You probably have goals. A personal best. A starting spot. A championship. Most athletes and performers do, and most have been told since they were young that goals are what drive performance.
But here’s the question nobody asks: what happens when you achieve the goal and still feel empty? Or when you fail to hit the goal and feel like the whole season was wasted?
Goals are finish lines. They’ve got a binary outcome: achieved or not achieved. Values are something different entirely. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), values are defined as chosen qualities of ongoing action (Hayes et al., 2006). They’re not destinations you arrive at. They’re directions you move toward.
A goal is “win the championship.” A value is “compete with courage.” A goal is “get selected for the state team.” A value is “train with discipline and integrity, regardless of who’s watching.”
The distinction matters because you can fail the goal and still live the value. And you can achieve the goal while betraying it.
Pull Quote 1: “You can fail the goal and still live the value. You can achieve the goal while betraying it. That’s the gap values and goals are filling.”
Why Athletes and Performers Get Stuck on Goals Alone
Goal-focused athletes and performers are vulnerable to a specific trap: their sense of identity becomes fused with outcomes. When the outcome is good, they feel good. When it’s bad, they feel bad. Their psychological wellbeing rides on something they can’t fully control, and the internal experience of performing becomes a constant low-grade threat rather than something they actually want to be in.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a predictable result of an environment that rewards results above everything else. Scoreboards, selection panels, and social media all reinforce the idea that your worth as an athlete or performer is reducible to what you produce. The system selects for goal-focus. That’s not the athlete’s failing; that’s just what the environment does.
ACT doesn’t dismiss goals. Goals are useful organisational tools. But ACT places values underneath them as the foundation. When values are clear, goals become expressions of those values rather than the sole source of meaning. Losing a final still hurts, but it doesn’t dismantle your identity, because your identity isn’t built on the scoreboard.
How Values Work in Practice
Consider two basketball players preparing for a grand final. Both want to win. One has only the goal. The other has identified three values that sit beneath the goal: compete with intensity, support teammates under pressure, and stay present regardless of the scoreboard.
In the third quarter, the team is down by 15. The goal-only player begins to disengage. The scoreboard says the goal is slipping away, and with it, motivation. The values-driven player has a different internal conversation. The score is irrelevant to whether they can compete with intensity right now. They can still support a teammate. They can still choose presence over frustration. None of their values have been taken by the scoreboard.
This works identically for performers. An actor in a production that’s getting mixed reviews, a musician mid-season dealing with technical failures. If the only source of meaning is the external result, a bad night threatens everything. Values provide a source of motivation that’s independent of outcome.
Free resource: The RAW Edge Self-Check gives athletes and performers a baseline read on their current mental fitness, including where values clarity is missing. [Download free at rawedge.au/self-check]
Committed Action: Doing What Matters When It’s Hard
Values without action are just words on a page. ACT pairs values with committed action: behavioural choices that are aligned with your values, taken even when discomfort shows up (Hayes et al., 2006).
Committed action isn’t the same as motivation. Motivation fluctuates wildly depending on how training’s going, how rested you are, how the season is unfolding. Committed action is the choice you make when motivation isn’t there and probably isn’t coming back today. It’s getting to training when you’re tired. It’s having the difficult conversation with your coach when avoidance would be easier. It’s running the extra drill when nobody’s watching, not because it feels good in the moment, but because preparation is something you value and skipping it would mean stepping away from that.
The word “committed” is important here. It doesn’t mean perfect. You’ll step off the values path repeatedly. Committed action means noticing when you’ve stepped off and choosing to step back on, without the guilt spiral that usually follows a slip.
Pull Quote 2: “Committed action isn’t motivation. Motivation fluctuates. Committed action is the choice you make when motivation isn’t there.”
Try This: Identify Your Values
Write down your top three goals in sport or performance. Then ask: “What do these goals say about what actually matters to me?” The answers are your values.
If your goal is “make the representative team,” the underlying value might be “pursue excellence” or “test myself at the highest level I can.”
If your goal is “improve my fitness scores,” the underlying value might be “preparation” or “earning my place through work.”
Once you’ve named the values, test them: would you still want to move in that direction even if the goal was impossible? If yes, you’ve found a value. If no, you’ve found a goal dressed as a value.
Where This Fits in Mental Fitness
Values clarification and committed action are two of the six core processes in the ACT model (Hayes et al., 2006). They interact with the other four (cognitive defusion, acceptance, present moment awareness, and self-as-context) to build psychological flexibility. None of these processes work in isolation. But values and committed action are often the starting point because they answer the most fundamental question in performance: what are you doing this for?
When that question has a clear answer, the rest of the mental fitness work becomes much more specific and much more useful.
Explore the full Mental Fitness curriculum at rawedge.au/courses
Pull Quote 3: “Values answer the most fundamental question in performance: what are you actually doing this for? When that’s clear, everything else gets sharper.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What if my values change over time?
They will. Values aren’t fixed rules; they’re living directions. As your sport career or performance life develops, what matters to you shifts. Review your values each season and update them if they no longer fit. That’s not inconsistency; it’s growth.
Isn’t focusing on values instead of goals going to hurt my results?
No. Values and goals work together. The research is consistent: athletes and performers with clear values alongside their goals show better resilience under pressure and more sustained motivation across a season (Hayes et al., 2006). Goals become more achievable, not less, when they’re grounded in something that doesn’t disappear when the outcome goes wrong.
Can performers (not just athletes) use this framework?
Yes, and it’s particularly relevant in performance contexts where outcomes are less controllable than in sport. A musician can’t fully control whether an audience connects with a performance. An actor can’t control reviews. Values give performers a source of meaning that’s genuinely within their control: how they prepared, how they showed up, what they committed to.
References
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, 44(1), 1-25. Full citation at rawedge.au/research
Aaron Williams is an AHPRA-registered psychologist (PSY0002297677) and the founder of RAW Edge Performance. He works with athletes and performers across sport, performing arts, and high-performance environments. This content is educational and does not constitute clinical advice.