works:
- Selective Attention: After encountering or thinking about something, your brain becomes primed to notice it. You pay more attention to that specific thing in your environment, even though its actual frequency hasn't changed.
- Confirmation Bias: When you notice the thing more often, you tend to believe it's appearing more frequently. This reinforces the idea that "it's everywhere," even though it's just your brain's way of filtering information.
TLDR: If you write down your values, opportunities will appear!
James:
My movie mind immediately thinks of Field of Dreams and “If you build it, they will come” - I guess here it’s, “If you define your values, opportunities will come!”
The part of The Inner Scorecard I struggle with most is what values I “should” care about versus those I do care about. From Ada’s list, I see values such as benevolence, inclusiveness, and peace, which I know I’m supposed to care a lot about; but while they resonate intellectually, they don’t resonate more deeply.
The other challenge I have with this exercise is all the values speak to me in some way, so the hard part if is figuring out which resonate most. It reminds me of being a product manager and getting feedback from sales reps or CSMs: the challenge is never that the feature requests don’t make sense, it’s whether they’re BETTER ideas than our current roadmap. Tied back here, the hard part is what are the values that resonate deeply vs connect with us on a more surface level.
John:
The tension between what I “should” care about vs what I do care about is real. Some helpful advice I received when feeling overwhelmed by things in the “should” column is to align the things you feel you should do to the life stage when you will be able to fully commit to doing them (and are more likely to want to do them).
I feel I should invest more time giving back to my local community. I also feel like I should be at all my kid’s sports games (and this is something I really enjoy and want to do). When weekend schedules become less consumed with kids sports, I’ll have plenty of time to commit to other things.
James:
I like that - it’s taking the ideas we Blueprinted in The Book of [Your Company] and breaking our lives into various chapters.
As a broader closing thought, The Inner Scorecard reminds me of a similar exercise I enjoyed from Designing Your Life from the Stanford Design School. There, we break our lives into four different elements - Health, Work, Play, and Love - but the idea of assessing where we’re at on each is the same. Given a favourite management credo, “If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it,” I like taking a similar approach to how I’m doing in a more quantitative way.
Want to learn more
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON THE INNER SCORECARD?
Ada published her own article about it here:
And here’s the link to Ada’s Core Values Exercise:
In addition, although she covers a broader range of topics than The Inner Scorecard, we’d heavily recommend her podcast with Lenny Rachitsky:
WANT TO GO DEEPER WITH ADA CHEN REKHI?
Not surprising given she’s a former marketing leader turned executive coach, she’d published on a wide range of professional topics at www.adachen.com:
Here are a few especially good reads:
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON RELATED TOPICS AROUND VALUES?
Here’s the Stanford Design school book mentioned above about life planning:
And here’s a Blueprint that could easily used through a values lens to ensure we’re making good decisions:
![The Book of [YourCompany]](https://images.spr.so/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/j42No7y-dcokJuNgXeA0ig/b32cc9fc-fd01-4422-8b49-08af46cd6f21/Untitled_Artwork_19/w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
