Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:53: Not feeling inspired
00:01:39: Collect the dots to connect the dots
00:02:31: Cited research on inspiration
00:05:23: The pressure to feel inspired
00:06:23: Immerse in the not normal
00:08:43: 30 minutes a day
00:09:36: Collective curiosity
00:12:37: Instant Inspiration
00:15:02: Say yes to potential inspiration
00:16:27: The Uncertainty Experiment
00:17:18: Amazing If's Pod and Plod!
00:18:59: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi everyone, I'm Helen Tupper.

Sarah Ellis: I'm Sarah Ellis.

Helen Tupper: You're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, where each week we talk about a topic to do with work, something that we think is relevant for most people right now and share tools, tips and ideas for action to help you with your career.  This week we are going to be talking about the topic of inspiration.  It's something we've talked about before on the podcast, but actually we think that it's a bit different in our current context. 

Sarah and I are going to talk a little bit about maybe how the last 12 months might have affected people's ability to get inspired at work and how we can take a little bit more ownership for it ongoing and maybe reconnect a little bit with our inspiration.  I think, where the idea for this topic came from was my own realisation --

Sarah Ellis: As always, this is basically just self-help.

Helen Tupper: This is basically therapy.  Where this started was, I was thinking, well it was the feeling not particularly inspired, because of what we do we're always writing articles and sharing things, so I can tell when I'm not feeling inspired because it just makes that all a lot harder to come up with ideas.  What I realised from myself personally was that I had been consuming more information than I have inspiration, ie everything that I have been absorbing has been to do with my day-to-day to help me get my job done, but I haven't really been consuming more unrelated articles and research that isn't directly part of my day-to-day.  I think that's where the best ideas come when you spend time reading different things and talking to different people and even in different places.

I shared this on Instagram and somebody, a lady from Spark Unlimited, said to me in our chat, she said, "Helen, you have to collect the dots to connect the dots".  I was like, "Yes, I need to do some dot-collecting so that I can come up with new ideas".  I think that's what we're trying to do for you today in the podcast, is to stimulate a bit of dot collection, so that you can connect the dots to help you with your career.

The reason that that is important is because when you look at the research around inspiration, what it shows is that it leads to more creativity and we know that that is one of the most important skills for work.  If you look at a lot of the research that LinkedIn have done, for example, creativity comes up as one of the top skills that are needed for work.  It improves people's self-esteem, which I thought was really interesting when people are more inspired; and also increases people's optimism, so it makes you feel more positive as well.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things I was reading was some work that psychologists Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot have done, and they've spent years researching inspiration.  They've identified that there are three things that happen when we're inspired: of course, we feel more energised and motivated as Helen said, I think that's probably what we expect and that's what we're hoping for; but we also see new possibilities, so I suppose that is the connecting the dots that Helen mentioned; and also, we're more receptive to outside influence and ideas probably because we are spending time in different places and spaces, it just broadens our perspective which is always really useful.

Similar to Helen, I've been finding this much harder I think over the past 12 months and I'm sure some of you will have read a recent article that Adam Grant did for The New York Times, which was all about this idea of the reason that we're not feeling great at the moment, or perhaps feeling a bit "blah", as he described it, is that we are languishing.  He used this word "languishing", and it really caught the attention of a lot of people, probably because he has named that emotion.  You sense that something's not quite right and as Adam is so good at doing, he understood that and has helped people to appreciate why we might be feeling as we're feeling.

What I loved was that Austin Kleon who wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist, as well as some others, and I've always really liked his work, he actually responded to that article and actually argued that he's not languishing, but he's dormant.  His perspective was, "Well actually, yes, I might not be as inspired as usual but there's almost no point", his argument was, "trying to flourish under very difficult conditions".  What flourishing even looks like right now, is so different to where we were before and so often the problem, or what I interpreted from also reading this, is you hold yourself to the standards and you're looking for a sense of feeling inspired in the same way as you were pre-12, 18 months ago.

I think what's I'm looking for, is I go, "Well, I know how I used to feel really inspired and what I used to do", and you can't quite do that same thing at the moment.  Actually, what Austin Kleon is saying is, "It is okay to be dormant and just to be kind of waiting for the right moment".  It doesn't mean that we can't take action and try out some of the things that we're going to talk to you about today, but also just recognising that we shouldn't beat ourselves up, or just the expectations that we have of ourselves do need to be calibrated with also where we find ourselves right now.  I just found both the articles brilliant, really well-written and thought through and reassuring, so perhaps have a look at those if that's interesting for you.

