Pocket Tools

The Values Compass

What matters to you, and which way to walk

Learn what a value is and isn’t, sort a deck of forty, choose the few that are truly yours, take a kind look at how much room last week gave them, and pick one small step for this week.

What matters to you, really? Not what you think should matter, and not what matters most to the people around you, but what you’d want your life to keep heading toward. Psychologists call those things values, and the handful that matter most to you are often called your core values. Knowing yours won’t make the hard parts of life go away, but it gives you something to steer by when you don’t know which way to turn.

I’m bringing you one of my favorite techniques from ACT, aka acceptance and commitment therapy, and you can use it right here, on this page. The tool itself takes no longer than ten minutes the first time, and a couple of minutes when you come back. There’s no score at the end, and nobody is grading you!

A direction, not a destination

Think of the difference between being a good friend and going to your friend’s birthday dinner on Saturday. You can go to the dinner, and then it’s done. You can’t finish being a good friend, because tomorrow there’s another chance to show up for them, and the day after that another one.

That’s what a value is: a direction you choose to keep walking in, never a place you arrive. In acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, values are the qualities you want your actions to have, meaning how you want to treat people, what you want to stand for, and who you want to be over time. They’re about what you do, not what you get.

That’s also why you can live a value on a terrible day. Honesty fits into one sentence. Kindness fits into a text message. Courage fits into the one phone call you’ve been putting off for a month. You don’t need to feel ready first, and you don’t need the rest of your life sorted out before you start.

Four things values get confused with

Values get mixed up with four other things, and each mix-up makes them a little harder to live by.

• A goal can be finished. Running a race is a goal, and caring for your body is the value it serves. When the race is over, the value is still there, pointing somewhere new.
• A rule comes with pressure. “I should call my mother every Sunday” is a rule. Staying close to her is the value, and on a busy week it might mean a voice message instead of a call.
• A feeling isn’t something you can choose. You can’t decide to feel confident, but you can choose to act with courage while you still feel unsure.
• Something you want from other people, like being admired or loved, depends on them and on luck. A value describes your part of it: treating people with respect, or being someone you can respect.

One quick question spots a goal: can you tick it off as done? Then it’s a goal, and it’s worth asking what it’s for. Part 3 has a second question, for telling a value that’s yours from a should.

The four quarters of the compass

Here’s something I find fascinating: all over the world, people’s values arrange themselves into the same shape.

The psychologist Shalom Schwartz and his colleagues asked people in more than 80 countries what mattered to them, and the answers kept falling into the same circle. Values that sit next to each other on it tend to get along. Values on opposite sides pull against each other.

Two tensions run across that circle. One is between caring for others and doing well for yourself. The other is between freedom and change on one side, and tradition, safety and belonging on the other. Those two lines split the circle into four quarters, and they’re the four quarters of this compass: caring and fairness, roots and belonging, freedom and discovery, and doing well and enjoying.

Because opposite quarters pull against each other, nobody lives every value fully at once. Time runs out, and a month spent chasing adventure leaves less of it for keeping traditions alive. Values work that way for everyone, and it matters later, when you look at the gap between what matters to you and what last week actually held.

The circle says something hopeful about people, too. Across countries, people agree about what matters more than they differ, and most of the differences sit between individuals rather than between nations. So there’s no right list for where you come from. Choosing duty to your family, your faith or keeping the peace is just as much a valued choice as choosing adventure or independence. Your list doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s!!

Tap a quarter of the compass to see the ten cards that sit in it, and the quarter it pulls against.

Now it’s your turn. Each card names a value and says what living it might look like, in the first person. Put each one in the pile that feels true for you today: matters a lot, matters some, or not for me right now.

Go with your first reaction. If you catch yourself wondering which pile you’re supposed to pick, that’s worth noticing, and go with the one that feels true rather than the one that sounds good. Nothing is locked in. When you’ve been through the deck, you can move any card to another pile.

The last pile is called “not for me right now” on purpose. A card that doesn’t speak to you today might next year. Putting it there isn’t a judgment of the value, or of anyone who holds it.

If something that matters to you is missing, write your own. You can add up to three.

Tap the pile each card belongs in. Back undoes the last card, and Skip moves a card to the end of the deck. Nothing you sort is saved or sent anywhere unless you choose to keep it on this device in part 5.

Why the cards are worded the way they are

Every card is written as something you do, in the first person, because that’s the part you can choose. You might have expected cards like being loved, being attractive or having plenty of money. Those depend on other people and on luck, so the deck offers the value hiding inside each of them instead. Being loved became closeness, which is about sharing your inner world and making room for someone else’s. Having money became providing, which is about making sure the people who rely on you are secure.

The cards are also written to work wherever you live, whatever you believe and whoever you love. Faith means any faith or spiritual practice, or the search for one. Family means the people you call family, by birth or by choice. Respect includes your elders, because for much of the world that’s where respect starts.

A compass with forty needles doesn’t point anywhere. From your “matters a lot” pile, choose the three to five that feel most like you right now. Those are your core values, the few you’ll steer by. If it’s hard to narrow down, imagine a friend describing you at your best, years from now. Which words would you most want them to use?

