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

Summary

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Squiggly Careers Podcast

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

Hosts: Helen Tupper & Sarah Ellis

Date: September 16, 2025

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Overview

In this episode of Squiggly Careers, Helen and Sarah focus on the importance of understanding and identifying your core values as a foundational skill for career development. As part of their five-day "Skill Sprint," this episode dives deep into why values matter, how to discover them (with the help of AI tools), and fun, practical team exercises for exploring values together. The tone is conversational, practical, and playful, making values work feel approachable rather than abstract.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Why Values Matter in a Squiggly Career

• Defining Values: Values are what motivate and drive you—they’re not just for work or home, but central to who you are. (00:38)
• Decision-Making Filter: With more choice and change in modern careers, identifying values helps make confident, authentic decisions (e.g., when to take risks or steer clear of distractions). (01:18)
  • Quote: “When you understand your values, they are a brilliant filter for your future… 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.” — Sarah (00:38)
• Values and Confidence: Clarity around values directly boosts confidence and connects with tackling career challenges. (01:51)
  • Quote: “I am more confident as a result of the clarity I have in my values. I can run my own race because I’ve got such clarity on what makes me me.” — Helen (01:51)

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2. Team Benefits: Values in Collaboration

• Empathy and Collaboration: Knowing team members’ values increases empathy and collaboration. (02:25)
  • Quote: “When you understand each other’s values, you collaborate better… when you make time for it, it does make a difference.” — Sarah (02:25)
• Start with ‘Who’ as well as ‘Why’: Inspired by Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why,” they suggest also starting with “who we all are” for richer team connection. (02:40)

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3. Practical Tool: The Values Institute

• Introduction to the Tool: The hosts strongly recommend using the free Values Institute tool to explore and clarify your personal values. (03:19)
  • The tool asks questions to narrow down your values, offers detailed descriptions, helps initiate discussions, and suggests practical actions.
  • Quote: “It’s the best thing I’ve seen to support values. I’m a big advocate of this tool.” — Helen (04:50)
• Action-Focused Outputs: Beyond listing values, the tool:
  • Generates descriptive profiles to aid conversation.
  • Offers action prompts—choose actions to take in one day, a week, or as a mindset shift.
  • Helps tackle challenges based on your values.

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4. AI as a Values Coach: Using Gemini

• AI Prompting for Value-Driven Actions: Sarah shares her experience using Gemini as an AI career coach. By telling Gemini her core values and their current prominence in her work (“achievement, ideas, learning, and variety”), she asks the tool for ways to strengthen each value. (05:24 – 08:30)

  • Quote: “If you don’t write a good prompt, ask the tool to write you a better prompt. Top tip!” — Sarah (06:32)

• Examples of AI-Generated Ideas:

  • Adding dedicated thinking time for “ideas”
  • Preparing a new idea to share in meetings
  • Piloting a new process or tool

• Prompting Advice: Don’t be afraid to ask AI to organize its responses in different formats (bullets, tables). Even free tools can increase self-awareness and inspire concrete actions.

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5. Fun with Values in Teams: The Songs Exercise

• Values Playlist: To make values visible and memorable in teams, each member picks a song that represents one of their core values. Teams create a playlist and guess the value behind each song. (08:41 – 09:59)
  • Memorable Moment: Helen sings George Michael’s “Freedom” to represent her value of—what else—freedom, while Sarah chooses Kate Bush for “ideas.” (09:24 – 09:55)
  • Quote: “Go as deep as Sarah or go as shallow as me, but you’ll have a lot of fun in the process.” — Helen (09:55)
• Playfulness as Engagement: The hosts note that playfulness makes an often-serious topic accessible and sparks authentic conversations about what matters to each person.

