Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:25: Summer School
00:03:17: Beach read
00:04:34: Strengths
00:05:18: LinkedIn
00:07:52: Strengths-based feedback
00:09:49: Stretching your strengths
00:11:18: Values
00:15:35: Confidence
00:18:20: Three Rs
00:21:01: Network or people helping people
00:24:02: Future possibilities
00:26:00: January 2022
00:28:00: Curious careers
00:29:15: A day in the life
00:30:30: A good fit
00:31:43: Future development
00:32:42: How to approach the conversation
00:34:44: Final help

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen Tupper.

Sarah Ellis: You're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we talk about the ins and outs of work and share insights and ideas for action to help you with your development and to navigate your ever so Squiggly Career.

For every episode we do, you can now download something called a Podsheet and what these podsheets do is summarise the episode and also, they have loads of links to things that you can read, watch and listen to on the topic.  So, we really hope that that means that you can just enjoy listening to these, be very present in your listening without having to worry about scribbling things down if you're out for a walk, or I know some people even go out for a run.  I don't know how people run and listen to us at the same time, so if you do that, that's very impressive multitasking!

You could also always join us live on PodPlus and that's every Thursday at 9.00am for 30 minutes.  It's a zoom workshop session, you don't need to have listened to the podcast before to join us and really, it's our way of approaching the topic not necessarily in an audio way, but in a visual way.  We draw different tools, we sometimes build on ideas, sometimes we even introduce new things that have been perhaps more difficult to talk about on the podcast to bring to life when we're just chatting to each other.

Everything is free and you can get all the information at Amazingif.com or in the notes for this episode.

Helen Tupper: Today we are going to be talking about Squiggly Career Summer School, which is a concept we kicked off last year actually, so over the summer last year we had a group of people who all came together for a month-long programme, like a series of workshops.  This year, someone asked us, "Are you doing summer school again?"  We hadn't actually planned it, we were saying, "Will we?"

Sarah Ellis: Basically just not being very organised, I think.

Helen Tupper: We were like, "Should we do that?"  We also quite like doing things differently and also making it as open as possible, so we've put it out on Instagram and in July we did it every week on Instagram and we thought, "What we'll do is take some of the things that we've talked about and turn it into this podcast episode, which is going live in August".  You don't just have to listen to it in August, but the plan for this episode is to share with you lots of short, impactful, actionable things that you can do to invest in your career.

 We're going to base it all around the skills that we focus on in our book: so strengths, and that's all about the things that you want to be known for; values, the things that make you you; confidence, that's really about building belief in yourself and having other people believe in you too; networking, which we call people helping people; and your future possibilities, how you can explore the different directions you want to develop your career in.  That's the five areas we're going to cover.

Sarah and I are going to talk through each one of those areas and share with you almost a Squiggly Career Checklist.  If you want to do some quick things to invest in yourself, your career, and your development, this is the episode that is full of all of those quick actionable takeaways.  It's not as philosophical as maybe some of our other episodes might be, like the recent one on ego.

Sarah Ellis: I tried my best everyone to make it more philosophical, but Helen's brought me back to make it short and sweet.

Helen Tupper: I'm like, "No, quick, short, sweet actions, that's what this episode is all about".  And, if you want to go further, if you're like, "I've done all those actions and I want to do some more", our book would be the next step for something to spend some time with and might be a good summer read for you.  People do share us pictures reading our book in the sun by a beach.  It's not my go-to beach read, but I'd love if it was some other people's go-to beach read.

Sarah Ellis: Imagine if you were reading your own book on the beach.  I think that's where you know you've crossed the line.  Who's book is that?  I'm just reading my own book.

Helen Tupper: It's mine, I love it!  I was saying recently on Instagram that when I went to get my second COVID jab, I was wearing this really Squiggly necklace and I had three conversations in the queue for my jab about, "That's an interesting necklace", and I was like, "Yes, let me tell you my interesting book".

Sarah Ellis: The ultimate salesperson.

Helen Tupper: The ultimate, but maybe not on the beach.  But if you are on the beach and you would like to invest in your career and development, The Squiggly Career, you can get it in all bookshops.  We'll put a link as well in the show notes that you can find that and if you do buy it and you like it, please do leave us a review, because it does help us to reach more people and help more people with their career.

