AI Skills Sprint: How To Identify Your Values (Your Filter For Your Future)

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Shop Flow Y now at lululemon.com. hi i'm helen and i'm sarah and this is the squiggly careers podcast and you are listening to day two of our squiggly careers skill sprint where today we are going to be talking about values more on that in a moment but maybe you've started at day two of our sprint and you're thinking what is this um so this is a five-day learning experience to support you and your development and probably the most important thing is that you are signed up for sprinting so that you get the daily summaries which will have all of the links to tools we talk about today prompts that you can cut and paste to make this easier for you and we've got screenshots so you can see how to get started with some of the things that we're going to be talking about so what are values and why do they matter in the context of your squiggly career so values are what motivate and drive you they're what makes you you you don't have work values and home values you just sort of have what's most important to you and I think with values they can feel a bit abstract or sometimes a bit fluffy you're like what are these value things but the reason that it matters to spend some time thinking about your values certainly from from my own experience is when you understand kind of your real drivers I think you just make loads better decisions and in a squiggly career we have more choices more decisions about where we might go what we want to do and there's more change in uncertainty so when you understand your values I think they are a brilliant filter for your future should I stay in this company should I do something different uh what jobs do i want to do who do i want to work with who do i want to work for and if i think about my best squiggly career choices when i've used my values i've made what might look like brave decisions to other people but have actually been brilliant decisions for me and when i have ignored maybe my values and got distracted by the shiny objects it has never worked help I think that I agree with you entirely about knowing values and I think that it's probably one of the five skills that we're going to talk about in sprint I'm like most personally passionate about because of the difference it's made to my development and I think it connects really well with the topic we'll talk about tomorrow on the sprint which is confidence I think I am more confident as a result of the clarity I have in my values because we talk about the quotes we did it actually in a series over the summer that one of my quotes is running your own race and that really motivates me and I can do that because I've got such clarity on my values like what makes me me what motivates and drives me so I think there's a really nice link with the skill we'll talk about tomorrow and one of the things that we know as a team is that when you understand each other's values you collaborate better you're more empathetic as a team and often we'll talk about you know in a team or in an organization we should start with the why you know Simon Sinek would tell us to start with the why and in lots of ways he's right and you should listen to him on talking to Helen on the podcast if you've not before but I often think in a team environment it's really useful to start with the who who we all are what motivates us what's important to us because then we just work better together and you spend so much time working in a team understanding each other I think is easy to miss but when you make time for it it does make a difference and we've got a very fun we have got a very fun right at the end of the podcast today we've got a really fun way that you can talk about values in teams but we also have some good tools you're so excited about this tool i feel like this is the my the best tool i think we found on the sprint and we found some good ones but i absolutely love the tool that we are going to recommend everybody tries out is the values.institute and it is a tool which will help you to identify what your values are i i already had a lot of confidence in what my values are so i was really intrigued as from a blank piece of paper how close did it get yeah so it will ask you a series of questions and then what you get is some really really rich learning resources out of it so it will not only tell you what your values are according to the things that you've answered so for example mine came out as achievement learning and collaboration it's pretty close to what i would hold as my values it's not it's not perfect but i think it's definitely closer than a lot of other things that I would see so it will help you with that but I think the really useful thing in this tool is it then has like three different ways in which you can put that insight into action so the first is it gives you a bit of a profile so for each of the values it talks about it in a bit more detail so that you can get more clarity I think that's really useful when you are discussing your values because I rarely go up to somebody and say hi my name's Helen I've got a value of achievement what I will often do is use the descriptions to just discuss it it just feels a bit more natural So it gives you some of those words.

