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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.
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.
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.
Darren A. Smith:
Yep. Ohh. Ohh. Ohh.
Clare Walker:
But something that’s valuable to them, and so they lay them out in a line and have a look at them. But then I’ll ask them a question that is, looking at that top ten, which is the one that you cannot live without. It’s non-negotiable.
Darren A. Smith:
Ohh that love it.
Clare Walker:
If it wasn’t in your life, it wouldn’t be worth living. Or if somebody stands on it. If somebody doesn’t live up to that values, things like trust, honesty, and confidentiality.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah, yeah.
Clare Walker:
Think about what it would feel like if that wasn’t in your life anymore. You know which is the one. So they will look at that. Now place that at their number one and then they can start to as a team. If you’re doing this as a team or as an individual or as a team, start to tell you what it is about that word, that value that’s so important to them. And they will start to tell you.
Darren A. Smith:
Of course.
Clare Walker:
Recently, with somebody who said they have wealth is #1 and their team kind of went, ohh yeah, right. Money bags over there and he said no, no, no, no, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is I need wealth in my life. That means that I’ve got food in my fridge. I’ve got shoes on my feet and I’ve got names in my phone of people I can call when I need them. That is what wealth means to me.
Darren A. Smith:
Right. I love that. Love that.
Clare Walker:
Yeah. The guys are like, wow and it was a relief. We have somebody else who when we did this we said, what we tend to do as well is if you’re doing it online, you can do this online is get people to type it out so that everybody shares a screen or you get them to layout. And I say put you on #1 card at the top. And somebody recently said, well, everyone’s gonna have the same card.
Darren A. Smith:
Yep.
Clare Walker:
And I said OK.
Darren A. Smith:
I’m just thinking that.
Clare Walker:
You know what, what would you say? Everybody should have as their number one card and they said Ohh, love. Everybody’s gotta have love and these voices when I’ve not got love, I’ve got family. I’ve got honestly. I’ve got this. It was such an eye-opener that yeah, we all have values that oh my goodness, this is like your rule book. Nobody has the same set of values and even if you have the same 10 values, they weren’t necessaril in the same order or have the same value put on them. And so then people started talking about, well, I’ve got this and family to me is.
Darren A. Smith:
Ohh. Ohh. Different order.
Clare Walker:
My wife and kids and someone else said no family to me is what I’ve got here. It’s all the people around me. That’s what family means to me. So people stop having this respect for what is important to other people. So somebody, for example, if they have punctuality in their list and they say oh, now I get it when I walk into a room and you’re sat there already and you go. I always think that you’re really annoyed with me and I never know why. Now I get it. You have a value around punctuality. Now, if I’ve walked in with a fresh cup of coffee in my hand and you know I’ve been over that, making that cup of coffee, talking to somebody who needed a bit of help. Therefore that’s my value around connection or collaboration.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah.
Clare Walker:
I didn’t get what your values was punctuality. So if I now walk into a meeting room and I look at my clock and I’m like a minute over and I go, I’m sorry. That will then show that I’ve respected your values around that.
Darren A. Smith:
That’s good. That’s good. I like that.
Clare Walker:
If I did that, would that mean to you and the people go, that would mean a lot to me because you use them, recognise that that’s important to me and I live by it. So recognising what people’s values are and getting them to talk through that number one value is so powerful. People start to learn what other people’s, I mean, we say this is your rule book. What are the rules that you live by? So if it’s about honesty, integrity, responsibility, leadership, and peace, people will place value on different things.
Darren A. Smith:
Yes, I like that.
Clare Walker:
That’s where the power of this really is because it not only gives you an understanding, it gives you a connection with other people. It allows you to understand how to have a conversation with that person. When I did this in my team, it was amazing because I had somebody who had peace and somebody who had leadership. So the person within peace, when you needed a conversation with them, you would say, come on, let’s just go for a walk down by the river. Let’s go outside, get a cup of tea, get a coffee, water, whatever we’re doing, and let’s have a conversation. And we would do that.
