Timestamps

00:00:00: TEDx elite
00:02:21: How to view success
00:04:12: Instagram community definition of success
00:05:47: Visible or invisible success
00:07:37: Sarah's success word
00:09:16: Ideas for action: reframe
00:12:54: The energy is in doing it
00:15:52: Ideas for action: vision boards
00:18:17: Quotes that define success
00:18:49: A team exercise using objects
00:21:46: Idea for action: circumference of success
00:25:34: Reflections
00:29:31: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen Tupper.

Sarah Ellis: This is the Squiggly Careers Podcast, where every week we talk about all topics to do with work, in the hope that we can help you navigate your Squiggly Career just that little bit more successfully.

Our topic this week has been inspired by our TEDx talk partly because we're really excited that it's now featured on TED.com.

Helen Tupper: Yay.

Sarah Ellis: That probably doesn't feel like a big deal for everyone else.  They were like, "We already know you'd got a TED talk", but for us that just makes it a bit easier for us to share and obviously then you're in some incredible elite good company, in terms of some of the other people who have done TED talks.  Alongside some of our heroes like Adam Grant and Brené Brown and Carol Dweck, maybe they'll be friends with us now, you never know.

Helen Tupper: Just on that point, we were doing PodPlus last week and Sarah was talking about radical candor and I was chatting to everybody on PodPlus in the chat and someone said that that'd be like the best ever rock band.  There was like Brené Brown and Simon Sinek and I was thinking, "Yes, I want to go to that concert, that would be amazing".

Sarah Ellis: I've got images of like Seth Godin on bass guitar.

Helen Tupper: Can you imagine?  What are we doing?  I think we're just like groupies, right?

Sarah Ellis: Yes, at the front, being like, "We love you".

Helen Tupper: "Let us be in your band".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, proper groupies.  The other thing that we've discovered which is brilliant if you don't already listen to it is there is a daily TED talk podcast, and on that podcast, you can hear our full talk, so if you're going for a walk and that's a much better way to listen, definitely try that out.  It came out on 18 May and it's just great to listen to in terms of extra inspiration; so wherever you listen to us, at the moment, you can download that podcast too.  Perhaps give that a go and let us know what you listen to that really inspires you.

One of the favourites, if that's the right word, things that we said in our TEDx talk is in Squiggly Careers, there is no one size fits all version of success.  Success is as individual as you are and that's really inspired us for today's podcast episode, because we thought we wanted to delve into this idea of success a bit more.  I remember earlier this year talking to Cath Bishop the ex-Olympic rower, diplomat, she wrote a brilliant book called The Long Win and she talked to me a bit about success and it's something that she's thought about a lot.  That's a brilliant accompanying sort of twin episode to this, if this is handy for you.

We just thought we wanted to think a bit more about what does success mean.  Now that we're encouraging everybody to let go of the ladder, to really embrace these Squiggly Careers, how do we view success in a way that is useful and helpful to keep us motivated, give us momentum.

Helen Tupper: I guess the context is that success in a Squiggly Career is different to what success meant when you were climbing the ladder, which really meant that there was only one version of success which was progressively getting more senior; and you marked that success with a series of statuses and symbols, like job titles getting more senior or salary upgrades.

Sarah Ellis: Stuff, more stuff.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, that stuff.  Do you know I collected those things, I really cared about the grades and I knew how that worked in an organisation, but I don't think it made me happy, it was just sort of like these external symbols of success and that was all that was readily available I think as well.  Those were readily available symbols of success in an organisational context, but when we think about Squiggly Careers, it's like much more nuanced, because you can develop in different directions, and we know that success doesn't mean the same for everybody.  I say how we know that, because we asked our Instagram community and lots of other people, but unfortunately when I googled, "What is a definition of success?"  The Oxford English Dictionary, no shade on that, but when I googled, "What does success mean?" it said their definition of success is, "The fact that you achieved something that you want and have been trying to do or get", which I was nodding along to.  I was like, "Yes, it think that's it". 

