ACT Values & Goals Workbook
The complete values exercise I use with clients: sort the deck, choose your top five, pin each value on a bullseye across four areas of life, and set small goals that close the gap. Your progress saves in this browser, so you can work in more than one sitting.
How the Workbook Works
What is the bullseye in the workbook?
The bullseye is a dartboard for your values. The center means you're living fully by a value; the outer rings mean you've drifted away from it. For each of your top five, you place a mark for where you honestly sit right now. Seeing the marks spread across the board, some near the center and some out at the edge, tends to land harder than a row of numbers does.
It comes from the Bull's-Eye approach used in ACT research, and it's the heart of what makes the workbook different from the quick version. You're not just rating a value, you're locating it in your actual life.
How is the workbook different from the quick assessment?
The quick version is a ten-minute snapshot: sort the deck, pick your top five, rate them, and see the gap on a simple chart. The workbook is the fuller, thirty-minute version I actually use with clients in session. You pin each value on the bullseye across four separate areas of life, then set a small goal for the ones that have drifted farthest.
The other difference is that the workbook saves. Your progress stays in this browser, so you can stop partway through and come back to it, which matters, because this isn't a quiz you want to rush.
What are the four life areas?
Work and education, leisure, relationships, and personal growth and health. Splitting a value across these areas is where the useful detail shows up. Honesty might sit near the center at work and far out at home. Connection might be strong with friends and thin with family. A single overall rating hides that; four separate ones surface it.
How do the goals work?
Once your values are pinned, you take the ones sitting farthest from the center and set one small, specific step for each. In ACT this is called committed action: a move in a valued direction that someone watching could actually see you make. Start with the value farthest from the bullseye, keep the step small enough that you'll actually take it, and let closing that one gap be the whole goal for now.
Is anything I enter saved or sent anywhere?
No. Everything you do in the workbook stays in this browser, on your own device. Nothing you type is transmitted, stored on a server, or visible to me. That's deliberate: it means you can be completely honest with yourself here. If you clear your browser data the workbook clears too, so if you want to keep your results, print the page or save it as a PDF from your browser.
If you'd rather start smaller, the quick ten-minute check-in covers the same 63 values in a lighter format, and ACT values: examples, exercises, and how to use them walks through the thinking behind the exercise.
One honest note to close on. If the same gaps keep coming back no matter what you try, the obstacle usually isn't a scheduling problem. Anxiety, intrusive thoughts, old trauma, or a relationship stuck in the same fight will quietly steer your behavior away from your values, and that is the part of this work I actually treat. If you recognize yourself in any of those, you can read how I work with anxiety and OCD, trauma, or couples.
Written by Dr. Olivier van Hauwermeiren, PsyD. Licensed Clinical Psychologist, ACT & CBT