Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

The model behind "a value is a direction, not a destination": psychological flexibility, the six processes, and why a value that starts to feel like a rule has stopped working.

Two clients turn up with the same problem wearing different clothes. One can name exactly what matters to them and still cannot move. The other hands you a tidy list of values that reads like a job description somebody else wrote. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) explains both, and it is where the sentence "a value is a direction, not a destination" comes from.

ACT is a contextual behavioral therapy developed by Steven Hayes and colleagues, built around psychological flexibility: contacting the present moment fully, and (depending on what the situation allows) changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values. It is a therapy. But the values and committed-action half of it travels into coaching far more cleanly than the rest, and there is a section near the end about where that line sits.

A value is not a goal

Russ Harris's image is a compass. A compass gives you a direction and keeps you on track, and values do that for the journey of a life. Acting on a value is like heading west: you never arrive. Goals are the sights you want to see while you keep heading west.

The canonical pair, which Harris credits to Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson: getting married is a goal, being loving is a value. You can complete the goal and neglect the value entirely. Three more in the same shape:

• Run a marathon → look after my body.
• Get the promotion → do work I can stand behind.
• Be home on time tonight → be there for my family.

Harris's operational test is the most useful sentence on this page: if it is not something you can do on an ongoing basis, it is not a value. By that test, happiness is not a value: you cannot do happiness. Neither is a sense of belonging, or being respected by others. Those are outcomes, and they are perfectly good things to want.

This matters for anyone using a printed values deck, ours included. Several cards in the 80-card deck (Happiness, Belonging, Fulfillment, Meaning in Life) are outcomes by Harris's test, not directions. That is not a flaw to work around; it is the most interesting card in the pile. A client who reaches for Happiness is telling you something real, and the useful move is to ask what they would be doing when they had it. The answer is the value. It is exactly why a values exercise should make someone restate each card in their own words with their own definition: that is the step that turns a noun into a direction.

There is a related trap worth naming. Harris's dead person's goals are anything a corpse could do better than you: "stop criticizing my partner", "stop worrying". The live version underneath is always a value: being appreciative, being understanding. Two questions find it: what is that in the service of? and what would having that let you do?

The six processes

The usual diagram shows these as six points of equal weight, which is misleading. Values sit between the mindfulness half of the model and the behavior-change half, and five of these processes exist so the sixth becomes possible. Defusion, acceptance, presence and self-as-context are not there for their own sake. They are there so that committed action toward something chosen is available at all.

Underneath sits Relational Frame Theory, ACT's account of how language and cognition work. It is worth knowing that it is there, and a Learn guide is not the place for it.

The printed version of all six is the ACT Compass (cs-ACT): laminated A4, double-sided, six processes with exercises on one side and the six matching inflexibility processes on the other, made for an erasable marker so a client can mark it, photograph it, wipe it and compare later: metafox.eu. There is also a free ACT Workbook in EN and DE: metafox.eu.

Workability

The guiding question in ACT is never whether a thought is true, or whether a feeling is pleasant. It is whether what you are doing works toward the life you want, in the long run.

That single move is what makes ACT useful to a coach who will never do therapy. It replaces "is this belief rational?" (a question that invites argument and belongs to a clinician) with "is this working?", which is a coaching question and one the client is better placed to answer than you are.

A value pulls. A rule pushes.

ACT's own instruction is to pursue your values vigorously and hold them lightly. Fused with, a value stops being a flexible guide and becomes a commandment. Harris extends the compass image: you do not clutch the compass every step of the walk, you carry it and pull it out when you need to steer.

Values are about how you want to behave, not what you should or have to do. The shoulds usually turn out, on inspection, to be someone else's values. ACT has a name for following a rule because of the approval that follows it rather than because it works: pliance. The jargon is not the point. The point is that a value pursued for approval fails ACT's own "freely chosen" test, and it will not sustain anyone.

The detector is one question: when did this last feel like something you wanted to do, rather than something you had to do?

Toward and away

Both directions are ordinary. Away moves are what every person does under the influence of difficult thoughts and feelings, and naming one is not an accusation. The idea comes from the ACT Matrix (Polk and Schoendorff): toward who and what matters, away from unwanted inner experience, sorted by workability rather than by good and bad. Harris's Choice Point draws the same fork.

The line that justifies doing values work at all lives here: a toward arrow only means something if the values work has been done. An arrow pointing at nothing motivates nobody.