5:06Then there's a bit on practice and you can pick one of the values and you can pick whether you want to do something in a day, something in a week or you want a mindset shift and it will generate you an action. I'm like, this is great. So you get really specific actions. And then there's a bit on challenge. So you type out a challenge. So, for example, I said, I really don't like my business partner. I'm really struggling to work with her. She's really difficult. thought and maybe I didn't do that one but you put in whatever challenge you want and then it uses your values to then recommend you a way to respond to that challenge and it's really it's I just find it very insightful really practical is it's free and it's just it's the best thing I've seen to support values I'm a big advocate of this tool one of the things I actually really liked about it was it also felt quite playful so it gave me a long list of things that could be my values it asked me to do the prioritizing which we always encourage people to do but again it's very quick to do because you can kind of move around the words on the screen um and to your point I like the fact that it went beyond just generating words you know like that there's quite a few different tools that do that but to me quite a lot of the value in this felt like well this is maybe what I would go and do now this is the action I would go and take and that's the inspiration for the prompt that then we used so I actually used Gemini for this one because I was like not use that one yet so why not give it a go give it a go and again I asked it to act as a squiggly career coach be high care high challenge I told it what my values are so I said my values uh which are what motivate and drive me are achievement ideas learning and variety I'd score each value seven six five and seven out of ten for how much they show up in my work at the moment and I'd like to increase each score by one on that scale can you give me three ideas for how to do that for each value and present the ideas in a table and you pushed it yeah also I've done a course on prompting obviously so I've got quite a lot better at prompting thank you David Hyatt at do lectures very accessible prompting course I think it's about 26 pounds and I was like that was 26 pounds very well spent um and that's why my prompts are as good as they are um and also if you don't write a good prompt ask the tool to write you a better prompt top tip what I did find with Gemini to be honest that it struggles a little bit more with presenting information in such a clear way some of the other tools are much better at putting it into tables converting it into pdfs at the time of recording gem and i didn't want to make me a pdf it said oh i'm a text or a copy-based tool and i was like oh okay um i thought i could just ask an ai to do me anything and it should do my bidding but apparently that yeah it did push back it did push back but actually once once i then asked it to present the information in a different way so I thought rather than just give up obviously it didn't want to do that my first version I said okay can I have it in bullet points instead and then it did work and I liked the idea it said ideas current score six target seven so it had understood me and then it gave me three bullet points say for ideas so one of them was about scheduling thinking time like add thinking time into your week one of them was about preparing one new idea or thought-provoking question to share in a team meeting so at least it was a specific context and then it also gave me suggestions about what about a small pilot project or experiment with testing a new process or tool that I've been thinking about so I felt like it was helpful prompts because I think for values one of the things that can feel hard is the so what now yeah so scales are helpful because they give us a starting point so like where are you out of 10 with those values even if you're not 100 % sure they're your values you can still give them a score you'll have your own ideas but actually AI can get you could either build on the ideas that you've got or it could give you some ideas to get you started I think it's just you you've got nothing to lose by trying these out I think you just become a bit more self-aware you'll identify some actions that's that's really what the sprint's all about do you want to do the team so we were chatting we were like how can we get people and we have to be fair we have done a whole podcast on talking about values in teams yeah we were like a small quick things that people could do so this is our recommendation we approach this quite differently i think it's fair to say yeah yeah so you take one of your values one that you really kind of recognize and think about a song that represents that value you can create your own like spotify playlist as a team and you can play like you know 10 seconds of the song and then you can discuss like you know what your value was maybe even get people to guess this is my song what do you think my my value is you can have a lot of fun with it that would work better with how you approach this than how i approach this so do Do you want to give the example?

9:46Well, we were having, practicing. We were chatting last night. We weren't practicing. So you went first. Yeah. And what did you come up with? Oh, I can't remember now. But I think one of mine's energy and I'd be like. No, you had freedom. Oh, that'd be freedom. You started singing George Michael to me at like half ten at night. And I was like, oh, this is the point where I go. Bye. You went quite literal. Yeah. So you had like gold. Value song. Yeah. Well, that was what I said for you. You said achievement. You should always believe in yourself. I still can't believe you're singing on the podcast.

10:13but one of my values is ideas yeah and i felt like kate bush was a real pioneer of like ideas and being creative i mean go as deep as sarah or go as shallow as me but you'll have a lot of fun in the process so yeah i didn't i didn't go literal i went quite conceptual which i think is quite appropriate standard yeah but i think music creates connection it is a lot of fun we have actually tested versions of this with groups before and i think it just gets everyone talking about themselves in a way that is low-key playful and where sometimes I think values can feel quite serious and also a bit off-putting for some people but I think everybody could sort of pick a song that tells you something about that what's important to them like in it and that kind of worked for us you can either start singing like Helen or you can just you can just get Spotify to do the work for you feel free to give us some what went well even better if uh feedback on my singing no don't no don't so that's the end of today's skill sprint on values tomorrow we will be back talking about confidence and those gremlins beliefs that hold you back and how you can cage them happy sprinting everyone