Values-based goal setting is a method that starts upstream of the goal page: you name a small set of core values first, then filter every goal candidate through them so only the goals that are genuinely yours get your time. In practice you rank five core values from a list of thirty, write a one-page purpose statement, generate two to three goal candidates per value, then screen the candidates through the same five values. The Values exercise sits at the top of the Goal Cascade, above the Vision Interview and the Summit Goal (the original Goals and Progress label for a five to ten year peak goal). Skip it only if your Summit Goal is already locked, or if you have done values work three times in a year without naming a single Summit Goal candidate, because at that point the exercise has become avoidance.
If you set goals every January and the goals dissolve by Easter, the goals were probably not yours. They belonged to a boss, to a parent, or to a version of yourself from five years ago. Goals borrowed from other people get carried forward by inertia for about three months and then quietly stall, because there is no internal reason to fight for them on a hard Tuesday. The fix is upstream of the goal page. This guide walks through the full 60-minute Values exercise, shows how the filter works with worked examples, compares values-first sequencing to goal-first and habit-first, explains when to re-run the exercise, and concedes the one trap where values exploration turns into a sophisticated form of procrastination.
The Values exercise worksheet is one A4 page. Thirty values on the left, ten in the middle, five on the right, one paragraph at the bottom. It fits inside 60 minutes.
For readers who want the broader system this exercise belongs to, the life goals system hub maps how values, vision, and a long-term goal connect, and the how to set effective life goals guide covers the goal-writing step that comes after this one.
What personal values actually are
Personal values are the small set of broad principles you use to decide what is worth doing when nothing external is forcing the choice. They are not preferences (you prefer chocolate to vanilla). They are not goals (a goal has an outcome and a deadline). They are not personality traits (introvert, conscientious). Values are the criteria you apply when no one is watching and nothing immediate is at stake.
The psychologist Shalom Schwartz built the most widely used cross-cultural framework for personal values. Across more than 80 countries, he and his collaborators identified ten broad value categories (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism) that recur across cultures, organized as a circle where opposite values tend to conflict [1]. The Schwartz model is not the only useful framing, but it has the most empirical backing and it gives you a vocabulary that survives translation.
A useful distinction sits at the heart of Self-Determination Theory. Deci and Ryan separate intrinsic motives (autonomously chosen, expressing who you are) from controlled motives (driven by external pressure or absorbed expectation) [2]. In practice, values you have absorbed from family, school, employer, or culture can feel almost identical to the ones you chose for yourself until you inspect them deliberately, which is exactly why the values exercise has to be done as its own separate piece of work. The empirical case is solid in one direction in particular. Sheldon and Elliot found that people who attain self-concordant goals (goals that match their own values and developing identity) reap greater well-being benefits from that attainment than people pursuing goals for external reasons [3]. Koestner and colleagues sharpened the picture: autonomous motivation was substantially related to goal progress, whereas controlled motivation showed no substantial relationship to it [4]. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis by Sezer and colleagues examined goal motives, psychological needs, and well-being across the goal-pursuit literature [5]; its findings are consistent with the value of autonomous, self-chosen goals. The practical takeaway is narrow and reliable: goals built on intrinsic values tend to survive harder days, because the reason to continue is your own.
Why values-based goal setting works
Values-based goal setting works because it gives you a small, explicit filter to apply to every goal candidate before time and energy get spent on the candidates that do not belong to you. The values-filter mechanism is not motivational; it is a screening step. When you have five named core values on a page, every candidate goal that arrives in your head can be tested against them. The goal “lose 15 pounds” reads neutrally on its own. Filtered through the value Family Time, the version that survives is “be the parent who plays tag in the garden for an hour without needing to catch my breath.” Same domain, different goal, different daily action, different reason to keep going.
