Values Clarification Exercise: Four Ways to Do It

Most people can tell you their goals in about ten seconds. Ask them what they actually value, the kind of person they want to be while chasing those goals, and you tend to get a long pause. That pause is the whole reason values clarification exists. It is the structured way of answering the harder question, and in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) it is one of the first things I reach for. This post is the practical version: four exercises you can actually do, step by step, plus what to do once you have your answers. If you want the background on what ACT values are in the first place, start there and come back.

What values clarification actually does

Values clarification is the process of naming the directions you want your life to move in, and then getting honest about how closely your current behavior tracks them. It is not journaling, and it is not a personality quiz. The point is to surface the gap between what you say matters and how you are actually spending your days, because that gap is where the useful work lives.

It is also not just reflection for its own sake. In one controlled study, undergraduates who added a short online values exercise on top of ordinary goal-setting went on to earn better grades than the students who only set goals (Chase, Houmanfar, Hayes, Ward, Vilardaga, & Follette, 2013). The values step did something the goals alone did not. That finding is narrow, it is one study in one population, but it points at something I see constantly in the room: people who connect their day-to-day effort to a value they actually hold tend to sustain that effort in a way that raw discipline does not manage on its own.

The four exercises below approach the same target from different angles. You do not need all of them. Pick the one that fits how your mind works, or run two and see which lands harder.

Exercise 1: The card sort

This is the fastest way in, and the one I start most people with.

Gather a list of values. You can use the deck of 63 in the free values assessment on this site, or write out your own on index cards. A prewritten list beats generating them from scratch, because a blank page tends to produce the values you think you should have.
Make three piles. Very important to me, somewhat important, not important. Move fast and go with your gut. Your first reaction is usually more honest than your second.
Take only the "very important" pile forward, and narrow it to five. This is the hard part, and the discomfort of setting down a value you feel you ought to keep is itself information. Sit with that discomfort rather than resolving it quickly.
Write a sentence for each of your five. Not a definition, a sentence about what living it would look like this week. "Honesty" becomes "I say the thing I am avoiding saying to my manager."

The narrowing is where the clarity comes from. A list of twenty values guides nothing, because when twenty things all matter, nothing gets to win when they compete. Five is short enough to actually steer a decision.

Exercise 2: Importance versus consistency

Once you have your top five, this exercise measures the gap directly, and it comes straight out of how values are assessed in the research.

For each of your five values, rate two separate numbers on a scale of one to ten. First, how important the value is to you. Second, how consistently you have actually lived it over the past week or two. Then subtract the second number from the first. That difference is your values-action gap.

This two-number structure is not something I made up. The Valued Living Questionnaire asks people to rate each area of life on exactly these two dimensions, importance and consistency, and treats the discrepancy between them as the thing worth attention (Wilson, Sandoz, Kitchens, & Roberts, 2010). A value you rate a nine on importance and a nine on consistency does not need you right now. A value you rate a nine and a three is where the work is. The gap is the signal, not the importance score on its own.

One caution. People sometimes rate consistency as high as they wish it were rather than as high as it is. The exercise only works if the second number is honest, and the values you feel a little defensive rating low are usually the ones pointing at something real.

Exercise 3: The bullseye

This one adds a picture, and it is the version I lean on for people who think better in images than in numbers.

Draw a dartboard, or use the full workbook mode of the assessment, which draws it for you. The center of the board means you are living fully by a value. The outer rings mean you have drifted away from it. Now take your top values and place a mark for where you honestly sit, and do it separately across four areas of life: work and education, leisure, relationships, and personal growth and health. This spatial, four-domain format comes from the Bull's-Eye Values Survey used in ACT research (Lundgren, Luoma, Dahl, Strosahl, & Melin, 2012).

The splitting is the point. A single overall rating hides too much. Honesty might sit near the center at work and far out at home. Connection might be strong with your friends and thin with your family. Seeing your marks scattered across the board, some near the bullseye and some out at the edge, tends to land harder than a column of numbers, because it makes the unevenness of a life visible in one glance.

Exercise 4: The looking-back prompt

The first three sort and measure. This one comes at values from the future instead, and it is useful when the card sort feels too abstract to connect with.

Picture yourself much older, near the end of a long life, looking back. Not at your achievements, the titles and the milestones, but at the kind of person you were in the day-to-day. What do you want to be able to say about how you treated the people close to you? About what you gave your attention to? About what you stood for when it was inconvenient? Write for a few minutes without editing.

