Every tool on this site starts from values, and values clarification has support far beyond any one school of therapy. Naming what matters to you and noticing the gap between that and how you’re living is one of the most reliable ways to change what you do next. What Matters, the card sort, was designed by Dr. Martine J. RoBards, a neuropsychologist, and rebuilt for the web by her son, Michael RoBards, LCSW. It ranks your values and asks whether each one is satisfied, which is the same logic clinicians use in the Valued Living Questionnaire.
What ACT is
The three tools that follow borrow their bones from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, usually said as one word: ACT. ACT is a form of behavioral therapy developed in the 1980s by Steven Hayes and colleagues, with several hundred clinical trials behind it and a place on most lists of evidence-based treatments. Its central idea is simple and a little unfashionable: a full life includes pain, and a great deal of our suffering comes from the fight to avoid it. Instead of trying to feel better first and live later, ACT works on psychological flexibility: the ability to be present, open up to what you feel, and do what matters to you, even with the hard stuff along for the ride.
The six skills
ACT describes that flexibility as six skills. They’re the six sides of the shape Flex draws.
Making room. Letting a difficult feeling be there without having to get rid of it first. The opposite is the frantic bail-out: the drink, the scroll, the fight, the withdrawal.
Unhooking. Seeing a thought as a thought rather than an order. “I’m going to fail” can be noticed, thanked, and left on the table.
Being here. Attention on what is happening now, in this room, with this person, instead of the rerun of last week or the rehearsal of next.
The watcher. There is a part of you that notices all of it and has been there through every version of you. That part is bigger than any story about who you are.
Knowing what matters. Values are directions, not destinations: who you want to be as a partner, a parent, a friend, a worker. You never finish them; you keep choosing them.
Doing what matters. Acting on those values in small, repeatable steps, especially when motivation hasn’t shown up. Motivation follows action far more often than it leads it.
How the tools map on
What Matters is the values skill, done with cards instead of a worksheet. Bull’s Eye is doing what matters, kept honest by a calendar; it adapts the Bull’s Eye Values Survey (Lundgren and colleagues, 2012), a standard ACT instrument. The Matrix is making room and unhooking, applied to the real moves you make when something hurts; it follows Polk and Schoendorff’s ACT Matrix. Flex is the whole picture, six skills on one shape.
Why repeat a questionnaire
The check-ins are ordinary clinical questionnaires: the PHQ-9 for mood, the GAD-7 for anxiety, and the rest. One score is a snapshot. Clinicians who have clients repeat a couple of these between sessions, and look at the line together, get better outcomes than clinicians who guess; the research calls it measurement-based care, and almost nobody does it because the tools are clunky. Here they take two minutes, remind you weekly if you ask, and draw the line with the published cutoffs on it. A score is never a diagnosis. A line that has moved is worth a conversation.
What this can and can’t claim
ACT is well studied. The questionnaires are validated and scored exactly as published. The four card-based tools are built on those methods and have not been tested themselves. None of this is therapy, and it can’t see who you are. If it makes you want the real thing, that is a fine outcome. More on what this is and isn’t, and what we keep. For therapists.