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

Summary

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Squiggly Careers Podcast

Episode: AI Skills Sprint: How To Discover Your Strengths Using AI (in 10 Minutes)
Hosts: Sarah Ellis & Helen Tupper
Date: September 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

The first episode of the Squiggly Career Skills Sprint series dives into discovering and developing your strengths using AI tools—all in just ten minutes. Sarah and Helen share practical prompts, personal experiences, and step-by-step ideas for how AI can accelerate your self-awareness and help shape your career identity. The episode blends expert tips with their signature friendly banter, making actionable insights accessible for everyone wanting to play to their strengths at work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Why Strengths Matter

• Defining Strengths:
  Strengths are the things that give us energy at work and what we want to be known for.

  "When your strengths stand out, it's actually a way that you can pull possibilities towards you... and you get to do more of the work that you enjoy." (Helen, 00:51)

• Impact on Wellbeing:
  Using your strengths leads to 36% less stress at work.
• Team Benefits:
  High-performing teams utilize everyone's strengths (reference to Amy Edmondson’s research).

The Myth of Having “Done” Strengths

• Strengths are Dynamic:
  "We're never done with strengths. Roles keep changing; what we want to be known for changes too." (Helen, 01:48)
• Importance of Continuous Reflection:
  Regularly revisiting strengths ensures they stay relevant as roles evolve.

Using AI to Discover Strengths — The 10-Minute Sprint

Choosing & Experimenting with Tools

• Try different AI platforms (Sarah recommends Claude, Helen uses ChatGPT, and both mention Canva).
  • "I do like Claude... I feel like I have actually connected. It probably was my favorite overall." (Sarah, 02:47)
• Use the free versions to start and compare outputs—see which feels helpful for you.

Crafting Effective AI Prompts

• Assign the AI a role: Act as a Squiggly Career Coach; be high care and high challenge in your approach.

  • This customizes the style ("less exclamation marks!") and the sort of feedback you get.

• Main Prompt Structure:

  1. Ask AI to pose 10 questions, one at a time, to explore your strengths.
  2. Respond honestly; the richer your input, the better the output.
  3. At the end, request a summary of your top strengths.

• Caveat:
  "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." (Sarah, 03:45)

Sample AI-Generated Questions & Personal Reflections

• E.g., “Think about a time someone came to you with a problem. What was your instinct—give advice, ask questions, brainstorm?”
  • Sarah’s honest answer:

    "I want to give everyone ideas, obviously." (Sarah, 04:57)

Visualizing & Refining Your Results

• AI can synthesize your answers into a “strength constellation”—a core superpower and a list of strengths (Sarah got 8, which she planned to refine).

  • Example: “Problem-centered innovation. You don’t just create for fun. Your innovations have purpose.” (Sarah, 06:01-06:35)

• "It distilled a core superpower. Mine came up as the idea catalyst: You spark possibilities that others bring to life." (Sarah, 06:01)

• Try visuals in Canva for a different output.

• All tools need some personal critical thinking and editing:

  "Everyone needed a bit of editing. It gets you a bit more aware, but you need to tailor." (Helen, 07:03)

Using AI Insights for Career Development

• Some AI tools spontaneously add practical next steps and motivational quotes ("so what now?").
  • "You're not just someone who has ideas, you're someone who creates the conditions for breakthrough thinking." (AI to Sarah, 07:31)
• If you want, use these insights to strengthen your LinkedIn profile:
  • Copy your strengths and ask AI to rewrite or improve your profile with those strengths in mind.
  • Both hosts found it easier and significantly better than writing from scratch, though some manual edits are still needed.

    "I put effort into writing it in the first place... [but] it's so much easier." (Sarah, 08:45-08:58)

Team Applications

• Suggestions for bringing strengths discussions into your team:
  • Share a strength that connected with you.
  • Offer your strength to someone who could benefit.
  • Ask for ideas from others on how to use that strength more.
  • "If we have those strengths conversations, they will really start to stick and everybody will be stretching their strengths at work." (Helen, 09:57)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI Personas & Feedback Styles:

  "As soon as I put 'high care, high challenge,' the exclamation marks reduced quite dramatically." (Sarah, 03:45)

• On Personal Strengths Realizations:

  "I want to give everyone ideas, obviously." (Sarah, 04:57)

• AI's Motivational Finish:

  "You're not just someone who has ideas, you're someone who creates the conditions for breakthrough thinking." (AI to Sarah, 07:31)

• On Collaborative Learning:

  "The more you put in, the more you'll get out." (Sarah, 05:01)

• On LinkedIn AI Magic:

  "It wrote something quite a lot better... and it got me to 8 out of 10." (Helen & Sarah, 08:45-09:19)

• Encouraging Experimentation:

