You've mapped where your energy goes. Now here's the harder question: does where your energy goes match what you actually value?
For most women in rebuilding, the answer is no. Not because they're doing it wrong — but because years of performing, pleasing, surviving, and carrying have slowly pulled their daily life out of alignment with what matters most to them. The drift happens so gradually you don't notice until one day you look up and can't recognise the shape of your own life.
The Values Bull's-Eye is a tool from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — originally developed by Tobias Lundgren — and it's one of the most visually powerful exercises in this room. You'll place yourself on a target for each area of your life, based on how closely your current behaviour aligns with your values in that domain. The closer to the centre, the more aligned. The further out, the bigger the gap.
It sounds simple. It is. That's what makes it devastating — in the best possible way.
How the Bull's-Eye Works
Imagine a dartboard with four concentric rings:
Far from my values
Ring 4 — very misaligned
Bull's-eye
Living my values
The centre means: I am living completely in line with what I value in this area. My actions match my truth. There's no gap between who I am and how I'm living.
The outer rings mean: there's a gap. The further out, the wider the gap between what I value and how I'm actually living. Ring 4 means: I'm not living according to this value at all right now.
You'll place a mark on the target for each of four life domains. Not where you'd like to be. Where you honestly are.
Important
This is not about perfection. Being in the outer rings is not failure — it's information. Every woman who does this exercise has at least one domain in ring 3 or 4. The point isn't to be in the centre everywhere. The point is to see the gap clearly, so you can choose — consciously — where to close it first.
Why Values, Not Goals
You might be wondering why this exercise focuses on values rather than goals. The distinction matters enormously — and it connects directly to what you learned in The Compass about purpose versus ambition.
Goals are things you achieve. You reach them or you don't. They have endpoints. "Get a promotion." "Lose ten pounds." "Finish the course." Once achieved, they're done — and you need a new one. Goals can be useful, but they can also become another performance.
Values are directions you move toward. They have no endpoint. "Be honest in my relationships." "Do work that matters." "Take care of my body with respect." You never arrive at a value — you live it, daily, imperfectly, continuously. A value can guide you for the rest of your life. A goal expires.
ACT research consistently shows that values-based living predicts wellbeing more reliably than goal achievement. People who pursue goals aligned with their values experience greater satisfaction — even when they fail to reach the goal — than people who achieve goals disconnected from their values. The woman who tries to start a business that matters to her and fails feels more whole than the woman who gets the promotion she didn't really want.
The bull's-eye doesn't ask "what have you achieved?" It asks "are you moving in the direction of what you care about?" That's a fundamentally different question — and a fundamentally kinder one.
Key sources: Lundgren, Luoma, Dahl, Strosahl & Melin (2012) on the Values Bull's-Eye; Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson (2012) on ACT and values-based living; Wilson & Murrell (2004) on values vs goals in therapeutic change; Chase et al. (2013) on values and psychological flexibility predicting wellbeing. Full citations in the Research Foundation.
Connecting the Audit and the Bull's-Eye
If you've done both exercises — the Energy Audit and now the Values Bull's-Eye — you now hold two pieces of information that, together, reveal the central tension of your life right now:
The alignment equation
The Energy Audit shows where your energy goes.
The Values Bull's-Eye shows where your values are.
The gap between them is the source of your exhaustion, your resentment, your 2am restlessness, and your sense that something is deeply wrong even when everything looks fine.
Most women discover one of two patterns:
Pattern one: high energy, low alignment. You're spending enormous energy on an area of life that's in ring 3 or 4 on the bull's-eye. You're working hard at something that doesn't match what you value. This is the pattern of the woman who gives everything to a career she doesn't believe in, or pours energy into maintaining relationships that don't see her.
Pattern two: low energy, high values. The area closest to your values is getting almost no energy. The thing that matters most to you — creativity, health, genuine connection, spiritual growth — is starving because everything else gets fed first. This is the pattern of the woman who knows exactly what she wants but "never has time."
Both patterns are fixable. Neither requires blowing up your life. They require one honest decision at a time — redirecting a small amount of energy from the misaligned toward the aligned. The one-week experiment from the Energy Audit applies here too: 20% less energy toward the most misaligned drain. 20% more toward the most starved value.
The next exercise — the Body Compass — adds the final layer. Where the Energy Audit gives you data and the Bull's-Eye gives you alignment, the Body Compass teaches you to feel the difference in real time — so you can make values-aligned decisions not just on paper, but in the moment, when it matters most.
The bull's-eye doesn't judge you. It just shows you the shape of the gap between how you're living and what you actually care about. And that gap — once you see it — is not an indictment. It's a doorway.
Every woman who's walked through this room has had at least one placement that made her pause. That made her sit with the uncomfortable truth that she's been pouring herself into something that doesn't deserve her. That's not failure. That's the first moment of honest reckoning.
And honest reckoning is where purpose begins to take shape.