Module 8 — Values | ACT Course
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Module 8 — Values
It is a common and disorienting experience: a person reaches the goal they were certain would make them happy, the promotion, the degree, the house, and feels, after a brief glow, strangely empty. The goal is checked off, and the quiet question returns: now what? ACT has an explanation for that hollowness, and it begins with one of the most important distinctions in the whole approach. Goals are not the same as values, and a life organized only around goals will keep arriving at finish lines that do not feel like home. Values are the missing compass, and this process is about finding it.
Values versus goals
In ACT, a value is a chosen direction for living, an ongoing quality of how a person wants to act and what they want to stand for. A goal is a destination, something that can be reached, completed, and crossed off a list. The cleanest way to feel the difference is with a compass. Heading west is a direction. A person can travel west for a lifetime and never arrive at west; there is always more west to go. Reaching a particular town along the way is a goal, an achievable point on the journey. Values work the same way. "Being a loving, present partner" is a direction that is never finished, no matter how many loving acts pile up. "Planning a date for Friday" is a goal, done once it is done.
This matters because values can never be completed, and that is their strength rather than a flaw. A goal achieved is over, which is part of why goals alone leave the hollow feeling. A value is available every single day, in countless small actions, for the rest of a life. It is what gives goals their meaning: the goals are the waypoints, and the value is the road.
Two further distinctions keep the idea precise. A value is not a feeling. "To feel happy" or "to feel confident" cannot be a value, because feelings are not directly chosen or controlled; they come and go on their own. A value is a quality of action a person can bring no matter how they feel. And a value is not an outcome that depends on the world cooperating. "To be loved" or "to be successful" are outcomes, partly outside a person's control. "To be loving" and "to act with dedication" are values, fully within reach in any moment, whatever the result turns out to be. A value is something a person can always do, here and now, regardless of mood or circumstance.
The life domains
Values do not float in the abstract; they live in the concrete areas of a life. ACT often maps these areas as the life domains, the major arenas where what a person stands for gets expressed. Common domains include intimate relationships, family, friendships and social life, work and education, health and the body, personal growth and learning, leisure and recreation, and community or contribution to the wider world. Surveying the domains does two things. First, it reveals that values can differ from one domain to the next; what a person most wants to stand for at work may not be what they most want to stand for as a parent. Second, laying the domains side by side tends to show where a person has clarified what matters and where they have drifted along on autopilot, giving whole areas of life no conscious direction at all. The domains turn "what do I value?" from an overwhelming abstraction into a set of smaller, answerable questions.
The Bull's-Eye
The Bull's-Eye is a values-clarification tool that makes the gap between intention and action visible. It is drawn as a dartboard divided into the life domains, with the center, the bullseye, representing living fully in line with one's values, and the outer rings representing acting far from them. For each domain, a person marks where their recent actions have actually landed, near the center or out toward the edge. The result is a simple, honest map of alignment, a picture of where life is being lived close to what matters and where it has wandered off.
What gives the Bull's-Eye its power is also what makes it worth approaching gently. Seeing in black and white that one's actions have landed far from a cherished value can sting. It helps to hold the map as information rather than a verdict. A gap between values and actions is not evidence of failure or a reason for shame; it is simply data showing where to aim next. The Bull's-Eye is a compass reading, not a report card, and its whole purpose is to guide the next step rather than to grade the last one.
The Sweet Spot
The Sweet Spot, an exercise from ACT trainer Russ Harris, comes at values from the opposite direction. Rather than asking what a person believes they should value, it looks at what already feels meaningful. The exercise involves recalling a sweet moment, a memory that carries a warm sense of meaning or rightness, often something small and ordinary rather than a grand occasion, and then looking closely into it to find the value living inside. A quiet afternoon teaching a child to ride a bike, a long-overdue conversation with an old friend, an hour lost in work that mattered. Such moments are saturated with values, and examining what made one of them feel rich is a reliable way to discover what a person truly cares about. Where other tools reason toward values from the top down, the Sweet Spot finds them from the bottom up, in the texture of moments that already glowed.
The 80th birthday and the eulogy
Two related perspective exercises clarify values by taking the long view, stepping back far enough from daily noise to see what a person most wants their life to have stood for.