The second part of it is, "And success is the fact of becoming rich or famous or of getting a high social position".  I thought, "That's the ladder!"  The Oxford English dictionary definition of success is basically still what success looked like when we were climbing ladders not succeeding in a Squiggly Career.  I actually think our Instagram community, I much prefer their definition.

Sarah Ellis: Did a much better job, yeah.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, so we asked them, "What do you think success is in one word; what would you say it was?"  The top word was fulfilment but then also autonomy; living my values, I know that's not one word; being valued, I thought that was quite interesting; growth; enjoyment; learning; impact; nobody said, "salary".

Sarah Ellis: Famous.

Helen Tupper: No one said, "Getting famous, becoming rich or having a high social position", nobody said that, and I think that's really interesting.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I guess that's a good question I think to ask yourself, if you were kind of going, "What does success -- how would you sum up success in one word; what would your answer to that be?"  I was also reflecting there as I was listening, the thing I don't want to ignore is, this is probably for a position of privilege, right.  So, I think there is a point of going, "Well, actually --" and probably particularly earlier in your career maybe, there is a level of success that you want to reach because you want to make sure you do have enough money, that you are in a position where you're not having to kind of worry about some of those more basic needs that help us to live day in, day out.

There may be successes; then it's not about seniority, maybe it's about security or stability and that's what that's about.  Because I was just thinking, it's a privilege isn't it to go, "Well, your success is about learning or about growth", and I think that that's brilliant, that's kind of what we would want from people; but not underestimating that sometimes though I think also your success can change over time.

Helen Tupper: Agree.

Sarah Ellis: So, at different points in your career, it might look and feel really different.  The other thing I was thinking is it's interesting like what's visible in terms of success, like what we can see?  Often, we get quite worried, I think, about visible signs of success, those symbols which are obvious to other people ie like if it was more about where you are in an organisation or hierarchy, that's something that other people can see. 

That's when you'd fall into all those kind of traps that get in our way like comparing yourselves to others, or even this I think can affect things like your confidence gremlins because you think, "Well, they are more successful than me, because they're in a box that's higher up on a diagram", versus thinking if you think about what our Instagram community said, they're things that you can't necessarily see from the outside, they're kind of very internal things, they're much more intrinsic symbols of success.

So, I was starting to come up with -- it started to feel a bit like a magazine quiz to be honest, by the end.  I was going, "This is like the alternative success quiz", it was like, "Right, okay so are you living your values?  Does your life feel purposeful?  Does your time at work feel like time well spent?  Do you feel like you're making a positive difference to other people from the work that you do?"  I guess this is perhaps whether you're thinking about success generally or maybe success in a kind of smaller context in terms of work, those questions might change slightly.

It is really interesting, and I do think, especially if you have grown up with one version of success that you thought you were aspiring to and I definitely had that in mind, I definitely got like a job title that I thought the classic, "Where do you want to be in five years' time?" that interview question that I want everybody to stop asking.  I am sure I was really clear about going, "Oh for me it's all about getting to this level and this job title".  Then suddenly redefining and reframing that, it can feel quite uncomfortable.  I do think this is quite an uncomfortable process that takes quite a lot of confidence.

Helen Tupper: Questions for you, I'm going to put you on the success spot, this is something we've not talked about.  The one-word thing, the, "What does success mean to you now in one word?", what would your one word be?

Sarah Ellis: Probably "learning".  I think learning was the first thing, so if we were doing rapid response answers.

Helen Tupper: Yeah.

Sarah Ellis: Learning was where I went first.

Helen Tupper: Second question for you, how different would that be for what you think that one word would have been ten years ago?

Sarah Ellis: Pretty different, I think ten years ago, God, I'm getting a bit old now, ten years ago I was still quite old.  Maybe 15 years ago in particular, 15 years ago it would have been "progression" probably; not just promotion but like progression, something much more ladder-like and staircase-like in terms of the language that I would have used.

