🎯Module 9 — Values | ACT Course
Updated: Aug 9
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🎧 Audio is read by AI - Jessica Anne Bogart 🎙️ Note: You will hear the AI read ACT as one word, "act," as well as the individual letters "A-C-T" throughout the lesson. We're aware of this and will be re-recording to always say "act."
Values
Most of us, asked point-blank, could give a list of what matters to us. Family, honesty, meaningful work, being there for our friends. The answers come quickly, and they might sound noble. What is harder is comparing those answers to what we actually do with our hours. The week you just lived — where did it go? How much of it went toward the things you say you care about? Most of us live with some version of this gap: a list of what matters and a calendar full of other things. And the older we get, the more the gap can start to feel like a quiet kind of grief.
This is the lesson where the second half of the therapy's name arrives, and it arrives aimed straight at that gap. Everything so far has been the opening-up work: attention trained, thoughts unhooked, feelings given room, a stable place to stand discovered. All of it was for something, and this lesson names what. Values are ACT's answer to the question that appears the moment the war on inner experience winds down: with the hands free and the energy back, what is this life going to be about? It sounds like a philosophical question. ACT treats it as an intensely practical one, with tools, and people are often surprised to find that this lesson, not the anxiety work, is the one that ends up reorganizing their week.
What Values Are
A value is a chosen, ongoing quality of action: a way of behaving and being that a person wants to bring to life, again and again, for as long as they live.
The definition is doing precise work, and unpacking it also draws the boundary, because values get confused with several look-alikes and every confusion costs something.
Values are not goals, and this distinction is the load-bearing wall of the whole lesson. A goal is a destination: something that can be reached, checked off, finished. Getting married, losing ten pounds, landing the promotion. A value is a compass heading: a direction that never finishes, because directions can't be completed. A person can travel west for a lifetime and never arrive at west; there is always more west to go. Being a loving partner is a value; the wedding is a goal on that heading. Being someone who cares for their health is a value; the ten pounds is a goal along the way. The difference sounds academic until its practical consequences land. First: a value can be lived in the next five minutes. Nobody can get married that fast, but anyone can be loving right away, through a text, a warmer tone of voice, or a moment of actually listening. Values make "living well" available immediately, in any circumstances, which no goal can offer. Second: values survive outcomes. A goal can fail; west cannot fail. The applicant who values courage and growth lived those values in the interview whether or not the job comes through, and that is not a consolation prize, it is the actual point. And third: values are what give goals their meaning in the first place. This is why reaching a long-chased goal, whether a promotion, degree, or house, so often produces a brief glow and then a strange emptiness, the quiet question of now what. A goal achieved is over. A life organized only around goals keeps arriving at finish lines that do not feel like home, because the goals were only ever waypoints, and the value is the road.
There is a small grammatical mark of this worth knowing: values tend to be written as adverbs more than nouns. Not love but lovingly; courage becomes courageously, and generosity turns into generously. The shift matters because adverbs are how actions are done. You can act lovingly toward someone in the next conversation. You cannot act "love."
Values are not rules. "I must call my mother every Sunday" is a rule, rigid, external-feeling, guilt-powered. "Being a caring son" is the value the rule was clumsily trying to serve, and the value is flexible where the rule is brittle: it can be lived on a Tuesday, in a hundred forms, without the resentment rules generate. A rule pushes; a value pulls. The clue is in the language: rules speak in should, have to, and supposed to, while values answer with wanting, caring about, and moving toward.
Values are not feelings. "I want to feel happy" or "I want to feel confident" are wishes about inner weather, and this course has covered at length how little direct control anyone has over weather. Building a life around the pursuit of a particular feeling is building a house on weather. Values are about conduct, which is the thing a person can actually steer on a bad day. "Being playful" is a value precisely because it can be done while not particularly feeling like it, and, in one of life's better jokes, doing it is what tends to invite the feeling.
