Module 6 — Values | ACT Course
- May 11
- 10 min read
Updated: May 12
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Module 6 — Values
Most of us, asked point-blank, could give a list of what matters to us. We'd say family, or honesty, or doing meaningful work, or being a good person, or being there for our friends. The answers might come quickly. 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? How much of it went somewhere else entirely?
Most of us live with some version of this gap. We have a list of what matters and a calendar full of other things. The two don't quite match. And the older we get, the more this gap can start to feel like a quiet kind of grief.
ACT takes this gap seriously. The commitment in Acceptance and Commitment is about a life lived in the direction of what genuinely matters to you. And before you can live in that direction, you have to know what it is.
This is the work of values. It is the slow process of figuring out what you actually care about, freely and on your own terms, so that the rest of your choices have somewhere to point.
Directions, Not Destinations
ACT has a specific meaning for the word values that takes a moment to settle into, because it isn't quite what the word usually means in everyday speech.
When most people use the word values they mean something like "things I think are important." Family. Honesty. Hard work. Kindness. These show up as nouns, and they sit there like furniture, identifying you as the kind of person who values them.
In ACT, values are not nouns. They are directions. They are about how you want to engage with your life, the qualities you want your actions to have, not what you want to acquire or accomplish. A value isn't "family." A value is something more like "being a loving and attentive presence in the lives of the people I love." That isn't a thing you can put on a shelf. It is a direction you can keep walking in for the rest of your life, day after day, choice after choice.
You can think of values as verbs more than nouns, the act of loving rather than the noun love, the act of creating rather than the finished creation. Values are directions, not destinations. You head west; you never arrive at west.
There is a small but practical mark of how ACT writes values down, and it is worth knowing. Values tend to be written as adverbs and adjectives more than as nouns. Not love but lovingly. Not courage but courageously. Not generosity but generously. Not honesty but honestly. The shift to adverbs makes the direction operable, because adverbs are how actions are done. You can act lovingly toward someone you are talking with right now. You cannot act "love." You can show up generously today. You cannot show up "generosity." The grammar matters because the grammar is what makes the value useable in a moment.
Not Goals, Not Feelings, Not Rules
It helps to be clear about what values are not, because each of the things they are often confused with leads somewhere unhelpful.
Values are not goals. A goal is something you can finish: get married, run a marathon, get the promotion, buy the house. Once you do it, you have done it. A value is something you can never finish: being a loving partner, caring for your body, doing work that contributes something, living with honesty. You don't check these off. You keep walking in their direction, for as long as you keep walking.
Goals are wonderful, they organize the day, they give shape to a life, they offer the small bright joy of finishing something. But goals are not where meaning lives. Meaning lives in the values that goals serve. If you finish a goal and you cannot say what value it was in service of, the satisfaction tends to fade fast. The goal was achieved; the life it was supposed to point toward was not.
Values are not feelings. When asked what they want from life, most people will reach first for an emotional state. They want to be happy, or peaceful, or less anxious than they are. None of these are values in the ACT sense — they are feelings, and feelings, by their nature, come and go. You will be happy sometimes and not happy other times, regardless of how the rest of your life is going.
Building a life around the pursuit of a particular feeling is like building a house on weather. Values are about how you want to live, not how you want to feel. Living with courage is a value. Feeling brave is a feeling, and it will be there sometimes and not others. You can act courageously when you don't feel brave at all and that is usually what acting courageously looks like.
Values are not rules. A rule pushes you. A value pulls you. The same action, calling your mother on her birthday, can be done as a rule (I should do this; I'm a bad person if I don't) or as a value (I love her and I want her to know it). The behavior looks identical from the outside. From the inside, one is duty and the other is direction. ACT cares about the difference because rule-driven action depletes you, even when it produces the same call. The clue, again, is in the language. Should, have to, supposed to, these are the words of rules. The words of values are softer and more chosen: I want to, I care about, I am moving toward.
Authentic vs Inherited Values
There is one more piece to add about values, and it is the trickiest part of the work.
A lot of what we tell ourselves we value isn't actually ours. It was given to us by parents, by religion, by culture, by the particular shape of the family or community we grew up in. We absorbed it before we were old enough to evaluate it. By the time we were old enough, it had already become what we believed.
Some of these inherited values are good fits and we keep them with our whole hearts. Others are not, and they cost us something to keep carrying. The clue that a value isn't really yours is often in the language you use about it, the should and have to and supposed to from the previous section. Underneath those words is usually a sense of obligation, sometimes guilt, sometimes a low-grade exhaustion that comes from spending your life serving a value you never actually chose.
The work of values in ACT includes the slow and sometimes uncomfortable process of separating what was given to you from what is genuinely yours. The point is not to discard everything you were raised on. Some of it might be exactly what you want. The point is that the values you live by become more yours when you have actually looked at them and decided. The same value held under obligation and held under free choice are not the same value. One is a duty; the other is a direction you have chosen.
It is worth saying clearly that ACT is agnostic about the content of your values. It does not prescribe particular ones. It does not tell you what should matter or how much weight to give your work versus your family versus your art versus your spiritual life. The content of your values is yours to determine. ACT only insists that the values you live by be values you have actually chosen.
The Life Domains
Most people, when first asked about their values, freeze a little. The question is too broad. Where do you even start?