I was then thinking, there are some things though that have stayed the same because my number one value is achievement, and it was my number one value 15 years ago and it's my number one value today and I am very achievement-orientated.  I think actually the difference is I've redefined what achievement means for me.  So that I think has stayed the same in terms of the word but what that word means, how that shows up, whether I'm kind of living that value looks and feels very different.

Helen Tupper: The reason I was probably asking, if success is going to be as individual as you are, there is no one size fits all version of success, I think it's useful to go with that rapid response, like, "What's my first instinct?", like mine would be, "impact", but then also think, "Well how has that changed over time?  What's consistent?  What's evolved?"  I just think it's useful insight as you start to think about this going forward as well.

Sarah Ellis: Right, so let's start to think now about ideas for action.  If you want to do some reflection on what success means to you, perhaps, what do you assume it means?  Just really kind of start to explore this for yourself, kind of increase your awareness and then work out what actions you might take, kind of how do you do that?

I think the first thing to think about is just reframing how we think about success from something that is black and white so, "I either succeed or I fail", to shades of grey.  And from a point in the future, like, "I'll be successful when", to actually, "What does success look and feel like for you in the here and now?"  I think there's some good reasons why we need to reframe our thinking in this way.  

I think if it is very binary, as in I'm either successful or I'm not, we lose so much opportunity for learning.  Actually, in hardly anything that we do, even if sometimes it does feel quite binary, either got the job or I didn't get the job, that feels quite like a win or lose outcome.  I still think there is lots that we can learn from say that process of going for promotion that you weren't successful in.  You probably had some successes along the way, perhaps you built some new relationships, perhaps you got to the final stage of that interview process; perhaps you sorted out your CV and your LinkedIn profile as a result.

So, sometimes I think if we see things as very black and white, we miss all of the small successes that are part of the process and we just see the success as being tied to the outcome.  I think that then we limit our learning and also, we are vulnerable to -- sometimes we're not in full control of that success and that failure.  We don't know who else has gone for that promotion and that job.  That promotion might disappear, that role might change; and so, if our motivation and our meaning is so tied to that outcome that we're chasing, you can end up feeling really disheartened and kind of disappointed.

The other thing and if you are like me, this is the harder of the two I think, I am really future-orientated and that can be quite useful when you're thinking about where you might want to go and for setting goals and plans; but I think you've got to be careful not to kind of fall into that trap of going, "I'll be successful when…", or sometimes the, "I'll be happy when I get to a certain level or I achieve a certain thing". 

Actually quite a few people gave this advice in the career advice section of the Squiggly Career book that we did.  Lots of people talked about you've got to find joy in the doing, in the present, because the success and the kind of satisfaction that you feel when you get to that moment, even if you've been successful, is actually really fleeting.

So, for someone like me, I am really motivated by outcomes because I'm really achievement-orientated, but I've actually seen that time and time again that actually all of the satisfaction, all of those are kind of moments of feeling really good, come from the doing, come from the making progress.  When we were writing our second book, I had like traffic lights that I filled in green each time we did a chapter; it comes from that.  Actually, I think I felt more success at the end of a week where I had turned one of these traffic lights on a whiteboard in my lounge green, than I did when we'd finished writing it as a whole.

So that again is just about changing our mindset towards what does it mean, what does it look like when we're kind of saying, "Oh!  This is a success", and to try and see all of those mini moments of success along the way, I guess.

Helen Tupper: It's so interesting, I remember a coaching session that I had years ago now, when I was studying at Cass Business School and I was studying a Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership.  I remember in the coaching session for some reason we were talking about -- I think I was fixating on the completion of the course, like when was it going to be completed and like --

Sarah Ellis: Been there, been there.

