Values clarification: find your top values and see whether last week reflected them

Values clarification helps you work out what matters most to you by choosing from a list of values, narrowing them down to between five and seven, and putting them in order. PiViva then asks you to rate how far last week reflected your top three. The exercise runs through acceptance and commitment therapy, CBT and coaching, and the gap between what you value and how you actually spent your week is often the most useful thing you'll learn.

Why can a busy week still feel strangely empty?

You worked hard all week. You ticked things off, answered the emails, got through the meetings and were thoroughly tired by Friday evening.

And yet somehow it didn't feel like your week at all. It felt more like you'd spent five days living somebody else's life, and then wondered on Sunday night where the time had gone.

That feeling often comes from a gap between what you say matters to you and what your diary actually contains. Most of us have never looked at that gap directly, which is a shame, because once you can see it, you can start to close it.

Where does values clarification come from?

The modern exercise goes back to the early 1970s. In 1972, Sidney Simon, Leland Howe and Howard Kirschenbaum published Values Clarification, a handbook that gave teachers practical ways to help students work out what they really valued, as opposed to what they'd simply picked up along the way.

Psychology has taken values seriously too. Shalom Schwartz's 1992 theory mapped basic human values across many cultures, from security to self-direction. Research on self-affirmation, reviewed by Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman in 2014, found that reflecting on your core values can reduce defensiveness and help people perform better under pressure.

In acceptance and commitment therapy, known as ACT and developed by Steven C. Hayes, values do something goals can't. A goal can be finished and ticked off, whereas a value is a direction you keep choosing, day after day, which makes it a steady guide when life gets busy.

How does Values Clarification work in PiViva?

There are three steps, taken in order. First you pick the values that matter to you, then you narrow them down to between five and seven, and finally you rank them.

The narrowing is where the real work happens. Agreeing that honesty, kindness, family, achievement, freedom, security and creativity all matter doesn't tell you very much, since they matter to almost everyone. Choosing a top seven, and then putting them in order, shows you what you'd actually be willing to trade when two of them pull in different directions.

Then, for your top three, you rate how far last week reflected each one. It's last week in particular, so that you're looking at what really happened, with all its interruptions, and not at the week you had in mind.

The gap you find is the part worth paying attention to. Many people rate a value very highly, look at their diary, and discover that almost nothing in it served that value at all. Ranking can feel a little artificial, and it's natural to resist it, but the slight discomfort of putting one value above another is itself useful information.

What if your week looks nothing like your values?

Then you've found exactly what to work on next, and it's far better to know that before you set another goal.

A good place to begin is with your top value. Add just one thing to next week that serves it, and use the Weekly Success Planner to protect the time. If a whole area of life feels out of step, The Four Quadrants will show you what's been taking up the space.

It can also help to share your top values with someone close to you, or with Viv, and talk through one small change you'd like to make, since saying it out loud often makes it feel more real. Come back to Values Clarification about once a year, and again after anything big changes in your life. Values tend to shift more slowly than goals, though often faster than we expect, and every time you check, you give yourself the chance to bring your week a little closer to the life you actually want.