Discover the Personal Rule Book
Join Clare Walker - a practise leader at Vodafone, an expert in personal values, and Darren Smith - the chief executive officer at MBM, as they explore the exciting topic of personal values. Discover the trick to finding your number one value with Clare using a special tool - personal values coaching cards.
Our new addition to our set of cards is Personal values coaching cards. Unlike other cards, these are not questions, but rather one word. There are about 70 cards in this exciting new pack! Check out the podcast to learn more!
You Can Read the Full Personal Values Share Transcript Below:
Darren A. Smith:
Hi and welcome to another podcast or video depending on whether you're watching on YouTube or on our podcast platforms. We're here with Claire Walker. Claire, how are you?
Clare Walker:
I'm very well. Thank you, Darren. How are you doing?
Darren A. Smith:
I'm good. I'm good. We're sitting here on Thursday afternoon. It's hot. Is it hot where you are?
Clare Walker:
It has clouded over a little bit, but I'm very fortunate. I've got an ever-changing view outside my window because I live in the Lake District. So yes, it may change to hot in a moment's time. It may rain.
Darren A. Smith:
Lovely. Lovely. I'm jealous. We're here talking with Claire because you are an expert on personal values and we have just collaborated on some coaching cards. So we have a bunch of coaching cards. I'll grab some here like this. But these are premium grow coaching cards and we've collaborated on some personal values and we want to talk to you about personal values and coaching cards. All right, so.
More about our expert on values
Clare Walker:
Indeed.
Darren A. Smith:
Claire, what do you do at the moment? What's your day job?
Clare Walker:
My day job is that I am the coaching community of practise leader at Vodafone and I'm very fortunate with that. I have a wonderful team of internal coaching coaches who are both certified and credentialed. There's about 100 of them.
And it's great and a coach will pull within Vodafone of probably in the region of about 80,000 people. So we have a lot of work to do here.
Darren A. Smith:
Wow. OK, alright. So you working for a very big company. You're doing coaching all day long and you've got a whole bunch of people who coach with you for you around you. Alright. Fabulous. Fabulous. So before we get started on personal values, would you tell us a little bit of something weird and about you?
Clare Walker:
Ohh gosh. It's gonna start with. I'm very modest, but that's really hard when you ask that question, isn't it? What do I what's where do wonderful about me? I'm a member of the local acting group and I recently played a 75-year-old woman who finds her neighbour's ecstasy tablets and proceeds to take them with some very interesting consequences.
So I love doing that. That's really good fun. And I think actually I really enjoyed playing her because I think one of my life's quotes is that you don't stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing and. And so I think I love playing her because of that. And I think that kind of leads to the fact that I love practical jokes. One of the things I really miss about working from home is that you don't get to do them quite similarly anymore. So yeah, probably the weird thing about me is my little practical joking.
Darren A. Smith:
Lovely. Lovely. Wow, wow, wow. OK. And in the nicest possible way I'm gonna ask this question, but particularly for our viewers. Why should we listen to you about personal values? What do you know about it?
Clare Walker:
I think because I can speak from experience about how values have changed my life and my relationships, but also about what I've witnessed within my coachees and colleagues and within teams that we run this session with as well. So I can tell lots of really good stories in confidence about those experiences of what I've seen and really bring to life, the values looking at them and looking at those around us as of those of people around us as well.
Darren A. Smith:
OK, OK, alright, cool. Cool. You and I got to know each other over LinkedIn. Great platform. We collaborated on some coaching cards. Would you share those coaching cards that you've got that we collaborated on?
Clare Walker:
I have them here.
Darren A. Smith:
OK, so we got these coaching cards, and each one just show us some of those cards and a bit about them.
Clare Walker:
Yeah. So each one of these cards, they're a little different because all that they have on them is a word and an icon and that's all that they have with them. So there is a lot of MBM cards are question stacks that you can either use. I used them very much too and I've got quite a few of them. I've got time management and leadership and Grow model and most recently the Imposter syndrome ones. They are great for being a Bank of cards, a Bank of questions that I read through and think that's a great question that I wonder where I could ask that one.