Helen Tupper: It makes me think about the difference between feeling like you're under pressure and that you're kind of feeling that your priming yourself, ie if you're like, "Oh gosh, I need to do be inspired, I need to be inspired", if you're pressured on doing it, then it's almost it's anti-inspiration, because you won't put your brain in that really open space where you can find out different ideas and work out how they all connect. 

Whereas this is more, I think today, about how you can prime yourself for it so that when you are ready, your brain's ready for you.  You've got some of those ideas and they're not starting from scratch; that you're warmed up and ready for that inspiration to be there for you.  So no pressure everyone if it does not feel like the right time for you to get inspired, because life is what it is right now, then this is ready for you when you are.

We have four different ways for you to prime your mind for inspiration and some of these I have been doing very recently as part of my collecting dots.  So, Sarah, if I go first with my one?

Sarah Ellis: Go for it.

Helen Tupper: One thing you can do, particularly if you're feeling a bit disconnected from inspiration is you can immerse yourself in it but for quite a short period of time.  What I did was I took a week and every day I tried to read, watch or listen to something out of the norm for me.  Some of these things might not be out of the norm for you, but these weren't the things that I was consuming, and I think in my normal day-to-day I also wasn't really prioritising them.  I spent a week every day engaging with something slightly different to really give me almost that kick-starter for my inspiration.

Now the reality is, I probably couldn't keep that up, I mean I haven't kept it up, but what it has done is it's just made me a little bit more aware of different sources of information and spending time in different places.  I feel like I've reclaimed my morning a little bit as well because that was when I did it.  I am a morning person, so I got up, I had a reason to get up and not hit the snooze button and I knew what I was going to be engaging with. 

For example, this is a way that you could do this immersive inspiration, pick a different thing to engage with and a time of the day where you know you can protect that time.  So, I did mornings and I had like a Monday morning, I would watch a TED talk; on Tuesday, listened to a different podcast; Wednesday, I engaged with a different online article; on Thursday, a curious conversation, so that was towards the end of the week so I could plan it.  That was a conversation with someone not connected to my day-to-day work.  And on Friday, an online course, and I actually did one about art which I wouldn't normally spend a bit of a morning doing a short online course, like 30 minutes on art. 

For me, I made sure those things, it wasn't the normal TED talk on a topic I would normally watch about careers for example, it wasn't an online article from a place that I normally read.  It just gave me that little bit of a kick-starter and put me into connection with a few different places to learn from, that I will definitely stick with going forward.  I probably just won't do it in such an immersive way every day.

Sarah Ellis: I think sometimes just almost really going for it just gets you started, doesn't it, and actually if it's a week, it feels doable, not too difficult and also something where you can just -- it doesn't sound like you did loads of time every day.  How much time do you think you spent; 30 minutes?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, 30 minutes in the morning and I quite looked forward to it.  And you know the point around priming that I mentioned?  So during that week, I was doing a podcast interview with somebody called Dorie Clark, which is an interview that will come out shortly everybody; a bit of a teaser there! 

We were chatting about curiosity generally and I then asked her, I said, "I'm doing a thing this week, I'm trying to read some different things, where do you get some of your inspiration from?"  Then she started telling me some of the things that she was reading and so I borrowed some ideas from her, and I don't think I would have asked that question if I hadn't primed myself for it in this week.  It was just making me a little bit more, "Oh, what does Sarah like watching?  I could ask that person what podcast they're listening to at the moment", and it just helped me much more to get new sources of inspiration.

Sarah Ellis: It's that conscious bias, isn't it?

Helen Tupper: Yeah.

Sarah Ellis: When you're focused on something then you find other things and you ask different questions.  The second idea we've got is about -- what Helen just described there really is about individual inspiration, which I think is really useful and you can curate that in whatever way works for you.  I also think what's really helpful is not feeling like you also have to find and spend your time being inspired by yourself.  Collective curiosity can be really useful because you can all help each other.

Actually, the best example of this I have seen is not us actually at Amazing if; we have tried this out but probably not quite found the right way of doing this for us I don't think yet.  I think we are probably both better at individual inspiration and then we share it as we go.  But I worked in one company where we used Slack, a bit like Teams or depending on whatever you use in your company, and we had a Slack channel; it was just called Staying Curious, really simple, does what it says on the tin.  But everybody did share really interesting links to videos, something they'd read or something they'd seen and there wasn't a theme.  It didn't have to feel really work-related or about a specific brief.  It was just anything you'd spotted that had inspired you or you'd found interesting.