The values list also works as a stop sign. A candidate goal that does not honor at least one of your five values gets dropped before it consumes a quarter. This is the mechanism that lets you align goals with values deliberately rather than by accident: the goal survives only if it earns a place. The reader who keeps adding “learn Mandarin” to every New Year list and never gets past the second lesson often finds, after the Values exercise, that Mandarin honored none of their five values; the goal was a polite default from someone else’s expectations. Dropping a goal because it failed the values filter is not failure. It is the kind of values alignment goal setting is built to produce, and it is the exercise doing its job.
The third mechanism is durability over time. A goal anchored to a value survives the inevitable months when motivation evaporates, because the reason to continue is not “I committed in January” but “this is part of who I am.” Hayes and colleagues, in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy literature on values-action alignment, framed this as values being the compass and goals being the destination [6]. The compass keeps working when the destination becomes unclear; the destination on its own does not.
The 60-minute values-based goal setting walkthrough
You need a blank A4 page (or a digital doc), 60 uninterrupted minutes, and a list of 30 broad values to sort. The list below is the Goals and Progress canonical thirty, drawn from Schwartz’s framework plus several common contemporary values. You are welcome to substitute up to three words that resonate more in your own vocabulary; the count of thirty is what matters.
The canonical thirty values
Achievement, Adventure, Autonomy, Beauty, Belonging, Compassion, Contribution, Courage, Craft, Creativity, Curiosity, Discipline, Faith, Family Time, Financial Security, Friendship, Health, Honesty, Independence, Justice, Learning, Loyalty, Order, Peace, Play, Recognition, Service, Stewardship, Wisdom, Wonder.
Setup (5 minutes)
Across the top of the page, write three column headers: thirty, ten, five. Under the thirty column, copy the list above (or your edited version). Leave space under the ten column and under the five column. At the bottom of the page, reserve room for a one-paragraph purpose statement.
Shortlist to ten (15 minutes)
Read through the thirty. Cross out the words that produce no reaction at all. Move into the ten column the words that produce a quiet “yes.” You are not yet ranking; you are filtering. The reaction to notice is recognition, not desire. A value that produces “I should care about this” goes back on the thirty list; a value that produces “this is already how I try to live” goes in the ten column. The rule: when in doubt, leave a value out. You can return values from the thirty into the ten if the five-column work later reveals a gap.
Cut to five (20 minutes)
This is the part of the exercise that actually does the work, and it is the part the brain quietly wants to skip. From the ten in the middle column, you have to cut to five. Cutting from ten to five hurts because every value you leave out is a value you are demoting, on paper, with both eyes open. Use this reaction as your guide: if you imagine your life governed by these four values plus the one you are about to cut, what is missing? If the answer is “nothing,” cut it. If the answer is “the cut value is the one that makes the others worth pursuing,” keep it and cut something else.
Write the surviving five into the rightmost column. Order them roughly by weight, so the value that would win if two of your five directly conflicted goes at the top. The ordering is rough; the cut is the point.
Write the one-paragraph purpose statement (15 minutes)
In the space at the bottom of the page, write a single paragraph (three to six sentences) that uses all five of your values to describe the life you are trying to build. A format that tends to work: “I want to build _____ that honors _____ and _____, in ways that _____, so that _____.” This is your purpose statement. It does not need to be eloquent. It needs to be true. Re-read it once. If it sounds like a corporate mission statement, rewrite it in plainer language. If it sounds like a wish, rewrite it in the present tense of who you are trying to be.
Pause (5 minutes)
Re-read the five values and the purpose statement. Notice which existing commitments in your life honor these values and which violate them. Notice which of the values you have not explicitly fought for in the past twelve months. Notice which goal you have been talking about that does not appear to honor any of these five. The pause is data collection, not action.
What a real session tends to surface
The exercise earns its hour at the cut to five, not at the shortlist. People typically clear the 30-to-10 pass quickly, because crossing out values that produce no reaction is easy. The 10-to-5 pass is where the time goes and where the useful information appears. A common pattern: a value that is currently being served by a well-paid commitment (say Financial Security) survives, while a value that the same commitment quietly violates (say Autonomy or Family Time) also survives, and the contradiction becomes visible on the page for the first time. That contradiction is the data the exercise is designed to produce. It does not tell you what to do, but it makes the cost of the current arrangement explicit, which is usually enough to change the next decision. This surfaced tension is the payoff of values-based goal setting: the conflict was always there, and the page is simply the first place it became impossible to ignore.