Then read back what you wrote and underline the recurring words. They are almost always values in disguise. Someone who writes "I want to have been there for my kids, really there, not just in the building" has just named presence and connection without using either word. This prompt bypasses the part of the brain that picks respectable-sounding values and gets closer to the ones you actually hold. A word of care: for some people this exercise stirs up more than expected, grief or regret in particular. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is worth doing gently, and it is often better done alongside a therapist than alone.

What it looks like when it works

Here is a composite, a few clients blended so nobody is identifiable. Someone comes in doing well on paper and flat underneath it. We run the card sort, and "connection" lands in her top five. On the importance-versus-consistency rating she gives it a nine and a two. On the bullseye, it sits near the center for her work friendships and out at the very edge for her family, whom she had not called in months, not from any decision, just drift.

None of those three exercises told her anything she did not technically already know. What they did was make the gap impossible to keep not-looking-at. The number was a two. The mark was at the edge. That is harder to file away than a vague sense that things could be better. The next step was almost embarrassingly small, one text to her sister suggesting a call, and she resisted it precisely because it felt too small to matter against how far the gap had opened. It was small. It was also the first move in the only direction that had ever actually helped. Clarification does not fix anything by itself. It just points, clearly enough that you cannot pretend you did not see.

Turning clarification into action

A clarified value that sits in a notebook does nothing. The bridge, in ACT, is committed action: one small, specific, doable step in the direction of the value with the biggest gap. Not "be more connected," which no one can actually do, but "call my sister Sunday for fifteen minutes," which someone watching could see you do.

Start with the single widest gap, pick one visible step for the week, and keep it small enough that you will actually take it. Then do the clarification again in a month or two. Your gaps move as your life does, and the exercise is meant to be repeated, not solved once. If the same gap keeps reopening no matter what you try, that is usually a sign the obstacle is not a scheduling problem but an internal one, anxiety, burnout, grief, or an old story about yourself, and that is the part I actually treat. You can read how I work with anxiety and OCD or trauma, or reach me for a free 15-minute intro call.

FAQ

What is a values clarification exercise?

A values clarification exercise is a structured way to identify what matters most to you and see how closely your current behavior matches it. In ACT, common versions include sorting a deck of values down to your top five, rating each on both importance and consistency, and placing them on a bullseye across different areas of life. The goal is to surface the gap between your stated values and your actual behavior.

How do you do values clarification step by step?

Start by sorting a list of values into important and not-important piles, then narrow the important pile to about five. For each of the five, rate how important it is and how consistently you have lived it recently, and subtract to find the gap. Optionally, place each value on a bullseye across four life areas (work, leisure, relationships, and personal growth) to see where you are living close to it and where you have drifted.

What is the difference between values clarification and goal setting?

Goal setting names destinations you can complete, like passing an exam. Values clarification names directions you keep moving in, like being caring or curious, which are never finished. Research suggests the two work best together: adding a values exercise to ordinary goal setting improved outcomes beyond goals alone in a controlled study of college students.

How long does values clarification take?

The quick card sort takes about ten minutes. The fuller version, adding the importance-consistency ratings, the bullseye, and committed-action goals, usually runs closer to thirty. Neither is a one-time task; most people benefit from repeating it every few months as their circumstances change.

Can I do values clarification on my own?

Yes, and the exercises here are designed to be done solo. That said, if the process stirs up grief or regret, or if the same gaps keep reopening no matter what you try, working through it with a therapist tends to go further, because the obstacle is usually emotional rather than a matter of not knowing what to do.

References

Chase, J. A., Houmanfar, R., Hayes, S. C., Ward, T. A., Vilardaga, J. P., & Follette, V. (2013). Values are not just goals: Online ACT-based values training adds to goal setting in improving undergraduate college student performance. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 2(3–4), 79–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2013.08.002

Lundgren, T., Luoma, J. B., Dahl, J., Strosahl, K., & Melin, L. (2012). The Bull's-Eye Values Survey: A psychometric evaluation. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 19(4), 518–526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpra.2012.01.004

Wilson, K. G., Sandoz, E. K., Kitchens, J., & Roberts, M. (2010). The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and measuring valued action within a behavioral framework. The Psychological Record, 60(2), 249–272. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03395706

Ready to try it? The free ACT values assessment walks you through the card sort in about ten minutes, and the full workbook adds the bullseye and goals. Both keep everything in your browser, nothing is sent or stored.

Values Clarification: Four Exercises to Find What Actually Matters