Helen Tupper: "I'll have a Masters then", and whatever I was saying, and I remember the coach gave me a little bit of a provocation around energy.  He said something along the lines of, or the thing that has stuck with me was like, "Helen the energy is in doing it.  Like once you've done, you've moved on, that moment's gone; the energy's in doing it and you're missing out on other energy".

It just resonates with what you're saying there that if I was so fixated on the completion of the course and getting my qualification, the energy and the success in meeting new people and learning new programmes and in every single assignment, I was just like missing all of that.  I'd just gone to the finish line and missed the opportunity to think about the good stuff.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it's so interesting.  I reckon I could divide like some of the learning experiences I have into a table where one was about tick-box learning, where I sort of had exactly the wrong attitude and I was sort of doing it to tick a box or because I thought I should because I felt like it was the right thing to do; and then those learning experiences I've had where I've actually been in it to really learn and it wasn't about the certificate or the tick in the box. 

What is so interesting is it's those learning experiences where you're still connected to them six years later, where you build your networks that really last and that support you in your careers, where you still remember and you use those things that you've kind of learned.

So, it's funny isn't it because it can feel counterintuitive because it slows you down or it feels counterintuitive to me; my natural inclination is about the next thing rather than the now. This is where I think if you are like that, actually having a bit of perspective can be really useful, I've found, remembering that this is only one year in a 45-year career; or remembering that if you're going to do something and it takes two years and you thought it was only going to take one, like in the scheme of things that doesn't really matter. 

So, I think what I've actually found probably in the past five years in particular, I'm more intentionally now slowing myself down because I actually think I will be more successful as a result of that.  That is only because I've done some of this reframing.

Helen Tupper: Perhaps as well just introducing a bit more reflection on the very small successes.  So, if you find that your mind does leap to the, "I'll be successful when I get promoted, I'll be successful when I've finished the course", all those sorts of things, then maybe thinking about, "Well, how have I been successful today?" and trying to create more of a habit of reflecting on the here and now or what success means to me and how it's shown up this week, might just be a way that you could start to build that kind of proximity and presence to where you are at the moment, if that might help for you.

Another thing that can be good so that you can get to know your individual version of success is to create some kind of what we call a Squiggly Career success statement and that implies that it's words and it doesn't have to be.  When I've done this before, and we've talked before about the value of vision boards, I remember it was a definite point in my career where I was thinking that the job that I'd got myself to externally looks quite successful, because I'd been promoted and I was doing well; but I didn't really feel like I was successful myself, because I wasn't happy and fulfilled and lots of the words that we shared from our Instagram community didn't reflect how I was feeling.

I couldn't have said my Squiggly Career success statement out loud; I didn't have the words, I wasn't articulate enough to share that.  But what I could do was I could see it in my mind, I knew what it might feel like and so what I did to get to my individual version of success was I just collected loads of images.  I spent like a good couple of weeks ripping out any image that for me had some kind of emotion attached to it that I was like, "Yes, that is what I want it to be like.  I want it to have…" 

I remember having this really clean house.  I remember it's random, I think it was like a picture from a White Company catalogue, or something like that.  But I was like, "Yes, success to me means a house where everything's in order and I feel like I've got time to make it clean".

Sarah Ellis: You would not like my environment right now, Helen.

Helen Tupper: I mean I don't like my own, Sarah.  It doesn't look like that, I've got kids' rubbish everywhere, but the point is you don't really think about it too much.  I mean I probably don't really want a white house to be honest, but there was something in that picture that spoke to me I think, and it was about like clarity and control or something like that, that I really wanted that I obviously didn't feel like I had at the time.  I ended up with a piece of A4 that had lots of images that I was like, "That is what I think success looks and feels like for me".  I was like, "That's what's on those pictures".  From that I actually was able to get to some words, but the pictures were my starting place.

Last year, last summer we had the Squiggly Career Summer School, I don't know if we'll do that again this year, but we did it last year and it was --

Sarah Ellis: I don't know, we should probably talk about that.

