Coaching practices for Values Audit
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Values Audit, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s a low hum of dissatisfaction in my life I can’t pin down
- I’ve named my top values, but looking back at the actual decisions I made this week, I’m not sure my behavior honored a single one of them
- I keep these apps because I’m scared I’ll miss something important, but when I’m honest about what I actually got from all those hours this week, it’s almost nothing
- I finally tracked my time and now I’m staring at the numbers
- I’m good at my job and on top of my commitments, and yet I’m quietly miserable
Practices that may help
- Valued living audit: how much are you actually living your values?
Rate both how important each value is and how consistently you have been living it — the gap is where to focus.
Values-Based Action (ACT), Made Practical - The values–behavior gap check
Audit the last week: which of your top values did your actual decisions honor?
Values Card Sort - Run a weekly platform value audit
Once a week, assess whether each platform you used is actually delivering value proportional to the time it received.
Defending Your Attention in the Attention Economy - Analyze your log for patterns and surprises
After logging, find the two or three surprising facts — not the obvious ones.
The Time Audit - Apply the matrix at the role level, not just the task level
Audit which of your entire roles or commitments are Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4 — not just individual tasks.
The Eisenhower Life Audit - Satisfaction audit: tracking what is actually good
Regularly inventory what genuinely works in the relationship — not as gratitude practice, but as an honest baseline.
The Investment Model of Commitment: Why People Stay (and Why They Leave) - Check action against stated values — the alignment review
Once a week, compare your stated values to your actual choices and name the gap honestly.
The Pythagorean Evening Review - The Time Audit
Laura Vanderkam argues that most people do not have a time shortage but a time-awareness problem: they underestimate how much discretionary time exists in 168 weekly hours. A time audit — tracking actual time use for a week — almost always reveals significant gaps between perceived and actual allocation, which is the foundation for intentional redesign. The method is straightforward; the hard part is using what you find. - Values Card Sort
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. - Rate each life domain with brutal honesty, not aspiration
The wheel’s value is proportional to the honesty of your ratings — aspirational scores produce a pleasant picture that changes nothing.
The Wheel of Life, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Want Should Audit
Laura Vanderkam argues that most people do not have a time shortage but a time-awareness problem: they underestimate how much discretionary time exists in 168 weekly hours. A time audit — tracking actual time use for a week — almost always reveals significant gaps between perceived and actual allocation, which is the foundation for intentional redesign. The method is straightforward; the hard part is using what you find.
- Default Audit
After logging, find the two or three surprising facts — not the obvious ones.
Analyze your log for patterns and surprises
- Jargon Audit
Go word by word through your explanation and mark every term a newcomer would not know.
Run a jargon audit on every key explanation
- Meaning Source Audit
After logging, find the two or three surprising facts — not the obvious ones.
- Ought Self Audit
People systematically miscalibrate self-monitoring — periodic objective checks correct the drift.
Periodically compare self-ratings with objective data
- Resource Audit Stress
Take stock of where you stand in each resource category — objects, conditions, characteristics, and energies — before the next stressor arrives.
Audit your current resource base
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