Values Exploration Discussion Cards: PDF Worksheet, Tools and Exercises

Ask a patient directly what their values are and you will almost certainly get a tidy, socially acceptable list, family, health, honesty, that tells you very little about how they actually move through a Tuesday. This PDF worksheet was designed for exactly that impasse: it gives you a concrete visual support you can open in session, hand across the table, and use to draw out genuine values through story rather than declaration.

Why Direct Values Questioning Tends to Fail in Session

Within the ACT framework (Hayes, 2005; Harris, 2009), values clarification is a cornerstone of committed action. But the gap between a patient's stated values and their lived behaviour is frequently the most clinically productive terrain. The problem is access. When you ask directly, the patient's verbal repertoire produces rule-governed responding rather than genuine contact with what matters. The answer sounds right; it just doesn't move anything.

The fiche addresses a second layer of confusion: patients routinely conflate values with goals. Explaining the distinction verbally in session ("a value is a direction, a goal is a destination") rarely lands with enough clarity to stick. A patient can paraphrase it back and still be working from goals throughout the remainder of the case. You need something they can see.

> Key point: This fiche is a visual support that facilitates the explanation of values in session, not an autonomous questionnaire to complete at home, but a psychoeducational anchor the clinician uses with the patient to make a notoriously slippery distinction concrete and personally owned.

What the Fiche Contains

The support opens with a values versus goals panel, a side-by-side visual contrast that the fiche frames as "compass versus destination." Values are described as "a direction you keep walking in," living in verbs (loving, creating, protecting); goals as waypoints that are crossed off and left behind. A brief test case is included: two people both want to get married, one living "loving deeply," the other "being respected", same goal, different compass. This single diagram does more clinical work than five minutes of Socratic explanation.

The core of the tool is 16 discussion cards, each carrying two questions. Q1 invites a concrete story or image ("Name someone you admire. What do they live by?" / "Describe a time you felt genuinely proud. What were you living out?"). Q2 asks the patient to name the value surfacing underneath the story in their own words. The fiche includes a brief rationale for the indirect route: "Your stories don't lie, even when your conscious answers might." This framing is one you can read aloud to the patient before drawing a first card, it normalises the method and invites a slower, more honest kind of reflection.

A closing "reading your own answers" section guides the patient to look for recurring threads across cards, aiming for five to eight core values written in their own words. It names two traps explicitly: confusing values with goals, and choosing values the patient thinks they should hold. A short "to discuss in session" panel signals the moments most worth returning to together, including when a stated value is barely visible in the current week, or when a polished answer produces no somatic resonance at all.

The fiche pairs cleanly with the ACT Hexaflex visual, the Valued Domains worksheet, and the Choice Point tool for moving from clarification into committed action.

When and How to Introduce It

The cards work best once the therapeutic alliance is established and the patient has already articulated some sense of being stuck, directionless, or living in ways that feel misaligned. Mid-treatment is the natural entry point: after initial formulation, when avoidance patterns are visible, before building a committed action plan with something like the Values Cultivation exercise or the Personal Values Clarification homework.

For patients with significant approval-seeking schemas or rigid perfectionism, the indirect format is particularly useful, it sidesteps the performance pressure of a direct question. For patients presenting with low mood and behavioural withdrawal, connecting the cards to behavioural activation or the Future Inventory exercise gives the values work an immediate practical outlet.

A simple introduction: "Instead of asking you what your values are, which often produces answers that sound right but don't quite fit, we're going to try a different route. You'll draw a card, tell me a story, and we'll see what surfaces underneath." Print the cards beforehand, cut them, and shuffle them. Drawing three to five at random, rather than letting the patient select, reduces the pull toward self-presentation.

Debrief by asking which story felt most alive, and whether any value that appeared across multiple cards is genuinely visible in the current week. That gap, when it appears, is the clinical material. The fiche doesn't replace the therapeutic frame; it makes the explanation clear and leaves the patient with a concrete map of their own compass.

Sources

• Hayes, S. C., Smith, S. (2005). Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. New Harbinger Publications.
• Harris, R. (2021). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living (2nd ed.). Shambhala Publications.
• Harris, R. (2019). ACT Made Simple: An Easy-to-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
• 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.