A shareable tool · 02
matters to you
Not what you should care about. Not what looks good. What you'd actually organise a life around. This is a sort, not a quiz — there's no score at the end, just a short list that's genuinely yours, and one honest look at whether your week reflects it.
Values are steady when everything else wobbles. Roles vanish — student, employee, someone's child — but what you care about survives, and it can be acted on today. Clarifying values is a core mechanism in ACT and motivational work, with reliable small-to-moderate effects on doing what you set out to do.
The sort · print or copy this page
Read them. Feel
for a small yes.
Go down the list once. For each, notice a quiet pull — not a should. The tinted ones are added for life here; add your own in the blanks. Then follow the three steps.
Very / somewhat / not for me. Be ruthless — if everything is "very," nothing is.
Then, harder: cut those five to three. The cutting is the exercise.
For each: what did you actually do about it in the last week? The gap between what you name and what your calendar shows is the working material.
Personal Values Card Sort — Miller, C'de Baca, Matthews & Wilbourne (2001), University of New Mexico. Public domain. Culturally salient values added for India by this practice, and flagged as such. Not endorsed by the original authors.
Consensus-to-moderate. Values work is a core mechanism in ACT and MI; effects on committed action are real but modest, and untested in Indian samples. A self-help resource — not therapy or diagnosis.
If clarifying this leaves you feeling hopeless or empty rather than clearer, that's worth talking through — Tele-MANAS 14416, free, 24×7.