Sarah Ellis: Cool, let's get started.  I feel it's like pens at the ready because we've got this checklist we've all got to work through, and we will summarise the checklist for you in the Podsheet, so probably a particularly useful Podsheet to download this week.

Number 1: we're going to start with strengths.  This is all about making sure that once you know what your strengths are, that they show up and stand out really consistently.  We know that when you use your strengths, it has so many advantages.  Firstly, you'll enjoy and have more energy in the work that you do.  The more you use your strengths the stronger they will get, so we don't want our strengths to stand still; our squiggles don't stand still, and we don't want our strengths to stall, we want them to keep growing.  It's also a win for everyone around us, because when we share our strengths with other people, they benefit, they can learn from us, they also get better at those things and it's how teams, I suppose win together.

Three actions for you to do on your strengths: first one, ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn.  I always feel like this is one of the most underused areas of LinkedIn and I think it can be really powerful; especially because we know that it's your weak ties, so those people you don't know as well, but perhaps know of you or perhaps you've known before in jobs you've done in the past.  Those people are really important in terms of spotting new opportunities for you, new possibilities that you can't see for yourself, and I feel like LinkedIn is often a way that that can happen.

If you've got recommendations that do a good job of sharing your strengths on your behalf, I think that's really powerful; partly because sometimes it's easier for other people to share our strengths and shout about our strengths than it is for us to do it ourselves, that can often feel more comfortable; and I think just peer-to-peer recommendations always feel really powerful. 

You can do this in one of two ways, you can either just go to somebody on LinkedIn, who you're already very well connected with, or you've worked with in the past and just say, "I'm just trying to get some recommendations on my LinkedIn profile.  If you have a spare five minutes, can I have one, please?"  Most people will hopefully say yes to that; or you could even frame your request particularly around your strengths, so you could say, "Hi Rachel, I'm sorting my LinkedIn profile, been on my to-do list for a while, I really want to make sure my strengths of problem-solving and visual thinking are a bit more obvious on my profile.  Wondered if you could give me a recommendation about those areas where we've worked together?"

You can help people to make sure that you are building your reputation for those things that you want to be known for, those things you'd like to do more of, the things you want people to say about you when you're not in the room.  So, have you got any recommendations; yes, or no?  If you have, do they do a good job of making sure that your strengths are shining and putting a spotlight on your strengths?

I actually did this last week, had a look and I think one of my strengths about ideas, developing stuff from scratch and thinking creatively really stands out, you're welcome to have a look and see if you agree.  And actually, I think perhaps some of my other strengths don't as much, because I need to ask maybe a wider range of people; some people who have seen me in different contexts, maybe some of the clients that we now work with, so I've got one of those and you'll see my most recent one is one of our clients at Amazing if.  And that's where I think I need to build my profile a bit more, so just have a think; do your strengths stand out on your LinkedIn profile, particularly your recommendations?

Second, get some strengths-based feedback.  Think about when was the last time you asked for or received some strengths-based feedback?  Often, it's not particularly frequent, it's something that we're not brilliant at creating a habit around, so perhaps just think about this week, who are three people that I could go and ask for some strengths-based feedback.  That might sound something like, "Claire, we've been working together on this project for a while now, I'd love to know when do you see me at my best?"  So, you'd go for an "at my best" strengths-based feedback question.

Or you could be even more specific, and you could ask somebody for one bit of feedback, so you could say, "What's the one thing you think I do really well?"  Or, "Where do you think I'm most helpful?"  Or, "Where do you think I add the most value?"  So, you're also making that easier, I think, for people to give you that feedback if you ask for one thing.  You're being very specific, you're saying, "I just want one thing, and I want you to tell me where I'm most useful or most helpful", and that's such good quality feedback because then you can start to see whether are those strengths that you want to stand out; is that the experience that people are having when they work with you; or is there a bit of a gap that you might like to fill? 

