How to stimulate your creativity

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction

00:03:16: Barriers to our creativity

00:06:37: Everyone has the ability to be creative

00:08:41: Examples of creative problem-solving

00:13:12: Sample exercise: The Secret Handshake

00:14:43: Sample exercise: Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe

00:16:36: Creating new ideas, individually or as a team

00:20:22: The decision-making phase

00:22:28: The prototyping phase

00:24:44: Giving and receiving useful feedback

00:26:08: Sample exercise: The Test of Silence

00:27:24: Sample exercise: Blind Contour Bookend

00:28:51: Sarah's career advice

00:30:19: Final thoughts  

Interview Transcription 

Sarah Ellis: Hello and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm one of your hosts, Sarah.  And today, rather than chatting to Helen, you're going to hear me in conversation with another Sarah, and this is the second in our Ideas to Inspire miniseries, where really we've just used this as an excuse to invite people who've really inspired us onto the podcast, and gives us free rein to chat to some people who we think you'd all really benefit from learning from and listening to, and we know that certainly we will. 

So, let me just tells you a bit about Sarah and what we're going to talk about before we dive into today's episode.  So, Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of Stanford Design School, and the author of a book called Creative Acts for Curious People.  I read the book and contacted Sarah directly, because it just really stood out to me for a few reasons.  It's not like many of the books that I've spent time reading. 

The first one is, it's a book full of exercises, examples and practical tips; that's sort of the essence of the book.  So, no surprise probably that it appealed to us, because it felt very aligned with our approach to career development in terms of trying to share things that you can use and that will be useful in your work, regardless of what career you're in or how experienced you are. 

Secondly, I love the fact that the book features lots of different people's work.  So I felt what Sarah has essentially done through the book is not only shared her own wisdom and insights, but she's also opened up all of her connections and collaborators for us to all learn from.  There's so much variety in the book, so even if one exercise isn't quite right for you, the next one might feel really relevant.  So, I really liked the going in different directions in the book, and every exercise, every technique felt like it offered something different.  The third thing, which is a really personal thing, is I love the design of the book.  It was really refreshing to spend time with a book where it's a bit bigger than your average book, there's loads of illustration, it's very well designed; I guess no surprise given Sarah is the Director at the Design School.  So, it feels like a very different kind of book. 

It feels a bit like we've tried to do with You Coach You, that you could pick that book up and open it in the middle and find something useful; you could open it three-quarters of the way through.    So, it feels, in lots of ways, very accessible; even though there's lots in there, you could open it at any point and I think just read a page or a couple of pages and keep coming back to it. 

And I always talk about the books that will have a permanent place on my bookshelf, and I don't think that book will be ever going anywhere, because it's already provided me inspiration for things like our team days, I've recommended it to lots of people who are facilitating maybe different groups or different projects, where you want to get to know each other quite quickly.  So, in today's episode, you're going to hear Sarah bring to life lots of those exercises so you can get a feel for things that you could try out, which ones you might like to have a go at.  I would hope that there would be something for everyone in today's episode. 

I really hope you enjoy listening and I'll be back at the end to let you know what's coming up towards the end of the year.  So, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really looking forward to our conversation together. 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Me too, Sarah.  It's so great to meet you and to be here with all your listeners. 

Sarah Ellis: So, I wanted to dive straight in with this idea of creativity, because in your book, Creative Acts for Curious People, you say, "Everyone is creative and everyone can use design to improve the world around them".  I think we all love that as a philosophy and as a sentiment, but it can feel quite far from our day-to-day.  So, what do you think maybe stops us or what are some of the barriers that stop us being as creative as we all can be and could be? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah, I mean I really resonate with your description of, "That sounds like a beautiful dream, it's a beautiful philosophy", but I have to say I really, really mean that, absolutely literally, that every single human being is creative.  We are naturally born to be problem-solvers and to notice things that are around us that can be improved, or that we want to improve and change.  

