Personal Values Clarification: A Guided Clinical Exercise

Why Values Work Is Harder Than It Sounds

Values clarification sits at the heart of many therapeutic approaches, from ACT to schema therapy to motivational interviewing. Yet the concept routinely slips through patients' fingers the moment you try to explain it verbally. Ask someone what their values are and you will often get a blank look, a list of socially acceptable answers, or a vague gesture toward things they know they "should" care about. The concept itself resists a quick oral explanation.

What makes it genuinely difficult is the gap between lived experience and reflective awareness. A patient may act against their values every day without ever naming that misalignment as the source of their distress. The connection between action and meaning stays invisible. This is precisely where the ACT framework on psychological flexibility and committed action work become clinically relevant: neither lands well until the patient has done the upstream work of actually naming their values. Similarly, tools like the Choice Point model or building discrepancy for motivation depend on that foundation. Without it, you are building on sand.

What This Exercise Contains

The exercise opens with a brief, direct psychoeducational frame: values matter because they support personal development, and actions only carry their full meaning when aligned with them. That framing is deliberate. It positions the upcoming question not as abstract introspection but as practical self-knowledge with behavioral consequences.

The patient is then asked a single, structured question: to list their values as they relate to three distinct domains, themselves, their family, and their friends. That three-part structure is clinically significant. It prevents the patient from producing one generic list and calling it done. By separating the relational context, the exercise quietly reveals value differentiation across domains and can surface tensions the patient has never articulated, such as a value around autonomy that sits uneasily beside a value around family closeness.

This is a concrete clinical support. It does not ask for philosophical definitions. It asks for a personal inventory, which is exactly what makes the output usable.

> This exercise is available to patients through the patient mobile application of SessionFuel: the clinician assigns it as homework, and the patient completes it directly on their phone, on their own, between two appointments.

Integrating It as Between-Session Work

Assign this exercise when a patient is ready to move from symptom description toward meaning-based work. It suits a wide range of profiles: patients who feel chronically dissatisfied but cannot name why; patients in transition (professional, relational, identity-level); patients who have started exploring their core beliefs about self and others and are ready to look at what they actually want to move toward; and patients doing longer-term work with tools like the personal meaning and direction fiche or the life goals worksheet.

Introduce it simply: "Between now and our next appointment, I would like you to take some quiet time with this exercise. There are no right answers. Just list what genuinely matters to you in each area." That framing reduces performance anxiety and keeps the output authentic.

When the patient brings the completed exercise back, the clinical richness is in the comparison across domains. Are the values consistent? Where do they contradict? Which domain produced the most hesitation? You can use what emerges as a direct entry point into values-based goal work across life areas, or articulate it with the relationship values clarification fiche if relational themes dominate. For patients whose values feel disconnected from daily behavior, pairing it with the My Future Inventory exercise sharpens the gap analysis further.

> À retenir : The three-domain structure of this exercise does more than generate content. It reveals value tensions the patient has never been asked to name, and those tensions are often exactly where the therapeutic work lives.

Practical Adaptations

For patients who find the open format daunting, you can prepare them by briefly exploring the Exploring Values PDF worksheet or the personal values circles of influence fiche beforehand, giving them a vocabulary to draw on. For patients further along, the exercise pairs naturally with the 6- and 12-month goal-setting exercise and the 10-year goals long-term vision exercise, where named values become the scaffold for concrete planning.