Values are not outcomes, either, and this close cousin of the feelings confusion is worth its own line. "To be loved" and "to be successful" are outcomes: they depend partly on the world cooperating, on other people and plain luck. "To be loving" and "to act with dedication" are values, fully within reach in any moment, whatever the result turns out to be. The same sorting applies to money, status, and success, which people often mistake for values. Wanting them is perfectly human, but they are destinations, reachable and partly outside a person's control. 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 are the actual values, and naming them is what keeps the pursuit from becoming one more finish line that, once crossed, leaves the familiar hollow feeling.
And values are not inherited shoulds. A lot of what we tell ourselves we value was given to us, by parents, religion, culture, absorbed before we were old enough to evaluate it. A genuine value, examined, has a chosen quality: it would still matter if nobody was watching, approving, or grading.
One useful test separates them: imagine no one would ever know. The person who would still create, remain generous, and keep learning has found a value. The one whose motivation evaporates without an audience has found a should wearing a value's clothes. Nothing is wrong with honoring family or culture, and the point is not to discard everything you were raised on; some of it might be exactly what you want. The point is that a value must be chosen, and choosing might mean re-choosing an inherited one freely, which changes everything about how it feels to live it. ACT is agnostic about the content of your values; it does not tell you what should matter. It only insists that the values you live by be values you have actually chosen.
The Four Life Domains
Left abstract, values float; everyone nods at "kindness" and nothing changes by Thursday. ACT grounds them by asking the values question inside four broad domains of living, a map used across the ACT world:
Work and Education. What a person wants to bring to their working and learning life, not which job, that's a goal, but the qualities: craftsmanship, contribution, curiosity, integrity, being someone teammates can rely on.
Relationships. The kind of partner, parent, child, friend, and colleague a person wants to be: loving, honest, present, loyal, forgiving, playful. Often the domain people care most about and tend least deliberately.
Personal Growth and Health. The relationship a person wants with their own body, mind, and development: self-care, learning, courage, spirituality for some, self-compassion, physical vitality.
Leisure. The forgotten domain, and its presence on the map is itself a teaching: how a person wants to play, rest, and create matters, adventurousness, creativity, fun, savoring. Many people discover their leisure "values" have quietly become whatever requires the least energy, which is a default, not a choice.
The domains do two jobs. They convert "what are my values?" (vast, vague, mildly paralyzing) into four smaller, answerable questions. And they expose lopsidedness: a life scoring rich in one domain and hollow in the others has usually been running on autopilot rather than on choice, and the map makes that visible before the toolkit measures it precisely. The domains also reveal that values can differ from one arena 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, and both answers can be true.
The Values Toolkit
Three tools, and a doorway worth naming before them, because it costs nothing and works everywhere: pain. We do not grieve things we don't care about. Loneliness shows up around the connection we want but don't have; guilt arrives when we have failed something we love. Wherever it hurts, look underneath, and there is usually a value, the thing that made the loss a loss in the first place.
The Bull's-Eye. Developed by Swedish ACT researcher Tobias Lundgren, and beloved for how much truth it fits on one page. Picture a dartboard divided into four quarters, one per life domain. The center, the bull's-eye, represents living fully by one's values in that domain. The move has two parts: first, write in each quarter a sentence or two naming the chosen value there; second, and this is where the tool earns its reputation, mark a dart in each quarter showing where daily life currently lands, dead center meaning "living it fully," outer rim meaning "far from it."
Watch Maya's board. Relationships quarter: her written value is being present and openhearted with the people she loves. Her dart, placed honestly, lands well toward the rim, because she has been in the same room as her family for months while actually being in her inbox. Work: value of craftsmanship and doing things properly; dart near the center, this one she's genuinely living. Health: value of caring for her body with some respect; dart at the outer edge, and she notes the sting of marking it. Leisure: she stares at the quarter and realizes she can't name a value there at all, which is itself the finding of the evening.