Same topic of conversation with the person who’s got leadership at the top of theirs, it would be right. I’ve booked a meeting room. Here’s the agenda. Let’s bash this out. Same conversation, but in a very different way because it was what motivated them. What were their drivers? We had this. I’ve got another say. I’ve got so many examples. Somebody who had humour in their list and their boss said I had no idea that humour is something that was in the was gonna be valuable to you. Well, you know what it did about humour.
What can you do in your day job or what can we do that means that human shows up more for you? And the guy said, I just want to have some fun with PowerPoints. I just don’t want to do script bullet points. You know, I want to be able to go and have a bit of fun with it anyway. Go do it. And you know, this guy went from being coming to work for our times fine to be suddenly an 8 out of 10, nine out of 10 where people were coming to him and saying show me what you did in that PowerPoint because I really enjoyed watching that. It really made a difference because his value around firm, he was allowed to suddenly bring it into his day job, which he never thought he could.
Darren A. Smith:
Good.
Clare Walker:
So being able to understand and recognise that is, that’s where the power is.
Darren A. Smith:
I love those stories and I was just thinking back to those few minutes ago. You said that guy had love and that other guy was, I think. I put love in my discard pile. This guy’s freaking out. Hold on. Hold on, love’s everything OK? Yeah, we get it. We get it. I love that. And the examples are great. So just to recap. Put a bunch of people in a room. They’ve each got a deck of cards this tall. We’re finding out about values. They’re separating them into discard. Maybe an absolute pile, something like that. Then they’re talking about what’s in their different parts. OK. OK. Wow. Wow. Wow. And what if we go to the end game of that? What have they figured out? Yes, we’ve got different values. But why does that matter?
Clare Walker:
Yeah. Yeah. It matters for pretty much those examples that I gave. You get that understanding one of the great things that I love about the that is kind of a byproduct of doing this exercise with people is it creates an atmosphere of psychological safety because you’re also saying to people okay you’ve laid out your 10 values.
Darren A. Smith:
Yes.
Clare Walker:
Tell me about what’s important to you people. Start telling you what is their motivation, their driver, what they will avoid, what they will do to get something where they need to focus. But nobody can tell them that they’re wrong.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah.
Clare Walker:
Because each has their personal value, and that’s the whole thing in this. So people will sit and it’s there is such a calm in the room and people sit and they listen because they want to learn about how do I do this differently with you? What is important to you and it’s just great. During this either get people to lay out their values so that everybody can walk around the table and see what’s in there or we get people to share a screen and put them onto an Excel spreadsheet so you can then see everybody’s values.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah.
Clare Walker:
You start seeing the correlations between ohh, that’s why I get on with you because we’ve got very very similar values. Or I can see that if I need to brainstorm with somebody, I can see you’ve got innovation at the top of your list. I’m gonna come to you next time or you’ve got empathy up there. I’m gonna come to you next time. I need to have that conversation or a conversation. You then start to recognise as well what shapes people, what makes them be who they are, and that really builds teams.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah, yeah. You know.
Clare Walker:
It isn’t a one-off exercise. What I see and I’ve just done this morning with somebody with a team of people is we’ve done a retrospective on it and said what have you seen in the last year because we have all these values on the screen and said what have you seen in last year, what’s shown up on there and they started pinpointing. So values is great for after the event times as well because you then walk out of somewhere and you go and you know there’s something niggling me about that conversation we’ve just had all or, you know, the meeting. What was it?
You suddenly start thinking which of my values didn’t show up at that point? It’s because I wasn’t given autonomy. I wasn’t given respect. You suddenly start understanding that if you’re value hasn’t shown up or it’s been spied on or there’s been friction around that value, he can really make you feel horrible. It can. It can make you understand why things haven’t worked and why it didn’t feel comfortable to you. So it’s great. It’s not just the one I am event and we say this as well. It’s not.
Your values can change day by day depending on what is happening in your life. So don’t say don’t have them put on a T-shirt and don’t have them printed out as your team values. This shop will live by just recognise as well that values will change over time. But sometimes you need to focus on your values to reach your goal.
Darren A. Smith:
Yep.