Helen Tupper: We should probably talk about that, probably not.  Let us know everyone if you're interested in a Squiggly Career Summer School because we haven't decided if we're doing it again yet, but we did it last year.  I think we had 100 people on it and one of the exercises in that summer school was to create some version of a Squiggly Career success statement, and we had all kinds of things.  Some people did pictures like me, some people drew their own pictures, some people had a collection of words.  Some people just had a quote, like a quote, they were like, "That sums it up".

I was looking at some quotes actually and there's a lovely from Maya Angelou that said, "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it".  Again, none of that's about becoming rich or whatever the social position things are, but it could just be someone else's statement that feels like success to you, but that I think can give you a sense of clarity and you can find your way through to something that feels unique and meaningful to you.  I definitely think it's time well spent doing that.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things you could do, depending on your team and the culture of where you work, is if you're going to create something like this, this would be a great thing to share as a team.  I think if somebody talks to you about their Squiggly Career success statement, so whether people bring along -- you could even bring along an object. 

This would be a great team exercise at a moment where I sense quite a few teams could do with that, thinking about how you're going to come back together in this kind of new hybrid world of work, if you all brought along one object that kind of represented your Squiggly Career success statement or your career success statement.  Bring that object, a bit like show and tell, and then just talk about it, for like a minute; like what does success mean to you?  I think it would be so surprising and --

Helen Tupper: It'd be so fun.  I want to do that exercise.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and also, it's just really interesting to see, I think people would come at it from really different directions.  I think you would learn a lot about people in a really short space of time and also then just build better relationships.  So, even if you did that in a team of two or three, I think that could be really fun.

Helen Tupper: I really want to know what object you'd bring.  I think I'd bring some kind of plant that I'd take from my house that was growing, not one of the one's that's dying because I've forgotten to water it, and I'd attach little things off the plant, like little things that I was growing; so I'd probably have a little picture of my children and then maybe a picture of our next book and success would mean for me that we're constantly new shoots; that's what I'd bring.

Sarah Ellis: That's so cute, I love the fact you've already just like, "I know exactly what I would do".  I think I might bring a cup or a collection of cups.

Helen Tupper: Go on.

Sarah Ellis: Cups have played quite an important role at certain moments in my career, some of you might have heard Helen and I tell this story before, but when we met at university, one of the things that we had to do in our weird and wonderful degree --

Helen Tupper: I know where she's going.

Sarah Ellis: -- we had to create a business, a start-up business as part of our degree.  It was awful, it was like an early version of The Apprentice; Helen loved it.  I think she might have been in charge if I remember rightly, and our brilliant brainwave was to create a cup company.  I mean, oh so rubbish.  These cups had lizards on; I think the lizards might have been my idea, but I don't know why.  I don't know why they had lizards on.

Helen Tupper: Probably from Clipart at the time.

Sarah Ellis: Probably, yeah, and also, we were rubbish at operations, so these cups were phenomenally expensive, and we had to sell them to our parents basically.  But there have been, bizarrely, a few moments were I have got or been given a cup that had felt really important as part of my career.  We got a cup from Abbey Road Studios, didn't we, when we did our TED talk?

Helen Tupper: We did.

Sarah Ellis: You bought me a cup last year that was very meaningful for me.  I've got a cup with our Squiggly Career mural on, from our first book launch.

Helen Tupper: What's the next cup?

Sarah Ellis: So, I think I'd bring a collection of cups, which I do realise doesn't really talk about the rest of my life that much, but that's just where my head went to first.  I'll obviously think about -- you were like, "I'm going to put my kids on there", and I was like, "I've not really got any cups that represent that bit".

Helen Tupper: Yet.

Sarah Ellis: Yet; I will sort that bit out before we do that team exercise.

Our third idea for action is thinking a bit about your circumference of success.  Now, when Helen suggested this name, I did say "circumferences" make me think of maths which brings back some quite bad memories, but hopefully it will make sense as a reference as we describe it.