We sometimes describe this as the difference between intent and impact and you want those things to be consistent when it comes to your strengths.  You want to know what strengths do you want to be known for, which is your intent; and then you need to know, is that what people are experiencing when they're working with you, and that's the impact that you're having.  So, start asking some of those strengths-based questions.  Maybe just set yourself a goal and think, "This week I'm going to ask three different people, maybe a manager, maybe somebody in a different team, maybe a peer, maybe somebody who works for you".  We can get feedback from all directions and just ask them all exactly the same question, make it really easy to respond and a couple of sentences can be really insightful.

Then the third idea for action on strengths is about stretching your strengths.  So, I mentioned at the start we talked about, you don't want your strengths to stand still; you want them to grow as you grow.  So, think about in the next month, so in the next four weeks, how could you stretch your strengths?  You might do that by using your strengths in a new way, so perhaps thinking about within your team is there an opportunity for you to use your strengths in a new way?  Could you talk to your manager about an opportunity to deputise for them on a particular project? 

At the moment if you are listening to us at the start of August, the likelihood is people are going on holidays and everyone sort of needs to help each other and cover for each other.  You could be really intentional about thinking, "Oh, well I know Helen's off on holiday for these two weeks, I'd really like to give this a go", and actually then being proactive and thinking that's a new way of stretching your strengths, because you're using them in a new situation or a new context.  

Or it could be something much more about your own learning and thinking about curating your own curriculum around your strengths, so is there a course that you could watch on Skillshare that's like three lots of ten minutes and you just think, "For the next four weeks I'm just going to do ten minutes a week on something like Skillshare or LinkedIn Learning to just develop this strength by actually learning from other people".  Often those courses also have communities of people who are learning the same thing as you, so you can choose to do that very much on demand and in your own time, or you could choose to do it as part of a community.

Helen Tupper: Onto values, our suggestion is to spend some time creating either a vision, a mission or a manifesto and let me talk about those briefly; why they're different.  They all help you do the same thing, which is just to get a bit of an insight into what matters most to you, but a slightly different tool to do it.  The vision is visual, so this is about you collecting a series of images that help you to bring to life how you want work to feel. 

I think, whether you start with the visual thing, which is the vision, or a manifesto which is more like a statement of intent about your career and life that you want to lead, or a manifesto which is more like a couple of words or bullet points really, it's almost like the most succinct version of it; all of these things are to help you get a sense for how you want work to feel, and it doesn't have to be how it is right now, you don't really have to analyse that much, this is almost like if I took off the constraints and I cleared my mind, how do I want work to look like, feel like for me.

Don't judge yourself at what images or words or statements that you write down, just start from scratch and from a blank slate and see what this says to you.  I tend to do this with visuals, because I've always got magazines hanging around my house and I just rip out pictures that, I was going to say call to me, but that sounds very dramatic.  Pictures that make me happy, that's what it is.  I look at pictures and I'm like, "Oh I love that".  Normally, it's like smiley people or they're doing exciting things or there's just something in it that I think, "I want work and life to be like that".  So, I find it easier to find lots of pictures, probably because I have them hanging around my house and I just collect them for a week or two and put them into a plastic wallet.  Maybe if you're having a bit of holiday time and you like magazines, maybe you're buying yourself a few more over the summer, you could do that too.

If you scroll social media, if you scroll Instagram or you scroll Pinterest, those are things that you can screen shot as well, you don't have to go retro ripping things out of magazines like me, you can do it digitally as well; but just collect those images somewhere.  Similarly, if you are more of a wordsy kind of person, whether it's quotes or words, but just collect those statements or words that speak to you in some way.  What you're trying to do is just to pull it into something that makes sense, so all those different images, pull them into a collage; all those different words, pull them into maybe a few bullet points that feel meaningful to you.  That's really all you've got to do, to begin with, is just pull that stuff together.

This is so that it can almost give you a bit of a guide to your growth, because what we're looking for you to do is to make decisions and to go forward with actions that feel more like that stuff.  It doesn't have to be a massive plan or any detailed decisions, you're just thinking, "Are the things that I'm doing, are the things that I'm choosing to invest my time in helping me to feel more like that; or does it align with these words and statements that I've written down?"  That's your first reflection point.  But I think the really good thing to do would be, once you've got that together and something that feels meaningful for you, just think about over the next month, maybe over the next two months, what is one thing that you could do differently to feel more like that or to align more with those words.

