Values Worksheet: Free Values Clarification Exercise

What Is a Values Worksheet?

Most of what ranks for values worksheet right now is one of two things: a static PDF from a therapy practice, or a long list of words borrowed from Brené Brown's Dare to Lead work. Both are useful starting points, but neither one takes you through a full process from noticing a value to actually living by it. This page gives you both: 48 exercises across six stages you can work through on paper with nothing to download or sign up for, plus a complete 60-value list below so you have raw material to start from even if you've never thought about this in words before. If you'd rather answer scenario questions and get an instant top-five, the core values quiz does that in about a minute. If you want open-ended prompts instead of a structured exercise, these journal prompts and the core values journaling guide cover that territory.

How Do You Do a Values Clarification Exercise?

The 48 exercises on this page are organized around those six stages: discover, narrow, define, conflicts, domains, and act. Start with discover if you genuinely don't know where to begin, or jump straight to narrow if you already have a rough list in your head and just need to cut it down. Building this kind of self-awareness practice works best in short, repeated sessions rather than one long sitting, and reflective writing in general tends to surface more than thinking the same questions over in your head.

What Is the Brené Brown Values Exercise?

The exercise works because most people can list 15 to 20 values they'd be happy to claim, but very few of those actually change a decision when it counts. Cutting to two forces trade-offs: you have to decide, for instance, whether security or adventure wins when they compete, not just admit that both matter in the abstract. The narrow exercises on this page rebuild that same process step by step, and the self-worth journal prompts page is a useful companion if the narrowing process surfaces doubts about whether your values are even yours to claim.

What Is a Complete List of Personal Values?

Read through the table once without judging your reactions, and circle or write down every value that pulls at you, even ones that seem to contradict each other. Contradiction at this stage is normal and gets sorted out in the narrow and conflicts exercises later on this page. If a printable, generated worksheet in a different category is more useful right now, the shadow work worksheet generator applies the same discover-and-define structure to shadow work instead of values.

What Is the Difference Between Values and Goals?

Confusing the two is common, and it's usually why goal-setting alone leaves people flat even after they hit the target. A promotion can satisfy the value of growth for a while and then stop, because growth is a direction, not a finish line, and the flat feeling that follows a finished goal is often a value with nowhere left to point rather than a sign the goal was wrong. Working out which of your goals are actually values wearing a deadline is one of the more useful things a worksheet does that a plain self-discovery prompt often skips over.

What Does Narrowing Your Values Down Actually Look Like?

Say a reader starts with ten candidate values from the discover exercises: connection, growth, security, honesty, creativity, achievement, freedom, family, compassion, and adventure. Cutting to five is fairly easy: freedom, adventure, achievement, creativity, and compassion get crossed off first, because none of them showed up in her strongest peak-moment or anger-trigger answers. Cutting from five to two is where it gets uncomfortable. Connection and growth both keep surviving forced-choice pairs against security, honesty, and family, and she eventually has to admit that a stable, well-paid job she's stayed in for security has been quietly working against growth for two years. Her final two values become connection and growth. For connection, she defines it as: calling one friend a week without being asked first, and saying no to plans that leave no time for the two people she's closest to. For growth, she defines it as: signing up for one thing a quarter that has a real chance of failure. Neither definition mentions the job at all, which is itself useful information for the conflicts exercises later.

How Do You Use Your Values to Make Decisions?

This is where the domains and conflicts exercises earn their place. A values worksheet that stops at a list of five words rarely changes a real decision, because most real decisions are exactly the situations where two values compete: a new job that pays more but travels more, a friendship that's easy but shallow, a career change that trades security for growth. Naming the conflict directly, the way the conflicts exercises ask you to, tends to produce a clearer answer than staring at the decision itself, because you're now weighing two named things against each other instead of one vague unease. The same tension shows up inside close relationships too; journal prompts for couples covers what happens when two people's values don't fully overlap.

What Does the Research Say About Values Affirmation?

A 2006 meta-analysis of 146 randomized studies found a small but statistically significant positive effect (r = .075) of expressive writing on well-being outcomes. Cognitive restructuring exercises, which use the same evidence-for and evidence-against structure as the define exercises on this page, produced a larger effect in a 2023 meta-analysis: 353 clients across four studies, d = 0.85. That said, results are not uniformly positive. A separate 2006 meta-analysis of 30 randomized trials found no significant health effect from expressive writing on its own (g = 0.04), which is a useful reminder that specificity and structure appear to matter more than writing volume alone. This worksheet is a self-reflection tool, not therapy, and it isn't a substitute for working with a professional if what comes up feels bigger than a values conflict. Writing that helps you regulate the feelings a hard exercise stirs up, not just name the value behind them, is covered separately on the emotional regulation worksheet.