The purpose statement does similar work in a different way. Written honestly, it tends to expose goals that have been carried for reasons that no longer hold. When a goal you have been planning does not appear anywhere in a paragraph built from your own five values, that absence is informative. The Summit Goal sentence you write later is meant to be a direct downstream consequence of these five values rather than a polite extension of whatever you were already doing.
From five values to goal candidates
The Values exercise produces five values and a one-paragraph statement. The next step is to turn those into goal candidates. For each of your five values, write two to three concrete outcomes that would honor that value if you reached them in the next twelve months. Write them in specific, verifiable terms: not “live by my values,” which is a slogan, but “spend at least 90 minutes a week one-on-one with each child,” which is a calendar commitment.
The output is ten to fifteen candidate goals. This is too many to pursue; the candidates are raw material, not commitments. The filter step turns the list of candidates into the short list of two to four annual goals that actually go into your Goal Plan for the year.
Filtering candidates using the values themselves
Run each candidate through three tests. First, the honor test: does it honor at least one of your five values explicitly? Drop the ones that do not. Second, the conflict test: does it conflict with any of your five values? Drop the candidates where pursuit would require violating a value, such as the salary jump that requires moving across the country away from family. Third, the calendar test: does the goal fit the hours you actually have?
The calendar test is the one people apply loosely, so make it concrete. Estimate the weekly hours the goal would realistically demand, then look at where those hours would come from. A half-marathon in spring is roughly three to four training sessions a week, call it four to five hours including travel and recovery. If your week has no spare four to five hours, the goal cannot live alongside your existing commitments unless something else is removed first. The test is not “is this goal worthwhile” (most are); it is “what gets displaced to make room for it.” A candidate that passes the honor and conflict tests but fails the calendar test is not rejected forever; it goes on a “someday” list with a note about what would have to change for it to fit.
The candidates that survive all three tests become your annual goals. The candidates that fail told you something true about which values you wrote down: if no candidate that honors a particular value survived the filter, either the value needs re-examining or the year ahead is being structured in a way that quietly contradicts what you said you cared about.
How filtered goals feed the Vision Interview and Summit Goal
If you are running this exercise on its own, the natural next step is not to start executing the annual goals immediately, but to pull them up one level first. The short list of value-screened goals becomes the raw input for the Vision Interview, a written conversation with your future self that turns recurring annual goals into a coherent five to ten year direction. That direction is what the Summit Goal sentence captures. From there, the Goal Cascade walks the Summit Goal down to the quarter, the week, and today’s action. So the sequence reads upward then downward: values screen the candidates, the surviving candidates and the Vision Interview shape the Summit Goal, and the Summit Goal cascades back down into daily action.
Same domain, different goals: three worked examples
The clearest illustration of the filter at work is three readers who land on the same domain (Health) and end up with completely different annual goals because their values differ.
The first reader is 36, mid-career, considering kids in the next few years. Her five values are Autonomy, Craft, Stewardship, Health, and Adventure. Under the value Health, she writes three candidates: lose 15 pounds, run a half-marathon in 2027, develop a strength-training routine that survives travel. The values filter passes the half-marathon (honors Adventure plus Health) and the strength routine (honors Autonomy plus Stewardship of her body). The 15-pounds candidate fails because it serves an external standard, not any of her stated values. Her actual annual goal becomes “build a strength-training routine I can run in a hotel room with no equipment by April, and sign up for the May 2027 half-marathon by November.”
