THE ACES IN THE DECK OF CARE ENCOURAGE YOU TO UNDERSTAND YOUR DEEPER SELF, AND TO ENVISION A FULLY SATISFYING LIFE.

Much of self-care is about addressing fleeting, temporary sensations like emotional discomfort, physical pain, or challenging situations. These skills help you to handle hardship as it comes with grace, and to savor joy more fully as it presents itself.

The skills covered in the Aces are different. Each of the Aces are designed to help you to understand the foundation of who you are - your values, gifts, and core needs. These pieces of yourself are much more stable than emotions or physical sensations, and can serve as guideposts for you as you build out a satisfying life. Whereas moment-to-moment awareness will help you handle and learn from guilt, understanding your values will help you to live with integrity and to avoid guilt. While gratitude will help you savor joy, understanding what brings you joy will help you bring more of it into your life.

Both skills are necessary. It is impossible to build a life free from hardship, so we must always be able to handle what comes when it comes. It is also unlikely, though, to build a satisfying life with just moment-to-moment responsiveness.

Ace of Hearts - Core Values

The Ace of Hearts encourages you to think about what brings you deep happiness. When writing this card, we went through a lot of versions, including overtly referencing value-based living. Our hope is that the exercise of thinking through what brings you true happiness will inevitably create some curiosity around what the core sources of true happiness are for you.
When you’re ready to go a step beyond daydreaming, we encourage you to reflect on what your core values are - such as adventure, challenge, or complexity. A good exercise is this card sort in which you rank different core human values by their importance to you. Understanding your core values will give you a guidepost for what kinds of activities will inspire you, and bring you true happiness.

Ace of Spades - Unique Gifts

The Ace of Spades encourages you to reflect on what you are good at. We all bring a natural skill set to the table, and we all have areas in which we struggle. It’s human to be happy when we perceive ourselves as succeeding and to be unhappy when we perceive ourselves as failing. Creating a meaningful life means finding a way to invest your life energy at the intersection of your gifts and core values, and creating boundaries sometimes means understanding how to address your weaknesses. As you think through this, you may want to look through lists of character strengths such as this one from the Via Institute on Character, and to think through questions like:

1. What do you excel at?

2. What do you struggle with?

3. What kind of work do you enjoy doing?

4. What do you lose time doing?

5. What do you dislike doing?

If you’ve identified your gifts, the Ace of Spades encourages you to think through the kinds of activities in your life that could allow you to share them with the world. The most meaningful endeavors will be those that both use your gifts and address your core values.

Ace of Clubs - Goal Setting

The Ace of Clubs encourages you to envision what your ideal life would look like. While understanding your values and gifts help you to create guideposts, creative visioning will help you to set targets for how to move in that direction. If you have a core value of adventure, your life vision may include visiting all seven continents. If your core value is duty, your life vision may include building a family. Take this opportunity to envision what you don’t want in your life as well and be open minded. If you value autonomy, you may find that you don’t want the responsibility of owning a house or raising children. This exercise will be most meaningful for you if you already understand your values and gifts.

While the card encourages you to create a vision board, you should feel free to engage in whatever creative process works for you. The goal is to design a life that would be satisfying for you.

Ace of Diamonds - Constraints of a Material World

As you go through the exercises in the Aces, it will be important to be realistic and grounded at some point in the process. The Ace of Diamonds is meant to encourage you to think through the material-world implications of your plans. If you have values you want to meet, gifts you want to share, and a vision for your life - you will need to make sure you have the time, money, and energy to do them. Be open minded that the result of this material-world planning could be that a certain job is your target - or it could be that a certain job will enable your targets outside of paid employment. The core of the Ace of Diamonds is to determine how you will make sure you have the time, money, and energy needed to get to the life you envision.

Final Thoughts on Aces

While Aces are the first number in a deck of cards, they might not be the best starting place for your self-care journey. Life design can often require major changes to how you live your life, and understanding of your core values and gifts can take a long time. If the Aces aren’t feeling accessible to you, you should feel free to skip them until they are.