I think we have a couple of myths in our society that do get in the way.  One of those is just this terrible myth that you're not creative if you can't draw, so that's one myth that I would love to see dissipate.    I think another thing that can get in our way, particularly in organisations, is bureaucracy.  So, I don't know how many of you have read the wonderful, wonderful short book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball by a guy named Gordon MacKenzie, who used to be at Hallmark, a greeting card company in the US.  Anyway, he wrote this brilliant little book that is about how companies become bureaucratic, and how bureaucracy is really this kind of gravitational pull in which you normalise that the processes and the policies and the way things have always been done somehow is also the formula for success in the future.  That is just not often true.  If an organisation is going to continue to evolve and improve and meet new market demands and change with the times, actually some of those rules may have to change over time. 

And, we are all living through a time where we're learning that on a daily basis.  So, being able to escape that gravitational pull and really recognise that when you're blindly following all of the rules that have been constructed that are really about how things have worked well in the past, sometimes that is actually holding back creativity and innovation within a company. 

Sarah Ellis: We've actually just written a piece for Harvard Business Review about learning, unlearning and relearning, and I thought there you just did a brilliant job of describing unlearning, as that idea of sometimes recognising what we've got to let go of to be able to move forward, and to not hold on to things too tight, just because that's how they've been done before. 

As you say, I think most of us recognise both of those things at the same time.  We think, first of all, perhaps we label ourselves in an unhelpful way, because we do think, "I can't draw, I'm not creative", or to you point, maybe comparison also holds us back, because I think we all know someone who we think is more creative than we are and I was thinking, "Yeah, because my sister is more creative than me, because she can illustrate and I feel like she can do beautiful drawings, but I'm not that", and therefore you seen it in such a binary and black and white way as either we are or we aren't.    I think, if we can just start with that mindset of going, "We are all in our own way", and I think that's one of the things your book does a brilliant job of; it just gives you loads of exercises that just help you to realise, "I am creative, we can all do this", and we'll talk a bit more about some of those. 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: The context where I work at Stanford, we have students who are coming to us from all across the university, so we're not just working with design students, we're working with students from the Business School, from all kinds of engineering, from the Medical School, from the Law School even, and every single one of those students has the ability to be creative within them.  It's also true that many times, because of those myths or those self-perceptions, we've arrived in our classes, we see students saying, "I'm in that comparison mode".  There are lots of ways that you can practise really unlocking those creative abilities. 

The things I've seen our students do, they're tackling real-world problems, like in education, in healthcare, and they're using tremendous creativity, and they're coming from all of these different disciplinary backgrounds.  So again, even though we use design and that is a field that's often associated with those people we sometimes call creatives, that's not a label that I love, because that perpetuates that division.  

Sarah Ellis: And that word, "problem", I think is a useful one, because I think a lot of your ideas and the different examples are very much grounded in practical problem-solving.  Because again, I think if we sometimes think about creativity as this big, abstract idea, we're not sure what that looks like or what that means for us in our day-to-day jobs, and you give some really good examples that I'd love you just to share with our listeners around almost identifying a problem and then exploring it, so much so that you then almost reorganise your life around it, or you really think about, "How can I think creatively, problem-solve creatively, act creatively in pursuit of this problem that matters to me, and that matters to lots of people, and that is worth solving?"    So, how do you help your students figure out those problems, because we aren't short of problems? 

I think we can all think of problems, but again, often those problems feel so unwieldy, and perhaps we also do that thing of letting our inner critic kick in and think, "I couldn't possibly solve that problem, because it's too hard". 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: So we, in our classes, we will often have a partner for a project, and the partner is kind of the organisation, the community, or a company that has some expertise and has been noticing a set of problems over time, or needs some help and has asked for some help.  Then our students really have the mandate to go in and try to learn as much as they can about the situation, and then apply their design abilities and actually try to figure out, "Okay, what is the problem here that we could solve?" 

So, one example that I write about in the book is a group of students, and again they were coming from all over campus, they were two medical students and a public policy student and a civil engineer, they were in one of our classes which is called Design for Extreme Affordability, and they were partnered with a hospital in South India that is a cardiac care hospital, among other things.  

They studied this particular hospital specialising in cardiac surgery, and when the students arrived to do their field work, they'd come in with this idea that they were really there to try to help the hospital achieve its mission of very high-quality, but low-cost healthcare at scale, so they were thinking along the lines of efficiency and patient flow and they thought, "We're probably going to design something that's for the administration, or maybe for clinicians, to help them be more efficient". 