The second reader is 38, a parent of two young children. His five values are Family Time, Honesty, Craft, Faith, and Stewardship. Under the value Health, he writes three candidates: lose 15 pounds, be the parent who plays tag in the garden without needing to catch his breath, prep healthier family dinners three nights a week. The filter passes the parent-and-tag goal (honors Family Time plus Stewardship of his body) and the healthier dinners (honors Family Time plus Stewardship). The 15-pounds candidate fails for the same reason as the first reader’s: external standard, no value honored. His actual annual goal becomes “be able to play tag in the garden with both kids for forty minutes without sitting down, by September.”
The third reader is 28 and post-layoff, running the same exercise from a different starting point. Her five values are Autonomy, Learning, Honesty, Craft, and Adventure. Under the value Craft she writes three candidates: complete a part-time UX-writing portfolio that lands a salaried role, write one essay a month on what she is learning about her own career, finish the half-finished side project from last summer. The filter passes the essay-a-month goal (honors Craft plus Honesty plus Learning) and reframes the portfolio (passes Craft and Autonomy, but only if the salaried role is one she would choose for the work itself, not for the income). The side project fails because, on inspection, she had kept it on the list out of guilt; none of her five values honored finishing it. Her actual annual goal becomes “publish 12 essays on the career questions I am working through, and complete the portfolio only with projects I would do again unpaid.”
Same exercise, three readers, three different annual goal sets, all derived from five values run through the same filter. Neither set of goals is wrong; all three readers are doing values-based goal setting correctly.
Values-first vs goal-first vs habit-first sequencing
The Values exercise is one of three legitimate places to start. The trade-offs are real, and the best sequence depends on what you already know about yourself. The first table compares where each approach begins; the second compares how each one tends to fail and who it suits.
| Approach | Where you start | What you discover first |
|---|---|---|
| Values-first (Goals and Progress) | The values list and purpose statement | Whether your existing goals belong to you |
| Goal-first (SMART goals) | The SMART format applied to a goal idea you already hold | Whether the goal is measurable |
| Habit-first (Atomic Habits, Tiny Habits) | The smallest daily action you can sustain | Whether the trajectory feels right |
| Approach | Most common failure mode | Time to first concrete plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Values-first | Values exploration becomes avoidance | About 60 minutes for values, plus follow-on vision and goal work | Readers without a clear direction yet |
| Goal-first | The goal is well-formed but belongs to someone else | About 30 minutes per goal | Readers whose direction is already clear |
| Habit-first | The trajectory may not lead anywhere worth going | About 15 minutes to identify the habit | Readers in execution mode, direction already set |
Each approach has a coherent internal logic. Values-first is the most upstream and the slowest; it produces goals that survive contact with hard months, but it can become a way to never commit. Goal-first is the fastest path to a written plan; it works if your direction is already clear, but it does not surface the case where the goal is borrowed. SMART goals, popularized in management writing in the early 1980s, are a useful format for tightening a goal you already trust, not a tool for deciding which goal deserves the year. Habit-first is the most action-oriented; the system in James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018) builds momentum well, but a habit does not test whether the daily action serves any longer-term destination.
In the Goals and Progress system, values sit at the start of Phase 1 (Initial Assessment) for exactly this reason. The Values exercise gives you the criteria; the Life Areas Map (a satisfaction-and-importance scan across your life areas) then shows where those criteria are currently under-served; and Three Futures stress-tests the Summit Goal candidates that emerge. If you already have a clear direction, values-first can be condensed to a 30-minute sanity check that the existing direction still honors your five named values. If you want to assemble the best elements from several frameworks, the create your own goal framework guide covers the assembly question. And if you are returning to goal-setting after a long pause, the Values exercise is a calm re-entry, because the cut to five forces clarity without requiring you to commit to a Summit Goal in the same sitting.
When values exploration becomes avoidance
The Direction Seeker trap is real. Values exploration can be a sophisticated form of procrastination, because every weekend you spend re-ranking your values list is a weekend you did not commit to a Summit Goal. A common version of this trap looks productive from the outside: months of reading books on values clarification and filling journals about what you care about, ending with a long document and no goal. The exploration becomes a way to delay choosing a direction, because choosing one direction means the others are closed.
