Coaching practices for Eulogy Exercise Values Act

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • If someone stood up at my funeral tomorrow and told the truth about how I actually treat people, I’m not sure I’d like what they’d have to say
  • I can’t tell which of my values are truly mine and which I just absorbed from my parents or my culture
  • My days get eaten by what’s urgent and I never zoom out to ask who I actually want to have been
  • There’s a quality — real courage, say, or quiet generosity — that I admire deeply but have no idea how to actually grow in myself, and I want to find a real person who built it under pressure and trace how they did it, because right now it just feels like an abstract wish.
  • I want to pin down the few things I most want to have stood for when I look back at my whole life

Practices that may help

  1. Write your own eulogy first
    Draft what you want said about your character at your funeral — then measure the gap against your life now.
    The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
  2. The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
    David Brooks distinguishes two sets of virtues: résumé virtues — the skills and achievements that get you hired — and eulogy virtues — the moral qualities like courage, honesty, and loyalty that people mention when you die. His argument is that modern culture relentlessly develops the first set while neglecting the second, and that deliberately cultivating character requires different work: self-examination, wrestling with weakness, and submission to commitments beyond self-interest.
  3. Use the eulogy / future-self lens
    Imagine how you’d want to be remembered to reveal the values you’d defend most.
    Values Clarification, Made Practical
  4. The eulogy exercise: working backward from the life you want
    Write a brief eulogy for yourself that describes who you were and how you lived — then work backward to what that requires today.
    Values-Based Action (ACT), Made Practical
  5. Choose a character role model and study their biography
    Find a person — living or historical — whose eulogy virtues you admire and study how they built them.
    The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
  6. Write a values declaration as the core of your legacy letter
    Name the two to four values you most want to have lived by — then write why they matter to you.
    The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
  7. Carry forward the person’s legacy in your own life
    Identify values, projects, or commitments the person cared about and carry them forward yourself.
    Continuing Bonds in Grief, Made Practical
  8. Write the passages about what you are genuinely proud of
    Acknowledge, without false modesty, the things you have done that were worth doing.
    The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
  9. Values Bullseye, Made Practical
    The values bullseye, developed by Tobias Lundgren within the ACT framework, is a visual exercise in which you rate how close your current behavior is to the bullseye in four life domains — work, relationships, personal growth, and leisure. It converts abstract values into a concrete gap-analysis, making it easier to choose one committed action that moves you toward the center. The exercise is part of the established ACT toolkit; direct evidence for the instrument is limited but the underlying ACT framework has substantial support.
  10. Write a brief final accounting
    Write as if you’re reporting on your life: what did you do with your time?
    Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters

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