How to respond to mistakes

Helen Tupper: Hi, 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 different topic to do with work and discuss practical ideas and actions to help you find your way through all of our increasingly Squiggly world of work.  This week, before we get started on our topic about how to learn from your mistakes, of which we have made plenty and people always want to hear us talk about, we just wanted to let you know if you don't know and if you follow us on any platform you probably will, we did a TED talk and you can watch it now!

Sarah Ellis: I do feel like we might have talked about it a bit because quite a few people messaged me and they were like, "Well done, I feel like I've really been there with you".  I thought, "Have we talked about it a bit too much maybe?"

Helen Tupper: Maybe, I don't know, but it's here now.  It is on Instagram and it is on LinkedIn, but we will put the link on the description for this podcast, so if you haven't seen it and you want a quick way to find it, we would love your feedback.  You'll know that it was a big thing for both of us and something we're really proud of.  More importantly it's an amazing platform to talk about Squiggly Careers and how people can help each other succeed at work.  Please do watch it, we're proud of it and it's a nice memory and a funny time as well.

Actually, today, we're recording this on Monday, and it goes out tomorrow; but today, as well as it being International Women's Day, we also have launched the Squiggly Careers Advocate Awards.  This is an award programme that we're running to recognise 100 people who are advocating Squiggly Careers, whether you're a manager who's helping someone to look at their career in a different way, or maybe you're a mentor and you're supporting people with their development, or maybe you're someone who's got a passion for a particular topic and you've set up a community or a network to help people learn from each other.  Whatever you're doing, to help people with their learning careers and development, we want to recognise and support you.

If you think you are a Squiggly Career Advocate and you'd like to be part of this community of 100 people who we are going to give lots of free learning to for a year and lots of resources to help you continue to develop so that you can help other people, apply.  You can find out more, again, I'll put the link in the description for this podcast, but if you want to go straight to the detail you just need to go to www.amazingif.com/advocates and you'll find out everything there.

Sarah Ellis: On to this week's topic, How to Learn from your Mistakes.  I was saying to Helen before we started, usually I find researching these podcasts are really interesting and I'm learning lots; all this podcast made me think about, particularly in the shower, was all the mistakes that I've made in my career.  I feel like I don't find it hard to remember them because I always struggle with moving on from making mistakes, I definitely hold onto them a bit too tightly.  I think I could list massive, long lists now of all the mistakes that I've made.

Helen Tupper: Sounds like a horrendous shower!

Sarah Ellis: It's actually not been particularly therapeutic, a bit more when we get to the some of the ideas we're going to talk about and I was thinking, "Yeah, I do some of these things".

The reason we wanted to talk about mistakes is there are two challenges that we have to overcome, one is a more general one that we are probably a bit less in control of, is that certainly historically and when companies were more set up for ladder-like careers and approaches to our thinking, the focus really was about performance rather than learning.  It was all about tasks and efficiency and productivity and those things are obviously still important, but they were much more critical and talked about than learning, than like, "If you've made a mistake what have we learned?"  Actually, we would expect to make some mistakes.

You probably didn't hear leaders and perhaps you still don't hear leaders that commonly talking about the mistakes that they've made.  A bit more now, and I think Brené Brown has done a very good job of talking about the importance of vulnerability and leaders and everybody being able to be vulnerable; but certainly for most of us, we've probably not grown up in a working world where making mistakes has felt that acceptable or even encouraged.  That's I think one context to be aware of, is almost like a counter mistake culture that has been around and certainly that's how I feel probably for the first big chunk of my career.  I don't think I really felt like I was somewhere that people made lots of mistakes.

Helen Tupper: Can you imagine on your CV when you have those bullet points for key achievements, can you imagine if it also had like, "Key mistakes that I've made"?

Sarah Ellis: That would be good though.

Helen Tupper: Wouldn't it?

Sarah Ellis: That would be so interesting.

Helen Tupper: That'd be really interesting, I'd be like, "Oh this person's really learned and been involved in some things and has so owned their mistakes so much that they could put them in this particular way"; brave.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, really brave.  Like you say, always more interesting, it's always more interesting than people's achievements and their successes.  Certainly, whenever we talk about our mistakes, I see people's ears pricking up and people ask a lot more questions than when I talk about, "We're really proud of this thing", everyone's like, "Yeah, move past it, move past it".