The fix is almost always a deadline rather than more reflection. One weekend to lock the five values, one weekend after that to write a Summit Goal sentence. A sprawling values document tends to compress to a single page within an hour once a deadline forces the brutal cut that open-ended reflection had been avoiding. The test for the trap is concrete: if you have done the Values exercise three times in a year and still cannot name a Summit Goal candidate, the exercise is no longer doing work. Two responses help. The first is to switch to Three Futures, which forces commitment by surfacing alternatives. The second is to write a rough Summit Goal sentence anyway and let it be wrong, because you can revise a draft but you cannot revise an empty page.
The research on intrinsic versus controlled goals is sometimes mis-read as a requirement to know your motivation perfectly before acting. That is not what it says. Goals aligned with intrinsic values tend to predict better well-being over time; this is not a finding that imperfect goals are worse than no goals at all. Imperfect goals that get revised quarterly are the working norm, and waiting for perfect goals is a category error.
A second failure mode is shallower but worth naming. Some readers cannot get to five core values because they keep wanting to add a sixth and a seventh. The fix is the same: cut to five, even if the cut hurts. The constraint of five is what makes the filter usable. With seven values, almost every goal candidate honors at least one, and the filter stops filtering. Five is the working number; six is one too many.
When to re-run the values exercise
Once a year is the right cadence for most people, ideally as part of the Annual Reflection. Values-based goal setting is an annual reset, not a monthly one. Values are stable in the short term; they do not swing from month to month, and treating them as if they do is itself a form of the avoidance trap. What does shift them is time and rupture: a decade boundary, a new child, a major health event, a bereavement, a career break that changes what you can take for granted.
A genuine values shift shows up in a specific way. When you re-run the exercise, a value that survived the cut last year falls out this year, or a value you would not previously have shortlisted now clearly belongs in the five. That is the signal worth acting on. The harder case is when this year’s Summit Goal was built on values that have since changed. The move there is not to abandon the Summit Goal on the spot, but to re-run the three-test filter on the goals currently feeding it: the goals that still honor your revised five values stay, the ones that only honored a value you no longer hold get retired, and if too many fall out, the Summit Goal itself is due for a rewrite at the next Annual Reflection rather than mid-year. The point of an annual cadence is to catch real shifts without letting normal week-to-week doubt masquerade as a change in what you value.
Bringing the exercise into the workbook
The exercise above runs fine on a blank page. If you would rather work from a template with the values list already laid out and the spaces sized for the cut to ten and cut to five, the Values exercise is template T1A in the Goals and Progress Life Goals Workbook, one of eleven reusable templates spanning the workbook’s four phases. T1A sits at the start of Phase 1 (Initial Assessment), where you clarify your core values and write the purpose statement before assessing and prioritizing your life areas. Keeping the values and the purpose statement on a fixed page means they stay visible later, when you write each new annual goal candidate and want the three filtering tests in front of you rather than in memory.
Neither the workbook nor any tool is required. The page and a Saturday morning are enough. The point of the templates is to make the handoff from Values to the Life Areas Map, the Vision Interview, and the Summit Goal feel like one continuous sequence rather than several separate exercises you have to remember to chain together.
How Values hands off to the Vision Interview
The Vision Interview is a written interview with your future self at the five to ten year mark: you write the questions and answer them in the voice of who you are trying to become. The handoff from Values works because the five values you locked become the lens for the interview questions. “What does a typical day look like” is too broad; “What does a typical day look like that honors Autonomy and Family Time” is specific enough to produce a usable answer. The five values function as prompts, not just background. Without the Values exercise first, the Vision Interview drifts into platitude; with it, the interview produces material specific enough to feed a Summit Goal sentence.
