The Personal Values Card Sort is intended to help you clarify your own central values and consider how they might reflect those values in your daily life.

To begin, print out this stack of cards.

Once you print and cut them, sort the cards into 3-5 piles based on how important each value is. There should be 5 piles: Not important to me, Somewhat important to me, Important to me, Very important to me, and Most important to me

Start by identifying the 5-10 values that you think might be the most important to you. This might simply be the “most important” pile unless it contains more than 10 or fewer than 5 cards. Then rank order these top values, with 1 being the most important or central to the person, 2 for the next most important and so on. As you then cycle through the rest of the cards, each time you feel compelled to add something to most or very important, it till force you to move some to the somewhat or not important pile, which can contain as many cards as you would like.

As you do this, here are some questions to keep in mind:

• What does [value] mean to you?
• Why did you choose this as an important value for you?
• In what ways is this important to you?
• How have you shown this core value in your daily life?
• In what ways could you be even more true to this value?

This process can strengthen your understanding of yourself and teach you much about the your guiding principles for living.