The 80th birthday exercise involves imagining a milestone celebration many years in the future, with the people who matter most gathered, and considering what one would most want them to say, not about achievements or possessions, but about the kind of person they were and what they stood for. The eulogy exercise takes the same long view a step further, imagining what a person would want said at their own funeral, what they would want their life to have meant. Both work by cutting through the urgent and the trivial to surface what endures. It is worth noting that these exercises can stir strong feeling, and that intensity is part of how they work, since the emotion points straight at what is most valued. They are less morbid than clarifying, using the long horizon to throw a person's deepest values into sharp relief.
The values card sort
The values card sort is the most hands-on of the clarification tools. It begins with a wide deck of named life principles, words like honesty, adventure, connection, creativity, fairness, security, and growth, among many others, and asks a person to sort them, typically into groupings such as very important, somewhat important, and not important. The deck is then narrowed, often by forcing a small final number, until only a handful of core values remain. The narrowing is the point. When everything can be called important, nothing is prioritized, and the sort's gentle pressure to choose reveals the difference between values that merely sound appealing and the few a person would actually organize a life around. Holding the full field and then paring it down turns a vague sense of "I value a lot of things" into a clear, short list worth steering by.
Common questions
Can a person's values change over time? Yes, and they often do. Values are chosen rather than fixed at birth, and the choosing can be revisited as life changes. A value that sat at the center of someone's twenties may quietly recede, while new ones come forward through events like becoming a parent, facing a loss, or changing careers. Some core values stay remarkably stable across a lifetime; others shift with circumstance. ACT treats this as normal and healthy rather than as inconsistency, and periodically revisiting what one stands for is part of living by values, not a sign of having gotten them wrong.
What if someone cannot identify their values, or feels they have none? This is extremely common and does not mean a person lacks values at all. After long stretches of autopilot, burnout, depression, or living mainly by other people's expectations, a person can simply lose contact with what matters to them, which is very different from having nothing there. Values tend to be buried rather than absent. They often show up first as quiet hints rather than clear declarations: what stirs a pang of envy, what brings an unexpected sense of meaning, what a person finds themselves defending or drawn back to. Coming up blank at first is a normal starting point, not a verdict, and the sense of emptiness usually reflects distance from one's values rather than their nonexistence.
Are values the same as morals, rules, or what others expect? No. In ACT, values are personally and freely chosen, which sets them apart from moral rules handed down from outside or the "shoulds" absorbed from family, culture, or social pressure. A direction a person pursues only because others demand it is not a value in this sense; it is closer to compliance. This does not mean a chosen value can never overlap with a moral principle, since many do. The distinguishing question is whether the direction is truly the person's own and freely owned, or merely an expectation they have swallowed without examining. Values that are genuinely chosen tend to feel vital and energizing, while inherited "shoulds" tend to feel heavy and obligatory.
Can two values genuinely conflict with each other? Yes, frequently, and this is a normal feature of a full life rather than a problem to be permanently solved. Valuing excellence at work and valuing presence with family can pull in opposite directions on any given evening. Valuing honesty and valuing kindness can collide in a single hard conversation. ACT does not arrange values into a fixed ranking that settles every clash in advance. Instead, in a given moment, a person chooses which value to act on, aware that honoring one now does not erase the other and that the other can be honored at another time. The presence of competing values is usually a sign that a person cares about many worthwhile things, not that something has gone wrong.
Is wanting money, status, or success a valid value? Wanting them is perfectly human, but in ACT's terms money, status, and success are goals or outcomes rather than values, because they are destinations that can be reached and they depend partly on factors outside a person's control. ACT does not treat them as bad or forbidden. The useful move is to look underneath them and ask what they are in service of. Money might serve security for a family, freedom, or the ability to be generous. Status might serve a deeper wish for mastery, contribution, or respect. Those underlying qualities, security, generosity, mastery, contribution, are the actual values, and naming them is what keeps the pursuit of money or status from becoming one more finish line that, once crossed, leaves the familiar hollow feeling.
Below this lesson, you'll find an ACT practice built around the exact skill you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
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