Find Your Values | Your Mindful Year
A free exercise from Your Mindful Year

Find the value you're quietly neglecting

Most values exercises hand you a tidy list of five words and leave you there. This one goes one step further, and shows you the gap between what you say matters and where your week actually went.

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Around 90 seconds. Keep the tool visible below it.

It takes about eight minutes. At the end you'll get your five values, the one with the widest gap, and a five week tracker to close it.

1Choose ten values that resonate, from sixty.
2Narrow to five by choosing between them, one pair at a time.
3Look honestly at where your last seven days went.
4Build your five week tracker for the value that needs it most.
Step 1 of 4Choose ten

Which ten of these matter to you?

Don't overthink it. Go on instinct, and pick the ones you react to rather than the ones that sound admirable. You'll narrow them down next.

0 of 10 chosen
Step 2 of 41 of 15

If one of these had to go, which do you keep?

Step 2 of 4Complete
Your working five

These are the ones you kept

They may shift as you get clearer, and that's fine. For now, treat them as your working set.

    Step 3 of 41 of 5

    Think about the last seven days only. Not a good week, not a typical week. Last week.
    If last week was a shocker, use it anyway. One rough week isn't a verdict on your life, and it's more honest than a week you've smoothed out from memory.

    How much of your time, energy and money actually went here?

    Step 3 of 4Complete
    What you said, against what you did

    Here's where the gap is

    The green bar is how highly you ranked each value. The orange bar is where your week actually went. The distance between them is the interesting part.

    Before you look: this isn't a scorecard. Life gets busy and we drift from how we meant to live, and a week that went to obligations rather than values is an ordinary week, not a failure. A GPS needs two things to get you anywhere, the destination and your actual location. You already have the destination. This is the other half.

    Your widest gap is

    Next, you'll pick five small ways to close that gap and get a five week tracker with them already filled in.

    Step 4 of 4Almost there

    Where should the five weeks go?

    You'll build your tracker on the next screen and can download it straight away. Over the following five weeks I'll send you one short email a week to keep the practice going. No more than that.

    One email a week for five weeks, then my usual notes. Unsubscribe whenever you like.

    Step 4 of 4Last one
    Your focus value

    Write five small ways you'll live this out. Make at least two or three embarrassingly small. Small enough that you could still do them on your worst day, because consistency matters more than intensity.

    Tap an idea to use it as a starting point, then edit it:
    Done

    Your five weeks start now

    Print this or save it as a PDF, and put it somewhere you'll actually see it. At the end of each week, mark how you went. Some weeks you'll manage all five. Some weeks two. That's the practice working, not failing.

    Value Tracker

    Five ways to embody this valueWk 1Wk 2Wk 3Wk 4Wk 5
    Your top five:

    What happens after five weeks?

    You choose another value and go again. That's the whole practice, and it's what Your Mindful Year does across twelve themes over a year. Your first email arrives in a few days.