I tend to always have pictures of smiley people and balloons, which combine to mean energy and freedom to me, and so I might think, "What could I do over the next month to spend some more time with smiley people?"  I'm genuinely doing some of the things that help me to do that, because I've missed it and I feel like I've got more of an opportunity to do it now, so that's the sort of thing that I'm doing off the back of that exercise.  It's fun, there are lots of very detailed values, reflection, activities that you can do and lots of different things that you can read, but this should just feel fun, and it should end up with you creating something that feels like the future that you want at work as well.

Sarah Ellis: Our third area is all about confidence and things that you can do to build your self-belief.  Given the 18 months now that I think most of us listening have had, we are all so much more resilient and adaptable then I think we ever imagined that we could be.  But we rarely take the chance to just pause for thought, press pause, just for a moment to think about what are we proud of?  Given it's the summer or certainly we are recording this ready for the start of August, maybe have a go at creating your own pride postcard.  You don't have to send it to yourself because that might be a bit weird to sort of put it in a post box to come back to you, though you definitely could if you'd like to.

This is an actually an exercise that we've designed for our next book, so I thought we would put it in today's episode.  This idea really is thinking about summarising your reflections on what are you proud of so far this year?  What you could do is you might draw the front of that postcard, so what would that look like?  Maybe it's something to do with your team working together, maybe it's something hard that you've made happen, maybe it's about how you've been able to combine things outside of work with things in work, maybe you've been really great at getting a bit fitter or starting a new hobby, whatever it might be.

Then just write a couple of sentences that sum up your pride postcard, so like, "This year I'm really proud that... ".  What does that sound like for you?  The reason this builds your self-belief is it reminds you of all the things that are going well in every aspect of your life, not just in work; those things that you've worked hard to make happen, that feel really personal to you.  And by writing this down, we know it helps your brain to process those proud moments in a different way.  It forces you to do that press pause, because you're not just sort of thinking about it and moving on quite quickly, you are having to put it into words. 

Perhaps have a go at doing that and/or have a go at doing one week of very small successes.  So, you might have heard us talk about this before, this is one of my favourite exercises to do, particularly actually when I'm struggling with my self-belief.  I come back to this exercise every time I'm having a tough day or a tough week or even a tough month, but I think this can work at any point during your year.

The idea here is at the end of every day, write down one, or you could even challenge yourself to say write down two or three, very small successes you've had that day.  Again, it can be from any part of your life, so it could be that you've taken ten minutes to go for a walk at lunchtime, it could be that you've listened to a new podcast, it might be that you've finished a presentation that you've been procrastinating over, whatever those very small successes are for you.

The important thing is that you follow what we call the three Rs.  That you recognise those very small successes, that you record them and then you reflect on them; and that record again, talking about writing things, down is really important.  You can record them in the notes section of your phone, you could put them in your notebook, you could type them into a Word document if you'd like.  Wherever you want to put them is fine, but put them in the same place, because that way it encourages us to reflect every day on the positive progress that we're making, it's those small little rewards that just give us that momentum that sometimes we need to then keep going.

I sometimes call it like a success snowball effect.  Once you start to see your successes, you notice them easier, they're more top of mind, they're more front of mind for you.  Sometimes when we ask this question in workshops, you know, "Share one very small success from the last week", so not even from today, people find it really, really hard to get started, not because they've not had successes because they've all had loads of them, but because it's not front of mind.  We're so busy on our to do lists and our tasks, this is stored away somewhere, so we have to create this moment and this way of making them be a priority; something that we continually think about. 

Then I think once you start to do this, the noticing gets so much easier and then you often start to realise you have way more than one very small success every day.  It just gives us that boost in optimism, so our mindset; and a boost in terms of our skillset that we are doing good stuff every day, even when things feel really hard.  So, I love that exercise.  So, whether you are feeling like you're flying or whether it feels like you're having kind of a bit of a tough time, either way I think this exercise could be really powerful.

Helen Tupper: Now, I don't think we probably need more ideas for action in this Podcast, but I've got another one inspired by what you just said there.  I know I'm squeezing it in into the building your self‑belief.  This is a how you can pre-build your belief; it's sparked by something that you said about the letter to yourself.  What you could do this summer is set yourself up with some messages to your future self.  So, if you know what you've got coming up over the next couple of months, you might want to send yourself a few words of encouragement. 

