Coaching practices for Values Ranking Exercise

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Values Ranking Exercise, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• If you ask me what I value I’ll say family, health, honesty, growth
• I’m supposed to rate how hard a workout felt on a scale, but the numbers are meaningless to me
• Whenever I try to narrow down what matters most I can’t bring myself to actually cut anything
• I’ve got a short list of values but they’re all just sitting there as equals, and the second two of them collide in real life
• I have to lay out a few options for people to choose from, and I keep noticing that the order I put them in completely changes which one they latch onto

Practices that may help

1. 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
2. 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.
3. Calibrate the Borg scale to your actual physiology
   The 6–20 Borg scale (or 0–10 RPE) only works if you know what each number feels like in your own body.
   The RPE Scale
4. Circle your top 5 without negotiating
   From 25, choose exactly 5 — the ones you’d feel worst about not doing.
   Warren Buffett’s Two-List Strategy
5. Rank your top values
   Force a strict order among your finalists so conflicts resolve in advance.
   Values Clarification, Made Practical
6. Sequence information so the most favorable item follows the least favorable
   Present a weaker option or negative context first so that your preferred option shines by comparison.
   The Contrast Principle, Made Practical
7. The RPE Scale
   The Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale translates subjective exercise intensity into a standardized number that correlates reliably with heart rate, lactate, and VO2. Using RPE alongside or instead of heart rate lets you autoregulate training load based on how you actually feel — accounting for fatigue, stress, sleep, and illness that devices cannot detect. The scale’s validity is well established in exercise science.
8. The ABCDE prioritization method
   Label every task A (must), B (should), C (nice), D (delegate), or E (eliminate) before starting.
   Eat That Frog, Made Practical
9. 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
10. Map your value hierarchy
    Rank what you most value so you can draw on the strongest affirmation when you need it.
    Self-Affirmation Theory, Made Practical

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