You get a job offer that checks every box on paper, better title, better pay, better hours, and you feel nothing when you read it. Or you sit down with a worksheet that says list your top five values, and the page stays blank because whatever you write feels performed, a line assembled for whoever might read it later.
How to figure out your values starts with an actual process, one with real history in counseling psychology, tested by people who studied how humans clarify what they care about and then act on it. Most attempts at naming values land on the same handful of nice-sounding nouns: honesty, family, growth, freedom. Those words are true for almost everyone, which makes them a poor starting point for something specific to you.
Psychologists building Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) spent years formalizing that process, and it starts by separating values from something people usually confuse them with: goals.
Why Are Values Important
In ACT, a value is defined as a freely chosen, verbally constructed direction for ongoing action (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012). A goal is a specific outcome you reach and complete: getting the promotion, finishing the degree, moving to the city you picked out. A value is the quality of action you keep choosing across many goals and many years: being a generous colleague, staying curious, protecting time for the people you love. You finish a goal. You practice a value, this week and the week after that.
Wilson and Murrell (2004) describe this direction as one of the core processes in the ACT model, because it keeps guiding behavior long after a specific goal has been reached or abandoned. That distinction has measurable consequences. A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that when people noticed a gap between how they believed they should have acted and how they actually behaved, they reported higher negative affect and lower positive wellbeing, a small effect specific to values tied to openness and connection to something larger than oneself (Chrystal, Karl, & Fischer, 2019). Goals get crossed off a list, which is part of why chasing one goal after another without a larger sense of direction, a larger quest, can leave a person feeling flat even after winning.
Researchers such as Shalom Schwartz have also mapped how individual values relate to each other structurally, in a circular model built from decades of cross-cultural data. This piece stays with the narrower, more practical work of finding yours in the first place.
How to Figure Out Your Values: A Practical Starting Point
A practical place to start is with reactions you already have, before you try to reason your way to an answer. Envy is data. When another person’s choice needles at you, some specific quality of what they are doing, one detail inside the whole shiny package, is pointing at something you want more of yourself. Resentment works the same way. A flash of resentment toward a request from your job or your family usually marks a boundary around something you value that just got crossed.
Take the job offer that checked every box and still left you flat. That flatness is information. It says the boxes on that particular offer, title, salary, hours, sit outside wherever your actual values live. Maybe what actually moves you is autonomy over your schedule, or working alongside people you respect, or building something you can point to years later. None of those show up on a standard offer letter. That kind of flatness carries the same texture many people describe when they feel lost in life without being able to say exactly why.
The same signal shows up in smaller moments. A friend cancels plans, and the relief you feel, more than the disappointment, tells you something about how much you actually valued that particular time together. A coworker gets praised for cutting corners, and the irritation it stirs up says something about integrity as a value you actually practice day to day. None of these moments require a worksheet. They only require pausing long enough to ask what the reaction is actually about.
If you have already worked through a list of questions meant to discover your life purpose and still feel unclear on your values specifically, what follows is a method to work through, one deliberate step at a time.
The Values Clarification Exercise That Actually Works
The technique called values clarification has roots in classrooms, decades before it entered a therapy room. Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon published Values and Teaching in 1966, laying out a seven-part process for how a loosely held opinion turns into something a person actually holds as a value. In their framework, a value has to be chosen freely, chosen from among real alternatives, and chosen only after thinking through the consequences of each option. Then it has to be prized and openly affirmed, and finally acted on, repeatedly, until it shows up as a pattern in someone’s life (Raths, Harmin, & Simon, 1966).
That structure still translates into a workable exercise. Take a decision you are currently sitting with, even a small one. Write down what you would choose if no one you know would ever find out. Then write down a second option you have not seriously considered, and sit with what draws you toward it or away from it. Ask what each choice would mean five years from now, then ask what it would mean next week too. Notice which option you would defend out loud to someone you respect. That is the value surfacing on paper.
A second version of the exercise comes directly out of ACT research. Kelly Wilson and his colleagues built the Valued Living Questionnaire, which asks people to rate a set of life domains, among them family, intimate relationships, parenting, friendship, work, and physical self-care, on two separate scales: how important each one is, and how consistently recent behavior has matched that importance (Wilson, Sandoz, Kitchens, & Roberts, 2010). The gap between those two numbers, domain by domain, is the clarification. A domain rated as deeply important but rarely acted on marks exactly where to build a new practice.
What Your Actions Already Reveal
Your calendar and your bank statement are already an inventory of your values, whether or not you intended them to be. Pull up the last two weeks. Where did the hours go. Where did the money go. Whatever gets the most uncontested time and money in a normal week is already functioning as a value, whether you would choose it on paper or not.
Sometimes that inventory confirms what you expected. Sometimes it shows a gap between the person you think you are and the person your schedule describes. That gap is the clearest data available about where to focus, and closing it, even by a small amount, is the entire practice. Values clarification sits close to the broader work of finding meaning in life; it operates at a smaller, more immediate scale, one you can practice inside a single week.
Living Closer to What You Actually Choose
Once a value comes into focus, treat it as an ongoing practice: something you enact this week, and then again next week, in small, repeatable choices. Pick one domain from the exercise above where the gap between importance and actual behavior was largest. Choose one concrete, doable action inside that domain this week, small enough that you will actually do it. Repeat it. The clarification exercise identifies the direction. Repetition is what turns a direction into a pattern someone else could recognize as who you are.
Once a handful of values are written down and tested this way, they become the raw material for the larger work of how you find your purpose, built directly on top of them.
Expect the list to shift over the years. A value that organized your twenties around career proof might quietly hand its weight to something closer to home once you have built the thing you set out to build. That shift is exactly what clarification work is supposed to produce over time: a person whose direction keeps updating as the life around it keeps changing.
Values rarely arrive as a sudden, clean realization. They surface in fragments: an old resentment you finally understand, a Tuesday afternoon where the hours went somewhere you did not choose, a stranger’s decision that lit up something like envy. Each fragment is worth writing down, even when it does not yet add up to a tidy list of five words.
The next time you catch a flash of envy, or a flash of resentment, or a stretch of flatness where you expected relief, stay with it a moment longer than usual. Ask what it is pointing at. That question, asked patiently and often enough, is the clarification exercise. It just takes longer than a worksheet ever let on.
References
Chrystal, M., Karl, J. A., & Fischer, R. (2019). The complexities of “minding the gap”: Perceived discrepancies between values and behavior affect well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 736.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Raths, L. E., Harmin, M., & Simon, S. B. (1966). Values and teaching: Working with values in the classroom. Charles E. Merrill.
Wilson, K. G., & Murrell, A. R. (2004). Values work in acceptance and commitment therapy: Setting a course for behavioral treatment. In S. C. Hayes, V. M. Follette, & M. M. Linehan (Eds.), Mindfulness and acceptance: Expanding the cognitive-behavioral tradition (pp. 120-151). Guilford Press.
Wilson, K. G., Sandoz, E. K., Kitchens, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2010). The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and measuring valued action within a behavioral framework. The Psychological Record, 60(2), 249-272.