If you don't fancy doing that on a pride postcard literally through the post, there is an app called Memories.co.uk so go there, you can get it for Apple or Android.  You can send yourself either a text message or an email encouraging you or reminding you about something to encourage yourself, and no one else has to see that stuff, but maybe it might just make you feel really good about what you're achieving and doing; so maybe try that out as well.

Our fourth area is really all around your network, which we call people helping people.  The idea here is for you to use this time to grow your giving.  Givers get more back, so when you start to think about, "How can I invest in my network and how can I have meaningful relationships at work?" your starting point is, "What can I give to other people and how can I help other people?"  Not only is that a great starting point for investing in a relationship but it actually results in you getting more back over the long run too, so givers get more.  What we want you to do is to grow your giving.

One of the ways that you can do this is to think about three people that you can help either with their day-to-day work, so maybe to increase their impact or maybe just make their life a bit easier, or if it's not their day-to-day work, maybe it's about their development; and we really like the idea of the five-minute favour.  Like a quick meaningful thing that you can do, this does not have to be a really long intensive commitment of your time.  In fact, if you can find five-minute favours to help people, even better because then maybe you can help more than three people.

Some examples of what this could look like are, maybe you're the person who gives strengths-based feedback to somebody, without them even asking for it.  When Sarah talked about strengths at the start, maybe you can go to somebody and say, "Do you know what, I really saw you at your best last week when you were in that presentation, and you answered everyone's questions really thoughtfully and you made sure that everyone felt included.  I thought it was brilliant".  That would be a five-minute favour and a really meaningful way of giving someone feedback.

Maybe you could offer to mentor somebody, you recognise maybe they've just joined the organisation and they've joined remotely, and you've been there a while.  Maybe you could offer to be their new join buddy to help them onboard into the business.  You could be a connector, that's quite a quick five-minute favour actually, where you might spot somebody has maybe something they're working on, and you know somebody else who's done something similar, and you could connect them and introduce them.  You could do that over email or something like LinkedIn. 

Or maybe you could be a sponsor, an advocate for someone's work, so that would be where you proactively promote the work that someone is doing, because you want other people to know about it or benefit from it; and that could be again in conversation with some of your colleagues at work.  It could be on social media, like you might say, "I've read this book and I thought it was brilliant and I want other people to know about it"  or, "I've read this article that someone's written, and I think it would really help you all if you read it too", that sort of thing.  It doesn't have to take a long time, but these things make a really positive difference to people, and they also keep you in their mind.

The last thing that you could do is offer maybe your time or skills in support of something that someone's trying to achieve.  Let's say someone's trying to get a project off the ground or maybe it's something outside of work and you say, "Oh, I've built a website before, maybe I could help you with that", or, "Really think what you're doing is great, if I can offer you a couple of hours a week over the next month to help you, I'd love to do that".  That's the sort of things that we're talking about.

Sarah Ellis: Then the last of the five skills which you might be listening thinking, "My list is already way too long", but pick and choose the ones that feel most useful for you, is all about exploring your future possibilities.  When we talk about this idea of future possibilities, this is not about having a five-year plan, this is not about applying for your next job right here, right now, though of course that might be something you're thinking about. 

Really what we're talking about here is how do you get really curious and continually explore the different options, the different possibilities that might be interesting for you in your career, knowing that we're all going to be working for a long time, we're going to have four or five different types of career?  Our squiggles are going to go in all sorts of different directions that we probably can't predict right now, so we want to take control of that.  We want to feel like we're being an active part of that, I think. 

Certainly, if you're like me and I'm someone who, despite obviously talking a lot about Squiggly Careers, I'm still someone who absolutely loves to plan, and I really like to think things through and I'm very future orientated; but I've definitely recognised that you've got to let go of this idea of thinking, "I can have a five-year plan that's all about steps and certain things happening at certain points, progression only meaning promotion", that ladder like language that many of us have got really used to in our careers, and we've got to replace that with this idea of thinking much more about exploring and curiosity and possibilities.

