In the complex landscape of life, work, and well-being, knowing what truly matters acts as a powerful force. These deeply held beliefs and qualities, known as personal values, serve as an internal compass, profoundly influencing the choices we make and the effectiveness of strategies designed to help us grow or change. Understanding personal values isn’t merely an abstract exercise; it has tangible benefits, leading to clearer decision-making and improved intervention effectiveness across various domains, from personal health decisions to organizational behavior and therapeutic practice.

Values as a Guiding Force in Decision-Making

When faced with choices, big or small, our personal values provide a framework that simplifies the process and enhances the quality of the outcome. Being tuned into what matters allows for clearer decisions. This clarity reduces ambiguity and helps individuals focus their attention on taking deliberate, meaningful action. Decisions can be made quickly and clearly—and with confidence—because they are rooted in what is fundamentally important to the individual or organization [29, conversation history].

One of the key ways values enhance decision-making is by promoting values alignment and congruence. This means making choices that directly correspond with one’s stated values. For instance, patient decision aids often include explicit values clarification methods precisely to help individuals make evidence-informed decisions aligned with their values. Research, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses, indicates that using explicit values clarification methods significantly increases values congruence. Some specific methods, such as multicriteria decision analysis, have even shown potential for being particularly effective at encouraging values-congruent decisions. Making decisions through the lens of core values ensures these decisions support and advance a desired personal path or organizational culture, leading to greater consistency and trust [conversation history].

Beyond alignment, understanding values helps navigate the inherent difficulties in decision-making:

• Reduced Decisional Conflict: Explicit values clarification methods have been demonstrated to decrease decisional conflict. When decisions are based on established core values, handling conflicts can become easier as the outcome is guided by these principles [conversation history].
• Managing Tradeoffs and Prioritizing: Decisions often involve tradeoffs where not all desirable outcomes can be achieved simultaneously. Values clarification methods help individuals evaluate the desirability of options or attributes to identify preferences. Values-based decision making involves considering how different options align with or conflict with core values, identifying values that cannot be compromised, and prioritizing among values when necessary. This process of prioritization is crucial, as the challenge is often less about compromising values and more about determining which values are most relevant or important in a given situation.
• Reduced Regret: Explicit values clarification methods have been shown to encourage desirable outcomes such as reduced decisional regret. Making choices aligned with deep-seated values can lead to greater satisfaction and less second-guessing over time.
• Increased Psychological Flexibility: Viewing challenges and opportunities through the lens of core values enables psychological flexibility. This adaptability is vital for navigating complex or uncertain situations effectively.

In organizational settings, applying values to decision-making involves a structured approach, such as outlining acceptable and unacceptable behaviors linked to each value. A framework for values-based decision making might involve identifying the decision, considering options, evaluating how each option aligns with or conflicts with core values, determining non-negotiable values, and prioritizing. Operationalizing values means embedding them in hiring, firing, promotion, policies, and processes, ensuring employees understand and live by them. Acting on values in tough situations, particularly ethical ones, can involve strategies like double-checking policies, reframing the issue to highlight alignment with values or business benefits, having prepared responses, finding allies, or using “silent resistance” like careful documentation and subtle escalation.

Values as a Catalyst for Effective Interventions

Values are not only crucial for individual decision-making but also play a central, guiding role in the design and effectiveness of interventions, particularly within fields like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).