Two teachings live in the gap between center and dart. The gap is information, not indictment: it maps exactly where the meaningful work is, which is more than most people know about their lives on any given morning. And the sting Maya felt has a name worth knowing: the places where the gap hurts most are reliably the places a person cares most. Nobody aches over a rim-distant dart in a domain they're indifferent to. The pain of the gap is the value, felt from far away, and that reframe turns the board's worst news into its most useful. The board 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. An exercise from Russ Harris that comes at values from the opposite direction of the pain doorway. Rather than asking what a person believes they should value, it looks at what already feels meaningful. Recall a sweet moment, a memory that carries a warm sense of meaning or rightness, often something small and ordinary rather than a grand occasion: a quiet afternoon teaching a child to ride a bike, perhaps, or that long-overdue conversation with an old friend, or an hour lost in work that mattered. Then look closely into it and find the value living inside, the quality that made the moment glow. Such moments are saturated with values, and where the pain doorway finds them under the ache, the Sweet Spot finds them from the bottom up, in the texture of moments that already felt like home.
The 80th Birthday. The long-distance tool, and warmer in practice than it sounds in summary. A person imagines their 80th birthday party. The room is full of the people who have mattered, and a few of them stand up to speak: maybe a partner, then a child or dear young person, followed by an old friend and someone from their working life. The question is not "what would they say?", minds fused to self-criticism answer that one badly, but "what would I most want them to be able to say, truthfully, about who I was and how I moved through the world?"
Devon runs it and notices what does not appear in any speech he'd hope for. Nobody says "he answered emails with remarkable speed." Nobody mentions the promotion timeline he's been anguishing over, or that he kept his inbox at zero. What he finds himself wanting is small and enormous: "he showed up," "he was fun," "you always knew where you stood with him," "he made time." The exercise works by borrowing the clarity of distance: from eighty, the noise of the current week falls away and the compass headings underneath become audible. A stronger variant, the eulogy exercise, takes the same long view one step further, asking what a person would want said about what their life had stood for; both cut through the urgent and the trivial the same way, and any strong feeling they stir is part of how they work, since the emotion points straight at what is most valued. The gap between the hoped-for speeches and the current week's actual shape is the same gap the Bull's-Eye maps, heard from the other end of a life. Kept warm, this is not an exercise about dying; it is an exercise about what the living is for, and people tend to leave it moved rather than morbid.
One more tool deserves a mention for people who think best with something in their hands: the values card sort. It starts with a wide deck of named qualities, honesty, adventure, connection, creativity, security, growth, and dozens more, sorted into piles ranging from essential to somewhat meaningful to easily set aside, then narrowed, deliberately and a little ruthlessly, to a final handful. 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. Free versions are easy to find online.
Toward Moves and Away Moves
Once values start coming into focus, they become a way of seeing every choice, through the simplest frame in ACT: every action is either a toward move or an away move.
A toward move points in the direction of a value. Calling the friend you've been meaning to call, when connection matters. Sitting down to write because creative work does. Saying the difficult thing kindly in the name of honesty. Nothing heroic is required; the walk taken for the sake of health is a toward move, and so is the single email sent toward meaningful work. The lens is small enough for ordinary moments, which is exactly where it's needed.
An away move points away from a value, usually in the service of avoiding some discomfort. Cancelling the dinner because you don't feel up to it, even though connection matters. Scrolling instead of writing. Saying yes when you mean no, because the no is hard. Away moves are not moral failures; they are usually the path of least resistance in a moment when a feeling is loud. But they accumulate, and a life made mostly of away moves is a life pointed away from what matters most.
Values earn their keep most in hard times. Loss, illness, crisis, conflict scramble everything else: identity shakes, plans fall through, the future clouds over. What remains usable is direction. Being present to the people you love still works when everything else has fallen apart; honesty, kindness, and care for your body don't depend on conditions being good. Values are the compass that keeps working in the storm.
Choosing What Matters Most Right Now
A completed values inventory has one danger: it produces a beautiful list of eight or ten headings, and a person cannot steer by ten compass headings at once. The final move of this lesson is narrowing: choosing one or two values that are most alive, most needed, in this season of life, and letting those lead for now.
