Valued Domains: PDF Worksheet, Tools and Exercises for ACT Practice

Explaining valued domains verbally rarely lands the first time. Patients hear "what matters to you" and produce goals, obligations, or inherited scripts, not actual values. This PDF worksheet gives you a shared visual reference that makes the distinction concrete and durable the moment you introduce it in session.

Why Valued Domains Resist Verbal Explanation in Session

The central clinical difficulty is conceptual slippage: patients conflate values with goals, rules, or feelings, and they do so genuinely, not because they are resistant. When you say "what direction do you want your life to take in the area of parenting?" a patient often hears "what outcome do you want to achieve?" Without a visual anchor, the distinction between direction and landmark dissolves almost as fast as you articulate it.

A second, quieter problem: many patients produce borrowed values. The list they generate sounds virtuous because it reflects exactly what their parents, partner, or cultural context would write for them. Spotting this in the room is delicate. Naming it without visual support can feel confrontational. A fiche that includes an explicit prompt to check whether a value is chosen or borrowed externalizes the question and makes the exploration feel collaborative rather than challenging.

Finally, the twelve-domain scope matters. Patients with depression, burnout, or high avoidance typically contract around one or two areas, losing sight of the full life canvas. Oral psychoeducation about "multiple life domains" is abstract. A wheel showing all twelve simultaneously is not.

What the Fiche Contains: A Visual Map for ACT-Informed Practice

The PDF worksheet opens with a spoke wheel divided into twelve wedges: family, intimacy, parenting, friends, community, health, learning, spirit, play, work, creativity, nature, with the phrase "at my best" at the center. This single layout does something no oral explanation achieves: it shows all domains simultaneously, so the patient can immediately see which wedges feel alive, which feel empty, and which feel tender. That visual information feeds the conversation directly.

Three structured panels follow, each targeting a specific point of confusion.

• Value vs. goal: side-by-side examples ("Be a warm, patient parent" versus "Book the holiday") make the direction-versus-landmark distinction stick faster than any definition.
• Three things a value isn't: explicit comparisons between a rule ("I should be a good parent") and a value ("I want to be warm, patient"), between a feeling and a guiding quality, and a direct prompt to check for borrowed content: "Ask: is this mine, or borrowed?"
• Using the map well: six concrete prompts the patient can work with autonomously, including the hidden-camera prompt ("If a camera filmed me at my best here, what would someone watching see me do?"), a caution against platitudes like "be a good person", and a closing instruction to pick "one tiny thing, in the next seven days" in the loudest gap.

A closing "To discuss in session" block flags three situations that warrant returning to the material with you: an empty wedge the patient cannot fully explain, goals appearing where values should be, and a list that reads suspiciously like someone else wrote it.

> Key takeaway: the fiche is a visual support that facilitates the explanation of valued domains in session; it is not a self-help questionnaire to fill out alone. The wheel creates a shared vocabulary and a concrete reference point the patient keeps after the appointment.

When and How to Introduce the Fiche

The fiche fits naturally at the formulation phase, once the presenting problem is mapped and you are beginning to build a case conceptualization around avoidance patterns or évitement expérientiel. It integrates directly with the ACT Hexaflex model and supports the values component of psychological flexibility work. For patients engaged in exploring their core values or working through the ACT Choice Point, the wheel provides a concrete life-canvas to situate the abstract.

For profiles presenting with depression, burnout, or unrelenting standards schemas, the empty-wedge exercise is particularly productive: it surfaces avoidance and grief without requiring you to name them prematurely. For patients with early maladaptive schemas, the borrowed-values check opens a direct route to origins work.

Introduce it simply: "I want to show you a map we'll use together. There are twelve life areas on it. We're not filling it in right now; I just want us to look at it and notice what stands out." That framing removes performance pressure and positions you as a guide rather than an assessor. Once the patient has located their "loudest gap", the fiche connects naturally to goal-setting work, values cultivation exercises, and behavioral activation planning.

Debrief by asking which wedges prompted a reaction, whether the value they wrote could be ticked off a list (goal test), and whether anything on the wheel felt like it belonged to someone else. For ACT defusion work, a natural follow-up is examining which fused thoughts appeared while the patient looked at tender or empty domains.

The fiche does not replace the therapeutic frame. It makes the explanation faster, the vocabulary shared, and the direction visible, in a single page the patient carries out of the room.

Sources

• Wilson, K. G., Sandoz, E. K., Kitchens, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2010). The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and Measuring Valued Action within a Behavioral Framework. The Psychological Record, 60, 249-272.
• Wilson, K. G., & Murrell, A. R. (2004). Values work in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Setting a course for behavioral treatment. In S. C. Hayes, V. M. Follette, & M. Linehan (Eds.), Mindfulness and acceptance: Expanding the cognitive-behavioral tradition (pp. 120-151). Guilford Press.
• Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Harris, R. (2019). ACT Made Simple: An Easy-to-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
• Harris, R. (2022). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living (2nd ed.). Shambhala Publications.
• Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS). Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ) - instrument page and working guide. Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.