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? So this is a five dayday 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 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? 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.

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

that I'm 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 spring, 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 of it 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

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