Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:15: Defining career criteria

00:04:34: Career criteria vs strengths and values

00:07:34: The high/low career graph

00:10:15: Must-haves versus nice-to-haves

00:15:53: Success statement

00:18:22: Understand your constraints

00:22:32: Career conversations

00:31:33: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we talk about a different topic to do with work, and share some ideas for action and tools to try out that we hope will help you.  And let's be honest, every week it helps us to navigate our Squiggly Career with that bit more confidence, clarity and control.

Helen Tupper: If you are a regular listener and you don't want to miss out on an episode, or all of the resources that we create to go along with the conversation that we have, sign up for PodMail.  It is an email that goes out on a Tuesday, hence it's PodMail, because it's about the podcast; and in PodMail, you will get the links to our PodNotes, to our PodSheets, details about PodPlus, all things Squiggly Careers are basically in there.  And it will come into your inbox about 8.30 every Tuesday.  If you want to sign up for that, go to the show notes, and then you'll find a link in there.  And if you can't find the show notes, then just email us. 

We're helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com. Today's Squiggly Careers conversation is all about how to create your career criteria.  It's something that we talk about on quite a few of our sessions, actually.  I think when we talk about exploring our future possibilities, and we think about using your strengths more at work, we often come back to this idea of career criteria, but we haven't talked about it on the podcast before. 

So, we thought it might be useful to share it with people. In terms of what a career criteria is, it's really just a list of things that are important to you about the work that you do, and that might include what's important to you about what you work on, the type of work; or when you work, so the shape of your working week, for example; where you work, maybe the type of businesses that you like to work in; the how of your work, the why of your work.  It's getting a list of things that feel personal and specific to you and using that as a guide to the decisions that you make about your career. It isn't a job title or a job description that's exactly what you want to do.  So it's not me going on LinkedIn, looking up a job and going, "That's my career criteria", because that's a job and it might be interesting to you, but we're trying to get you to think a bit more broadly with the career criteria, because if you have a career criteria, what it helps you to do is look beyond a job title or a single job description, and think a bit more broadly about what you could do and where you could find your fit.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things that career criteria has always really helped me with is not getting distracted about what we sometimes call, "shiny object syndrome".  Shiny object syndrome is job titles, as Helen's described, maybe it's a brand that just seems very glamorous, maybe it could be about a salary, but something that on the surface, does feel very sort of jazz hands.

Helen Tupper: The jazz-hands job!

Sarah Ellis: I know, jazz-hands job!  But you realise, I think, quite quickly that those shiny objects do tarnish.  So, it's really questioning yourself in terms of, what are your career criteria, and those things that last way beyond some of those shiny things on the surface?  And I have made some difficult, but definitely right decisions, because I knew my career criteria. I think I've also made some really bad decisions in my career earlier on, where I hadn't thought about this enough, and I felt like other people were more in control of my career than I was, or I was doing perhaps what I should do, or what other people told me was a good idea to do, without really stopping and questioning, "What's my career criteria; what feels important to me about my decisions and my choices?"  Given, in Squiggly Careers, we're going to have a lot more of those, this feels like something that you want to keep coming back to.

Helen Tupper: And I think, when you have that insight into your career criteria, it also makes you much more confident in the conversations that you have.  Because, I feel like once you've got clarity on it, you can go into a conversation and you can say, "These are the sorts of things that I'm interested in, and this is why I'm interested in it".  And I think, once you have that knowledge, you don't feel like you have to apologise or you have to defend it, you're just saying, "This is what I want to do in my career and I'm hoping I can do that here, I'd like to find a way to do that here, but ultimately these are the things that are important to me". I do think it helps you have better conversations, it helps you be a bit braver, to your point, braver about some of the choices that you might make; and also it means, I think, you can get better support from other people, because when you have clarity about your career criteria, other people can support you, because you can be more specific about the support that you need.  And I think it's that clarity that you have that helps other people to help you in a way that might be more meaningful.