When they got there, they noticed a lot of opportunities, but one of the things that was surprising to them was how many people were waiting in the hospital.  They were waiting in the waiting rooms, but they were also waiting in the hallways and outside, and what they learned is that these were the family members of the patients, and some of them have come from a long distance, and they're waiting for the whole duration of the hospital stay.  They really noticed that these family members were undergoing a lot of stress and anxiety. 

The students, their empathy was kind of activated and their curiosity was activated and they left really holding this challenge that they'd experienced, that there was so much anxiety, because the family members just didn't know what was going on with their loved one, and they were expressing concern about, "How do I take care of this person when they come home?"  So, the students came back and they really felt strongly that what they wanted to do was to design something actually to help alleviate this suffering of the family members. 

What they wound up creating is a whole organisation now, called Noora Health, that provides training and education to family members while they're waiting, to be able to be prepared to be basically part of the care team and to know how to practise the right hygiene after somebody has a surgical wound, or to take someone's pulse, or to watch for signs of infection.  

That small intervention both really empowers the patients' families and decreases the anxiety, but it also helps reduce the rates of hospital readmissions and post-surgical complications.    So, they found actually a way to address a medical need, but in this very human, empathetic approach, towards trying to help include the family members as part of the picture of care. 

And that is just a great example of the way that we set up these projects which allows the students to basically notice things that are off the menu.  That was not a need that the faculty could have predicted would have been what really caught the students' attention.  But in partnership with the hospital, they registered that this is actually a real need, "No one else is designing for this.  What if we could try to alleviate this?"  That's actually both the ability to notice, but then also the explicit permission to pursue something that we don't know where that's going to lead.  That's one of those creative mindsets that you need when you're working on big, challenging, open-ended problems, to actually discover something that's novel, or discover something that's innovative. 

Sarah Ellis: So, we've hinted a few times for our listeners at these exercises, so I feel they'll all be now going, "Tell us about some of these exercises!"  Now, there are lots.  So, there are 81 different things that you can try.  I think I've tried four of them so far, but I'd love to hear from you which are some of your favourites and some that you'd like to describe to our listeners to give them a flavour for what they could expect if they read the book. 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Sure.  I mean, the assignments that are in the book are drawn directly from our classrooms, so these are real practices that we teach all the time with our students, and also with our professional learners who come from all different sectors.  I wanted to share a wide range, so there are some in here that you could do on your own, there's some you could do with a team, and they all have really different purposes.  One of my favourites that is just such a great way to launch a new group of collaborators is called The Secret Handshake.  The Secret Handshake is basically where you pair up with someone else in the group and you pretend, you do a little bit of improv, that when you were in high school together, or when you worked at that summer job together, you had a secret handshake, because you were such good friends; and you're seeing each other again after many years of being apart, and immediately you just break into that secret handshake again. 

So, you take some time and you develop your secret handshake with your partner, then you dissipate and everyone in the room then migrates and finds their partner again, and you do your secret handshake.  It's just a fun and silly way to bond with someone quite rapidly, and to have a little shared secret between the two of you, and that has this very curious effect of creating just a little bit of trust. 

But then, all over the room across the workshop or the class or the company, everybody is having that little bonding experience, and it builds a little bit of allyship and a little bit of kinship.  And it's also quite playful.  Actually, I strongly believe that one of the things that adults need more of is play, and that that is a thing that, if we want to have creative workplaces, we actually need to bring a little bit more play into the room and into the mix in how we relate to each other.  So, that's a great example of an assignment that just is really about accelerating the bonding process that you need when you're going to get to trust and rapport, which is truly the foundation of good collaboration.  So, that's one of my favourites. 

Another one of my favourites is called Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe, and that you could do on your own or you could do with a group.  But that is really about breaking down the bad habit that many of us have of when we come up with an idea or a solution for something, we often just leap to the first idea that we have.  Yet, that very first idea that you have, that might not be the best idea.  So, Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe is a little way to push yourself to explore those less obvious manifestations of your idea.   