The choosing runs on the evidence the tools just produced. The domain where the dart-to-center gap stings most is usually the place a live value is calling. The theme that showed up in every imagined birthday speech is another. Priya, running both tools, finds the same word surfacing twice, presence, at the rim of her relationships quarter and inside every speech she'd hope for, and the choice makes itself: this season, presence leads.
Narrowing also answers a worry that stops people here: values genuinely conflict, and often. Excellence at work and presence with family can pull in opposite directions on any given evening. Honesty can collide with kindness inside a single hard conversation. ACT does not resolve this with a fixed ranking that settles every clash in advance. 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. Competing values are usually a sign that a person cares about many worthwhile things, not that something has gone wrong.
A different obstacle deserves its own reassurance: some people run the tools and come up blank, and conclude they have no values at all. Almost always, the values are buried rather than absent. After long stretches of autopilot, burnout, low mood, 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. Buried values tend to surface first as quiet hints rather than clear declarations: a pang of envy at someone else's life, an unexpected sense of meaning, or whatever a person finds themselves defending or drawn back to. Coming up blank is a normal starting point, not a verdict, and the sense of emptiness usually measures distance from one's values, not their nonexistence.
And a word that saves people years of misplaced guilt: values emphasis shifts across seasons, and that is normal, not failure. A new parent's compass swings hard toward family, and creative values wait in the harbor. When a health crisis arrives, the health domain moves to the front for a year. An empty nest hands the leisure and growth domains their first real turn in decades. The values were never abandoned; a compass carries every heading all the time, and a traveler still sails one direction at a time. What matters is that the current heading is chosen, consciously, by the person doing the living, and refreshed when the season turns.
One honest note at the close, because this lesson can stir it: values work sometimes surfaces grief, the ache of years spent far from a compass heading, or of headings inherited rather than chosen. That ache deserves the acceptance skills from earlier in this course, room, not war, and where it runs deep, it deserves a qualified professional's company. The ache is also, read rightly, the best news on the page: it is caring, located. A compass heading has been found, and everything in the next lesson is about how to start sailing it, one small, concrete move at a time.
Below this lesson, you'll find an ACT practice built around one of the skills you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
ACT Practice: Your Bull's-Eye
This practice runs the Bull's-Eye on your own life. You'll need paper, a pen, and ten to fifteen minutes of honest company with yourself. If a domain surfaces more ache than expected, ease your grip, name it as caring, and keep the pen moving gently or set it down; the board will keep.
Draw a large circle and divide it into four quarters. Draw two or three smaller circles inside it, dartboard-style, with a small bull's-eye at the center. Label the quarters: Work and Education, Relationships, Personal Growth and Health, Leisure.
In each quarter, write one or two sentences naming the value you would choose there, the quality of action you'd want to bring, not a goal, not a should. If you're stuck, try: "In this area, I want to be someone who..." And run the nobody-watching test: would this still matter with no audience? If not, dig once more.
Now place a dart, an X, in each quarter: dead center means your daily life fully expresses that value; the outer rim means you're living far from it right now. Be honest rather than kind or cruel. This is a map, not a grade.
Look at the whole board. Notice the quarter where the gap between center and X stings most. Write one sentence naming what that sting is telling you it cares about.
Circle the one value, or at most two, that feels most alive for this season of your life. That's your current heading. You don't need a plan yet; the next lesson is entirely about turning a heading into motion.
Keep the board. It's worth redrawing in six months, seasons turn, and watching the darts move is one of the quiet satisfactions of this work.
This Week
Pick your circled value and live it once a day in a five-minute form: a present conversation, one honest sentence, some small act of care. Compass headings are available immediately; test that claim.
Catch one "should" this week and check its passport: chosen value, or installed rule? No need to act differently yet, just sort it.
In one ordinary decision, what to do with a free hour, how to answer a text, try asking "which choice is a toward move?" and notice that the question changes the decision's shape.
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