I think because everybody committed to it, but not in a, "You must post one thing a day" way, it wasn't like a forced inspiration, but everybody found it useful quite quickly.  Therefore, everybody just kept contributing their curiosity to it and it felt like a very small moment of inspiration everyday spending ten minutes on that channel.  It could be such a short amount of time, but it made you step away from the day-to-day and also spend time with people and in places that perhaps you wouldn't have done anyway.

If you don't already a have this in your organisation or just in your team, I think you can do this in a really small way, just two or three of you; think about how could you also spend some time getting inspired together.  Whether that's creating something like a teams channel or a WhatsApp together, or whether it's even just something like spending time once or twice a week for 15 minutes, half an hour, doing something that will just help you to feel inspired.  Maybe it is watching a talk, maybe it's spending some time on something like Tortoise or TED or 5x15 talks. 

I have these places that I know that when I go to them, they will give me some inspiration, but I always prefer that inspiration when I'm with other people.  Whether that's people I don't know and they're just live events, or whether that's people from within Amazing if; so perhaps give that collective curiosity a go.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I feel like we should do more of that together.

Sarah Ellis: We should as a team, yeah, we should.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, we should.  Our team at Amazing if is growing, so that's a business that Sarah and I run and I'm always very conscious of practising what we preach within our business; but we're so busy helping other people that I think, "Oh, we need to make sure we are definitely doing those things for ourselves and for people that we work with and work for us as well".  Maybe that's one for us to take away.

Our third idea for action actually goes back to the point that Sarah picked out around how much time are you spending doing this every day, Helen, when I was doing my immersive thing.  The third idea is actually about doing it even quicker than what I was doing, which was 30 minutes a day.  It's the idea of instant inspiration; almost these little sparks in your day that are the quickest way that you can take your brain to a different space. 

There are lots of different ways you can do this, and some might feel better for you, you might enjoy it more, but things like an inspiring quote, maybe every day you are going to look at a different quote.  That's something that I do when I'm journaling every day and I find that quite helpful.  It always sparks my thoughts when I'm doing that.  Something like if you're on Instagram, something like Vex King, he has lots of different quotes; or Sarah and I really like an account called the @newhappyco.

Sarah Ellis: It's so good, I love that account.

Helen Tupper: So good, yeah.  There are less quotes but they are very short.  You can look; there's a different visual concept to do with happiness every single day.  Just looking at that just might inspire you to think differently or connect some dots in different ways.  I like poetry so I've got a book, did you buy me this?  Somebody bought me it, a poem for every day of the year.

Sarah Ellis: I think I bought you this.

Helen Tupper: I think you might have bought me that.

Sarah Ellis: I want credit for this!

Helen Tupper: You can have the credit, there you go, credit granted!  I have loads of poetry books, but I like that one because it's a poem for every day of the year and sometimes I read them and I go, "Oh that's nice", and sometimes I go, "I don't get that at all".  Again, I don't read poetry that much but that just takes my brain to a slightly different place than my to-do list, for example.  Maybe it's music for you, if you use Spotify, they have loads of mood music.  I was listening to the good energy playlist the other day, I quite like that in our office.

Exercise, that's actually proven to be a way that some people get inspired, if you like exercise, if that works for you.  There are obviously apps like FITAPP that you can use, and you can just put in like five minutes and there'll be some short exercise you can do, or even art.  I mentioned I did that course on a Friday, there's a DailyArt app that I ended up downloading during my week.  My last one would be doodling; I think this could be quite a cool thing to do for your very instant inspiration.  There is a challenge going on at the moment on, and I'm going to say this wrong; @doodleledo.  It's basically the one doodle-a-day challenge.  Again, I think that would just take your brain to a slightly different place than diving into your inbox first thing might do.

Sarah Ellis: Our last idea for action is about saying yes to things that have the potential to provide you with inspiration.  I was reflecting on this for myself and I was thinking so often we say no to these things, because they feel like they're perhaps on the periphery of our days, they take extra time, we feel like we're too busy, we just don't prioritise them.  We can come up with loads of reasons to say no to things that have the potential to inspire us, just because we don't get that instant gratification or tick on our to-do list; it just feels like too hard to make happen perhaps.