Worksheet or Quiz: Which Should You Do First?

The core values quiz gives you a scored top-five in about a minute by asking you to react to twelve scenarios, which is the fastest way in if values feel like a completely open question right now. This worksheet is slower and more demanding, but it takes you past a list of five words into behaviors, conflicts, and a weekly action plan. Values work also overlaps with the question of purpose, since a value like contribution or growth often sits underneath what someone calls their sense of purpose; if you've already done the quiz, the discover exercises here are a reasonable next step. If narrowing your list surfaces a value you feel embarrassed to admit, like ambition or recognition, that discomfort is common and worth sitting with using self-compassion journal prompts rather than quietly editing the value away. Anyone whose values feel entangled with old patterns of undermining their own progress may also find the self-sabotage page useful alongside the conflicts and act sections.

How Often Should You Revisit Your Values?

Values tend to hold steady for years, but their order changes: security can jump ahead of growth after a layoff, and connection can outrank achievement after becoming a parent. A midlife transition is one of the more common points where people redo this exercise from scratch and get a genuinely different answer than they did a decade earlier. This worksheet works the same way for a college student and a parent in their fifties; the exercises don't change, only which ones feel most urgent, which is also true of the open-ended journal prompts for adults covering similar ground.

The Full Values Worksheet Exercise Library

Discover: Surface the values you already live by

1. Write about a moment in the last two years when you felt completely certain you were doing the right thing. List the values that moment seems to point to.
2. Recall the last time you felt genuinely angry at someone else's behavior. Name the value you believe they crossed, and write one sentence on why that value matters this much to you.
3. Think of someone whose life or choices you quietly envy. Write down what you envy specifically, then name the value underneath the envy rather than the surface thing.
4. Write about a person you admire, living or not, and list three things about how they act, not what they've achieved. Turn each one into a single-word value.
5. Describe your best day from the last year in full detail: who you were with, what you did, how it felt. Underline every word that points to something you value.
6. Write about a time you turned down money, comfort, or approval to protect something else. Name what that something else was.
7. List three purchases or time investments from the last month you don't regret at all. Write one sentence per item on what each one actually bought you.
8. Write about a rule you break on purpose, even a small one, and name the larger value that rule-breaking protects.

Narrow: Sort and rank until two remain

1. From your discover-section answers, list 10 candidate values. Cross off the two that feel least essential to keep, and write one sentence on why they didn't survive the cut.
2. Take your list of 10 and cut it to 5 by asking, for each one, would you still respect yourself if you gave it up for a year. Keep only the values where the answer is a clear no.
3. Write your 5 remaining values on separate lines. For each pair, circle the one you'd keep if you could only have one of the two, then tally which value wins the most rounds.
4. Using the two-value method from Brené Brown's Dare to Lead work, force your list down to exactly two values. Write one paragraph on what got harder to decide as the list got shorter.
5. Write a forced-choice pair: security against adventure. Pick one, then write two sentences on what a life fully built around your choice would look like.
6. Write a forced-choice pair: achievement against connection. Pick one, then describe a decision from the last year that would have gone differently if you'd led with the other.
7. Ask someone who knows you well to guess your top two values without telling them what you picked. Write down their guess next to yours and note where you agree and disagree.
8. Write your final two values at the top of a page. Underneath each, write the single sentence you'd want someone to say about you at 80 that proves you lived it.

Define: Turn each value into behaviours

1. Pick one of your final two values. Write five specific behaviors that count as living it on an ordinary Tuesday, not a big moment.
2. For that same value, write a looks-like column and a does-not-look-like column, five items each, using situations from your actual week rather than hypotheticals.
3. Write one sentence defining your value the way you'd explain it to a ten-year-old, with no abstract words allowed.
4. Describe the version of this value that would embarrass you if you took it too far. Write where the line sits between the healthy version and the extreme one.
5. Write about a specific decision this month where you can point to this value and say exactly what you did because of it.
6. List three people who model this value well in your eyes. For each one, write the specific behavior you're actually responding to, not just their reputation.
7. Write a one-line personal definition for your second value, then write three concrete actions from the past month that match it and one that contradicted it.
8. Pick a word people often confuse with your value, for example freedom confused with no responsibilities. Write two sentences distinguishing what you mean from that confusion.