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Notable Quotes

• “When you understand your values, they are a brilliant filter for your future.” — Sarah (00:52)
• “I am more confident as a result of the clarity I have in my values.” — Helen (01:51)
• “If you don’t write a good prompt, ask the tool to write you a better prompt.” — Sarah (06:32)
• “Go as deep as Sarah or go as shallow as me, but you’ll have a lot of fun in the process.” — Helen (09:55)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:04 – 01:18: Introduction to values and why they matter
• 01:51 – 02:25: Values and confidence in careers
• 02:25 – 03:07: Team collaboration and starting with “who”
• 03:19 – 05:24: Introducing the Values Institute tool
• 05:24 – 08:30: Using AI (Gemini) for value-driven action prompts
• 08:41 – 09:59: Team playlist exercise—using songs to share and guess values

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Episode Flow & Tone

Helen and Sarah maintain their signature conversational, supportive, and action-focused tone throughout. They combine reflective personal stories, actionable tool tips, and playful exercises, encouraging listeners to experiment and lower the stakes around values exploration.

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Takeaways

• Identifying your values is a career superpower—clarifies decision-making, builds confidence, and strengthens team culture.
• Tools like The Values Institute make values work practical and actionable.
• Experiment with AI prompts and playful team activities (like the values playlist) to make values visible and memorable.

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Next Episode Teaser: Tomorrow’s Skill Sprint is all about growing confidence and banishing “gremlins” (the beliefs that hold you back).

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Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Helen.

[B]

And I'm Sarah.

[A]

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? 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.

[B]

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 and 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? 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 out.

[A]

I think that I agree with you entirely about known values and I think that it's probably one of the five skills that we're going to talk about in Sprint that I'm like most, 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.

[B]

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 whole 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.

[A]

And we've got a very fun, we.

[B]

Have got a very fun right at.

[A]

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.

[B]

You're so excited about this tool.

[A]

I feel like this is the, my, the, 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? 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 can 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, 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. It talks about it in a bit more detail so 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 and 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. Then 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 challeng, 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. 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. I just find it very insightful, really practical. It 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.

[B]

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. 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. 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, which are what motivate and drive me are achievement, ideas, learning and variety. I'd score each value 7, 6, 5 and 7 out of 10 for how much they show up in my work at the moment. And I'd like to increase each score by one on that side scale. Can you give me three ideas for how to do that for each value and present the ideas in a table?

[A]

I mean, you pushed it.

[B]

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. And I was like, that was £26. Very well spent. And that's why my prompts are as good as they are. 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, Gemini 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. I thought I could just ask an AI to do me anything and it should do my bidding. But apparently that's. 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 6, target 7. 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, 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? 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 out of 10 and then just nudging up on that scale. 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.

[A]

I think it's just. 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 really what the sprint's all about.

[B]

Do you want to do the team? You might also know how excited about us.

[A]

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, but we were like a small, quick things that people could do. So this is our recommendation.

[B]

We approach this quite differently, I think it's fair to say, isn't it?

[A]

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 value is? You can have a lot of fun with it.

[B]

That would work better with how you approach this than how I approach this. So do you want to give the example?

[A]

Well, we were having. Practicing, we were chatting, we were practicing.

[B]

So you went first?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And what did you come up with?

[A]

Oh, I can't remember now, but I think one of mine's energy and I'd.

[B]

Be like, no, you had freedom.

[A]

Oh, that'd be.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like you had like gold value song.

[A]

Yeah, well, that was what I said for you.

[B]

You said achievement.

[A]

You should always believe in yourself.

[B]

I still can't believe you're singing on the podcast, but one of my values is ideas. And I felt like Kate Bush was a real pioneer of, like, ideas and being creative.

[A]

I mean, go as deep as Sarah or go as shallow as me, but you'll have a lot of fun in the process.

[B]

So, yeah, I didn't go literal. I went quite conceptual, which I think is quite appropriate. Yeah. But I think music creates collection. 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 it also a bit off putting for some people. But I think everybody could sort of pick a song that tells you something about what's important to them 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.

[A]

Feel free to give us some. What went well? Even better if feedback on my singing. No, don't. No, don't, don't.

[B]

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.

[A]

Happy sprinting, everyone.