Sarah Ellis: And for people who listen all the time, you will have heard us talk a lot about strengths and values, and I think of course we would always encourage you, when you're thinking about career choices, to start with some questions around, "Am I going to get the opportunity in this role, or with this move that I might make, to make my strengths stronger, or to stretch my strengths? 

Am I going to get to use them, first of all, but am I going to make them even stronger?  And, will my values show up and will I be able to live my values?" Those are really good starting points, I think, as you're thinking about where your career could take you.  I think the difference between those things and career criteria, or certainly in my experience of how I've used these, is I think career criteria are a bit more basic.  I can't think of a better word to describe them than that, but they're a bit more day-to-day and they're a bit more in the here and now, and I think they maybe include some things that are just more about you and your life in general, and trying to make all of your work/life fit feel right for you at that moment in time, because your career criteria do change. So, where your values stay pretty constant and your strengths certainly develop over time, but we've talked before, you choose your super-strengths, I think your career criteria does change.  It depends on what you learn about yourself, your self-awareness, but also your life stage and what are your priorities at the moment; and that's where I think, of course they all come together and they're kind of blurred at the edges, but that's where I think career criteria ends up being a bit different.

Helen Tupper: There's some, I never say that word "Ikigai".

Sarah Ellis: Oh, I don't know how you say that, yeah!

Helen Tupper: You know that, everyone knows Ikigai.  Everyone's shouting at this podcast now going, "That one!"  I feel there's some sort of Venn diagram where you have your values, what makes you you; your strengths, what you want to be known for; and then, your career criteria, which is how you do what you want to do. I think, if you can get those, and I'm not saying it's easy, everybody, but if you can think about your career opportunities and design your career around those things, you will be fulfilled, because you're using your values; you'll be increasing your impact, because you're using the stuff you want to be known for; and you'll be happier in work, because you'll be working in a way that works for you.  And at some point, there's some Squiggly Career sweet spot in the middle of all that that is the aim!

Sarah Ellis: I feel a diagram.

Helen Tupper: I know, there is definitely going to be a diagram!  But maybe this should be called, "How to find your Squiggly Career sweet spot"; maybe that's the podcast after!

Sarah Ellis: Maybe.  So, what we're going to talk about is how to firstly find out your career criteria, so what you want from work, a couple of ideas for actions and exercises that we've always found helpful; secondly, understanding your constraints, so understanding our reality and what might be getting in the way of that career criteria at the moment; and then how you can use your career criteria to have really good career conversations, some of the actions then that you can take once you've got that knowledge and awareness, how that can lead to really useful conversations with other people. So, to start off with, in terms of finding your career criteria, the single best exercise I've ever done to help me with this, is what we describe as the high/low career graph. 

This is a very visual thing, which I'm now going to attempt to explain over audio, so let's see how this goes!  But you can all imagine an empty graph, where on one axis you've got how happy you are, from very unhappy at the bottom to super-happy and loving life at the top.  Then, on the other axis, you've got time. You can choose what's helpful for you in terms of that time period.  So, you might want to do all of your career, you might want to start from your first job ever and go through all of your career, or you might want to choose the last couple of years or the last five years, whatever feels most helpful for you.  What you are doing on that graph is plotting your own personal highs and lows.  So, what were the highs, what were those really good moments, where were you somewhere in the middle, did you have any dramatic lows?  Everybody's graph ends up looking, unsurprisingly, relatively squiggly, because we know there's no such thing as a straight line to success. But the important thing about doing that graph is not the line as such, it's what you can learn from that learn. 