They're amazing because they pop up every so often. You'll be coaching someone, you'll listen, you'll hear them say something and you think oh, that great question that I've read the other day on the cards. It pops into your head and you think this is really relatable and what they've just said. So using them as coaching prompts, certainly not ever going through them. And although saying that they do actually use them sometimes.
If you've got a coach who is very nervous or a little bit sceptical about coaching, I will kind of fan the cards out, especially if I'm doing grow model or I'm doing you know those are coming useful and say to them pick a card and you answer on.
Darren A. Smith:
Yep, Yep. OK. Nice.
Clare Walker:
So I'm not asking the questions they get to then get what it feels like.
To answer a question, I'll let them choose the question sometimes as well. I'll lay out 10 or 20 and they'll say I'm going to answer that question. It builds that confidence in being able to be a little bit more open than answering questions. So whereas a lot of MBM's cards are a stack of questions that are very useful, the personal value ones are very different because they're not questions. They are literally, as I say, one word. So we've got leadership, humour, punctuality, contribution, dependability, all of those. And there are about 70 cards.
Always a value on them and an icon on them and each one of those values will mean something different to the person who's choosing it. So yeah, there it's a great, great set of cards in the way. The reason that I love them is because of people. It's that tactile thing. People look at them, feel them, and I have somebody who did this two weeks ago with me picked out one of the cards and just, well, burst into tears almost because the word on that card resonated with them so much that it was just so solid that they kind of.
That was it. The tears came. So yeah, a great coaching moment where I can see there's some emotion there. What was it that came up then when you saw that word? So there a little bit different in that they're single words as opposed to questions.
What makes people tick
Darren A. Smith:
Ohh wow. Okay. So these cards are not questions. They're more prompts. I think you and I called it when we were collaborating maybe team activity cards. Would you just bring to life for me, for the viewers, how do you use these things? You gather a bunch of people and give them some cards? What do you do?
Clare Walker:
Yeah, okay. So we've got within the culture, there is a 10-step exercise as to how to do this, but I'll walk you through how you do it. So really you get either an individual to get an individual coaching or you get a team together who worked together and might know each other and might not have done this with people who've known each other for a long time. I've done it with new teams and it works perfectly well with both.
So you start off using it as personal values and you would give each member of the team a pack of these cards. So there's about as I say, 70 different values on them. I normally find 12 to 15 minutes for them to go through the cards. These 70. Wwhat they tend to do and it's very interesting when you watch people do it. Some people will do it this way up and they'll look at each the front of each card and go, yeah. There are other people who hold the cards this way up and they'll flip each card and then have a look and then layer it down. It's always very interesting to see. But what the purpose is for them to go through all of these cards and they tend to put them into three different piles.
We'll say. Yeah. OK. This one really resonates with me. So that's gonna be in my top 10. And that's the point of doing this is that they find their top ten cards. That one's gonna be my top ten. They look at the next one and go, No, that doesn't resonate with me. They'll put it in probably a discard pile at the side because that's never going to be in my top ten. Might still be important. Might still be part of their life. But really what they will do is put on site.
Darren A. Smith:
I'm good. Yep.
Clare Walker:
Then there'll be other cards that they'll not be quite so sure at, so they can put those in the whole pile. Though it might be my top ten, I've not quite yet beside it. So what they will end up with after those sorts of 10 minutes? It is a line of 10 cards that are what they will say is up to 10 cards. We always get people who go Oh, can I have 18 and my answer to that is always as long as nonconformity is at the top of that list.
But what they will do is then sort out those top ten cards and even by just doing that is an eye-opener because people go, yeah my values are honesty and trust but when they actually see them in front of them and they start laying them out there will be values in there that they've never thought of as being.
