Practice Valuing: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Practice Valuing, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 1 minute
Try it here: rate how your week matches your values
Seeing how closely your days match what you value shows the next step, so rate your week.
How closely does your week match what you value?
Practices that may help
- Review the bullseye weekly to track real movement
Re-mark each domain every week and compare — small outward or inward shifts are your feedback loop.
Values Bullseye, Made Practical - Values clarification through lived evidence
Infer your actual values from your past behaviour, not from what you wish you valued.
Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice - Use value-based self-affirmation before threatening evaluations
Before a threatening evaluation, write for 10 minutes about a value that matters to you — unrelated to the domain being evaluated.
Power Posing Revisited - Write about a value that matters to you
Before a stressful or threatening situation, spend five minutes writing about a value that is genuinely important to you.
Self-Affirmation Theory, Made Practical - Values Clarification, Made Practical
Values clarification is the work of naming what matters most to you, sorting the genuine priorities from the inherited ones, and using them to guide real choices. The methods — card sorts, ranking, value-consistent action — draw heavily on values work in acceptance-and-commitment therapy (ACT), which has clinical support; living in line with your values correlates with wellbeing in observational research. - Run a values card sort
Sort a deck of value words into keep/maybe/discard to surface what actually matters.
Values Clarification, Made Practical - Excavate your actual values from your history
Use past choices and sacrifices — not aspirations — to find what you actually value.
Life Review and Reminiscence Therapy - 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. - Apply the "value per dollar" test to major purchases
Before a large purchase, ask how much wellbeing per dollar this generates relative to alternatives at the same cost.
Values-Based Spending, Made Practical - The forced-rank sort
Write your top 20 candidate values on cards, then sort them ruthlessly until you have a ranked top five.
Values Card Sort
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Working on my values feels like an endless aspiration with no scoreboard
- I say I value family, or health, or creativity
- Before any big evaluation my whole sense of worth narrows down to how I’ll perform in that one room, and if I bomb it I feel like I’m worthless as a person
- I’ve got a big evaluation looming and I can already feel myself bracing to defend my whole worth on it
- When I try to name what I value on a blank page I just freeze or write what sounds good
Related concerns
- Finding Values
A values card sort is a structured exercise — originally developed in motivational interviewing — that forces you to rank competing values by choosing between them rather than claiming you hold all of them equally. The comparison process surfaces implicit priorities that self-report alone misses. Evidence for values-clarification as a lever for behavior change is observational to clinical; the specific card-sort format has good face validity but limited direct trial data.
- Values Assessment
Before a stressful or threatening situation, spend five minutes writing about a value that is genuinely important to you.
Write about a value that matters to you
- Act Values Deck
A values card sort is a structured exercise — originally developed in motivational interviewing — that forces you to rank competing values by choosing between them rather than claiming you hold all of them equally. The comparison process surfaces implicit priorities that self-report alone misses. Evidence for values-clarification as a lever for behavior change is observational to clinical; the specific card-sort format has good face validity but limited direct trial data.
- Act Values Sort Worksheet
A values card sort is a structured exercise — originally developed in motivational interviewing — that forces you to rank competing values by choosing between them rather than claiming you hold all of them equally. The comparison process surfaces implicit priorities that self-report alone misses. Evidence for values-clarification as a lever for behavior change is observational to clinical; the specific card-sort format has good face validity but limited direct trial data.
- Core Values Excavation
Use core values in hiring, recognition, and decision-making — not just on the website.
Make core values operational, not decorative
- Core Values Exercise Free
Identify 3–5 core values — not what you should value, but what actually matters when life is stripped back.
Values clarification: what matters most to you?
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.