Values Clarification Worksheet — The ACT Choice Point

What this worksheet is for

Most people can name their goals within seconds and struggle for several minutes to name their values. That asymmetry is the problem this worksheet addresses. Goals are visible and socially reinforced — promotions, weddings, degrees, targets. Values are the quieter question of what you want the effort to be for, and when they go unexamined, it is entirely possible to achieve every goal on your list and still feel that something is off.

The Choice Point worksheet is the values-clarification exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It does three things in sequence: surfaces what you actually value, measures the distance between that and how you currently spend your time, and converts the widest gap into one specific action. That last step is what distinguishes it from the personality quizzes it superficially resembles — the output is not a label, it is something you do this week.

The theory behind it

ACT rests on the observation that trying to control unpleasant internal experience is often the thing that shrinks a life. You avoid the conversation because it might get uncomfortable; you avoid the gym because of how you look; you avoid the new role because of the anxiety in the interview. Each individual avoidance is reasonable. The cumulative effect is a life organised around not feeling bad rather than around anything you chose.

Values are ACT's answer to that. If your reason for acting is "so that I feel less anxious", then anxiety gets to decide your behaviour. If your reason is "because being a present father matters to me", the anxiety can be present and the action can still happen. This is the psychological flexibility that ACT is built to develop — the capacity to hold the discomfort and move in your chosen direction anyway.

The Choice Point diagram formalises this. At the bottom sits the situation and the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. Two arrows lead upward: towards moves, which take you in the direction of what you value, and away moves, the things you do to escape the discomfort. The diagram deliberately does not moralise. Away moves are not failures — they are usually intelligent short-term solutions with a long-term cost, and seeing them named on paper is what makes the cost visible.

Using it well

The worksheet takes 15-20 minutes, and the arithmetic in step five is where the value is concentrated. Rating importance alone tells you nothing surprising — nearly everyone rates health and family at 9 or 10. Rating how fully you have been living each value over the past month, and then subtracting, produces the number that is genuinely informative. A value at importance 10 and living 3 is a gap of 7, and that gap is a better predictor of low-grade dissatisfaction than any single symptom score.

Keep the committed action in step six almost embarrassingly small. The common failure is to respond to a gap of 7 in the health domain by committing to five gym sessions a week, which collapses within nine days and adds evidence that you cannot follow through. One fifteen-minute walk, scheduled, is a better instrument. The action is not the point — the demonstration that values can move behaviour is the point.

Why "values" and not "priorities"

The word is doing specific work here. Priorities are a ranking — this before that, this quarter before next. Values are qualities of action, and they are available in any moment regardless of circumstance. You cannot always prioritise your family; a hospital shift or an exam season will decide that for you. You can, in almost any five-minute window, act with the quality you value — attentively, honestly, generously.

This distinction is what makes the exercise usable by people whose circumstances are genuinely constrained. A caregiver, a resident doctor, or a single parent working two jobs cannot restructure their week around a values list, and an exercise that implies they should is not just unhelpful but faintly insulting. What they can do is identify the quality they want the constrained hours to carry, which is a smaller claim and a far more achievable one.

It also explains why the worksheet asks for one 48-hour action rather than a plan. ACT treats committed action as something that recurs and accumulates, not as a project with a completion date. You take a small step, notice what showed up to stop you, make room for it, and take the next step. The worksheet is simply the instrument that tells you which direction to step in.

When to use it, and when to skip it

Use it when you are functioning but drifting: the work is fine, nothing is wrong exactly, and you cannot say what any of it is in service of. Use it at genuine transition points — a new job, a move, the end of a relationship, becoming a parent — when the old defaults have stopped applying. Use it if you have finished a course of therapy and want something to organise the next phase around. It also pairs naturally with behavioural activation, where the scheduled activities work far better when they are chosen for what they mean to you rather than picked at random.

Skip it, for now, in two situations. First, during acute crisis — when someone is in the middle of a panic cycle, an acute depressive episode with severe hopelessness, or immediate grief, abstract values work lands badly and can read as pressure. Stabilisation comes first; values work is what you do afterwards to decide where to go. Second, if the exercise reliably produces heavy self-criticism, pause the exercise and address that first. The worksheet is a compass, not a verdict, but for people with a strong inner critic it can be converted into a verdict very quickly.

Patterns worth watching for

Inherited values. The most common finding on a first pass is a shortlist that belongs to someone else — a parent, a spouse, a professional culture. The test is simple: would you still hold this value if nobody ever knew you held it? Anything that fails that test is likely a rule you absorbed rather than a value you chose.

Values as sticks. Some people convert every value into a standard they are failing to meet, and finish the exercise feeling worse. If your notes read like a charge sheet, the useful move is to work on the critic before returning to the compass — a CBT thought record on the harshest line is a good starting point, and the self-compassion journey addresses the pattern more thoroughly.

One domain at 10, everything else at 2. A single domain absorbing all your living scores — usually work — is the standard pre-burnout profile. It rarely feels like a problem while it is happening, because the high-scoring domain is going well. The emotional reset journey revisits values in weeks 7 and 8 with this specific imbalance in view.

Nothing above a 6 anywhere. A flat profile with no strong importance ratings at all is worth taking seriously rather than reading as indecision. Broad flattening of what once mattered is a recognised feature of depression, and the depression page is a more useful next step than repeating the worksheet.