Helen and I are both going to share one idea here, which I suspect particularly sums up the differences in our personality with the two different actions that we've both chosen.  Mine is about thinking ahead to the future, having just said that I was very future orientated and asking yourself a coach yourself question, so this about a reflection for you.  Thinking about as you listen to this here today, depending on when you are listening but hopefully this will still feel relevant, ask yourself a coach-yourself question along the lines of, "What one thing do you want to be true about your work by January 2022?" 

This could be a continuation of something that's already happening, so you go, "I'm really proud that I've got to this point, and I want to keep that momentum going".  Perhaps it's incremental change so something quite small that you'd like to change but perhaps hasn't quite happened yet, or perhaps it's something bigger, a bit more of a significant change that you want to make some progress on, but I would really encourage you to do the one thing.

When I ask other people this question in coaching sessions, the temptation here I think is to start with one thing and add and add and add and add, because of course there'll be more than one thing that you would like to make happen between now and January 2022, which is let's say five months or so away.  Of course you will achieve more than one thing during that period of time.  What we're really trying to encourage you to do with this coach-yourself question is to prioritise and to focus in terms of, "What's the most important thing for you that you really want to make happen?" because then I think when we have that clarity of thinking, we can then work out what's the so what.

If that's the one thing that you want to be true, well are you building the right connections; are you doing the right learning; are you prioritising the right things?  By doing the one thing, I think it forces you to think about some of those trade-offs and to ask yourself sometimes some hard additional questions, probably about how you're spending your time.  Usually I often think a bit about your time, what you're saying yes to, what you're saying no to.  So, it's a coach-yourself question that will inevitably lead to more questions if you're like me and you just keeping thing and keep thinking. 

But what I hope is it also gets you to doing, not only to self-awareness, but it also gets you to action, because that awareness of the thing that you want to be true should then prompt you to action of going, "Well, how can you take control of making that one thing happen?"

Helen Tupper: What's Sarah's then shared there is like a thing that you will do on your own, that reflection and what could I do differently; that's a you on your own, maybe with a notebook and pen if you're so inclined to thinking that way.  Mine is about you with somebody else, and this idea is all about you having a curious career conversation with somebody whose role you're intrigued by.

Over the next couple of weeks, maybe people have a little bit more space in their diary, because people are going on holiday and hopefully people might be taking a little bit of a breather over the summer.  I appreciate that's not the same in every industry and organisation, but maybe you can spot one of those people that might have a bit more time over the next few weeks whose role you might find really interesting, and you're intrigued by.  It doesn't have to be a role that you want to do, it's just a role that you're just interested to find out a little bit more about. 

Get in touch with that person, it might be reconnecting, it might be connecting for the first time, but just to find out a little bit more about what they do.  You can say, "I'm thinking about my career, I'm trying to understand a little bit more about other people's careers, what they do, the skills that they need, and I'd love to talk to you, if you could spare half an hour with me".  That's your intro to getting a curious career conversation going.

Then when you're in the conversation, if you have a moment of panic and think, "What do I talk about now, Helen and Sarah, give me some thoughts about what I should talk about in this curious career conversation?" three things that are useful to explore in a curious career conversation.  The first thing which is quite an easy opener, is some idea of a day in their life.  People often quite like talking about their careers and their work, so this feels like quite an easy thing for them to respond to.  I always think the interesting thing is challenging your own assumptions about what you think a certain job is or where a certain place in your mind, what it might be like to work there, what the reality is like.

I might say to Sarah, "Sarah, you work in your own business, Amazing if, I'm sure you're doing quite a few different things; I'd love to know what an average day in the life for you might be".  Sarah might laugh and say, "Well, there's absolutely no average day in the life, because I do a bit of everything and it's all very different".  That might just start us off down a different conversation about, "What are those different things; and what do you really like doing; and how did you learn about those things?"  With curious questions, you can go down lots of unpredictable routes in a conversation, which is sort of why they're so fun, I think.

Two other areas that you can explore in a curious career conversation: the second might be getting some kind of sense of fit for you.  Maybe this is an area that you are intrigued by, because it's something that you might want to explore further in the future.  What you really want to understand if that's the case is whether this is a good fit for your strengths and your values; the things you want you be known for and the things that make you you.  What you might want to do there is have some really open questions that are connected to those things for you.