ACT offers a working map of the territory of a human life, broken down into domains so the question becomes tractable. The list varies slightly from teacher to teacher, but a common version includes work and career; education and learning; intimate or romantic relationships; family of origin; parenting, if you are or want to be a parent; friendships and broader social connection; health, body, and physical wellbeing; leisure, recreation, and play; spirituality, religion, or contact with what feels larger than yourself; community, citizenship, and contribution; and personal growth or self-development.
Looking at this list domain by domain, the inquiry gets smaller and more answerable. What kind of partner do I want to be? What kind of parent? How do I want to engage with my work? What does the health of my body actually matter to me as? Each domain is a separate small question, and most people find that some of them feel alive with values they can name quickly while others feel blank or neglected or like territory they haven't visited in years.
That information itself is useful. The blank domains are often where the most important values work is waiting. The neglected ones are often where the quiet grief at the start of this lesson lives. A whole life made of work and parenting, with health and friendship and leisure left to wither, will eventually feel like a life half-lived even if the work and parenting are going beautifully. The map matters because it shows you the whole field, not just the part you've been tending.
Practices for Clarifying Values
Clarifying your values is not a one-time exercise. It happens over months and years, and depends on a willingness to be honest with yourself about what is actually moving you and where you actually want to go.
But there are starting places.
One classic exercise asks you to imagine your eightieth birthday. Picture the people who matter to you gathered to mark the occasion. Imagine each of them saying something about who you have been to them and how you have lived your life. What do you want them to be able to say? What kind of presence do you want to have been? The answer will not be a list of accomplishments. It will be qualities of how you showed up. Those qualities are pointing at your values.
A more concrete tool is the Bullseye, developed by Tobias Lundgren. You draw a target on paper a bullseye in the center, three concentric rings around it. For each domain of your life, you place a single dot. A dot in the center means you are living in full alignment with your values in that domain. A dot near the outer edge means you are far from where you want to be. After marking the dots, you look at the pattern. The domains with dots near the edge are not failures. They are information. They are where the next bit of work waits. The Bullseye is not a one-time exercise. Many people return to it every few months to track which way they are moving closer to the center in some domains, farther in others, all of it useful data.
Another way in is the magic wand question. If shame and fear weren't running the show, what would you do today? What would you say in this conversation? What would you stop putting off? The point is not to identify what you'd do if life were perfect. It is to surface what you'd choose if the usual obstacles weren't loud. What's underneath the answer is almost always pointing at a value.
A fourth way in is through 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. The places that hurt are usually pointing at the places we love. If you look carefully at what your suffering is about, somewhere underneath it is a value, the thing that made the loss a loss in the first place.
None of these exercises produces a final list. Values clarification is a longer conversation with yourself than that, and the answers tend to deepen and refine themselves over time. What the exercises do is open the door. Once it is open, you can keep walking through it for the rest of your life.
Toward Moves and Away Moves
Once you have begun to identify what matters, values become a way of seeing every choice. ACT introduces a simple but useful frame: every action you take is either a toward move or an away move.
A toward move is an action that points you in the direction of a value. Calling the friend you've been meaning to call, when connection matters to you. Sitting down to write, when creative work matters. Saying the difficult thing kindly, when honesty matters. The action does not have to be heroic. The walk you take when health matters to you is a toward move. The single email you send when meaningful work matters is a toward move. The lens is small enough to apply to ordinary moments.
An away move is an action that points you away from a value, usually in the service of avoiding some kind of discomfort. Cancelling the dinner because you don't feel up to it, when connection matters to you. Scrolling instead of writing, when creative work matters. Saying yes when you mean no, because the no is hard, when honesty matters. 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. A life made mostly of away moves is a life pointed away from what matters most.
The point of the toward-and-away distinction is not to grade your behavior. It is to give you, in any moment, a question you can ask: which direction is this choice moving me? The answer is often clear once asked. The asking itself is most of the work.
Values are also what you can return to when life destabilizes. Hard times — loss, illness, crisis, conflict — tend to scramble everything else. Identity gets shaken. Plans get broken. The future gets uncertain. What remains usable, in those moments, is your sense of direction. The value of being present to the people you love is still usable when everything else has fallen apart. The value of being honest, of being kind, of taking care of your body, of doing work that contributes — these don't depend on the conditions being good. They are how you choose to walk through whatever conditions are. Values are the compass that keeps working in the storm.
Values are not goals to be achieved or feelings to be sustained or duties to be discharged. They are the directions in which you want your life to point. They give your actions a reason, your time a shape, your suffering a meaning. They make it possible to know, at any given moment, whether the choice in front of you is moving you toward the life you want or away from it.
This is the work that the rest of a life can be organized around — the slow, brave, sometimes inconvenient process of figuring out what you actually care about. Once you know, you have something to move toward.
Quick ACT Practice
Choose one area of your life that matters right now.
It might be relationships, work, health, learning, parenting, friendship, spirituality, creativity, community, or personal growth.
Now ask:
What kind of person do I want to be in this area?
Try to answer with a quality of action, not a goal.
For example:
lovingly
honestly
courageously
patiently
generously
creatively
steadily
Now look at one recent choice you made in this area.
Was it a toward move or an away move?
A toward move points you in the direction of the person you want to be. An away move usually protects you from discomfort, but pulls you away from what matters.
Do not use this question to shame yourself. Use it as information.
Now choose one small toward move you could make today.
Not a life overhaul. Not a perfect plan.
Just one action that points, even slightly, in the direction of what matters.
That is values practice in ACT: knowing your direction, noticing when you drift, and choosing one next move toward the life you want
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