The other reason we wanted to talk about this topic was the point that everyone makes mistakes.  We all have that in common and when I think we start thinking actively about how we approach and recover from our mistakes, we can learn a lot more from them.  I am definitely someone who previously would have not wanted to tell anyone about my mistakes, would have squirreled away and tried to fix them for myself.  They would have spent long time living in my head.

When we talk about some of the ideas for action today, we're not going to talk about never making a mistake, because I think that's unrealistic and I don't think that's useful, but I think there is a way that when mistakes happen, how can we, I suppose, be better as a result, be even better.  Like I say, I spent too much time thinking about this and my own mistakes over the last few days, and I was thinking I think there's a useful distinction between mistakes, failures and experiments which again just kind of sets the scene for our conversation today.

To me, experiments are also really important in our organisations and in Squiggly Careers.  When we're experimenting, we're deliberately trying stuff out, so we've got a hypothesis to follow the language through and we are working out what works and what doesn't.  We expect to make mistakes and we don't anticipate everything working.  Failure is inherently part of experimenting, so we're not talking about that today, I think that's also a really fascinating topic, but we'll come back to that a different day.

We are not really going to focus on failure, and I think failures are slightly different in that failures are things where we don't achieve what we were hoping for, ie you failed to get a promotion that you were going for, or you failed to get a job that you were hoping you were going to be successful in.  Though I think mistakes and failures are more commonly talked about together, for me mistakes are when something goes wrong that you hadn't anticipated and you didn't intend it for it to go wrong. 

You only know you make a mistake in hindsight, which is always the point about going, "Well, you can never get yourself to the point where you're not going to make mistakes, because if we knew it was going to happen you wouldn't do it in the first place", which I think is part of the reason I really don't like making mistakes, because despite my love of all things Squiggly Careers, I love control and I love to plan.  If you have those kinds of tendencies, making mistakes is harder because you feel out of control and they're spontaneous, you can't plan for them because if I knew I was going to do it, I would have made sure that I'd have put the hard work in or put the preparation in.

That's the thing we really want to focus on today is these unanticipated, unintended mistakes that we all make and when that happens, what do you do so that you can learn, you can help other people to learn and like I say, you could be even better at your job as a result.

Helen Tupper: I think that's probably the hard truth as well, isn't it; which is that even though making mistakes can feel hard, making mistakes is actually shown to make you better.  The relationship between mistakes and resilience is really strong.  There are some studies that we will give the links to and again, you can find on our website for this podcast, but they show that when you respond to failure or errors or mistakes that you're making you become more resilient. 

That resilience that you develop results in people having higher self-esteem, actually lower levels of perfectionism because they start to realise you can't be perfect all the time and that's not really a realistic aim.  Also, the thing that I found interesting from these studies, is that people who are able to make mistakes and then become more resilient as a result of them, they actually have a kind of a more positive way of looking back.

Rather than seeing mistakes as like a bad mark on your CV, or something really negative that happened in your past, you can look at it and you can be quite objective about it and you can understand the reasons why, what your contribution to it was and maybe what you've done differently as a result.  You become less defined by the mistakes and they become less of a shadow, I think, over you and what you do in the future.

There's a quote from Elizabeth Day which I quite like which is, "We're all going to make mistakes and once you accept that, you can look failure in the face and build up emotional resilience".  Without the mistakes you don't get to the resilience; so as hard as it is, it can be helpful.  I think there's also a bit of a link back to something that you're probably quite familiar with, because we talk about it a lot and it's growing in appreciation of the idea of growth mindset and fixed mindset.

Fixed mindset is you're very defined by your identity today and you protect that and therefore, making mistakes is a threat to that identity and you can become quite fixed about your development that you won't put yourself into a situation where there might be a threat of a mistake, or where something might go wrong.  Whereas the opposite being growth mindset, that you do recognise that mistakes are how you will grow and how you will become more resilient.  You're more able to put yourself into situations that might be difficult and challenging where you might not get everything right, because you recognise that basically you become better, stronger as a result of that.

That's what we're trying to do, we're trying to talk about mistakes in a way that will help you to be resilient and help you to stay in that kind of growth mindset mode as much as possible.

Sarah Ellis: What we're going to do, is we're going to talk about four ideas for action in terms of in that moment and straight after that moment where you've made a mistake, what can you do?  What can you do so that you can recover, learn as much as you can and move forward and make really positive progress as a result, and not sit with those mistakes in an unhelpful way, where perhaps your inner critic feels much louder than your inner coach? 