So, you may be somebody who is in a digital environment all the time, so the first thing you think of is, "Okay, I'm going to build an app [or] I'm going to build a website", but you might actually benefit from pushing yourself to think about, "What if that was an in-person service [or] what if that was a physical product [or] what would be the simplest version of that [or] what would be the craziest, most wild expression of that particular idea?"  It doesn't mean that you're committing to any one of these different directions, but having the ability to, what we call, defer judgement while you're still in the speculative phase, when you're still in the messy middle and you're trying to preserve lots of different options for yourself, that actually often helps you find that thing that's less obvious, or that's connecting across multiple versions of those ideas; and it's very practical too.  It's like a personal brainstorm tool that helps you think in directions that you might not normally be geared to thinking. 

Sarah Ellis: Is there anything that you find is helpful for people, when they are trying to create ideas, I think sometimes people are maybe a bit more like me?  I feel like I'm not very good at coming up with ideas on the spot, whereas Helen, my co-founder, is very good spontaneously.  If I've got some time to percolate and to think, then actually I love coming up with ideas.  So, I think you get these mixes of approaches.  How do you suggest, if someone listening is at the start of a project, or you want to generate ideas, is it best to let people do things individually first and then come together; do you mix it up?  Any suggestions, or hints and tips, on just managing that mind-mapping idea generation process? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Well, you really just said the answer, which is people are different.  Having that self-awareness and then having that team awareness about what are the conditions under which you thrive and you can actually be at your best in terms of generating ideas, and what are the conditions under which Helen generates ideas, those might be two very different things.  That might be fun to play in each other's world a little bit and to try both together, but it's really fine to set up a situation in which you ask people to do individual brainstorming first, and then come to the table with some ideas; but then, to try some practices that are explicitly about building on each other's ideas.   

That's a way that you can harness both the individual brilliance and ability for people to go off in interesting different directions, but then also harness the group dynamic, which is really about what happens when you share something and then I build on that and then someone else builds on that and you get to a totally different place than any one of us would have gotten to individually.

  I strongly believe in that mix of approaches being quite important.  I think the other thing that is implicit is either knowing for yourself, what are those conditions under which you feel most free to generate or that helps you suspend judgement, but also explicitly asking somebody to be the person who holds that container, who sets up those norms for a group, or for individuals, and helps you preserve that mentality of deferring judgement, or just being generative.  And that can be a rotating role, that can be, "Okay, I'm the facilitator today, I'm the one who's going to design our small exercise around Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe", or another kind of ideation technique. 

Really, the example you gave around adopting, "What if this big, multinational corporation did it [or] what if this small, scrappy start-up did it?" that's a wonderful example of, use invoking constraints, of actually trying to adopt the lens of how some other existing organisation might operate, and that's a perfect example of how a little creative prompting can help people just focus on designing within those particular constraints for a period of time, and then you move on.  I think that one of the things that often holds us back is somehow we think, "We've got to get this right the first time".  That is actually a very important idea to let go of, but if you have one hour, instead of just focusing in one mood the whole time, try those different prompts and try them each for ten minutes and see where you get.  Some of them will be really fruitful, and some of them won't, but you won't have wasted more than ten minutes.  Again, we're back to that theme of play, of holding these things lightly and trying a bunch of different things in that messy zone before you solidify the direction that you're moving.  Having someone who's explicitly facilitating that conversation can just let everyone else relax, lets everybody else be, "I'm just showing up in this generative way.  I don't have to worry that we're not going to get to closure, or we're not going to make a decision by the end of this period.  Someone else is responsible for that right now". 

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think so often, we forget that role.  I can think of lots of examples where we miss the importance of someone who can help us with that structure and give everybody else the time to think and the space to breathe.  And as you say, that's not got to be the same person every time.  I think reassuring people, because some people will find some elements, I think, of creative thinking and problem-solving more comfortable than others; there will be some people who really enjoy that generative stage, and I would always be someone who would enjoy that stage.   

I find the next bit harder, the moving on and the, "You've got to make a choice now and you've got to make a decision"; that's where I get more out of my comfort zone, because I get so excited about all the ideas, I then struggle to go, "Oh, I really liked that idea".  And then you know when you end up with Helen and I sometimes describe it as, sometimes we are guilty of "frankensteining" things, is the phrase that we use, where essentially because I won't let go of something, I'll say, "Well, we've got this idea, but I'm just going to add in a bit from this one and I'm just going to add in a bit from this", but then you lose almost a sense of what was good in the first place, because you've just almost adapted it too far. 