Clare Walker:
Another coaching example of this one I had a guy pull out his values and he was a member of the band. So he was going out every week with his band and his friends. He had in his top, music, he had social, he had family.
Darren A. Smith:
Hmm.
Clare Walker:
He wondered why his wife was getting a little bit upset with him because he had her at #3 in his top ten values. So through the coaching conversations, you know, where do you need to focus your energy? What do you need to do differently? He moved her up to #1 and said this is where she needs to be. Therefore I need to do things differently to ensure that I value her as a #1, not behind the music and the social. He did that and that’s like, four or five years ago. He’s happily married.
Darren A. Smith:
Right okay. Brilliant. I like that.
Clare Walker:
To change the way that they conversed in the same way it did with me when I first did this with my husband, which you can read in the blog that we did. I did this one afternoon in a work environment on the train home. I’m kind of thinking, I know what my husband’s top ten are gonna be. I’ll list them out now. I did this exercise with him and in his top five, I didn’t get any of those right.
Darren A. Smith:
Ohh.
Clare Walker:
They’ve been married for 30 years. I didn’t get his top five and that just shows you how these values can really be the subconscious to us, but also definitely to other people as well. So I sat with him and said, OK, tell me what your values are, what’s important to you, but really importantly, what can I do that means that this shows up more?
Darren A. Smith:
Front. You know.
Clare Walker:
So by having that conversation completely changed the way that we had conversations, completely changed the way that we would interact with each other. I mean, there was nothing wrong with the marriage beforehand, but it made things even better purely because we’ve done this exercise and kind of opened each other’s rulebooks and said this is what’s important to me. This is what I wanna be able to see more of. And it’s brilliant for doing that.
Darren A. Smith:
Wow. I do love that term rule, but because we have our own rule book and we often don’t know what is in our rule book and all this exercise does is translate for us. OK, I’m translating what’s in here with these cards to ohh, that’s your rule book. I love that idea. I’ve heard that before. Rule book. Brilliant. Brilliant. Let’s for those people who are, we use a term that we’ve heard other people use of. If it’s all a bit Foo Wawa, it’s a bit too pink and fluffy. What’s the real business benefit? Why should I care rather than go do this fluffy stuff, would you say?
Clare Walker:
Yeah. I think for all those reasons that I’ve already given, it’s.
The psychological safety that you can build within a team if you’ve got a team who aren’t communicating because you start with it as being a personal value, everybody looks in and their personal values and they look down on themselves and they reflect.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah.
Clare Walker:
You then ask them to start sharing that then can really build that psychological safety. It starts to build respect within a team because you go OK, so I now get why you do that differently. You are into autonomy or boldness or whatever it might be when you start to see and understand why other people’s values might differ from yours, but also why you might get on with somebody. But the other thing that I love that it does, is it gives you permission to voice your values as well.
Darren A. Smith:
Yep. Yeah, yeah.
Clare Walker:
So if you are in a meeting and it’s not quite feeling right and you’d say hang on, mate, can I just raise the flag here on the honesty value? Are we being absolutely honest about this project?
Darren A. Smith:
Nice night.
Clare Walker:
Because at the moment there’s something not quite feeling right about it. So what is? What’s the value that we’re not meeting right now because it might be honesty, as is our value around trust being there and and when I do the personal values I talk through Brene Brown’s braving trust as well, which holds the values of the braving the real liability, sorry, boundaries, reliability, the confidentiality of the accountability, all of those sort of things. When you talk through that, people then start to recognise as well. That’s why you’ll trust with you is because you’re nonjudgmental. You are generous. You have integrity.
People start to very much understand. What bills that trust, but also why people are motivated by certain things. If you’re motivated by money and you’re not getting paid enough, you’re probably not gonna want to show it to work in full on. So you can see why people then have these motivators, these drivers, why someone might be avoiding something, but lets you really understand how to talk to people in a way that will resonate with them as well. So it’s a great connector, and that building builders report as well.
Darren A. Smith:
Oh. Love it. I love that one. Maybe love 1-2 final questions. So we have our own rule book. Does that mean we have a rule book? Then if we’re part of a team and part of a company, how does that happen? So my rule book, does it then change?