Actually, most of our conversation today, when we think about success we get very "I" focused and we really focus on what matters to us and what is important to us and what's motivating and meaningful, and that's all really important.  What we know actually is that when we think about success collectively, actually that's where we often find a lot of our meaning and purpose, and if we not only think about this for ourselves but also think about how can we be successful; how can I be successful with other people; that actually potentially gives us even more opportunity for shared success and actually a heightened sense of being successful.

I think there's two lenses that you can look at this through: first of all thinking about all the different places where you can perhaps help other people to be successful.  You can help your team, you could perhaps help other parts of your organisation, you could perhaps help networks within your organisation.  How could you help your industry?  Where could you volunteer?  What projects could you be part of?  Just thinking about all of those places where there's opportunities to be successful. 

Sometimes I think as well being realistic and thinking back to my own career, sometimes if perhaps we feel, where we are today in our day jobs perhaps isn't giving us some of the success that's important to us, some of those other places can really help with that.  It's basically other sources of success which I think is really nice, and that's where the circumference comes.  Think about how you can make your circumference as big as possible in kind of all the different places that you could spend time. 

Then I think it's just thinking also about this transition from kind of "I" thinking to "we" thinking; so rather than just thinking, "My own success statement", you could do that exercise that we have just talked about and you could do that together.  You could do that together with the people that you run your business with, the people in your team and thinking about back to the first point that we talked about in terms of seeing all your very small successes, not only for yourself but how are you going to do that as a team?

This idea of how do you make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts?  So, rather than all thinking about how do we all individually be successful; well how could we work together and all bring our brilliant best selves so that actually we could have even more success as a collective, making that whole bigger than the sum of the parts.

Helen Tupper: I think if I sat down with you, and I drew my circumference, so I was like, "Okay, me in the middle, what success means to me?"  One word at the moment's "impact" and maybe we talked about that a little bit more, and I drew some rings, and I was like, "I think this is the impact I make; impact I help other people make; the impact I help the business make", for example; I think you might be able to increase my circumference because you might say, "Oh, but Helen, you also do this.  This is also an impactful thing that you do", that I might not realise, but you also might be able to help me identify other ways.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

Helen Tupper: "Okay, Helen, so success for you is about impact and particularly in the context of people's careers.  What about this or could you do this?"  You would only get to that by sharing that with other people and I think that's such a great opportunity to have a conversation about success, because I think sometimes people think success is about like -- it sounds a bit arrogant doesn't it, talk about what does success to me; but actually, if we had those sorts of tools, I think it could be really collaborative and meaningful.  And actually, what we could do is support each other with success in a really honest and authentic way and it not sound or feel like an arrogant conversation.

Perhaps to close I think both for Sarah and I this topic, it kind of provoked thinking, inevitably, about our own success and what success means to us.  I hope it provokes the same thing to you and I've got a Post-it note in front of me and I was like, "If I was going to articulate this, if Sarah put me on the success spot, what would I answer?"

Sarah Ellis: Which obviously I wouldn't do because that would be very unfair.

Helen Tupper: Obviously, haven't done that to her.

Sarah Ellis: I'm joking.

Helen Tupper: I have done it to myself, so I thought I think to me success at the moment for me is all about like how big my ripples are and I thought, "Well if that's what success means to me, then how do I support myself to make bigger ripples?"  I ended up actually getting to quite a lot of clarity and I was like, "Okay, okay". 

I took this analogy quite far, I was like, "Well, to make my ripples big I've got to be able to throw a pebble in, so I need to make sure I've got lots of energy.  Then I need to make sure that my ripples are really defined, so I need to have a real clear message about how I, kind of, for example help people with their career.  Then I need to think about the reach of my ripples and how they help and connect with other people's ripples".

Basically, that might mean nothing to you, but for me, just working through some of the things that we've talked about ended up giving me a bit more clarity about what success means to me right now and what I need to do to increase that sense of success.  It worked for me as a process, Sarah, what are your reflections having talked through this and thought about it for a week?