  "Don't put any pressure on yourself... just having a play gets easier and easier." (Sarah, 09:57)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:51 – Defining strengths and their impact
• 01:30 – Strengths in high-performing teams
• 01:48 – The myth of being “done” with strengths
• 02:13 – Getting started with AI prompts and tools
• 03:45 – Customizing the AI's role & feedback
• 04:55 – Personal example of a strengths question
• 05:24 – Different AI tools and response quality
• 06:01 – AI-generated “strength constellation”
• 07:03 – Editing and refining AI responses
• 07:31 – AI-generated career advice and quotes
• 08:45 – Using AI to improve your LinkedIn profile
• 09:19 – Taking strengths conversations into your team
• 09:57 – Final thoughts and encouragement

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Overall Tone

Warm, playful, and supportive—Sarah and Helen encourage listeners to experiment with AI, reflect honestly, and continuously stretch and share their strengths. The practical, action-focused approach feels achievable and motivating.

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Next Episode Preview

Tomorrow’s sprint will focus on values—what motivates and drives you—and how AI can help you accelerate both your awareness and your actions related to those values.

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Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Sarah.

[B]

And I'm Helen.

[A]

And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This is the first episode of our Squiggly Career Skills Sprint.

[B]

You were trying really hard to say that. Congratulations.

[A]

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 helenand sarahquigglycareers.com and. 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. 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.

[B]

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, 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 like doing a bit of the talking for you and you get to do more of the work that you enjoy. It 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% less stressed at work, which was a kind of surprising insight, I thought.

[A]

It's always good, it's good for you and it's good for your team strengths, isn't it? Because we know from people like Amy Edmondson's work, in those high performing teams, people's strengths are useful and utilised. 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.

[B]

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, definitely. They've done strengths. And I'm like, no, no, we need to keep doing strengths because squiggly careers, our roles keep changing. We decide we want to be known for different things. We need to keep stretching those strengths so that they stay relevant to our role. So I don't think we are ever done with strengths, which I think means today's episode is particularly useful.

[A]

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 suggest perhaps as today is day one, you could actually do this simultaneously in two or three different AI tools. 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.

[B]

Feel like you're connected with Claude.

[A]

I feel like I have actually connected.

[B]

It was like a person to you.

[A]

It probably was my favorite overall. And 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 quite a lot throughout the week. So act as a squiggly career coach. Be high care and high challenge in your approach. So. 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, what do you know?

[B]

Is that not your natural preference?

[A]

No. And I was like. And so sometimes I was like, oh, it just got a bit too supportive.

[B]

Too Nice.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well done, Sarah. Keep trying.

[A]

Oh, no, there was a lot of exclamation marks. You know how I feel about exclamation marks.

[B]

Yeah, I do.

[A]

But as soon as I put high care, high challenge, the exclamation marks reduced quite dramatically. So. So I'll stick to behaving 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. But I do think when I look at them, the questions that it asked me, they were all really useful. 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 it 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. What do you think I said in response to that one?

[B]

I don't know. I don't know. Tell me.

[A]

I said, oh, I want to give everyone ideas, obviously.

[B]

Obviously.

[A]

They were like, oh, did you just ask loads of questions? I'm like, well, no, if I'm being really honest, I just skip idea with ideas. 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.

[B]

And I cut and pasted that prompt and put it into ChatGPT. And I found that the questions it 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.

[A]

So at the very end, I asked it to kind of create me this visual, something that would be shareable. And it came up with this idea of like your strength 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.

[B]

I liked an idea activate.

[A]

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 the Moticons, 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? 8. Which I was like, oh, that's quite a long list. So I think I'd want to refine that further. So that could be an extra prompt 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 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.

[B]

So I tried a few different things. I got ChatGPT to do the same thing with the visual. I found it a bit less effective than Sarah's actually. But 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, maybe even more. But you just, I think there's a bit of tailoring needed.

[A]

I also got at the end what this means for your career. 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, done 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.

[B]

Did you love it? Did you love it?

[A]

Obviously I do think the strengths one I'm like, you are going to feel.

[B]

Better because of this.

[A]

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.

[B]

You start talking that quote to me, I create the conditions I'll be like.

[A]

For breakthrough thinking, you're fine.

[B]

Okay, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I look forward to hearing that. 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 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.

[A]

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. And you know when you think, well, I put effort into writing it in the first place.

[B]

I was like, this is so much.

[A]

Better, it's so much easier. I still think, obviously you need to go through. And there were some bits where I was like, well, I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that word or I wouldn't quite write 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 6 out of 10. And then you need more work. I found with the LinkedIn one, I think it got me to 8 out of 10.

[B]

Yeah. I was like, this is a tiny bit of thinking 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? And 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.

[A]

So that's it for the sprint today. We hope you've enjoyed getting started and you're experimenting. 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 valleys. See you tomorrow, everyone.