This is one of those moments where you really need your inner coach to kick into gear and you need to hear them loudly because if that critic creep starts to happen, that's when we blame ourselves; as Helen said, stop trying stuff out; it's where you magnify things.  I was reading one article that I thought described mistakes really well, where it said, "Your losses loom large", like they really magnify in importance and impact in your own minds.  I think that is your inner critic creeping in, so we've got to stop critic creep and we've got to hear our inner coach.

The first thing to remember and I think we would all know this, but making sure that we say sorry when we do make a mistake.  It sounds obvious, but I think sometimes finding the right way to say sorry can actually be quite difficult, because you've got to balance two things; I think you want to take accountability and acknowledge your mistake, but without over explaining or over apologising.  That's the tightrope you need to walk where probably at that moment, you are really beating yourself up. 

You could end up going into a bit of a vicious cycle of thinking, "I'm going to say sorry, but this is all my fault and I've done all these things wrong", and you can lose your confidence, but other people can lose confidence in you as well because, I think if you overstate a mistake then people can maybe think, "They sound like they're really confused", and it could maybe a bit frustrating. 

So I think, the sooner you say sorry, the better.  I always think as quickly as you can and saying, "I'm sorry", if you can acknowledge the other person, so if that person has maybe let you know that something has impacted them negatively, or perhaps there's been a loss of trust in some way, if you can acknowledge how that person might be feeling.  Then actually just say, with the benefit of hindsight what is it that you should have done, because I think there is a lot of vulnerability and also just a shared empathy in saying that something's gone wrong.

If you said to someone, "I'm sorry, you're right, I should have thought to chat to you about that presentation before the meeting", and you just didn't do that, and that's the mistake that you made and you go, "Yeah, absolutely, I got that wrong".  Just saying that to someone just shows that you've got the self-awareness, you appreciate the impact it has on that person; that person might have been a bit surprised, they might have been a bit confused, they might have thought, "Why didn't this person talk to me beforehand?" 

It's at that point you get onto common ground I think, where if someone says that to you, we all think, "Do you know what; they've taken ownership but also, we all make mistakes", and I think you get to forgiveness essentially.  Without wanting to make it sound too dramatic in that moment, because I do think there's a wide range of mistakes that we all make, but if I had made a mistake and I said to Helen, "Helen, I'm really sorry I've got this wrong, I definitely should have done that.  Sorry, let's learn from it", Helen's going to go, "Okay, fair enough.  We can't change it now, there's usually no going back that mistake has been made.  All we can do is help each other for next time so we don't make that mistake again".

Maybe just practising how you would do that, whether that's writing it or in person, but always think accountability and acknowledging versus over explaining, over apologising.

Helen Tupper: It neutralises the conversation as well and it gives you back a bit of control, because if I don't say sorry, let's say something's happened between Sarah and me and I don't say sorry, then I'm basically thinking, "What's Sarah going to do next?" or, "What's Sarah thinking?" or, "How is this going to affect things?".  It's almost until I say sorry, that's sort of my taking back control of that situation and that conversation so that I can get onto what might happen next.

Our idea for action number two is really all about that, what might happen next, and it's about prioritising how you respond to a mistake rather than how you might react to it in the moment; so, when you get anxious and worried and upset.

Sarah Ellis: Defensive.

Helen Tupper: Defensive totally and I think some of that is normal, but you have to give yourself a time limit, you have to go, "I'm going to beat myself up for 24 hours and then I'm going to shift from reacting to this to how I respond".  We've got an acronym for you, which is all about LEARN, how you can LEARN from your mistakes, how you respond to them in a constructive way.  The LEARN acronym we've got for you stands for: Listen; Explore; Ask; Rebuild; and Next time.  We'll go through each one of those for you, so it makes sense for you. 

The first part of the acronym is L for listen.  This is about getting out of your own head a little bit, where you might have done all that magnifying stuff that Sarah talked about.  It's about listening to other people's perspectives on that mistake; what do they think the impact of it is; what do they think we could have done differently?  It's about getting some feedback, because you might just be seeing your view of this mistake and your role in that mistake.

But sometimes if you get some feedback from other people, like if there was another colleague that was working on a project with Sarah and I, and I asked that person what did you think I did well in that situation, how do you think I could have responded to it differently, I collected some different feedback, it gives me the insight that helps me to take action rather than just getting stuck in my head.  Sometimes as well it helps you to realise that it might not be as bad as you seem, just when it's your view going round in your head; that can sometimes get a bit challenging.