• Guiding Intervention Goals: Values represent qualities or beliefs that are of high priority to an individual or community. In interventions, understanding a client’s and caregiver’s values can directly guide treatment goals and targeted outcomes [conversation history]. Values are described as intangible outcomes of purposive action that are meaningful to the individual.
• Increasing Motivation and Engagement: Values provide a sense of meaning and purpose that directs and maintains actions. They can function as verbal motivating operations, increasing the likelihood of behaviors that lead to valued outcomes. Goals and actions that stem from core values are inherently more meaningful and motivating [conversation history]. This intrinsic motivation leads to higher levels of engagement and satisfaction in the intervention process [conversation history]. Embedding values clarification into training programs, for instance, has been shown to increase motivation related to practice.
• Promoting Values-Behavior Coherence: A fundamental goal of ACT-based interventions is to increase the coherence between an individual’s behavior and their values. Values clarification and achieving values coherence are crucial for designing and evaluating ACT interventions. Valuing, conceptualized as engaging in behaviors consistent with stated values to produce valued outcomes, is itself often a target of intervention. This coherence serves as both the “guide” of action and a measure by which to evaluate intervention outcomes.
• Evaluating Intervention Success: Values provide a crucial metric for evaluating intervention outcomes [conversation history]. The “success” of the intervention is assessed, at least in part, by the increase of values-congruent behavior [conversation history].
• Applicability Across Domains: Values-based interventions demonstrate broad applicability in various areas within ABA practice, including professional development, Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), parent training, and individual treatment plans. Research shows promise in using values-based approaches to improve academic performance and psychological flexibility in students, enhance job performance and engagement in OBM settings, support positive parenting behaviors, and guide treatment plans for individuals.
• Fostering Mental Health and Well-being: In clinical psychology and counseling, values clarification is a well-established technique for fostering mental health. Therapies like ACT, which help people define and commit to value-driven actions, have been shown to improve resilience, reduce anxiety, and enhance overall well-being. Even brief exercises like values affirmation writing tasks (spending 10–15 minutes reflecting on important values) can lower stress levels and buffer against adversity. Living by values helps individuals build resilience and persevere through challenges [conversation history]. This positions values identification as a cornerstone of well-being interventions.

Methods for Understanding and Measuring Values

Understanding values in practice involves various methods. Values clarification methods are strategies specifically designed to help individuals evaluate the desirability of options or attributes within a decision context to identify preferences. These can range from implicit methods (like describing options in detail or encouraging reflection) to explicit methods that require interaction (like worksheets, interactive websites, or structured conversations). Explicit methods have shown greater effectiveness in improving outcomes like values congruence and decisional conflict compared to implicit or control conditions. Examples of explicit methods include adaptive conjoint analysis, allocation of points, analytical hierarchy process, best-worst scaling, multicriteria decision analysis, discrete-choice experiments, open discussion, pros and cons lists, ranking, rating scales, social matching, standard gamble, and time tradeoff. Multicriteria decision analysis, for example, asks users to indicate how much an attribute or outcome matters, then calculates how well options align with these stated values. While open discussion might seem ideal, trials have not always shown strong results, suggesting this ideal can be difficult to achieve.

Beyond traditional clarification exercises, computational methods are emerging to measure personal values, particularly in large-scale user-generated content like blogs. These lexicon-based methods quantify the usage of value-related themes in text. Approaches like Document Embedding Relatedness (DDR) use word embeddings to capture semantic concepts, performing better than simpler Word Frequency counts in identifying text related to value categories. An advantage of these methods is that they rely on observable behavior (the language people use) rather than solely on self-report data. This offers a new dimension for understanding values as they are expressed in naturally occurring contexts.

Despite advancements, there is a need for further research in behavior-analytic approaches to values. This includes developing more comprehensive assessments of the valuing process and the extent of values–behavior coherence, rather than relying solely on self-report or the articulation of values. Behavior analysts are uniquely suited to develop methods emphasizing direct observation, operational definition of values-consistent behavior, and measurement of values-driven behavior. Additionally, research is needed to evaluate and refine specific techniques and components within values-based intervention protocols.

Conclusion

Understanding personal values is far more than a philosophical exercise; it is a practical tool with significant implications for how effectively we navigate choices and how impactful interventions designed to support us can be. Values act as a reliable internal compass, guiding individuals towards decisions that foster congruence, reduce conflict, and minimize regret. They provide meaning and purpose, acting as powerful motivators that drive engagement and direct action towards valued outcomes in interventions across diverse fields, from health care to organizational management and therapeutic practice. By clarifying what matters most and actively working to align behavior with these principles, both individually and within structured interventions, we can enhance psychological flexibility, build resilience [92, conversation history], and ultimately lead lives and implement strategies that are not only effective but also deeply fulfilling.