A note before you sit down with the page
Values clarification has a long and somewhat compromised history. The phrase “what matters most” appears on coaching websites, on Instagram tiles, on motivational posters, and on the inside cover of business books that do not actually help with it. The cynical reading is reasonable: a lot of the popular content on personal values is rhetorical wallpaper. The Values exercise above is not that. It is one structured page, a hard cut from thirty to ten to five, a one-paragraph purpose statement, and a filter that turns the five into a screen for every goal that comes after. The exercise produces information you can act on the same week. If it does not, the exercise was done wrong, or the reader is in the Direction Seeker trap.
If you arrive at this page mid-transition (post-layoff, post-graduation, post-relationship), Values is the right next step before any goal-setting. If your January goals reliably dissolve by Easter, run the exercise as a 30-minute sanity check on the goals you already have; you will likely find that one or two of them fail the values filter and can be quietly retired without guilt. And if your Saturday morning already contains pancakes and a soccer-practice run, split the exercise across two mornings, because the cut to five is the part that needs uninterrupted attention.
Start with the blank page and the list of thirty this weekend. Write the five values, write the paragraph, generate two or three candidates per value, and run the filter. Values-based goal setting is upstream of every Summit Goal that survives.
Foundations
This walkthrough draws on established research rather than reinventing it. The ten-category value structure comes from Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic values; the intrinsic-versus-controlled motivation distinction comes from Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, with supporting work from Sheldon and Elliot and from Koestner and colleagues; the compass-and-destination framing comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes and colleagues). Summit Goal, Goal Cascade, Three Futures, Vision Interview, and Goal Plan are the Goals and Progress teaching labels for the steps that surround this exercise.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Values-based goal setting names five core values first, then screens every goal candidate through them, so the goals you keep are ones you have a genuine internal reason to pursue.
- How the filter works: Each candidate must pass three tests, the honor test (does it serve a value), the conflict test (does it violate one), and the calendar test (do the hours actually exist), before it becomes an annual goal.
- Why it holds up: Research on self-concordant and autonomously motivated goals finds that goals tied to your own values are pursued with more sustained effort and yield greater well-being when attained.
- The trap to avoid: If you have run the Values exercise three times in a year without naming a Summit Goal candidate, the exploration has become avoidance; set a deadline and draft a rough goal anyway.
- Same domain, different goals: Two people can both want to “get fit” and end up with entirely different annual goals once their five values do the filtering.
- When to re-run it: Once a year inside the Annual Reflection is enough; a value dropping out or a new one entering the five is the signal that this year’s goals need re-screening.
Frequently asked questions
How long does the Values exercise actually take?
About 60 minutes the first time, broken into 5 minutes of setup, 15 minutes of cut-to-ten, 20 minutes of cut-to-five, 15 minutes for the purpose statement, and 5 minutes of pause. If you finish in under 30 minutes, you skipped the brutal cut and the five values you wrote are probably still ten; redo the cut.
Do I have to use the canonical thirty values, or can I write my own list?
The thirty above are the canonical Goals and Progress list, drawn from Schwartz’s universal values and contemporary additions. You can substitute up to three words with synonyms that resonate more in your own vocabulary. What matters is the count of thirty: enough range to surface preferences, not so many that the cut becomes overwhelming. Do not expand the list beyond 35, because the cut to five becomes too easy and the exercise stops working.
What if my five values include both Autonomy and Family Time, which seem to conflict?
The Schwartz model shows several pairs of values that tend to conflict at the structural level (self-direction versus conformity, achievement versus benevolence). Having two values from opposite ends of the Schwartz circle in your five is common and not a problem; in fact, knowing the tension is the data. The two values become the question your annual goals have to negotiate. A reader whose Autonomy and Family Time both survived will need goals that honor both (the Tuesday-evening tag game, the part-time-only contract) rather than goals that maximize one at the expense of the other.
Can a value ever become a goal?