The E is about exploring, so you've got all that perspective; this is now about exploring solutions and ideas.  What we don't want you to do is make a mistake and then just run right ahead with a solution without having explored that with somebody else, because then you might just rush into things and we want you to bring people with you as you resolve a mistake.  Saying to Sarah, "Sarah, I'm really sorry.  What do you think we could do differently next time; how do you think we could work on this together; what ideas have you got for how we could approach this differently?", just collecting some solutions and ideas.

The A is for asking for help.  When something has gone wrong and you're trying to resolve things, you don't have to do it alone.  I think sometimes we think, "I've made the mistake, I have to respond to it".  You don't have to do that alone and that help can come in lots of different forms.  It could come in support because you might have found the situation quite difficult, it could come in practical ways, like you need to get all hands on deck so that you can maybe fix things fast, if they need to be fixed fast.  That doesn't have to be you working 18 hours a day to solve a problem, when you're probably more likely to get tired and make mistakes as a result of that; so who do you need to ask for help and what is the help that you need.

The R is for rebuilding.  When things have gone wrong, you might have a few things to rebuild, and I think it's useful to reflect on what those things are.  It might be relationships.  I might recognise that some trust has gone out of Sarah's and my relationship and I might want to think about, "Well, how am I going to get that trust back?  What do I need to do so that we have that trust built into our relationship again?" 

It might be about rebuilding your own confidence.  Maybe this has been a really bruising experience that's made you doubt yourself and you might need to rebuild your confidence by reflecting on your successes or spending a bit of time in your comfort zone, so that you can feel good about what you're doing again.  Just think about, "How do I get back to my best?  How do I rebuild the relationships and my belief?"

N is for next time.  This is about applying what you've learned from your mistake.  It's about when you're faced with a similar situation next time, how would you approach things?  How would you take all of this experience, the learning that you've got from this experience and do things differently next time, so that you might not feel so stuck in the moment again?

Sarah Ellis: What's also really important to say about the LEARN framework is you don't do all of this at once.  It depends on the sort of mistake; sometimes you make a mistake, and you can do all of this within 24 hours.  It's a small mistake, you still need to get a bit of listening, explore some solutions, you ask for a bit of help, you sort it out together and you're onto the next day and onto the next time.  Or sometimes this takes a month or a couple of months or you might keep coming back to different areas of this.

You also don't need to do it in order.  It's helpful to have a LEARN framework to work your way through but you might listen to some perspectives and then you might be in rebuild and then you might go back to that.  You might go and think, "There's someone who I didn't get the chance to talk to the first time round", because sometimes I think when you make a mistake, you have to quite quickly get into the explore and ask for help, because you've got to fix it.  Depending on what the mistake is, certainly I think Helen and I have both been in jobs where you don't have loads of time initially, you can't do the listening, you can't do the rebuilding or the next time just yet, because you have got to sort it out.  I think that's okay too.

If you need to do, "Right, what are the solutions; what are the options here?  Let's do the exploring", ask for some help, make that happen.  Often, responding really quickly and including people and getting things fixed does an awful lot for both your reputation and your confidence.  People will forget you even made the mistake in the first place, or what they'll talk about is how well you responded to making that mistake. 

Again, don't feel like, "I can't even start fixing this until I've done a bit of listening"; you absolutely can kind of jump around.  I think just spotting what is most useful, given the mistake that I've made, what is most useful here.  Think about LEARN, think about where you might start and then use that to frame your approach depending on your own context.

Our idea for action number three, and I think this is the scariest one of the four that we're going to talk through, is about sharing your mistakes with other people so that everyone can learn from your experiences.  This is you choosing to share your mistake with people who probably don't even need to know that you've made that mistake, and it's a very generous and growth mindset and Squiggly Career thing to do, and I think it's scary at the same time.  If you're someone like me and you find making mistakes hard, this feels like something that would be in my courage zone rather than in my comfort zone.

One way that Helen and I have found to do this that works really well, and certainly works well for me as somebody who sometimes, mistakes trigger more of a fixed mindset than a growth mindset, is doing mistake meetings.  This might sound horrendous, you might be like, "The last thing I want to do is be in a mistake meeting", another Zoom meeting where I have to talk about my mistakes.  Essentially, the reason for doing this is to normalise and to realise that everybody makes mistakes, and the more we talk about them the more we can learn from them and learn from each other.  I think it really reduces the fear factor.

You don't have to call them mistake meetings, so I think when we've talked to other organisations and other groups about this before, sometimes even the word "mistake" just doesn't feel acceptable or useful in their company.  It could just be a "lessons learned" meeting, or an "even better if" meeting, maybe that's better language.  To be honest the content of the meeting would be the same; call it something that you think people would respond really well to.