It is also why asking about anti-values (what someone wants to keep out of their life) is a real technique rather than a gimmick. "What do you disapprove of in other people's actions?" is one of Harris's standard routes into values. What a person pushes away shapes their choices as much as what they move toward, and it usually points straight back at a value they hold. Tim Brownson's coaching book The Clarity Method gives anti-values a step of their own, and the anti-values cards in Values Discovery come from the sample list in it.

Committed action

Coaching, not therapy

ACT practices can be used by a coach without being a therapist, as long as the work stays coaching and the client does not actually need psychotherapy. That is the line Jon Hill and Joe Oliver draw in Acceptance and Commitment Coaching.

The coaching stance is not that the client is broken. Everyone has values that get obscured by their own thoughts and feelings; the work is finding realistic ways to act on them anyway (Oliver's short version for the ICF). One technique worth naming because it is simple and safe: Harris's dropping anchor, or ACE (Acknowledge what is showing up, Come back into your body, Engage with what is around you). He has a free step-by-step script.

And a line we hold to in our own products: asking a client to notice what shows up is a coaching move. Asking them to be willing to accept it, with nobody else in the room, is not. That is why the reflection questions in a self-serve values report only ever ask what is there.

What the evidence says

ACT is one of the most heavily researched contemporary psychotherapies (the ACBS indexes well over 1,500 randomized controlled trials), and a review of the meta-analyses finds it efficacious across anxiety, depression, substance use, chronic pain and transdiagnostic groups.

The counterweight belongs on the same page. Cumulative meta-analyses have concluded that there is not yet enough evidence to say ACT outperforms active control conditions for anxiety or depression. And none of that clinical literature is evidence about values work with non-clinical coaching clients, which is a much thinner field. Borrowing the clinical numbers for a coaching claim would be dishonest.

Two theories, two jobs

Schwartz asks what values people hold and how those values are structured. It is nomothetic and measurement-driven, and it tells you that freedom and security sit opposite each other, for people in general.

ACT asks what this person is moving toward, and whether it is working. It is idiographic and functional. It tells you nothing about where "freedom" sits on a circle, and everything about whether this client's freedom still pulls or has quietly become a rule.

They are not rivals; they answer different questions. metaFox uses Schwartz for structure (the nine families, the wheel, the opposition axes behind a conflicts report) and ACT for meaning: what a value is, why it is not a goal, why a rule drains it, and what to do on Tuesday.

Worth naming rather than smoothing over: ACT is wary of ranked lists, because a hierarchy invites "I should be living number one more". The answer has to be in how the exercise is framed, and Values Discovery takes its framing from Tim Brownson: there are no right or wrong values, number seven still matters, the order is approximate and situational, and the client is the one who checks it by feel.

Where this shows up in metaFox

• Values Discovery: your client gives merged values their own name, can rename any value and say what it means to them, and at the end rates how much room each value gets in their life right now: Values Discovery.
• The ACT Compass (cs-ACT) for running the six processes in session: metafox.eu.
• The "What Really Matters!" Values Cards (cc-VAL), 80 cards for the values process specifically: metafox.eu. The in-app version runs on the whiteboard: see the Values Cards guide.
• The companion guide on the Schwartz value model, where the nine categories and the wheel come from.

Further reading

• Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy. The model, from its authors.
• Plumb, J. C., Stewart, I., Dahl, J., & Lundgren, T. (2009). In search of meaning: Values in modern clinical behavior analysis. The Behavior Analyst. Open access; the technical definition of a value, and why a value based on pliance is not freely chosen.
• Harris, R. (2007). The Happiness Trap. The accessible entry point.
• Harris, R. (2019). ACT Made Simple (2nd ed.). The practitioner's primer, and the source of the compass, the goal and value examples, dead person's goals and "hold them lightly". Harris shares free worksheets and handouts on his website.
• Polk, K. L., & Schoendorff, B. (Eds.) (2014). The ACT Matrix. Where the toward and away moves come from.
• Hill, J., & Oliver, J. (2019). Acceptance and Commitment Coaching. ACT adapted for coaches.
• Gloster, A. T., et al. (2020). The empirical status of acceptance and commitment therapy: A review of meta-analyses. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.
• Hacker, T., Stone, P., & MacBeth, A. (2016). Do we know enough? Cumulative and sequential meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Affective Disorders. The counterweight.
• Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. The field's own body, with free practitioner resources.
• Brownson, T. (2019). The Clarity Method. The coaching book behind several Values Discovery steps: ranking values in pairs by gut feel, defining them in the client's own words, and anti-values.
• Values Coaching with the Clarity Method by Tim Brownson. The Impactful Coach, episode 41 (2026). Tim walks through the method with Tobi from metaFox, using Tobi's own values: what each value word means, the ranking in pairs, anti-values and value conflicts.