No, and trying to make one into the other is a common source of goal-drift. A value is an enduring criterion you never finish satisfying (Family Time, Craft); a goal is a specific outcome with a deadline that you can complete and check off. When people write “be more present with my family” as a goal, they have actually written a value in goal clothing, and because it has no finish line it quietly stalls. The fix is to keep the value as the filter and express it as a dated, verifiable goal underneath, such as “no phone at the dinner table on weeknights through the school term.” The value stays constant; the goals that serve it change every year.
What if none of my goal candidates pass the values filter?
The exercise has done its job. You have learned that the year you were quietly planning was structured around values you do not actually hold. The follow-up question is which is wrong: the five values you wrote, or the goal candidates you generated. The likelier diagnosis is that the candidates are wrong (they came from external expectations) and the values are right. The opposite diagnosis (the candidates are right and one of the five values is borrowed) is rarer and harder to spot. Either way, write a second round of candidates that explicitly honor each value, and rerun the filter.
How does the Values exercise differ from a vision board?
A vision board collects images of what you want to have or become. The Values exercise produces a short list of the principles you use to choose what is worth pursuing. The two outputs do different work. A vision board is a downstream visualization of an already-chosen direction; the Values exercise is an upstream filter that helps select the direction. Many readers find a vision board complements the Values exercise after the five values are locked, but it cannot substitute for the values work, because it does not require the brutal cut.
Glossary
- Values | the small set of broad principles you use to decide what is worth doing when nothing external is forcing the choice.
- Values exercise (T1A) | the 60-minute Phase 1 worksheet: cut thirty values to ten to five, then write a one-paragraph purpose statement.
- Purpose statement | a single paragraph at the bottom of the Values worksheet, three to six sentences, using all five core values to describe the life you are trying to build.
- Values filter | the three-test screen (does it honor a value, does it conflict with a value, does it survive the calendar test) applied to each goal candidate to produce a short list of annual goals.
- Goal candidate | a draft goal not yet committed to; produced by writing two to three outcomes per value; filtered to produce annual goals.
- Intrinsic motivation | acting because the action expresses who you are (Deci and Ryan 2000); contrasts with controlled motivation, which acts to satisfy external pressure.
- Schwartz universal values | the ten broad value categories (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism) found to recur across more than 80 countries.
- Direction Seeker trap | the failure mode where values exploration becomes a sophisticated form of avoidance; the test is three Values exercises in a year without a Summit Goal candidate.
- Vision Interview | the downstream exercise; a written interview with your future self at the five to ten year mark; drafted from the values and purpose statement output.
- Summit Goal | the long-term goal (five to ten years) that the Values exercise, Three Futures, and Vision Interview converge on.
- Goal Cascade | the architecture that runs from Values down to today’s action; the Values exercise sits at the top.
- Annual Reflection | the once-a-year cadence inside which the Values exercise gets re-run.
References
- Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). DOI: 10.9707/2307-0919.1116
- Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. DOI: 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
- Sheldon, K. M., and Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need-satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The Self-Concordance Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482-497. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482
- Koestner, R., Otis, N., Powers, T. A., Pelletier, L., and Gagnon, H. (2008). Autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and goal progress. Journal of Personality, 76(5), 1201-1230. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00519.x
- Sezer, B., Riddell, H., Gucciardi, D., Sheldon, K., Sedikides, C., Vasconcellos, D., Jackson, B., Thogersen-Ntoumani, C., and Ntoumanis, N. (2025). Goal motives, approach/avoidance appraisals, psychological needs, and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Motivation Science, 11(3), 259-276. DOI: 10.1037/mot0000366
- Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., and Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. ISBN: 978-1609189624.
The Values exercise synthesizes Schwartz’s universal-values theory (Schwartz 2012), the intrinsic-versus-controlled motivation distinction from Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 2000; Sheldon and Elliot 1999; Koestner et al. 2008; Sezer et al. 2025), and the values-clarification format from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes et al. 2012). The 60-minute structured walkthrough, the cut-to-five constraint, the values-as-filter step for goal candidates, and the placement of Values at the top of the Goal Cascade are original synthesis from Goals and Progress.