Three to five isn’t a rule from research. It’s enough to give you a direction, and few enough to keep in mind on a busy day, and you can choose fewer if fewer is true.

As you choose, each value takes its place on the compass, in its own quarter. If they all land in one quarter, that’s fine. It’s a picture of what matters to you now, and nothing needs evening out.

Tap three to five cards from your “matters a lot” pile. Tap a card again to put it back.

Is it yours, or is it a should?

Some values arrive from outside. A parent who always said work comes first, a workplace that treats being busy as a virtue, a feed full of people waking up at five. There’s nothing wrong with values you learned from other people, and many of the best ones come that way. The question is whether they’re yours now.

Researchers who study goals have found that the ones that fit a person’s own interests and values get steadier effort, are reached more often, and leave people feeling better when they get there. The same seems to go for values: ones held mainly to avoid guilt or disapproval tend to feel heavy, and they’re harder to keep going.

So for each of your picks, the compass asks one gentle question: would this still matter to you if no one ever knew? If the answer is “yes, it’s mine”, keep walking. If it’s “maybe it’s a should”, you can swap it for another card, or keep it and see how it sits with you over the next few weeks. Either is fine, and noticing it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong.

Knowing your values is the start. What makes the difference is living them, and this is where it’s easy to get stuck, because looking at the gap between what matters to you and what you actually did can feel awful.

Here’s what the research says, and it’s kinder than you might expect. How important you rate a value says little about how you feel. Living it says more, and it works in both directions. When researchers followed people in Europe, India and Türkiye day by day, living some of their values lifted the next day, and a good day made it easier to live their values the next. Another study found the same thing from the other end: a low day tends to come before a day with less room for what matters. A hard week shrinks the room for everything, so a short needle tells you about the week, not about you.

That’s why this compass doesn’t ask how well you did. It asks how much room last week gave you, and there’s no score, no total and nothing marked in red.

One more thing is worth knowing. People who keep the closest eye on their valued actions, and find them the most effortful, tend to feel more distressed overall. In the moment, though, noticing a valued action goes with more meaning a few hours later. So noticing can help, as long as it doesn’t turn into keeping score. Look at your needles the way you’d look at a weather report: useful to know, and not a measure of your worth.

For each value, tap how much room last week gave you to live it: 0 is no room at all, and 4 is plenty. Its needle grows toward the edge of the compass. Then, if you like, choose what got in the way.

What got in the way

One reason in that list deserves a closer look. If another value came first, nothing went wrong. Remember the quarters: opposite values pull against each other, and an evening spent sitting with a friend who’s struggling is an evening not spent on your own project. A short needle on one value can be the cost of living another. That’s a choice, not a failure!

Being kind about the gap

It’s tempting to turn your values into a stick to beat yourself with. I value my health, so why can’t I just get to the gym? I value my family, so what kind of person misses dinner three nights in a row? When that happens, values stop working as values and become one more way to feel not good enough.

Perfectionism goes with more distress, and a large analysis of students in the US, Canada and the UK found it has been rising for decades, so if your inner voice is harsh, you’re far from alone. Kindness here isn’t letting yourself off the hook. It’s what keeps you walking. If being kind to yourself feels hard, our article on self-compassion explains why it’s so difficult, and what helps.

Big plans have a way of waiting for a better week. Small steps don’t. Pick one of your values and one thing you could do for it this week, small enough that you could manage it on a low day. It might be a message to a friend you miss, ten minutes outside before work, or saying no to one thing so there’s room for another.

Some therapies are built on exactly this. Behavioral activation for depression, for example, plans small activities that fit a person’s values, one week at a time.

Then give your step a when and a where. “If it’s Sunday after dinner, then I’ll call my brother” is more likely to happen than “I’ll call my brother more”. This kind of if-then plan has a lot of research behind it, and our article on if-then plans shows how to build one that holds up in a real week.

You can also tag your step with the part of life it belongs to, like family and home, or rest and play. Over a few weeks, the tags can make a pattern easier to spot.

Choose a value, write one small step, and, if you like, when you’ll do it and the part of life it belongs to.

Toward or away

Through the week you’ll meet small moments where you can take a step toward what matters to you, or a step away from it, often to escape a hard feeling for a while. It might be scrolling instead of calling, staying late instead of going home, or saying yes when you meant no.

Both kinds of step are human, and everyone takes both. The aim is to notice, more and more often, which way you’re facing, and to turn back when you can.

Coming back to it

Values are fairly steady, but they aren’t set in stone. The cards you’d choose after a move, a loss, a new baby or a new country might be different from the ones you chose today, and that’s healthy. It’s worth sorting the whole deck again after a big life change, or every few months.

Between those, come back once a week if you can, and rate how much room the week gave each value. It takes a minute or two. Over a few weeks you may start to see what tends to crowd your values out, and what makes room for them.

Below, you can keep your compass on this device, or copy it as text and keep it wherever you like.

Keep it, or copy it

There’s no finish line here, and that’s the point. A compass doesn’t tell you where you’ll end up. It tells you which way you’re facing, and whenever you lose your bearings, it’s still there to look at again.