Personal Values: PDF Worksheet, Tools and Exercises for Clinical Practice

Values clarification is one of the most frequently underestimated clinical tasks. Patients agree the concept matters, then struggle to name a single value that feels genuinely theirs rather than inherited. Explaining the difference verbally rarely resolves that confusion. This fiche PDF gives you a structured visual to bring into session, so the distinction lands rather than floats.

Why Values Are So Hard to Clarify Verbally

The core difficulty is not that patients lack values. It is that most values arrive pre-installed, absorbed from family scripts, peer groups, and cultural benchmarks, without the patient having explicitly chosen them. When you ask "what matters most to you?", many patients answer with goals ("getting promoted"), feelings ("being happy"), or socially desirable abstractions. The fiche addresses these directly: it includes a short section called Two confusions to avoid, distinguishing values from goals (a goal is ticked off; a value is "a direction you keep walking in") and from feelings.

A second problem is that patients rarely have language for the experience of living from someone else's value system. The quiet resentment, the hollow wins, the reflexive yes followed by days of dread: these are recognizable clinical presentations, but patients rarely connect them to misaligned values. Without a shared vocabulary and a visual that makes the structure explicit, this link stays implicit and hard to work with.

This is the gap the fiche PDF closes.

What the Fiche Contains: A Visual Map of Four Value Sources

The fiche is built around a four-circle model presenting the distinct sources from which values originate: MYSELF, FAMILY, FRIENDS, and SOCIETY. Each circle carries the same five dimensions (who speaks, what it sounds like, how it feels, what the risk is, and concrete examples), so patients can compare across circles on identical axes. This parallel structure is precisely what a spoken explanation cannot replicate: it lets the patient see, at a glance, that "In this family we..." (Family) and "A successful life looks like..." (Society) are both external voices, distinct from "I'd still want this alone" (Myself).

A curated word list of 22 values (honesty, curiosity, freedom, belonging, adventure, tradition, and others) prompts patients who go blank when asked to generate their own. The instruction embedded in the fiche is clinically usable as-is: "List the top 5 values each circle holds dear. Then compare: what overlaps everywhere is shared ground; what appears outside Myself but not inside may be borrowed."

The chosen vs. borrowed values panel maps each category across four dimensions: body feel, motivation, test (does it survive loss of approval?), and direction. This is the section that most patients photograph or take home.

> Key takeaway: the fiche is a visual psychoeducation support that facilitates the explanation in session, not a self-administered questionnaire. The clinician uses it to anchor the conversation, name the distinction, and hand the patient a concrete reference they can return to between appointments.

Finally, a To discuss in session block offers three ready-made clinical prompts: what to explore when a value sits in Family or Society but not in Myself, how to read a patient whose four lists are nearly identical, and how to open the cost-benefit conversation when a value appears in Myself alone.

When and How to Introduce It in Session

The fiche is most useful after an initial anamnèse and once a working alliance is established, typically from session two or three onward. It fits naturally into ACT-oriented work (especially alongside values-guided committed action exercises and the ACT Hexaflex), but it also complements schema therapy case formulations where enmeshment or undeveloped-self dynamics are central. It pairs well with motivational interviewing when building discrepancy around lifestyle choices.

For patients presenting with approval-seeking patterns, the borrowed-vs-chosen distinction can reframe compliance as a survival strategy rather than a character flaw. For those working on life goals across multiple domains, the circles model provides the values layer that goal-setting tools alone skip.

A low-threshold introduction: "Before we decide what direction to work toward, it can help to map where your current values actually come from. This sheet makes that structure visible in about ten minutes." Debrief by asking the patient to identify one value that lives only in the Myself circle and one that appears everywhere except there.

For between-session follow-up, the My Values guided exercise and the My Future Inventory extend the conversation autonomously. The fiche does not replace the clinical framework; it makes the explanation precise and leaves the patient with a map they can actually use.

Sources

• 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.
• 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.