This Choosing Your Values exercise is designed to help clients clarify their values and practice making intentional choices about what matters most to them.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Values are the “principles for living” that capture what matters most to people. clarifying these values can fulfill various therapeutic purposes, such as providing a sense of purpose, guiding goal setting and treatment planning, and motivating clients to confront challenging experiences or engage in therapeutic tasks. Values-focused interventions are utilized in many forms of psychotherapy, with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) being one of the most prominent. The Choosing Your Values exercise is designed to help clients identify their values and make intentional decisions about what matters most to them. This exercise can be especially beneficial for individuals who may be unfamiliar with their own values or who have a limited vocabulary to describe them.
Utilizing this resource supports various therapeutic outcomes:
Encouraging activity and meaningful action to improve mood.
Motivating clients to face and overcome their fears.
Promoting valued living to improve engagement in life.
Clients sort values into categories of importance.
Clients select the values most significant to them.
Clients narrow down their choices to their top priorities.
Clients reflect on their choices and the implications for their lives.
Collaborate on how clients can out their values into action.
Values play a significant role in various psychotherapies. Among them, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) offers the most comprehensive theory of values, grounded in basic behavioral principles and relational frame theory, and it has developed a wide range of values-focused interventions (Plumb et al., 2009).
Within the ACT framework, values are technically defined as “desired global qualities of ongoing action” (Hayes et al., 2006). Values possess at least three key characteristics (Harris, 2019): they are desired, they represent global qualities, and they are ongoing actions. In simpler terms, values are the “principles for living” that encapsulate what matters most to individuals and what they want their lives to signify (Hayes et al., 2012; Lundgren et al., 2012).
Living in accordance with one’s values is linked to better mental health. For example, research has shown that aligning with personal values is negatively correlated with anxiety and depression (Tunç et al., 2023) and can lead to reduced disability in individuals with chronic pain (McCracken & Yang, 2006). However, many people often lose touch with their values. Factors such as self-doubt, fear of judgment or displeasing others, adherence to externally imposed norms, and avoidance of discomfort can disconnect individuals from what truly matters to them. Discrepancies between values and behavior are associated with decreased well-being and increased distress (Lundgren et al., 2012).
The Choosing Your Values exercise is designed to assist clients in clarifying their values. This exercise involves reviewing a list of values, categorizing them by importance, and identifying which values are currently most significant. Importantly, clients are encouraged to make deliberate choices about what matters most to them. This exercise can be especially beneficial for individuals who are unfamiliar with their values, have a limited vocabulary to describe them, or lack a clear sense of what is most important in their lives (LeJeune & Luoma, 2019).
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