You probably have a values list somewhere already. Ten or twelve words, chosen carefully on a good afternoon, and not one of them changed a Tuesday.
An ACT values clarification exercise asks for something a list does not. You rate every life domain twice, once for how much it matters and once for how consistently you behaved that way last week. Then you pick a domain where the two numbers sit far apart and take one action there.
Of the eight pages I read on this on 2026-08-28, seven carry no effectiveness evidence at all, and the one that does names its studies without citing any of them. So every number below is linked, and every finding sits next to the people it came from.
I'm Chrys Bader, a 6-time founder and Y Combinator alum. After years building products at Google and founding Secret (which reached 15 million users), I co-founded Rosebud because I saw firsthand how transformative guided reflection can be — and how few people have access to it.
The second rating is the half a values list never asks for. It is the one that knows anything about last week, which is why the distance between the two numbers is worth looking at.
I have spent my working life on finishable objects. Companies ship, features launch, rounds close. Values are the one category that refuses to work that way, which is why a list on its own goes nowhere.
What ACT values clarification exercises actually are
An ACT values clarification exercise uses two passes: naming how you want to behave, then looking at how you actually behaved. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) treats values as directions rather than destinations, so the exercise never produces a finished result. What the exercise produces is a choice about where to put your next action.
A value is a direction you can live today. Russ Harris draws the line plainly: a goal is something you achieve, complete or get, and it can be finished. A value has no finish line. As Harris puts it, "You can live the value of being loving right here, right now, in this moment."
Committed action is the half that moves. The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science describes ACT clients as people who get clearer about their personal values and then commit to needed behavior change. Clarity and commitment are two separate jobs. An exercise that finishes the first one leaves you knowing more and doing nothing differently on Wednesday.
Psychological flexibility is what the whole model aims at. The same association defines it as staying in full contact with the present moment and then "changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values." Read those last two words. You choose the direction, and nobody hands it to you.
A values exercise that stops at naming has done the clarity job and none of the commitment. You are left with a clearer list, no committed action, and no idea which life domain is going unserved.
Why naming your values changes nothing on its own
Naming your values does nothing on its own, because a list carries no information about last week. Values describe a direction, and a direction cannot tell you which part of your life you have been quietly stepping around. The second rating supplies that comparison: what you said mattered, set next to what you actually did.
A list is a statement of intent, and intent is cheap. None of those ten words competes with the others until a Wednesday evening forces you to pick one.
A domain can go quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with laziness. Hayes and his colleagues named one of them in 1996: experiential avoidance, described in their paper as "unhealthy efforts to escape and avoid emotions, thoughts, memories, and other private experiences." That is a pattern named in the research literature, not a verdict on you.
Experiential avoidance is one possibility a list cannot raise. When a domain keeps going quiet, ask whether something in it is hard to feel, or whether the week had no room.
This next part is not from the clinic. In Rosebud's own subscriber research, the people who arrive wanting relief tend to leave once the thing that hurt stops hurting, and the people who arrive wanting to understand themselves build a practice that lasts.
Relief is a finishable job. Understanding is not. That is the values-and-goals distinction showing up in who keeps journaling.
Seeing which domain keeps going quiet takes more than one week. I wrote about how to notice emotional patterns over time separately.
What the research on clarifying values actually found
Research on clarifying values found small changes in the choices people made, mostly in medical decisions. Witteman and colleagues pooled 43 values clarification methods tested in randomized trials and found fewer choices in conflict with people's own stated values. None of the studies below tested this pen-and-paper exercise as written.
| What was studied | What was found | Who it was studied in | The bound that travels with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does clarifying values change a decision | 43 values clarification methods in 33 randomized trials cut values-incongruent choices (risk difference -0.04, 95% CI -0.06 to -0.02) and decisional conflict (SMD -0.20, 95% CI -0.29 to -0.11) | Patients using decision aids for medical choices | Patient decision aids, not ACT. The outcome is whether a choice matched a stated value, not wellbeing, and both effects are small |
| Does a short self-directed values exercise beat goal setting | Values plus value-based goal setting beat the control on state paranoia (partial eta-squared = .148) and out-scored goal setting alone (partial eta-squared = .072), but only the control comparison was significant | 94 people high in non-clinical paranoia, three 30-minute self-directed online conditions, two-week follow-up | Per-protocol, the three groups did not significantly differ (p = .077). Self-report only, predominantly White female sample |
| Does ACT work when a clinician delivers it | 20 meta-analyses reporting 100 controlled effect sizes across 12,477 participants found ACT "generally superior to inactive controls (e.g. waitlist, placebo), treatment as usual, and most active intervention conditions (excluding CBT)" | People receiving ACT as a delivered therapy | ACT delivered by clinicians, not a worksheet done alone. The "excluding CBT" clause is part of the finding |
| How settled the ACT authors called their evidence | Writing in 2006, the authors of the ACT model said "the literature is not mature and many questions have not yet been examined" | The ACT model's own authors | The model's own posture in 2006, not a description of the literature today. The 2020 review above is the more current picture |
None of those rows is a study of you.
The move from that evidence to the exercise below is an argument, not a finding. In the decision-aid trials, clarifying values changed whether a choice matched what someone said mattered. The online trial bundled values with goal setting, so it cannot say which half did the work.
The broader review is about ACT delivered by a clinician, not a worksheet. So the exercise ends at a decision, which is the outcome the closest evidence actually measured.