I'm someone who never responds particularly well, or I've never been very successful is probably a better way of putting it, at anything that is too routine or ritual-based.  All those things that Helen describes and that she does so well just never really work for me, because variety is one of my values.  I don't really like doing the same thing every day, and so I think more about, "What do I say yes to that I think has the potential to inspire me?" without necessarily knowing exactly what you're going to get as a result, but I think you can start to spot those things that you can say yes to.

For example, there are a few things that I've got coming up in the next few months because again, like Helen, I was feeling exactly the same, not getting the inspiration or feeling as inspired as I would like to be, but the way that I would respond is probably quite different to Helen.  So, I've signed up to something called the Uncertainty Experiment, which is something that Sam Conniff, who is the author of a book called Be More Pirate, is running.  I know Sam and he always does really interesting things, I suspect it's something that's going to make me quite uncomfortable. 

I don't really understand what it is, to be honest; it's one of those things where I looked at it and thought, "I don't really understand what this is", but the people involved look really interesting, people I've never met before like the idea of it and he's doing something really different.  I was just going, "That would be so easy to say no to", because you just feel like you've got so many other things you could be spending your time on, but that was a good example of where I was, "Right, I'm going to say yes to that and I'm going to really prioritise the time that it takes".  It's quite a big time commitment; I think the experiment is three or four sessions together.  Again, I don't really understand exactly what it is, but I've just said yes and I'm just going to go with the flow.

The second thing that we're doing and actually that you listening can get involved in if you'd like to, is in a couple of weeks' time, we're going to be doing a PodPlus at the end of May, the last Thursday in May it is, we do our PodPlus sessions on a Thursday morning for half an hour and we're going to do a bit of a takeover on that May session, where we're going to do a Pod and Plod.  We're actually going to do a walk together, guided by David Pearl, who's been on the podcast before, so you might have listened to his episode.  He's the founder of something called Street Wisdom, he wrote a book called Wanderful, as in to wander, and there's quite a lot of evidence about when we get our mind in motion, ie when we're walking and when we're moving, it's how we get inspired.  We do connect dots in different ways which is an idea that we've talked about before.

Again, that was something when David and his team suggested, "Would we ever want to, as a podcast community, do a podcast where we all go for a walk at the same time and get inspired in a different way?"  Easy to say no to because you think, "I've got to organise that, I've got to make that happen, how do we communicate that; it is a bit different".  There's a bit of effort and complexity around it but I just could spot in that that potential for inspiration.  I thought, "Do you know what, just say yes and hopefully it'll be worth it".  It will be worth it for us and what we get to do, but hopefully something that we can also offer to all of our listeners as well.

If you're interested in that, it'll be free, like all of our other PodPlus sessions are; if you follow us on Instagram where we're @amazingif, you'll see all the details for that.

Helen Tupper: I'll put the link to it as well in the show notes, so that mainly shows up I think on Apple, so if you're listening on Apple that might be easier to find, otherwise head to Instagram.

Also, just before we leave you to your days, whatever you're doing with your days after listening to this podcast, just to let you know that we have been behind the scenes very busy creating some new assets for you to support this podcast.

There are some PodSheets that we are producing, which means that for every episode going forward, and I'm working on the backlog at the same time, but for every episode going forward you will be able to download an interactive, editable PDF which has some of the key points that we've covered, so like the four things we've covered today for example, some quotes and also some coach-yourself questions.  We get so many messages from people that say, "I listen to you while I'm walking the dog and I don't have a pen" or, "I'm running and I forget what you said".  Hopefully, this is a way that you can spend a little bit more time reflecting after you've listened and support you taking action and to help other people take action too.

You can find all of those resources from Episode 200 onwards and I'm working on the backlog as I said, all of those are on amazingif.com/listen so just go to the listen page and you'll find this podcast, you'll be able to download that PodSheet.  We'd love some feedback on that and anything else that could help you with the podcast, anything else that could help you with your learning, just get in touch with us.  It's helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com, we would love your feedback on anything that's working and anything you think you could be even better; always open to that.

Sarah Ellis: If you're listening to this and you have ideas or you've done things, particularly over the last 12 months, that have really helped you to stay inspired at work, please do share them with us because when we get lots of ideas, we'll usually find a way of putting these things together or we'll perhaps try and share them in a future episode, so the more that we can all help each other, this is not just about us sharing our ideas.  Please do always get in touch if you think, "We've done this brilliant thing at our company or at our work", and you'd love to share it.  We always love to hear from you.

Helen Tupper: Thank you very much for spending your time with us and Sarah and I will be back with you very soon.

Sarah Ellis: Thanks everybody, speak to you again soon, bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye.