AI Skills Sprint: How To Discover Your Strengths Using AI (in 10 Minutes)

0:00Helen:Lulu Lemon's new drop of daily essentials feels like a deep breath of fresh air. Breezely is a collection of drapey pants, shorts, and tanks designed to mix and match with your wardrobe as the weather warms up. It's all made in our lightweight, stretchy, swift fabric. Throw on these everyday staples after practice and bring an airy feel to your daily moves. Shop the Breezely collection now at lululemon.com. Hi, I'm Sarah. And I'm Helen. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This is the first episode of our Squiggly Career Skills Sprint. You were trying really hard to say that, congratulations.

0:35Helen:It's like, please don't get that wrong. And today we're going to be talking about strengths. Now, if you haven't signed up for the daily sprint summary, this might be the moment to get that sorted. Link in the show notes or just email us, helenandsarahatsquigglycareers.com. And the reason that really matters is the prompts, the tools, the examples we're going to talk about today, all of that's going to be linked in there for you just to make your life easier. You're going to be able to cut and paste those prompts. You're going to see examples of what some of these strengths profiles we're going to talk about actually look like.

1:04Helen:We're going to do our best to bring them to life if you are listening in an audio way. But I do think some of these things are really nice to see at the same time as to hear us talk about. So let's start with this skill of strengths, what it is and why it matters. So strengths are the things that give us energy at work. It's what we want to be known for. When your strengths stand out, it's actually a way that you can pull possibilities towards you. So you decide what it is you want to be known for. And then because those are standing out, they're kind of doing a bit of the talking for you and you get to do more of the work that you enjoy.

1:35It is also proven to be a way that you are more impactful. And we did a bit of a bit of research on some squiggly stats. There's an interesting relationship between strengths and stress, which is that people who use their strengths at work are 36 percent less stressed at work, which was a kind of surprising insight, I thought.

1:52Helen:it's always good it's good for you and it's good for your team's strengths isn't it because we know from people like amy edmondson's work uh in those high performing teams people's strengths are useful and utilized you know everybody recognizes everybody else's strengths and we're all using them so i always just feel like it's one of those areas where if you can get it right it's just good for everyone i also think because we talk about strengths quite a lot in our workshops this is one of the areas that people think they have done yeah like yeah definitely i've done strengths and I'm like no no we need to keep doing strengths because squiggly careers our roles keep changing we might decide we want to be known for different things we need to keep stretching those strengths so that they stay relevant to our roles so I don't think we are ever done with strengths which I think means today's episode is particularly useful.

2:35Helen:And so we're going to start today with an AI prompt about strengths so what you will actually ask your AI tool to do for you. I would to suggest perhaps as today is day one you could actually do this simultaneously in two or three different ai tools yeah and just to start experiment with which tool do you like which one works for you but today i used claude and i use the free version so i just use the personal free version sometimes there are ones where you like you pay a bit every month but i didn't use that for this i do like claude i did find myself probably keep like you're connected with claude i feel like i have actually connected it was like a person to you it probably was my favorite overall and um the other thing i did like and it's not the only tool that does this is it does save your recent chats so if you're using this over the sprint you can come back and be like oh what did that say and you can keep building especially if you don't have time to do everything all at once so the first thing as part of your prompt remember to give your ai tool a role so i've said act as a squiggly career coach obviously so i use that i use that quite a lot throughout the week so act as a squiggly career coach be high care and high challenge in your approach so i was sort of also telling it how to behave and that worked quite well for me because otherwise i do find sometimes the ais are just really supportive and i'm like which you know is that not your natural preference and i was like and so sometimes i was like oh it just got a bit too supportive too nice yeah well done sarah keep trying oh no it's okay there's a lot of exclamation marks you know how i feel about exclamation marks yeah i do but as soon as i put high care high challenge the exclamation marks reduced quite dramatically so i asked it to behave in that way ask me 10 questions one at a time to help me explore what my strengths might be at the end use my answers to create a summary of what my top strengths could be and i think the watch out with all of these things an ai does not know you better than you know yourself but it can very quickly give you some clues some data some insights to work with even if it's some data to disagree with so please don't see these processes as like oh it's just like that's it i'm done now um but i do think when i look at them the questions that it asked me they were all really useful um it did prompt me to sort of say well don't don't just use what you think the right answer is be really honest just one example of a question that asked me think about a time when someone came to you with a problem a personal professional it doesn't matter what was your instinct did you immediately want to give advice ask questions to understand better help them brainstorm solutions or something else entirely and then it prompted me like be brutally honest um what do you think i said in response to that one i don't know i don't know tell me i said um oh like i want to give everyone ideas obviously i was like obviously they were like oh did you just ask loads of questions i'm like well no if i'm being really honest i just i just want to work with ideas um so that's what i did i went through those 10 questions again as a reminder the more you put in the more you will get out so I actually did this a couple of times on a different on a couple of tools but I sort of gave Claude the most to work with and therefore I got a better visual and better responses as a result and I cut and pasted that prompt and put it into chat GPT and I found that the questions that asked me it just made me think it was definitely it was definitely prompting me I felt like you know it's prompting me to think a bit more deeply and about my strengths from a few different directions I found it kind of just useful useful to sort of pause and think so at the very end I asked it to kind of create me this visual something that would be shareable um and it came up with this idea of like your strengths constellation and at the top it says your core superpower so mine came up as the idea catalyst you spark possibilities that other others bring to life I was like absolutely I don't actually do the work well I like to buy this idea here's like activate here we go yeah I mean so you get that which I like the fact it sort of distilled a core superpower it might you know you've got to decide how you feel about it but then it gave me sort of with emoticons small descriptions of things that could be my strengths which I think you would then need to do some refining of so I actually got a list of how many have I got here eight which I was like oh that's quite a long list yeah so I think I'd want to refine that further so that could be an extra prompt um from the answers that I've given which are the three strengths that really stood out or you just decide that for yourself you can just apply your own critical thinking but it definitely gave me some things to think about like uh problem-centered innovation you don't just create for fun you're driven by real problems that need solving your innovations have purpose and meaning behind them and I was like thinking actually yeah I don't think I just create for no reason I'm not a kind of creative person who would just be like oh just within a vacuum would create I think I am quite problem orientated I like to know the problem that I'm solving so I tried a few different things I got chat GPT to do the same thing with the visual I found it a bit less effective than Sarah's actually but um you know I think it's worth trying it I also copied and pasted the answers of what it said my strengths were into Canva Canva has an AI tool and that created me a different visual so I think a bit of this is sort of playing but I did find that everyone needed a bit of editing to your point like I think it gets you a bit more aware yeah definitely a bit even more but yeah I think there's a bit of tailoring needed I also got at the end what this means for your career and I didn't ask it to do that and I was like okay you know there's a bit of there's always what like what my strengths might be then there's the so what now and actually without prompting it did a bit of the so what now and so it was sort of saying to me you know collaborate with people who can build on your ideas but done um have space for reflection and creative thinking and then it gave me a little quote at the end as well you're not just someone who has ideas you're someone who creates the conditions for breakthrough thinking did you love it happen did you love it obviously i do think the strengths when i'm like you are going to feel better because of this because this ai is basically telling you like what you are best at so i was like oh if you need a bit of like motivation if you start talking that quote to me i create the conditions i'll be like for breakthrough thinking you're fine okay yeah yeah sure sure sure yeah i look forward to hearing that um on the so what point an extra thing that you can do if you want to take this further is take the insights into LinkedIn so if you've already got a LinkedIn profile or maybe you haven't got one at the moment you can say these are the strengths I want to be known for create a LinkedIn profile that is kind of clear and confident and can build my brand and um you can either do that from scratch or I put my existing one in and I said improve this profile with these strengths in mind and it was actually quite effective because you'd done that I then did that because we were sort of sharing as we went and straight away it wrote something quite a lot better yeah uh and you know when you think well I put effort into writing it in the first place I was like this is so much better it's so much easier I still think obviously you need to go through and there was some bits where I was like well I wouldn't I wouldn't say that word or I'm quite right in that way but to your point it's quite an interesting question is it how far did this get me out of 10 and maybe with the strengths I might have gone oh it got me to six out of 10 and then you need more work.

9:39Helen:I found with the LinkedIn one, I think it got me to eight out of 10. Yeah, I was like, this is a tiny bit of talking I've done. And so last thing for today's episode is how can you talk about this together in your team? So we would love you to take these conversations into your teams. So three ways in which you can do that. First of all, share one of the strengths that really connected with you. So maybe it was the ideas or for me it was like creative leadership, like whatever, whatever those things are. Then offer to help someone who can benefit from what you could bring. So does anyone else need that strength?

10:07and you could say I'd like to use it with you to help you and then the third thing is ask for ideas of how you could use it more if we have those strengths conversations they will really start to stick and everybody will be stretching their strengths at work so that's it for the sprint

10:21Helen:today uh we hope you've enjoyed getting started and you're experimenting we've I think we've both got a lot of energy from just having a play so I think don't put any pressure on yourself to do this in the there's no like right way I think just once you get started it just gets easier and easier and in tomorrow's sprint we're going to be talking about values so what motivates and drives you and how AI can accelerate both your awareness but also the actions you take about your values see you tomorrow everyone