For example, I mentioned earlier two of my values are freedom and energy.  If I was having a curious career conversation with Sarah and I didn't know and work with her, I might say, "Sarah, can you tell me what the energy's like working for Amazing if for you?"  Or I might say, "How much freedom do you find you have in being a co-founder of a company?"  That would give me some insight in her responses as to whether this could be a good fit for me in the future, because what we want you to do is to have possibilities that you're exploring that have a high level of fit for your strengths and your values, because they're basically more likely to make you happy and more likely to be a place and a role where you can be at your best.

The third area that you might want to explore is all around your future development.  If this was something that you did want to keep exploring and keep staying curious about, you might want to understand whether there are any expertise or experiences that you could get now that would make this possibility more of a probability for you in the future. 

So I might say to Sarah, "Are there any skills that you have found particularly useful for the role that you do today that you would recommend that I started to invest in now, so that this could be something that I could pursue in the future?"  Sarah might say, "Relationship building's really good", or, "Having a network of people who do a role like this has been really important for my support system"; whatever she would say, but they would become things that I could proactively invest in so that when I do make moves into this area in the future, I've already got that network or those skills or that expertise to help you transition.

Sarah Ellis: One thing just to build on Helen's curious career conversation, because we got asked this in our Instagram Live when we were running the Squiggly Career Summer School and I thought it was a really good question, is this can feel quite intimidating.  To approach someone for these kinds of conversations, particularly perhaps if you're not more extroverted, it can feel like a really big ask and perhaps it's an insurmountable ask.  You are just listening and you're thinking, "I would just never do that", or, "I would just find that really difficult". 

Another way of approaching this where you get some of the same insights is to think about, what curious career communities could you join rather than maybe one-to-one conversations.  So, are there networks and by network, I mean it could of 4 people or it could be 400, but are there places that you could go and prioritise spending some time that are communities that are around a future that you're interested in?  So, if you were interested in a certain type of journalism, or if you were interested in moving into food retail, whatever it might be, or you were interested in moving into the charity sector.  As soon as you spend a bit of time doing some searching and some Googling, there is very few areas I think where you can't find an open community that you could become part of. 

It might feel a bit more passive initially but then as you learn more about that community you can often spot those opportunities to be really curious about what does it feel like to be living and breathing that world.  That can be a way of inching closer to understanding that possibility, whereas I do think a curious career conversation you will get deeper insights quicker.  So, if you can do that, I think that's always where I would start and if you can ask someone for an introduction that often makes things easier to get started; but if you're feeling like that feels maybe just too big a leap because it's so far from where you are today or just hard for you personally, maybe have a look at curious career communities as well as conversations.

Helen Tupper: If you would like one more thing to help you with your development and you can find your way through, we're laughing because it's if you want one more thing and another thing, in addition to our 200-plus episodes of the podcast that you can listen to on the beach, we created the Squiggly Career Knowledge Navigator and it starts off with a question, "How are you feeling at work right now?"  There's a few different options for that, and then it leads you through to a different set of resources that we have created and shared to help you; so whether it's an article we've written or a toolkit we've located or a podcast episode we think might help you, it's a bit of shortcut for your career knowledge.  What we will do is we will link to that on Amazingif.com with this podcast episode post and I'll also put that again in the resources that are linked on the show notes for this episode, so hopefully you can find it.

If you can't find anything we've mentioned you can always email us, that's sometimes the easiest route.  We're just Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com and we'll always send you the links that way too.

Sarah Ellis: We'd also love your feedback, so one of our values at Amazing if is "useful", which might not sound very glamorous, but it's very important to us that we're creating useful career content for you.  So, if there are topics that we've not covered, if there are things that we could create that you would find really helpful, always please get in touch with us, either email us or DM us on Instagram, because lots of the ideas and things that we do end up doing, even if we don't do them right at that moment, often do come from our listeners. 

Please always let us know what you need because that's what we're here to do, that's how we fulfil our purpose on making careers better for everyone, so we love to hear from you, and we always do our best to help.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening today and we will both be back very soon, bye everyone.

Sarah Ellis: Bye everyone.