Sarah Ellis: Well I think, actually, not even just over the last week but over the last year, the thing that I keep coming back to is -- because I spent a lot of time thinking about my values, and I know my values really well; rather than thinking, "Oh I know my values now", and sort of putting them in a virtual draw, I do come back to those values pretty frequently, at least monthly if not more often and just think about if I was to score myself zero to ten on each of my four values, which are achievement ideas, learning and variety, where am I am zero to ten?  Why is that and what might I do to increase that number by one; from a seven to an eight, from a six to a seven?

It's never about beating myself up.  Sometimes I've found it really helpful just to understand how I'm feeling, so there have definitely been times over the last year where I just haven't felt successful, or I haven't felt like things are going that well for whatever reason.  Then when I think to my values I go, "Okay, that helps me to understand why".  Sometimes that's okay, that's literally as far as you get and you think, "Well, I understand why there's maybe some things that I can't control, some things I can't do that much about right now", and that's okay and you just feel more comfortable kind of living with that sense of going, "I'm perhaps not quite where I would like to be".

Also, then it does prompt positive action, it helps you to think, "Okay, what are the small things" and I think in particular over the last year it has had to be quite small things, you know, what are some of the small actions that I can take that just give me a little bit more of that in my life; that little bit more of what I view as success in my day-to-day?  When it comes to things like variety, obviously a lot of our variety has been taken away, so I have had to work sometimes really hard to just inject that bit of newness into my days. 

Also, making sure that you prioritise the things that are important to you, because I think when you understand your own success, you make better choices and trade-offs.  Because we are all making choices and trade-offs with our time, with what we do, with what we don't do, all of the time, I think in Squiggly Careers.  It helps me to just think, "Well, I know I'm going to do this because it's going to help me be more successful day-to-day, week-to-week in the work that I do and the kind of career that I want to have, so it's worth doing; it's worth prioritising; it's worth saying no to this thing so I've got a bit more time for something different".

I think you just feel more confident and in control when you have really spent some time thinking about this.  It doesn't mean it's always easy and it doesn't mean that everything is then really straightforward, but I just think you understand yourself better and then you just feel much better as well.

Helen Tupper: So, maybe just draw our conversation to a close and just to summarise a few things we said, so I repeat that quote from right at the beginning of our TED talk which was, "In Squiggly Careers there's no one size fits all version of success.  Success is as individual as you are", and we've talked about three different ways to help you reflect on what success means to you.  So, Sarah talked about reframing success from black and white to shades of grey; I talked about the importance of defining your Squiggly Career success statement; and then Sarah just talked about how you can increase your circumference of success.

Also conscious we have mentioned a couple of different podcast episodes, so Sarah mentioned the episode with Cath Bishop, and that was Episode 193 and then also the episode on values, which is Episode 42.  Now, for all of our podcasts, we have a PodSheet so that is a downloadable summary of the episode, it's got like different boxes where you can put in your Squiggly Career success statement and maybe that one word.  You can get that from our website if you just go to amazingif.com and we'll put the link as well to it on the show notes, so you'll be able to get that and hopefully it might be a way that you can take what you've listened to and reflect a little bit more with it.

Sarah Ellis: As always, if you have five minutes to do us a bit of a favour, we'd love it if you could rate and review the podcast, we read every one of those and we just love it.  It just gives us that kind of moment of joy during the week.  If you have read our book, The Squiggly Career, an Amazon or equivalent review, wherever you bought your book, is also really, really appreciated.  It's how our work gets shared with other people and it's how other people discover us, so we always really appreciate you doing that.

Helen Tupper: I'm nodding along but you can't see my nods everyone, but I am.  I'm like, "Yes, please do that, that would be really helpful, thank you".

Sarah Ellis: So that's everything for this week, we'll speak to you again soon and thank you so much for listening.

Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.

Sarah Ellis: Bye.