Clare Walker:
It can do, yeah, absolutely. A lot of people, actually when we do it in a work environment, they say, am I looking at these at my home or am I looking at these in a business environment? Choose. You can choose one or the other and finally run it twice if you need to find out actually what is it that I’m doing at work that I’m not doing at home. Is there a gap between the two of them? Am I being authentic?
Therefore, if my top 10 core values are differing in my different situations, it can change completely depending on what your circumstances are, and you know life-changing injuries or critical illness is gonna change your value in life. I’ve seen this happen where people will then look at their values and really change the way that they focus and give them energy because of the way that their life circumstances are as well.
Darren A. Smith:
Ohh. Yeah. I’m not even sure it’s in our deck. I must check, but I realise.
My key value is fairness and it’s taken me a long time, a lot of years on the planet to realise that fairness is really important to me and if someone steps on my fairness, what? The world goes off, but it’s my definition of fairness as well, which is probably not as defined as everyone else’s. Why don’t I?
Clare Walker:
It’s true, and it was the thing this morning that set the vibration off on me in the UK at the moment, England at the moment, everybody’s getting their A level results today and they’re talking about how those marked the A levels much more strictly this year than they have in the last two years and it set something off on me and I immediately thought that’s my fairness value going really. How can that? And I recognise straight away that that’s what it was. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go ohh. That’s what it is. Gone. It allowed me to then understand that knowledge.
Darren A. Smith:
No. Right.
Clare Walker:
That’s not something I like happening.
Darren A. Smith:
No, it’s strange.
Clare Walker:
It can really allow you to have that understanding of what’s going on with you, which can, if you can name it, you’re already starting to understand it, control it, deal with it, work on it. So yeah, absolutely. It’s knowing what your values are very, very important.
Darren A. Smith:
Very true, very true. I’ve got a friend who I always call and he doesn’t call me ever. That’s starting to annoy me. It’s not fair, but at least I know what it is within me. I expect this of him. All right. Claire, fabulous. Let’s do a shameless plug for you. What’s your shameless plug in 30 seconds? Do you want people to come use you as a coach? What do you like?
Clare Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. So I am on LinkedIn, so you can find me on there, Clare Walker PCC and I also have my own coaching company, which is acoachingconversation.co.uk, but also just plugging the cards. I mean, one of the things when I was thinking about the weird and wonderful is that actually one of the things that resonates best with me is helping other people to progress, learn who they are, who they want to be, what makes them tick.
So for me, I mean, the third chamber played really is if you can’t go and use these cards with people. But if you do come and tell me about it on LinkedIn because that would mean so much to me to hear how people have used these value cards and the difference that it’s made for their team. And if you have any questions about it, as you can tell, I can talk about it for hours. So I would be more than happy to have a conversation if anybody wanted to have that conversation. Just come and find me either on LinkedIn or Claire at acoachingconversation.
Darren A. Smith:
Oh lovely. We’ll have those links on the YouTube video at the bottom of the article. The podcast we’ll add them all there so you can click on them.
Claire, you’ve come across as an absolute expert on personal values. Thank you. The stories you clearly lived it. Big thank you for doing it and also a big thank you for collaborating on the cards. Big thanks. Oh. What’s your top value? I’m gonna ask you that and then let you go. What’s your #1 value?
Clare Walker:
Very welcome. This comes to what I was saying earlier is that they change over time so.
Darren A. Smith:
Oh. Okay like choosing your top film.
Clare Walker:
Oh, favourite child. No, no, I didn’t say that. I love them both equally.
My top value is probably respect cause I think so much falls under respect and if you don’t have respect.
Darren A. Smith:
OK.
Clare Walker:
Some people gotta have your respect honesty, trust, fairness. They all kind of fall into each other but yeah. They play around each other. But yeah, I think respect is one of the most important ones.
Darren A. Smith:
I love that because when I asked that question you did some real soul searching because you really understand this topic, which one, and the rest was going well. We’ll just choose this one and you’ve gone right into your soul and come back out. Wow, thank you for being an expert. This is great. We shall see you next time.