Conflicts: Where your values pull against each other

1. Write about a current decision where two of your values genuinely pull in opposite directions. Name both values by name, not just the situation.
2. Describe a past choice between security and growth. Write what you chose, what it cost you, and whether you'd choose the same way again.
3. Write about a time work and family asked for the same hour. Name which value won, and write one sentence on what made that possible or impossible to protect.
4. List one value you were raised to prioritize and one value you've since adopted that sometimes conflicts with it. Write about the last time they collided.
5. Write a short dialogue between your top two values, as if they were two people arguing over the same decision. Let each one make its actual case.
6. Describe a relationship where your need for honesty and someone else's need for harmony have created friction. Write what a workable compromise would look like.
7. Write about a time you chose comfort over a value you claim matters more. Skip the self-criticism and just describe what happened and why comfort won that day.
8. Pick two values you hold that rarely conflict but theoretically could. Write the specific scenario that would force you to choose, and guess which one would win.

Life Domains: Score work, relationships, health, money

1. List your top values down one side of a page and your six life domains, work, relationships, health, money, learning, community, across the top. Score each domain 1 to 10 for how well it reflects each value.
2. Look at your lowest-scoring domain from the grid above. Write two sentences on the specific gap between what you value and what that domain actually looks like right now.
3. Pick your money domain and write down how your last week of spending either supported or ignored your top two values.
4. Write about your work domain. Name one weekly task that directly expresses a core value and one that quietly works against it.
5. Score your relationships domain against your value of connection or loyalty specifically. Write one relationship that's scoring low and one concrete reason why.
6. Write about your health domain in terms of a value like discipline, freedom, or vitality rather than a number on a scale. Note where the two are out of step.
7. Look at your learning domain. Write one thing you've been meaning to learn that a top value of yours would push you toward, and one honest reason you haven't started.
8. Total your domain scores from the first exercise. Write one sentence naming the single domain that would improve your total the most if you changed just one habit there.

Act: This-week commitments and review

1. Pick your lowest-scoring domain from the audit exercises. Write one specific action you'll take this week that would raise its score by a single point.
2. Write an if-then plan for your top value: if a situation that usually derails this value happens, then you will take a specific action. Base the situation on something that happened in the last two weeks.
3. Write down one commitment tied to your second value that you can complete in the next 48 hours, small enough that skipping it would be an obvious choice, not an accident.
4. Set a weekly review question for yourself: where did I honor my top value this week, and where did I ignore it. Write today's answer as a test run.
5. Write about one recurring meeting, habit, or relationship you'd change if you took your values seriously as a filter. Name the specific change, not just the discomfort.
6. Write a short note to read next Sunday: three sentences reminding yourself why your top value matters, addressed to the version of you who will have forgotten by then.
7. Pick one value you scored lowest on across your domains. Write a single new habit, no more than five minutes a day, that would move that score up over a month.
8. Write your two final values somewhere you'll actually see them this week: a note on your desk, a phone lock screen, the front of this worksheet. Write where you're putting them and why.

Values Worksheet FAQ

What is a values worksheet?

A values worksheet is a set of structured writing exercises that help you discover, narrow, define, and act on your core values, rather than just circling words on a list. It differs from a quiz because it gives you tasks to complete instead of a score.

What is a values clarification exercise?

A values clarification exercise is any structured activity that helps you identify what genuinely matters to you, rather than what you assume should matter. It usually works by examining past decisions, strong emotional reactions like anger or envy, and real trade-offs you've already made, then naming the value those moments point toward.

What is Brené Brown's values exercise?

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown has readers start from a long list of values, cut it to ten, then force it down to just two. The exercise works by making trade-offs unavoidable, since most people can name many admirable values but few that actually win in a head-to-head choice.

What is the difference between values and goals?

A goal is something you complete, like getting a promotion. A value is a direction you keep moving toward and never fully finish, like growth or connection. Goals can satisfy a value temporarily, but the value itself doesn't go away once the goal is met.

How many core values should I have?

Most values worksheets, including this one, push you toward two to five top values rather than ten or more. A shorter list is more useful for decisions, since a list of ten rarely forces the trade-offs that reveal what actually matters most.

Is a values worksheet the same as a values quiz?

No. A quiz, like the core values quiz on this site, scores your reactions to scenarios and gives you a fast top-five. A worksheet takes longer and pushes further, asking you to define each value in behaviors and test it against real conflicts.

Can I print this values worksheet?

Yes, the exercises, the 60-value list, and the worked example are all designed to print on plain paper. Choosing your focus categories first, rather than printing one generic packet, means what ends up on the page matches what you're actually working through that week, not a one-size-fits-all handout.

How often should I redo a values exercise?

Every three to six months, or after a major life change like a new job, a breakup, or becoming a parent. Values themselves tend to stay stable, but which one takes priority shifts, and revisiting the exercise catches that shift.