Using the card sort in your practice

Where it fits

The Personal Values Card Sort comes out of Motivational Interviewing, where values exploration helps develop discrepancy: the felt difference between how a client is living and what they care about most, which strengthens their own reasons for change (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). It fits equally well in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where clarified values anchor committed action (Hayes et al., 2006), and it adapts naturally to narrative, existential, career, and couples work. The research page covers the evidence in detail, including the self-affirmation literature behind the writing step.

Three ways to run it

In session. In the room, hand the client a tablet or your laptop. In telehealth, have the client open the site on their own device and share their screen. The sorting has to happen under their fingers, and much of what you learn comes from watching them do it. Decide beforehand whether you want a think-aloud sort, which is richer but slower, or a quiet sort with discussion after. Pause on hesitations: “you held onto that card for a while” is often the door to the most useful material of the hour.

Between sessions. Assign the sort as homework with the client instruction sheet. The site saves progress on the client’s device, and they can print, copy, or save their results to bring back. Their written reflections come along on the printout. Clients who prefer a native app can use the app for iPhone and iPad or Android, which saves past sorts to revisit over time.

On paper. Some clients think better with physical cards. Print our card deck, which has the same 83 values restyled for clean printing and a business card sheet version that needs no cutting, or the 2001 deck from UNM CASAA. Have the client record their results on the recording worksheet.

Questions worth exploring

• What was it like to choose only five?
• Which cards were hardest to place? What was the pull in each direction?
• Which pile surprised you? Is anything in Very Important there because it should be?
• How does your week actually spend itself, compared with this list?
• Which of these values did you inherit, and which did you choose?
• Which value is most under threat right now, and by what?
• Think of a recent decision you felt good about. Which of these values was it honoring?
• If the people closest to you saw this list, what would surprise them?

Couples and families

Have each person complete the sort separately, without conferring. On the results screen, each partner can save a session file. The “Compare with a partner’s sort” button then shows both ranked top 5s side by side, with shared values, values high for both, values distinct to each person, and discussion prompts. Shared values are an easy place to start. Differences give structure to conversations that otherwise go in circles. It can help to frame a partner’s distinct value as information about what nourishes them, rather than as a competing demand.

Groups

The sort adapts well to group therapy, where members get to hear how other people weighed the same values. The group materials swap the cards for a printed list of all 83 values. Members check anything that matters to them, star the ones that are very important, narrow to ten and then five, and rate how much their daily life reflects each one from 0 to 10. There are facilitator guides for a 50-minute session, a 90-minute session, and a three-session series, each drawing on ACT and Motivational Interviewing, with suggested wording, discussion questions that move from light to personal, and notes on common patterns, such as a list where every value points outward. The series gives each part its own session: naming values first, then the gap and what shows up on the way toward a value, then measuring again and planning for hard days.

Some of this matters more in a group than in individual work. Set norms out loud before the sort, especially that sharing is optional and that members don’t compare lists. Keep the sort itself silent. When someone names a gap between a value and their life, reflect it and leave it there for a beat instead of rushing to reassure. The values exercises page has a shorter version for classrooms and workshops. For a series that carries one value through all four Everyday Insight tools, there is also a four-session skills group with its own guide and handouts.

Children and teens

For younger clients, choose the youth deck on the welcome screen. It uses the values from Values Card Sort for Kids by Aria E. Fiat, PhD, adapted and used with her permission. It has 48 short, concrete phrases such as “being a good friend” and “helping animals,” with no separate definitions. The steps are shorter too. Your client sorts the cards into the same three piles, picks a top five straight from Very Important, puts them in order, and can say a few words about why each one matters. There is no narrow-to-ten step. Every instruction is written for a young person, and the results give three simple questions to talk through together. With younger children, reading the cards aloud and writing down their words works well, and so does printing the youth deck for anyone who does better with cards in their hands. Some older teens will prefer the adult deck, and it is worth letting them choose. The kids and teens page is written for parents and teachers, and it can be handy to share with a family.

Documentation

What clinicians typically find worth recording: the ranked top five, which the printout includes verbatim, any 0 to 10 living ratings you elicited, notable process observations such as long-held cards or surprises the client named, the client’s written reflections if they consent to share them, and the committed step with its target date. A re-sort after six to twelve months, compared against the first, makes progress visible in the client’s own language.

To set up that re-sort, have the client save a session file from their results screen at the end of the first one. When they sort again later, the “Compare with a partner’s sort” button accepts their own earlier file just as readily as a partner’s, producing a then-versus-now view: values in both top fives, plus what appears only in the earlier sort or only in the new one. The two sorts can be labeled on screen, for example “January” and “Today.”

Companion tools

Everyday Insight makes three other free tools that pick up where a values sort leaves off, with the same approach: no accounts, and what you write stays on your device. Activity Record is an hourly activity and mood diary. It suits clients who want to see how much of their week actually goes toward the values they ranked, and it pairs naturally with behavioral activation. Thought Record is a CBT thought record for the thoughts that show up when a value feels out of reach. Behavioral Experiment helps a client test the anxious predictions that keep them from acting on a value, one small step at a time.

Privacy and data

The sort itself runs entirely in the visitor’s browser: no accounts, and nothing the client enters is sent to a server. Progress is saved only on the client’s own device, and “Start over” erases it. Session files are ordinary files the client controls. The site uses privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics that count anonymous visits but never see the contents of a sort. The privacy policy has the details. As with any digital tool, follow your own professional judgment and organizational policies.

Go to the values card sort