ACT Values Worksheet: A Step-by-Step Exercise You Can Do Right Now

An ACT values worksheet is a structured exercise that helps you identify the directions that matter most to you — things like connection, health, or creativity — rate how closely your current life matches them, and turn each one into a small action you can take this week. It comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), where values are one of six core processes. This page is the worksheet itself: you can work through it right now, with pen and paper or a notes app, no download required.

If you want the clinical background first — why ACT treats values as verbs rather than nouns, the named exercises therapists use, and how values work differs across anxiety, depression, OCD, and trauma — read values clarification in ACT. This page skips the theory and takes you straight through the exercise.

What This Worksheet Does

ACT draws a sharp line between a value and a goal. A goal is something you can finish — send the email, go to the appointment, get the promotion. A value is a direction you can never finish — being a present parent, being honest, staying curious. Goals are stepping stones; values are the direction you're stepping toward. This worksheet is built around that distinction, because conflating the two is the single most common reason values work fails to change anything.

The exercise below moves through four steps: naming the domains of your life, testing candidate values against ACT's "verbs, not nouns" rule, rating the gap between what matters and how you're currently living, and converting that gap into one concrete action. It takes 15–25 minutes the first time through.

When to Use This Worksheet

This worksheet is useful any time your actions feel disconnected from what you actually care about — when you're busy but not fulfilled, stuck but can't say why, or making decisions purely to avoid discomfort rather than to move toward something. It's commonly used:

• At the start of ACT treatment, to give the therapy a direction before acceptance and defusion work begins
• When motivation for a goal (exercise, a job search, repairing a relationship) keeps collapsing because the goal was never tied to a value
• During a stuck point in therapy, when symptom reduction has plateaued and the work needs a "why"
• Independently, as a periodic check-in — many people redo it every few months

It is not a crisis tool. If you are having thoughts of self-harm or suicide, this worksheet is not the right resource right now — contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) or your local emergency number instead.

The Step-by-Step ACT Values Worksheet

Step 1: List Your Life Domains

Values show up inside specific areas of life, not in the abstract. Before naming values, list the domains that apply to you. A typical set:

• Intimate relationships / partnership
• Parenting or family of origin
• Friendships and community
• Work, career, or education
• Physical health and the body
• Leisure, recreation, and play
• Personal growth and learning
• Spirituality or meaning
• Citizenship and contribution to the wider world

Skip any domain that genuinely does not apply to your life right now. You should end up with 5–9 domains.

Step 2: Name a Value for Each Domain, Then Run the Verb Test

For each domain, write one value — a quality of action, not a thing you want to have. ACT's test: can you act on it for the next thirty seconds, regardless of how you feel? If yes, it's behaving like a value. If what you wrote is really a feeling ("happiness"), an outcome ("success"), or a possession ("a stable career"), rewrite it as the verb underneath it.

Also watch for "should" values — things you believe you're supposed to value rather than things you'd choose if no one were watching. A quick check: if no one would ever know, would I still choose this? If you hesitate, it's likely a should, not a value.

Step 3: Rate Importance and Alignment (0–10)

For each domain's value, rate two things on a 0–10 scale:

• Importance: how much does this actually matter to you?
• Alignment: how closely does your current behavior match it?

The gap between the two numbers is the most useful data on the page. A value rated 9 for importance and 2 for alignment is telling you exactly where the worksheet — and your attention — should go next. A value rated 9 and 8 needs no intervention; it's already working.

Step 4: Pick Your Biggest Gap and Write One Action

Sort your rows by gap size. Take the single largest gap — not all of them, just one — and write down one small, specific action you could take in the next seven days that moves toward that value. The test for "small enough": would you actually do it on a bad day? If not, shrink it further.

"Be healthier" is not an action. "Walk for fifteen minutes after dinner on Tuesday and Thursday" is. This is the handoff point from values clarification to committed action — the ACT process that keeps values moving instead of staying a nice list on a page.

A Worked Example

Here's how the worksheet looks filled in for someone we'll call Dana, a 34-year-old managing work stress and some social withdrawal.

Step 1 — Domains: work, friendships, health, personal growth.

Step 2 — Values (verb form):

• Work → contributing (not "being successful")
• Friendships → connecting (not "having a social life")
• Health → caring for my body (not "being fit")
• Personal growth → learning (not "being smart")

Step 3 — Importance / Alignment / Gap:

Step 4 — Biggest gap and action: Friendships, gap of 6. Dana's action: "Text my friend Priya Wednesday to set up coffee this weekend — not 'reconnect with everyone,' just one text to one person."

Notice Dana didn't try to fix all four rows. ACT values work is deliberately narrow at the action stage — one value, one small move, repeated weekly — because that's what actually gets done.

Key Takeaways

• A value is a direction you can never finish; a goal is something you can complete. Mixing them up is the most common reason values work doesn't change behavior.
• The verb test — can you act on it for 30 seconds regardless of how you feel? — separates real values from feelings, outcomes, and "should" values.
• The gap between importance and current alignment, not the importance score alone, tells you where to focus.
• Pick one value and one small action per week. Smallness is a feature, not a shortcut.

Common Mistakes on This Worksheet

• Writing goals instead of values. "Get a promotion" is a goal with an endpoint. "Contributing meaningfully at work" is the value that goal might serve. If a row can be "finished," it's a goal — ask what it's in service of.
• Trying to fix every gap at once. Six rewritten rows and six new habits by Monday is a plan that collapses by Wednesday. One value, one action.
• Scoring from guilt rather than honesty. Alignment ratings are data, not a performance review. Rating yourself a 2 is not a failure; it's information about where to put a small action.
• Stopping at Step 3. A list of values and gaps with no action attached is a nice piece of self-knowledge that changes nothing. Step 4 is the step that makes the worksheet work.
• Picking "shoulds." A values list that is really your parents' or your industry's expectations will not sustain motivation under stress. Run the "if no one would know" test on anything that feels like an obligation rather than a pull.

How This Fits Into ACT

Values are one of six interlocking processes in ACT, alongside acceptance, cognitive defusion, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, and committed action. In treatment, values clarification typically comes early — it gives the harder work (tolerating discomfort, dropping avoidance) a reason, rather than asking clients to sit with distress for its own sake.

If exposure-style work or acceptance practice feels pointless in the abstract, anchoring it to a value from this worksheet usually restores the "why." Many clients come back to this exercise repeatedly across treatment — values are chosen, not discovered once and filed away, so revisiting it as life changes is expected, not a sign you did it wrong the first time. For the deeper clinical picture — named exercises like the Bullseye and sweet-spot method, how values work differs in anxiety, depression, OCD, and trauma, and what the evidence shows — see values clarification in ACT.

Want Support Putting Values Into Practice?

A therapist trained in ACT can help you move from a filled-in worksheet to lasting committed action, especially when motivation stalls or old patterns pull you off course.

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