Values Worksheet
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Looking for a core values worksheet to share with therapy clients?
A values worksheet is a great way to explore deeply held principles that guide your clients’ behavior, their relationships, and how they navigate life. However, as each person’s values may differ, misaligned values can be a cause of conflict in your client’s life.
This guide to core values worksheets explains the premise of core values, their benefits, and how to support clients in identifying their values. In addition, download a free values worksheet to save to your electronic health record (EHR) and use in your therapy practice.
What are core values?
Core values are the fundamental beliefs and guiding principles that shape an individual's behavior, decisions, and interactions with others. These beliefs and values are considered part of a person's character or identity. They represent what a person finds most important.
It might be helpful to think of them as a guiding compass used to make decisions and analyze situations. These values also reflect a person's sense of right and wrong, influencing their priorities, how they want to live, and the boundaries they hold.
Values may differ from person to person based on their unique experiences, culture, upbringing, and beliefs. For example, some families live in intergenerational homes, prioritizing the care of their elders and are greatly influenced by their approval, whereas more western families may hold a more individualistic point of view when navigating priorities and decisions.
Core values may include:
- Honesty: Valuing truthfulness and integrity. May also view dishonestly strongly.
- Compassion: Caring for others by showing empathy and kindness.
- Autonomy: Valuing freedom, independence, and personal rights.
- Respect: Both treating others with consideration and respect and expecting the same from others, even if there is a difference of opinion.
- Loyalty: The expectation that others will hold you in high regard and you will also remain loyal to them.
- Goal achievement: Striving for success, desire for accomplishment, and control.
- Responsibility: Taking accountability and seeing through your obligations.
- Family: Prioritizing relationships with family members and spending time with loved ones.
- Creativity: Valuing innovation, self-expression, and original thinking.
- Health: Striving for physical and mental well-being.
- Social connectedness: Prioritizing socialization and community and receiving validation and affirmation through these relationships.
Core beliefs and values don’t usually change, however, they may evolve to reflect life experiences, such as childbirth, death, trauma, and other stressful life events. These experiences may reflect a need for personal growth.
In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a CBT values worksheet might reveal the client has a stronger preference for autonomy over sociotropy (the desire for social connectedness). Each preference has a slightly different personality style.
For instance, a person who values autonomy may be more concerned or angered by social justice than a sociotropic person. When people with different values engage, conflict and interpersonal difficulties can arise, which may show up as controlling behaviors, anxiety, depression, avoidance, guilt, or dissatisfaction.
Therapists can support clients dealing with these challenges by helping them better understand how their core values may have been compromised, using a values assessment worksheet, so they can achieve more alignment.
Benefits of using a values worksheet
Using a personal values worksheet with clients may help in several areas:
1. Develop self-awareness and identity: Understanding their core values helps clients to know who they are and what is important to them. This gives clients a stronger sense of self-awareness and identity.
2. Decision-making: Core values provide a framework for making decisions that are consistent with core beliefs, leading to greater satisfaction and a sense of authenticity.
3. Values-based goal setting and motivation: When goals align with core values, individuals are more likely to be motivated to pursue and achieve them, providing a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment.
4. To strengthen relationships: Knowing and respecting others’ core values may enhance effective communication, understanding, and deepen the trust in relationships.
5. Develop resilience: Core values can serve as an anchor when navigating challenging circumstances by helping people stay true to who they are and what matters to them.
6. Address value conflicts: Having a strong sense of self and acting within one’s values may provide an opportunity to see more clearly if there are misalignments in relationships. For example, knowing your client places more value on autonomy may help your client to understand why they feel suffocated if their partner is seeking more connection than they want.
7. To support cognitive restructuring: Understanding your client’s core values can help to identify how automatic thoughts or negative core beliefs are impacting them. For instance, they may value achievement, but hold a negative view of their abilities. Knowing this can help to restructure these automatic or unhelpful thoughts by building confidence and achieving more alignment with their values.
8. Foster behavioral activation: For example, you can help a client with depression identify their values to then structure behavioral activation exercises, which may alleviate some of the symptoms of depression and boost mood.
Ways to identify core values with clients
There are various ways to identify values with clients, such as:
- Use an identifying values worksheet: The free core values worksheet, which you can download at the top of this article, provides clients with a list of values to identify their own and prioritize them in order of importance, and then asks a series of prompts, such as:
- What are some specific examples of how you have honored these values in your life?
- Describe two situations where you felt misaligned with your values. Elaborate on these situations and how they made you feel.
- Reflecting on your current actions and behaviors, how well do they align with your core values?
- Create value exploration exercises in session: Or, use a values inventory worksheet that provides a list of values clients can choose from.
- Values sorting: Ask the client to pick from a values deck and then organize their values in order of importance.
- Behavioral analysis: Discuss challenging situations or conflicts to better understand the values that might be driving them.
- Values discussion: Explore with the client how their values may have influenced their choices and behavior.
How to use the core values worksheet with clients
You can download the free values worksheet PDF to use with clients in several ways:
- In session as a discussion prompt—whether you see clients in-person or telehealth
- As a values worksheet handout for psychoeducation
- Provide it as homework for clients to complete on their own time
- To help clients set value-based goals
- To review progress or adjust treatment planning
Sources
- Harris, R. (n.d.). The happiness trap: complete set of handouts and worksheets from ACT books by Russ Harris.
- The Values Institute (2024). A guide to destructive core values.
- Sokol, K., Fox, M, G. (2019). The comprehensive clinician's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy. PESI Publishing.
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