The Values Check-In (ACT Values Clarification)
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Drawn from acceptance and commitment therapy, this is a repeatable method for living a meaningful life by clarifying values rather than chasing outcomes. The core distinction is that a goal is finished once achieved, while a value is a path you never complete — running a marathon is a goal, staying fit and healthy is the value that generates many such goals. Because life pulls you off those paths and because what matters at 21 differs from what matters at 31, the method is not a one-off exercise but a recurring check-in: map your life domains, define who you want to be in each, look back honestly at the last two weeks, then set one small corrective action for the week ahead. The aim is never perfection, only tipping the balance back.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Map your life into domains
Take a piece of paper and split it into boxes for the different areas of your life — family, lifelong learning, health, creativity, relationships, work. The boxes make the abstract question of meaning concrete and reviewable.
Pro tip Keep the sheet somewhere you will see it again; this becomes the map you return to at every check-in.
- 2
Ask who you want to be in each box
In each domain, write bullet points answering what kind of person you want to be there — what kind of son, what kind of partner, what you want to represent to those people, and how that would show up in daily behaviour and action.
Watch out Frame answers as how you want to behave, not what you want to happen to you. Outcome-framed values turn into failures the moment life intervenes.
- 3
Name the conflicts between values
Values pull on each other — wanting to be a successful entrepreneur can consume the time that being a present family member requires. Write down where yours currently conflict, and which direction life has pulled you.
Pro tip Treat this as a balancing act rather than a scoring exercise; the goal is direction, not a perfect equilibrium.
- 4
Book a protected reflection slot
Set a fixed, recurring time — weekly or fortnightly — that functions the way a therapy hour does: a protected space where you are accountable to your own values map rather than to your task list.
Pro tip If you have no therapist, use a standing calendar block or a friend as the accountability surface.
- 5
Review the last two weeks in hindsight
Pick one value and ask honestly whether your behaviour over the past fortnight lived in line with it. Learning happens in hindsight — you look back at actual behaviour, not intentions.
Watch out A vague sense of feeling lost or that life is meaningless usually signals you have drifted from a value, not that something is broken in you.
- 6
Set one mini-goal for the week ahead
If the answer was 'not really', create a small set of specific actions you will take this week to steer back toward that value. The value stays constant; the goal is the week's steering correction.
Pro tip Make it small enough that it survives a bad week — the point is tipping the balance, not overhauling your life.
- 7
Reflect, tweak, repeat
Next session, ask whether that action moved you closer, whether it felt like enough, and whether to do more or step back. The cycle of reflection, planning and tweaking is the framework — it never terminates.
Watch out Never aim to do this perfectly. Perfection is explicitly not the aim, and treating the check-in as a performance defeats it.
In the wild
The therapist's worked example separates the two levels cleanly. Someone says their goal is to run a marathon. Underneath that sits the value: to stay fit and healthy. The marathon is one of many possible goals along that path, so if injury, an intense job or a new baby takes the marathon off the table, the value survives — it simply generates a different goal. When the check-in reveals 'I haven't been working out for a while because I've been so focused on work,' the response is not failure but a small correction back in that direction.
→ A setback stops reading as failure, because the path continues even when a specific goal is dropped.
A listener adapts the exercise without therapy. They keep a single sheet with six boxes and, every other Sunday evening, pick one box at random and ask: over the last two weeks, did my behaviour match what I wrote here? The 'lifelong learning' box says they want to be someone who reads rather than scrolls; the honest answer is no. They set one action — twenty minutes of reading before bed, four nights this week — and review it at the next sitting, where they discover four nights was too ambitious and settle at two.
→ The habit sticks at a lower, sustainable level because the review corrects the goal rather than abandoning the value.
Common mistakes
Doing the values exercise only once
Values shift as life changes — someone at 19 focused entirely on study and travel may find parenthood is the most important thing in their life a decade later. A one-off clarification session goes stale, which is exactly why the method insists on repeated check-ins rather than a single definitive answer.
Writing values as outcomes you want
Saying 'this is what I want in my life' means that when things go wrong you conclude you failed and it hasn't worked out. The exercise is explicitly about how you want to be in the face of whatever life throws at you — how you respond when things are hard and when things are good.
Stopping at insight and never acting
Ali's own admission is that he ran the value-finding exercises and figured out some of his values, but never used them to change a decision he would otherwise have made. Without the hindsight review and the weekly mini-goal, the sheet is journaling, not a framework.
From the transcript
“a value is like a path that you follow your whole life there is no end to it but you just you value that part…”
“sometimes you can literally just grab a piece of paper um separate into little boxes you might have boxes for family life or lifelong learning…”
“so i think translating kind of ideas and values into action is really about reflection and planning”
From the episode
6 Lessons That Improved My Life - Season 2 Round Up
Season 2 Round Up