And it's thinking about, what do your highs have in common and what can you learn from your lows.  And that's where sometimes really diving in on maybe one year can be helpful, because you can get very specific and you can remember, and I've done this looking at this through loads of different lenses.  I can still do it thinking about all of my career, because I've done this exercise quite a few times, and I've got some really dramatic lows along the way, and I've really learnt about what happened, and why those lows happened in the way that they did; why did those moments feel so hard for me. Then, I really remember my first ever high, and I often talk about it in some of our workshops.  I won't talk about it now, because we don't need to in today's podcast, but I've got a real spike, probably about five years into my career, where suddenly I found my flow.  For the first time, I was like, "Wow, work can feel like this!" and also, "I am so much better at this job than any job I'd done before".  So, I was like, "That's interesting". So, plot your line on your graph and then just look back and think about, what have your highs got in common, what can you learn from your lows?  And I would suggest doing this as a bit of a mind map.  So, all you're trying to do at this point is just get as many words as possible onto a page.  Don't question yourself too much, don't try and figure out, "What next?" just yet; just get all of your insights, what do you notice, what do you observe about the really good stuff, and also the really bad stuff along the way too.

Helen Tupper: So, once you've got that information about your career, where you've been so far, whether that's, as Sarah said, a week, a year or since you started, what we then want to do is layer on another big of insight onto the top of this.  That is, what are your career must-haves versus your nice-to-haves?  I think this is more useful when you think about, what does that look like with where I am today?  So not generically, "What must I have in my career?"  So, "I must have flexibility, I must have freedom, I must have learning", because you probably do need that for you.  But I think it gets much more useful when you think, "Where I am right now in my life, what really must I have?" So for example, I have got two relatively young children, a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old. 

So what I must have now is a job that enables me to see them.  Previously, I've had a job where I travelled an awful lot and I loved it at the time because then, the thing that was really important to me was, "Must have a job where I get to learn to be a better leader", and leading people in different countries and travelling and learning different things, that was really, really important to me. That's a sort of nice-to-have now.  It's still something that's important to me, but what is more important, what I must have is a job that enables me to achieve and make an impact, that's fundamental to me, achieving and making an impact; but I also must have a job that enables me to see my children.  So, if I was travelling all the time now, that wouldn't be the right thing for me to do.  And it is just thinking about where I'm at right now, what ultimately do I want? I would just start with a list of all the things that I want.  So, I want to make a difference and I want to have an impact and I want to see my family and I want to meet lots of people through my work and I want to learn new things.  I would write it all down, just get it all out, because it's quite fun to.  But then, look at your list of stuff, and really start to divide it.  Of all these things, what really must I have right now with where I'm at, and what really is nice to have, that if I had to choose between the two of these things, there would be one that would top-trump it? It is really that must-have list that you need to hold onto quite tight, because sometimes you might make a decision, and you might unknowingly trade that stuff off.  I might be like, "Oh, wow, a job with loads of travel in it, amazing!" and I still probably would think that.  But ultimately, that's probably a nice-to-have for me right now.  And if it conflicts with my must-haves, I'm probably not going to make the right decision.  That might be something to do in the future, but my must-have for right now probably isn't that.

Sarah Ellis: I think at any one time, we probably only have between two and four must-haves.  You might have a few more, you might have a few less, but I always really challenge myself when I do this exercise, I always really enjoy creating a wishlist.  I like to have a really long career criteria to get started with, with all those insights from the highs and the lows; but then almost, as Helen says, making those choices between going, "What really matters to me right now?"  That's particularly useful. Actually, if you can share it with someone else, it does make it even more helpful.  And when I say someone else, this might not be a manager, I think this is more likely to be a work best friend.  So, we've talked before about the importance of having best friends at work.  There's some great research about how important it is in terms of our resilience and how much we enjoy the work that we do. 

But I really distinctively remember, at certain points in our careers, Helen and I talking about our must-haves to each other, and then holding each other to account when we were both quite tempted to do things that probably wouldn't have been right, but had got a lot of shininess, but would have contradicted one of those must-haves. So occasionally, it's quite helpful to have, we sometimes call it our accountability partner, but I just basically think of this as someone who can call you on it, someone who can go, "Okay, but you said to me that it was really important to work a four-day week, Sarah?  You have just been offered a job --" obviously this is a real example, because I basically can't make stuff up particularly well on the spot; but one of my must-haves for a long time, for about four or five years, was to work a four-day week so I could spend a day on Amazing It. 

