Values and what matters to you

Knowing what matters to you helps you choose goals you'll actually stick with. Goals that fit your values are pursued harder and pay off more, but quick values-writing tricks have mixed results.

• Evidence: Some

The idea

A value is a direction, not a finish line. “Be a good parent” is never done. “Take my daughter swimming on Saturday” is a goal that moves you in that direction. Values help you pick goals, and they help you decide what to drop.

Two research traditions use this idea.

Goals that fit you. Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot asked people why they were pursuing their goals. Some goals were “self-concordant”: people pursued them because they found them interesting or important. Others came from pressure, guilt or wanting approval. In three long-term studies, people kept putting effort into self-concordant goals, so they were more likely to reach them. And reaching them did more for their wellbeing [1]. A later study followed first-year university students. Those whose first-term goals fitted them reached more of those goals, which went with better adjustment and even better-fitting goals the next term [2].

Values in ACT. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a method that asks people to name what they care about and take small steps towards it, even when those steps feel uncomfortable. It was first developed and tested in clinical trials, but the values work is a simple exercise anyone can do. A meta-analysis of 66 short lab experiments found that values exercises had positive effects compared with doing nothing, and the effects were similar in stressed and ordinary volunteers [3]. In a large review of wellbeing programs, ACT-based programs as a whole helped, though effects were moderate at best and study quality was often low [4].

How to use it

1. Name a few areas. Common ones: close relationships, family, work, health, learning, community, play. Skip any that don’t matter to you right now.
2. For each, write one sentence about how you want to act. Not what you want to get. “I want to be someone who listens properly” is a value. “I want people to like me” is an outcome you don’t control.
3. Pick the two or three that matter most this year. You can’t serve ten things at once.
4. Check your goals against them. For each goal you have, ask: am I doing this because it matters to me, or because I’d feel guilty or judged if I didn’t? Goals in the second group are harder to keep up [1]. You don’t have to drop them all, but notice which is which.
5. Turn one value into one small action this week. Something with a day and a time.

The values exercise walks you through these steps. A weekly review is a good place to check whether your week matched what you said mattered.

Common mistakes

• Writing the values you think you should have. If “career success” appears because your parents care about it, it won’t help you choose. Be honest, even if the list looks ordinary.
• Treating values as goals. You can’t complete “be kind”. If you think of a value as something to achieve, you’ll either feel you’ve failed or stop thinking about it.
• Expecting a values exercise to fix a bad week. Values help you choose where to put your time. They don’t make hard things feel easy.
• Trusting the hype about values writing. Short “self-affirmation” exercises, where you write briefly about a core value before a stressful event, were reported to improve school, health and relationship outcomes, sometimes for months or years [5]. But a large, careful repeat of one school study, run in the same district with the same procedures, found no effect at all [6]. It may work in some settings and not others. Don’t count on it.

Evidence

The goal-fit findings come from long-term studies by one research group, mostly with students, and they show associations over time rather than proof that changing your goals causes better wellbeing [1][2]. The ACT values evidence comes from short lab experiments and from trials of whole programs, where values are one part among several [3][4]. The quick self-affirmation exercise has a mixed replication record [5][6].

Rated Some. The direction is consistent: knowing what matters to you and choosing goals that fit seems to help. How much it helps, and for whom, is less certain.

Topics: Values, Goals, Meaning, Motivation, Decisions

Sources checked 4 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.