I think sometimes, when I've worked with some start-ups before, I think mistake meetings would actually be really acceptable because start-ups are so used to finding your way as you go, you have to make mistakes; that's sort of part of the process.  Whereas if you're in a bigger company, perhaps these things are a bit harder; certainly in my experience it was harder in a bigger organisation.  The word "mistake" wasn't something I heard very often at all, which tells you a lot in its own right.

Whereas actually if we'd have had a meeting that was called "lessons learned", or, "even better if", I think people would have been much more comfortable and confident with that.  That's what you want; you don't want people to fear the meeting itself, otherwise we end up even worse than when we started.  You could do this with one other person, someone who maybe you really trust and who's really supportive; you could just do this with your manager.  You will know where this feels like it could be useful, but the point has to be everybody is doing the same thing, so you could only do it with your manager if your manager is also prepared to share their mistakes, this can't be a one-way street.

It doesn't matter what those mistakes are, they can be very different sorts of mistakes, you might think, "In hindsight, I would have approached that meeting differently" or, "I would have done that presentation in a new way or I would have added this bit of information in".  They can be small, medium, large; everybody's mistakes, the range of mistakes will always be really different, but if you could come up with some sort of shared way, I think of talking about this more often, everybody's learning would accelerate as a result, because you learn more yourself but then you just learn from each other.  So, if you feel that you can, are brave enough to give it a go, it's certainly worth it in terms of what you'll get as a result.

Helen Tupper: Our last idea for action is really all around not waiting for a mistake in order to learn from them.  Everything we've talked about today has been about, "How do you respond when it happens?"; something's happened in your week and how do you respond to it in a constructive way and then reflect on it maybe with others.  But this is about, "If we recognise that mistakes help us to learn and that helps us to be resilient, then actually how can we do something a bit more proactive?"  One of the things that you can do is you can relook at mistakes that you've made in the past but look at them with a learning lens.

Think about three mistakes you've made in your career, this can be in the last year, it can be in your career, but basically get to a point where you can look back and think about, these are three mistakes that I have made.  So I remember I talked about one before; I think I've talked about it when I was at Capital One and I launched this new product and it all went disastrously wrong; and it was very hard and it required a lot of quick work to fix it.  Now, I've made other mistakes where I've let a manager really get to me and really affect how I thought about myself and my work.  I've also made mistakes before when I've missed deadlines because I've taken too much on, so there's just three that happened to me in my career.

Sarah Ellis: To get you started.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, just to get you started in case it inspires any mistakes that you might have made, but get your three down and then ask yourself a couple of coach-yourself questions.  Just give yourself a bit of space to reflect on these, but the first question is, "What patterns can you see in how you might have contributed to that mistake?"  Again, we're taking ownership for this, so what did you do that contributed to it?  The second thing, "What do you notice about how you responded to them?"  The third question, "What can you learn about them and your response to inform how you approach future mistakes?"  I did this for myself, I took those three examples.

Sarah Ellis: I've done this too.  This is my favourite one, I think this is really helpful.

Helen Tupper: My three that I talked about, and as I said there are way more than three, they are just the first three that came to my mind; but I realised when I asked myself those questions about the patterns and my response and my learning, I realised that all three of them were connected by me not asking for help when I really needed it. 

In each one of those moments there was a sticky moment where either I didn't know enough, or someone was getting to me more than I wanted them to, or I needed some help with a deadline because I wasn't coping, and it was my inability to ask for help in that moment of challenge that then resulted in the mistake.  It makes me think, when you're approaching that moment and I think I know when those moments happen, but my first reaction is to force my way through it.  I think I need to change my reaction to asking for help in that moment.  Sarah's laughing because she knows!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I can really see that in you!

Helen Tupper: Okay, well what's yours, so I can laugh at you?

Sarah Ellis: Okay, you can laugh at me.  Mine is different.  Mine is when I am working on something that I think is maybe for the first time or it's complicated and I feel overwhelmed but ultimately, I don't understand.  I don't have clarity in either what I'm asking or what I'm trying to do.  I don't understand it for myself and then as a result, because I'm not naturally detailed in terms of my approach to things, I'm more sort of visionary or strategic, I'm sort of higher up in my thinking, I'm good at thinking about the future, I'm less good at diving into the detail, I make mistakes when I don't spot that I need to dive into the detail, because we all need to do that at different times.  You can't keep your head in the clouds the whole time, essentially.