And I once interviewed for a job that I really wanted and I talked about working a four-day week.  It was all fine until they offered me the job, and then they said, "But you've got to work a five-day week". I remember being, "I don't know, maybe I should take it".  I needed to get a job at some point.  And I really remember having a conversation with Helen where she was like, "You told me the four-day week thing was a must-have, and you talked about how important it was and you light up when you know you've got that extra day".  It wasn't like we were running Amazing If particularly seriously, I was just spending a day learning and absolutely loving it, so I wanted that freedom of that day.  So, just in that moment, someone else knowing your must-haves, when you are making difficult decisions, or you've maybe got a choice where you've got two or three options, it can be quite useful, I think, for a work best friend to know your must-haves.

Helen Tupper: I agree.  It's actually making me think a little bit, that I don't think you and I have talked about it for a while.  Because our work has been growing quite a lot --

Sarah Ellis: Because we're too busy working!

Helen Tupper: Well, yeah, but I was just thinking, for both of us, what's probably quite important is that our work is not our entire world; as in, you liked having the diversity of a four-day week and a one-day week, and it's part of the reason I work for the charity, and you do the thing with the Mayor of London, is that we've got some things that we learn from outside of the work we do.  I think that's probably one of our must-haves.  I think we could do with a bit of a refresher, and we should reconnect on our must-haves so that we can support each.  Right, let's take that action!

Sarah Ellis: Okay.  I feel like you've just given me an action.  You've given me something else to put on my to-do list!

Helen Tupper: Sorry, I'm really sorry!  Okay, so you've done your high/low career graph, you've thought about your must-haves versus your nice-to-haves.  The next thing to think about is a Squiggly Career Success Statement, and this, I think, is just to have something that really brings it into a relatively neat articulation.  Now, we know people that have done Squiggly Career Success Statements actually visually, they've almost created a visual.  They've drawn it out, which we love, because we use so much visualisation in our workshops, but they've almost drawn what their success looks like, or they've got one word or a quote.  It doesn't really matter how you do it, it can be a nice statement, or it could be a quote or a picture, but there's some way, I think, to summarise some of these insights that we've got. So, "Success in my Squiggly Career means to me…" and then you can draw it, stick a quote, like one of the quotes that I like is, "It means to me, challenging my limits, not limiting my challenges".  You might have a nice pithy thing that you attach yourself to.  It's just something that is meaningful and motivating for you that brings all these different insights that we've gone through, with the high/low and the must-haves and the must-nots, together into something that you can, I think, hold.  This is the thing that you go to first and reminds you of what you want work to be.

Sarah Ellis: As you were describing that, I was thinking, "What would mine be?"  I think mine is the same as the best piece of career advice that I always share with people when people ask that question, or when we ask other people that question; my answer is always, "Never live the same year twice", and I think that's mine.  I think that's my success statement, because variety is one of my values, back to how this connects with our values; I like new stuff, so I love ideas and I love starting stuff from scratch.  And you talked about your Squiggly Career sweet spot and the diagram that I'm sure you'll create --

Helen Tupper: It's going on social media, I've already made a note.

Sarah Ellis: I'm sure, I've got no doubt!  But I think, in the middle of that diagram for me, it would say, "Never live the same year twice".  So, it's almost interesting, your statement could maybe go in the middle.  I can't believe I'm helping you now to create the diagram that I'm not even sure we need, but that's what I would put in the middle of mine, I think.

Helen Tupper: I actually think mine genuinely would be, "Challenge your limits, don't limit your challenge", because I think I'm so motivated by what you can do if you pursue your passions.  I find that very motivating, as a driver for my career, so yeah, I think that probably would be mine.  Look at us getting some clarity!

Sarah Ellis: Look at us continuing to basically use our own podcast to help ourselves, that's what's happening right now!

Helen Tupper: Coach ourselves, amazing.  Thanks for listening along, everybody! So, now you've got your career criteria, you've got your Squiggly Career sweet-spot diagram that you can fill in, and there will be a fillable PDF coming your way, so now we are going to think about what might be getting in your way.  So, we're going to go from finding out your career criteria, to understanding your constraints. We've taken a bit of inspiration here from Tash Walker, who is the founder of a research agency called The Mix who, amongst other stuff, has some brilliant resources on the importance of four-day week; was doing a four-day week, I would say, far before it was fashionable to do so.

Sarah Ellis: Years before, yeah.

Helen Tupper: Years before, loads of stuff.  And she shared a post, and I think I saw it because you liked it first, Sarah, on LinkedIn.

Sarah Ellis: I just read it and I thought, "That is genius".  You know when you read something and your like, "Yes, you are so right"?

Helen Tupper: Well, explain, explain to our listeners what was genius about her post?

Sarah Ellis: Yes.  So, we're going to borrow some genius from Tash, and hopefully she'll be okay.  We do know her, so we're hoping she'll be okay with this.  In this post, she was talking about the word "insight" and how insight often gets misinterpreted, or perhaps used in the wrong way.  And she defined insight in such a simple and straightforward way, it really stuck. So, we're going to use that, we're going to use her definition, and then we're going to apply it to this idea of almost connecting your career criteria with your constraints, so how do those two things connect together.  So, let me just talk you through the framework first, Tash's framework, and then we'll give you a few examples. So the first bit is, "I want". 

So this is, what do you desire, what's your goal, what's your ambition.  The second part, "Because", why do you want this, why is it important to you.  The final part, "But", what's the tension, the constraints, the one thing that's holding you back, the obstacle that's getting in your way.  So it's, "I want… because… but…" and it helps you to get to a very simple and straightforward way of sharing where you are, I think, with your career criteria, and acknowledging those obstacles. I remember thinking back to when I was at Sainsbury's, I was very clear that I wanted to work a four-day week, because I wanted to spend a day developing Amazing If, but I couldn't say any examples of other people a bit like me.  So, my constraint felt a bit like not having role models, or not feeling confident, because I couldn't see anyone else who'd done what I wanted to do before. Or, I was then trying to think, "Right, let's do it in the here and now", and I was thinking, I want to spend more time developing new ideas, because it's one of my strengths and it's something that I enjoy and gives me loads of energy and it's how I make careers better for everyone, but I don't feel I have space in my week at the moment. The reason I think it's such genius is, I really like the simplicity and I like that clarity.  So, when I was writing those sentences, they're almost half a sentence.  So, they are so short and pithy and specific, and I think it helps to clarify your thinking.  So, I'm someone who definitely, as a thinker, I meander and wander, and my head goes in loads of different directions; so just having this framework just helped me to bring my thoughts together in a very concise way.

Helen Tupper: I think the other thing it really helps with is, you can get much more specific about the support that you now need.  So, if you take Sarah's example of the four-day week, she ended with, "But I can't see examples of other people like me".  So, you're like, "Okay, so that's what I need, I need to see other people who've made this work".  Or, the one about Sarah said she wants to spend more time developing ideas, but then the constraint at the end that she got to was, "But I don't feel like I've got space in my week at the moment", so then what she needs to get some support with is redesigning how she's spending her time at work, so that she has the space. She might not have got to that clarity of how to overcome that constraint, until she'd gone through that process of really reflecting on that insight.  So, we would highly recommend that you take the, "I want… because… but…" approach to exploring what might be getting in the way of you realising your career criteria, because it helps you to be much more realistic about it and specific about the support; which then takes us onto the third one.

So, we've done the criteria, we've done the constraint, and now we're going to go on to career conversations.  And the point here is, no one really succeeds on their own, even when you see the people who look very brilliant and very successful and their lovely posts, and it's not just the shiny objects, it's the shiny person, who's probably got a team of people behind the scenes, mentors, a manager, a team of people who enable them to be at their best.  Understanding how you can use this insight you've developed in your career conversations to get the support you need will help you to succeed so much more than going it alone in your career. What we want to do now is think, "How do I take what I've got and use it in the career conversations that I do need to have?"

Sarah Ellis: The first thing we'd say about these conversations is that your commitment creates commitment.  So, we've said before, we don't want our development to be dependent on other people.  So, what we're not turning up to these conversations and doing is, Helen's my manager and I just turn up and go, "Right, I want to work a four-day week, but there's no examples.  Help, or ideally sort it out for me!"  So, we don't want to be passive, we still want to take ownership for these conversations. Certainly, I would always recommend to people that once you're clear on your criteria and your constraint, you do some options and some exploring and some ideas, and you might even take some actions before some of these conversations. 

Often we say, some of the best career conversations are where you've got halfway there, or basically you've gone as far as you feel that you can go, and then you've recognised that it's a moment where you need someone else's input or ideas or perspective. So, just make sure that you've done some of that hard graft first, because I think when people hear you talking for yourself about going, "Well, I've looked at this [or] I've thought about this", and it shows that you really care, people see that commitment and they'll think, "How can I help?"  I've probably told this story before on the podcast, but certainly when I was talking to my manager about working a four-day week, I mean I wouldn't recommend taking this approach, but the approach I did take was creating about an 18-page PowerPoint on why working a four-day week was going to work, why it was a good idea, why they should definitely say yes. Now, don't create an 18-page PowerPoint; that was not a smart thing to do and not a good use of my time.  But do you know the one thing I think it did do, is it showed I was incredibly committed. 

I mean, my Gosh, was I committed to that idea.  And I think what that person probably saw was, "Okay, not great judgement to go and do the 18-page PowerPoint, sure, but she obviously really cares and she has thought about it a lot, and she has explored it".  And I had gone and looked at examples of four-day weeks elsewhere, and talked to some other people who'd done it and looked at some different models of how I might have done it.  I mean, I'd really thought about it; that much was definitely clear. Then, I think I got more support as a result, so it didn't feel like a nice-to-have, when you're like, "This would be nice [or] I'd quite appreciate this if we could do it".  It didn't feel like a maybe, it felt like something where I was like, "I really want to make this happen, this feels really important to me".  But equally, I couldn't do that by myself, that wasn't a decision I could make and just initiate on my own.

Helen Tupper: So, I guess that's the action that you take ahead of the conversation, to create more commitment and support in the conversation.  The other thing that's really important is that when you have that conversation, you want it to be as open as possible.  So, the aim in our career conversations is to get the support we need, but to be open about perhaps what that could look like.  So, rather than saying, "Sarah, I want you to find me someone who can answer this exact question", what I would say to Sarah is, "One of the things that's important to me is to learn more about, I don't know, leadership at work. 

Do you know anyone who could help me explore this further?" So, I'm giving Sarah a broad -- this "exploring" word is actually really interesting, because Sarah could take that in lots of different directions.  But those sorts of questions, "Do you know anyone else who can help me explore this thing that's important to me, further?" is a really good one to keep a conversation open, so that someone can connect dots for you.  If you're too fixed about the support that you need, you don't really help them to connect the dots. Another really nice open question might be, "What do you think I need to learn more about to take this forward?"  You're not giving someone the answer, which is, "I want to learn about this.  Can you put me on this course?" which is quite fixed and closed; you're saying, "This is what's important to me, what do you think I need to learn more about to take this forward?" and you're not entirely sure what they're going to suggest to you, or who they're going to connect you with, but that's the point, because you're going to benefit much more from what they know or who they know, if you let them connect the dots, and you stay open to that outcome. A third question you could ask, which I think actually is really interesting, because it is so open, which is, "And, what do you think I might be missing?"  You've got no idea of where that will go, but that's the point, because you'll gets more information and insight if you ask those sorts of questions in the conversation.

Sarah Ellis: What I think can be challenging, but is really important for us to keep in mind as we're having these conversations, is we don't want to be fixed.  So, we don't want our career to be fixed to one future, but also we want to be flexible about how that career criteria might happen.  So even though, as I've described, I really wanted to work a four-day week, that was in my must-haves, I was still very open to how we made that happen.  Did I try it for a month?  Did it have to be a four-day week; could it be two days, once a month? I also think, as part of your must-haves, you want to hold on tightly to those, because they are really important to you; but I think people have better quality conversations with you when they feel like you are not fixed in terms of the exact outcome.  So, if I'd have said, "Well, I want to work a four-day week and I want that to happen by next month, and it's that or nothing", then that makes someone else defensive, they feel like they're being backed into a corner, and no one wants to have that conversation. Whereas, I think my most successful career conversations have always been where I've done the commitment thing, I've always done the hard work first, but I have been flexible about my career criteria. 

So, "It might not be able to be achieved quite in the way that I'd like right now, but I can see that we might get there in a couple of months [or] there are some things we're going to try out".  And when you're positioning these conversations, they're really about exploring and being curious.  I think then, you get much better insights and ideas from the other person, because you're not putting them on the spot to make a decision, and people never respond well to being surprised. So again, if I'm going to talk to Helen about developing new ideas, if I just turn up to a conversation with Helen and just say, "Well, I want more space in my week to have new ideas, Helen, so I'm just going to spend half a day doing that", that actually feels very fixed and quite unhelpful, and quite hard for Helen to respond to.  What's she going to do?  It feels quite binary, it's like, "Yes, okay then" or --

Helen Tupper: It sounds like you've already made the decision, so why are you talking to me?  I mean, you're not really having a career conversation with me, you're telling me something.

Sarah Ellis: Exactly.  So, I think we want to keep these conversations as open and as exploring as possible.  But we're not talking about letting go of those must-haves, but I think just always having that adaptability.  Adam Morgan, who we interviewed back in January, describes that stubbornly adaptive mindset of being clear of, what do we really want to hold on to and what might it be okay to let go of for a while, or for a bit, and just bring that approach to those conversations; because, I've found I've had much more effective conversations when I've had that kind of mindset. I've also made the mistake, I think sometimes, of having conversations where I've been too fixed about my future, about plans rather than possibilities, about what needs to happen in exactly what order, versus just having that flexibility; and also remembering, you don't need to fix everything in one conversation. I was talking to someone about this today and I think so often, because we say "Having a career conversation", we almost put a full stop at the end of it.  Just remind yourself, it's career conversations, because most of these sorts of conversations are rarely complete in one sitting.  In one half-an-hour slot, you're very unlikely to suddenly realise all of your career criteria.  So, see it as a series of conversations, which might be with one person, or might be with a number of different people.

Helen Tupper: Ideally, more people.  More people for ideas, more input into your careers, is what we really want.  So, just to summarise then, step one is finding out your career criteria, that is what you want from work; step two is understand the constraints, what might get in your way; and then step three is to use that in your career conversations, so that you can get the support you need to succeed in your Squiggly Career. So, we hope that has been helpful, we hope it's created a bit of clarity.  We always think that Squiggly Careers are full of uncertainty and ambiguity, but things like having a career criteria can give you back a bit of control, can create that bit of clarity that you might need, so hopefully that has done that for you.  And don't forget, there's the PodSheet, so we'll summarise all of this on the PodSheet.  And at some point soon, there will be a Squiggly Career sweet-spot thing appearing somewhere, as soon as I've got round to developing it, which I will do!

Sarah Ellis: And, if you've been listening for a while, and perhaps you've been meaning to get round to leave us a review or a rating, or to share it with someone, please take five minutes and do that five-minute favour for us.  That's how we continue to share Squiggly and keep growing, and we really appreciate it.  All of our podcasts have always grown just by you all telling other people, "This is worth a listen", and then that person telling another person.  And that's how we went from my mum to 2 million downloads. So, if you've got a chance to do that, we really appreciate it.  And we do read every review, and we do really appreciate them all, so thank you.

Helen Tupper: Thank you, everyone.  Speak to you again soon, bye.

Sarah Ellis: Thanks, everybody.  Bye for now.