How to run the two-rating exercise in about fifteen minutes
To run the exercise, list your life domains and rate each one from 1 to 10 for importance. Then rate the same domain again for how consistently you behaved that way over the past week. Hayes suggests one starting point, the domains you rated 9 or 10 for importance and 6 or below for consistency.
The instrument underneath this is the Valued Living Questionnaire. Wilson and colleagues published the acceptance and commitment therapy research version in 2010 across ten core life domains. Hayes publishes a twelve-domain version free alongside A Liberated Mind.
- Write down your life domains. Hayes's Valued Living Questionnaire lists twelve: family, intimate relationships, parenting, friends, work, education, recreation, spirituality, community, physical self-care, environmental issues, and creative expression. Cross out any that do not apply to your life.
- Rate importance from 1 to 10. Rate how much the domain actually matters to you, not how much you wish it mattered. Aspiration belongs in the next pass.
- Rate consistency from 1 to 10, for the past week only. Hayes's own instruction is specific about the window: he asks how you think you have been doing during the past week. Not this year. Last week.
- Read the gap. Hayes suggests a starting point of 9 or 10 on importance with 6 or below on consistency. That is a suggestion in a free self-help resource, not a score, a cutoff, or a clinical threshold. Subtracting one rating from the other is my arithmetic, not his, and the difference is a reflection cue rather than a result.
- Pick one domain. One, not four. A wide gap is a prompt to look, not a rule to obey. Choose the domain that is meaningful and workable this week, not just the widest gap.
If your consistency numbers are low across nearly everything, that may say more about the season you are in than about your values. Take the one domain that stings most and leave the rest alone. You can run this again in a month.
How to tell a chosen value from an inherited should
To tell a chosen value from an inherited should, notice what happens when nobody will ever know. Hayes tells readers to answer with nobody watching, setting aside social pressure and what he calls the wagging mental fingers of should and have to. The test is which of your ratings would change if nobody would ever see them.
- Answer privately. Hayes builds this into the instructions rather than bolting it on, telling you to "plan not to let anyone see this so you can answer as honestly as you can."
- Ask who would be disappointed. If you dropped this value tomorrow, who notices? When the only answer is one specific person, that is a question worth sitting with rather than an answer.
- Watch for the 10 you would never say out loud. If part of why you rated a domain 10 is that someone might read the page, that is worth a second look.
- Treat a long-running mismatch as a question rather than a failing. A domain at 10 for importance and 2 for consistency, year after year, could be avoidance, an unchosen value, or a life with no room. The ratings cannot tell you which.
- Let yourself score something low. Hayes is direct: values are what you choose to work toward, not what your mind says you have to care about. If a domain is honestly a 3 this week, write 3.
Turning one value into one committed action this week
Turning a value into committed action means choosing one specific thing you will do this week, in the domain you picked. The value is the direction you keep heading in, the action is one step that way, and the result is not fully yours to control. Finishing the step does not finish the value.
Not one of those eight ends by asking you to do a single thing this week. That is the step where psychological flexibility stops being a concept and becomes a Wednesday.
Write the action in behavior, not in outcome. "Call my brother on Sunday" is an action you can finish. "Be a better brother" is the direction it points in, and "repair the relationship" is a result you do not control.
A committed action and a SMART goal do different jobs. Both can be completed, and the difference is what sits behind them: a goal is done when you hit it.
A committed action is one sample of a direction, so the next one counts as much as this one. Missing one is information rather than failure.
Size it for your worst week. If an action only survives a good week, what it measures is mostly the week.
It helps to have something ask you on Sunday whether the thing happened. A calendar reminder does that. So does Rosebud, which offers goal and habit follow-up.
What to keep after the exercise is over
Keep four things after the exercise ends: the domain you chose, what got in the way, what action followed, and what changed by Sunday. Those four notes turn a one-off worksheet into something you can compare next month, and the pattern only shows up in the comparison.
One pass tells you where the gap sat this week. Four passes tell you whether that gap is a season or a shape.
The "what got in the way" line is the easiest of the four to leave blank. Fill it in anyway. A domain that loses to work three months running is telling you something a values list never will.
A notebook is a perfectly good place for those four notes. If you would rather not rely on memory, Rosebud recognizes patterns across entries over time and produces a weekly analysis of themes and progress. It compares your own entries, and it does not interpret an ACT result.
If you want somewhere to run the second pass, you can start a free journal.
If you are seeing a therapist, this is exactly the kind of thing worth carrying in. Choosing what to capture across a week is its own job, which I wrote about in how to journal between therapy sessions.
Where a values exercise stops
A values exercise stops well short of therapy. It gives you a direction and one action, and it does not resolve grief, treat a condition, or replace the person who knows your history. The exercise is a starting artifact rather than a finished piece of work.
Rosebud is an AI journal. Its own App Store listing says Rosebud "is not a substitute for professional mental health care, medical advice, or therapy," and I would rather lead with that than footnote it.
The study closest to this exercise ran two weeks and could not separate values from goal setting.
That is not a reason to skip the fifteen minutes. It is a reason to hold the result loosely and take it somewhere it can be argued with. A gap you found on Sunday beats "nothing much happened this week," which is where what to talk about in therapy picks up.
So go back to the list you already have. Add a second number to every line, for last week only, and see where the two sit furthest apart.
Pick one you could do something about this week. That is the whole change, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