I remember one of my managers giving me a really useful -- I don't know if it's a metaphor or analogy, you'll be able to tell me in a minute, of almost imagine you're flying a helicopter, you have a natural height that you fly your helicopter, but there are moments where you need to land and stay still and make sure that you really understand before you take off and keep going.  I think, because I'm achievement orientated, I want to make progress and I want to keep going and I don't like landing and I don't like drilling deep.

Thinking about lots of mistakes that I've made, it's often because I keep going regardless.  I was in a couple of teams where I started to get a bit better at that and now, I think I now know when I need to stop and drill into the detail and make sure I understand it a bit more.  Even now, I notice that if I make a mistake, it's perhaps sometimes because I've sort of just kept going, so it's quite a specific one but actually, I can really see it coming up again and again.

In my career if I think about lots of the mistakes, like I say, I reckon I can remember most of them, it's always because I just didn't stop and I really think something through properly and critically and really dive into the detail.  I think it's because it's not something that comes naturally to me, because it's hard; it's a bit like avoiding something that's hard.  So, it's being prepared, I think, to do that hard thinking and to work your way through the detail, and it doesn't matter that you don't know where you're going to get to yet, but you've got to spend some time on it otherwise you will make mistakes if you just keep going for the sake of it.

Helen Tupper: You know what's interesting in listening to you, and maybe you get this from listening to me talking about those mistakes, is me knowing that about you, and you sharing your reflections makes me think, "Oh, there'll be times when we're working on something that I could say, do you think this is one of those dive deeper moments".  I think you said the drill down; is this a time when it might be good for you to drill down a bit more into it?

For example, in our business, I manage quite a lot of the operations and things and Sarah totally gives me the space to do that, but there might be some occasions where I could be like, "This might be a moment that you want to drill down in it".  Equally, Sarah could say, "Helen, is this one of those moments where you need to ask for help?" 

I think you can spot it and that pattern that someone else might not have the perspective to, once you know that that's kind of been something that's occurred, but you only do that if you have these open conversations about mistakes.  Perhaps this isn't just about doing this alone; this is about maybe you do the reflection, looking back with a learning lens and then sharing that with somebody else so that they can support you to stop those mistakes from reoccurring in the future.

Sarah Ellis: This was the one where I said to you, I wasn't really enjoying reliving all of my mistakes, but when it got to this point, I thought, "This is helpful, relooking at your mistakes through a learning lens, I think helps you to reflect on your previous mistakes in a useful and helpful way".  Then I hope that things like how to say sorry, the LEARN framework about responding and the mistake meetings, they're things that are really good to do after you've made mistakes which again, everyone will make.

It has to almost become like an acceptance.  For me I think I actually think loads of people are better than me at this and everyone goes, "Of course, we're all going to make mistakes", but I think I did have to rewire a little bit my thinking of like, "You are going to make mistakes".  That just is a reality and you've got to accept that before you can do any of these things.  I think actually that took me quite a long time.

Helen Tupper: We hope that that has been helpful to you and maybe helped you to reconsider the role of mistakes in your career and why they're not awful all the time, even though they might feel hard.  Next week really different topic and we've got a guest, it's exciting.

Sarah Ellis: It is exciting.

Helen Tupper: It's really exciting.  Sarah and I are going to be talking to Maryam Pasha who is the Director of TEDx London and TEDxLondonWomen and we're going to be talking to Maryam all about how to share your ideas with confidence.  A big part of TED is about creating a platform with ideas that can be shared and spread around the world and whilst we're not saying that everyone has to has to have some kind of TED-level idea, we recognise that ideas are a big part of most people's day-to-day, like influencing other people with our ideas, making our ideas stick, making sure that we get support for our ideas.

Maryam has helped hundreds of people share their ideas and create stories that inspire and create clear actions that people can take, so we know that there's so much that we can learn from Maryam and how she's helped other people to share their ideas and to share them with confidence.  So, we're really looking forward to that conversation and making sure that we create lots of actions for you and your ideas too.

Sarah Ellis: As always thank you to everybody who continues to rate and review, whether it's our podcast or our book, they're those small moments of magic every week that Helen and I get to realise that it's not just us talking to each other or writing in a room by ourselves.  We really do appreciate people who have taken the time to do that and if you have five minutes and you've not yet, that would be fab too.

That's everything for this week, thank you so much for listening and we'll speak to you again soon, bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.