Most core values exercises end with a list of good words. Honesty, growth, family, freedom. The client nods, the coach writes them down, and nobody looks at the list again. The exercise isn’t the problem. It just stops one step too early.
A core values exercise is worth your session time when it ends with a real goal or decision held up against the client’s values. That last step is where clients see why a goal keeps stalling or why a choice has felt wrong for months. Here’s how to run one that gets there.
Why values work belongs in a coaching session
A goal that keeps stalling isn’t always a discipline problem. Sometimes the goal was never checked against what the client actually cares about.
Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot studied this in their 1999 self-concordance research. Goals people pursued because the goals expressed their own interests and values got more sustained effort than goals pursued out of pressure or obligation. People also got more benefit to their well-being from reaching them.
There’s a second reason. In a 2014 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman looked at research on self-affirmation. Across many studies, briefly reflecting on your own core values made people less defensive when they faced threatening information. For a coach, that’s useful before any hard conversation about a goal that isn’t working. A client who has just named what they stand for may be able to look at a stalled plan with more curiosity and less self-protection.
None of that research tested a worksheet. It tells you why the exercise is worth doing, not that any one version of it is guaranteed to work.
Where values exercises usually go wrong
If you’ve run a values exercise before and it fell flat, one of these is the likely cause.
- “Should” values crowd out real ones. Clients pick the values they think a good person, a good parent, or a good leader would have. The Clemmer Group names this as the main pitfall in clarifying personal values. The real ones already show up in a person’s actual choices and reactions.
- The list is too long. Twenty values can’t guide a decision because they’ll always disagree with each other. A value only becomes useful when it’s one of the few a client will actually defend.
- The words stay abstract. “Freedom” means something different to every client. Without a definition in their own words, you and the client may be talking about two different things.
- Nothing gets tested. The list never meets a real goal or decision, so it never changes anything.
Each step below is built to prevent one of these.
How to run a core values exercise, step by step
Plan for most of one session, or split it across two. The client can do the list work as homework, but the last step is better done with you in the room.
1. Start with a moment that felt right
Before any word list, ask the client for a specific time in the last year or two when they felt proud, energized, or fully themselves. What were they doing? Who were they with? What mattered to them in that moment?
A real moment is the best defense against “should” values. It shows you what the client acts on, not just what sounds admirable. Keep this step forward-looking and positive. You’re asking for a good moment, not a painful one. It’s also optional. Some clients would rather go straight to the list, and that’s fine.
2. Circle what fits, and go fast
Hand the client a broad list of value words and ask them to circle every one that feels true, aiming for somewhere between 15 and 30. Encourage them to go with their first reaction and to add words that fit better than anything on the list.
Speed matters here. When clients slow down, they start editing for how the word will look. Watch for hesitation and ask about it later. A word they circled and then crossed out often has a story behind it.
3. Narrow the list to ten
Now ask them to cut the words that are nice to have but don’t really drive their choices. This is the first hard step, and some clients will resist it. That’s useful. The words they fight to keep tell you a lot.
4. Choose five, define them, and score them
From the ten, the client picks five and ranks them, most important first. Then comes the step most exercises skip. For each value, they write what it means to them in a sentence or two.
Co-Active’s values clarification exercise frames values as who a person is rather than who they think they should be. Asking for a definition in the client’s own words keeps you both honest about that. For one person, “security” means a savings cushion. For another, it means a team they can trust.
Last, the client scores each value from 0 to 10 for how fully they’re living it right now. Make it clear that a low score isn’t a failure. It shows where to put attention, and it often points straight at the goal you’ll test in the next step.
5. Test a real goal against the top five
This is the reason for everything above. Ask the client to pick a goal or decision they’re actually facing, not a hypothetical one. If it’s a goal that keeps stalling, even better.
Then work through a few questions together:
- Which of your top five values does this goal serve, and how?
- Which value does it ignore or work against?
- What would change if the goal served that value too?
- What’s one change you could make this week so the goal fits your values better?
Often the answer is to reshape the goal rather than drop it. A promotion that serves “achievement” but ignores “family” might still be the right move once the client decides what they’ll protect along the way.
We built a member worksheet that walks a client through all five steps in order, from the opening moment to the goal check, with room to write at every stage. You can hand it over as homework or fill it in together during a session.
Core Values Clarification Worksheet
A goal that keeps stalling isn’t always a willpower problem. Often it’s a goal that was never checked against what you actually care about. Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot found that people put more sustained effort into goals that fit their own values and interest
What to do with the results
A values list that lives in a folder won’t change much. Bring it back.
When a client sets a new goal, check it against their top five before you move on. If you use the GROW model, the values fit naturally at the Goal and Options stages, where the client decides what they want and which path is worth taking. They also help when you’re shifting a client from goals to outcomes, since a value often describes the outcome better than the goal does.
Values work also pairs well with other tools you may already use. The Wheel of Life shows how satisfied a client is across areas of their life. It doesn’t ask what they value. Run the two together and the gaps become clearer, because a low score in an area tied to a top value matters more than a low score in one that isn’t.
It’s worth revisiting the list every few months, too. Most core values hold steady, but the way a client defines them can shift as their life changes.
Keep the exercise where coaching belongs
A core values exercise stays in forward-looking territory. You’re helping a client identify what matters, rank it, define it, and check it against a real choice. It isn’t a tool for digging into painful history.
Now and then, a client’s reflection will bring up something heavier than a stalled goal. If that happens, slow down and follow your usual referral judgment. Knowing when a conversation belongs with a therapist is part of good coaching, not a failure of it.
For most clients, though, this is one of the more energizing sessions you’ll run together. People rarely get the chance to say out loud what they care about and then see it applied to a decision that matters to them this week. Give them that chance, and you’ll have a reference point you can return to for the rest of your work together.
