exercise · all tools
Meet Yourself at 90
A guided values visualization from the ACT tradition: after settling into body and breath, participants imagine themselves at their 90th birthday, visited by someone who matters to them — and hear that person say exactly what they would most want to hear about who they have been. Writing down what was said turns the exercise into a personal compass: what do I want to do more, or less, of?
Prerequisites
- Private writing stays private — no sharing round is required, and saying so up front is what makes honesty possible
- The report's own flag: 'sometimes causes strong feelings and sometimes tears' — normalize this in the framing and leave landing time
- Deceased loved ones may appear in the visualization by design; grief can surface
- Solo use with audio is legitimate (holding 0) — the privacy of the format is then the container
Practical
- Time
- 20-30 min + 15 landing
- Group
- 1–60 · individual, small-group, large-group
- Settings
- in-person, online, self-guided
- Materials
- Full read-aloud script in the Phase 2 report (pp. 63–65); paper for private notes
- Mechanisms
- narrative-identity, values-clarification, perspective-taking
- Change scope
- state · repeatable
Origin & where it lives
Fredrik Livheim (this codification); ACT values-work tradition — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Training
Instructions: open online
In this directory via IDG Phase 2 Research Report & Toolkit (2022)
The Being dimension's closing short exercise in the Phase 2 Toolkit, with the complete facilitation script published openly — one of the few fully publishable-as-is scripts in the corpus. ACT's own "90th birthday" classic.
status: checked · added 2026-08-25