I can see how I certainly do that quite a lot and it makes me almost feel quite anxious to go, "We've got to let go of these three things that I think could be good though, there's something in them".  Any advice for people who, you've maybe gone through that idea in the generative bit, and then you're now in the, "We need to prototype", as I would think of it; you're either prototyping or you're making something happen?  What helps when you get to that stage; any exercises that you particularly recommend to listeners? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: I love that you're asking this question, because a couple of things come up.  So one is, what you're describing in terms of that dynamic, in many teams an unexpressed or implicit difference, where somebody's still in the exploration mindset and somebody's in the decision-making mindset, that actually is one of those things that creates a lot of discord on teams. 

So, really figuring out, "Which mode are we in right now; are we generating or are we selecting and narrowing?" it's very, very helpful to have that vocabulary and to have that awareness.  One of the places where people inadvertently wind up editing out a lot of innovation potential is when they're in that idea selection mode, and that can be because they're frankensteining ideas, or it can be because people pick ideas that they know they know how to build, or are within the current technical capabilities of the team, or feel safe, or they can see to the end, they can go, "Okay, now I get where we're going". 

That is usually way too early to know that with confidence.  So, what I highly recommend is you think about, "Let's come up with a rubric before we start that helps us preserve some of that potential; and also, let's select more than one concept, but not frankenstein them.  Let's keep three ideas alive until we test and actually get external feedback".  So, you might have a rubric where you say, "We're going to select the one that we think has the biggest innovation potential, the one that would change our industry if we did it right; we're going to select one that seems the most delightful for the people we're designing for; and, I don't know, let's select one that seems like the most likely to generate revenue", and preserve those as three different prototypes and move into a testing phase, where you're preserving the distinctions between those and you're not trying to meld them.  

Figure out, how do you build the lowest resolution possible prototype so again, you don't take up too much time, but you are then able to get feedback that's external from the team.  Often, that's the thing that will help you let go of that idea.  That power of getting that external feedback to help guide how you're moving forward, it just cannot be underestimated. 

Sarah Ellis: Let's maybe stay on the feedback exercises for a second, because I think I really enjoyed that section, and there's a couple that I picked out.  There's one that's called The Test of Silence, and another one called What, So What, What Now, which I think both helped to give a bit of structure for people.  Because, I think your point on, when you really care about something and then people critique it, rather than criticise it, I find critique a bit more positive, it's really hard not to take that personally.   

I think that point conceptually about separating yourself from the work, a bit like where we started, "That sounds like a good idea", and then I think, "Help me, help me with how I might do that", so that I don't end up, even though logically and objectively you know that, when you get hard-to-hear feedback, that does permeate and you feel, "Oh, I'm not doing a good job", and we know that we all have negativity bias in our brain that can kick in pretty quickly.  So, how would you suggest people structure, if you're giving that hard-to-hear feedback, what can help people with structuring that conversation? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: I mean, one thing that you always want to do if you're the giver of the feedback is ask, "What kind of feedback do you want?  What kind of feedback would be helpful to you right now at this moment in your process?" 

That allows the person who is going to receive the feedback to set some boundaries, to actually say, "We're at this stage and I'm really open to any kind of feedback that you have about who might the user be", or they might say, "I really want to watch you use this and I'm going to observe and see what I can learn by seeing where it breaks down", or they might say, "I just want feedback on the aesthetics".  That allows you, as the feedback giver, to say, "Okay, this person is open to this, but not open to that, and actually it's not going to be helpful if I…" 

As the feedback receiver, you actually want to build the muscle to be really open to any feedback that they want to give, but you also have the ability to set some constraints there.    Then, as the feedback giver, there are just some verbal techniques, like instead of saying, "I didn't like it when you did…" to be able to say, "This app breaks when I try to do this".  Make it about the work, rather than about the person. 

Or, "The flow of this information is really confusing" rather than, "When you wrote it this way, I just couldn't follow", and literally taking the person out of it and just talking about the work.  It helps if you're feeling like you're on the same side of the table as the person who made it, and you're both viewing it objectively.  In the example that you gave from the book, The Test of Silence, it's a brilliant way, as the maker, that you can try to put some distance between yourself and the thing that you're testing.  Really, the purpose of the feedback, or the testing, is to understand, "What is the current gap between the way that you intended for something to land, and the way that it's actually landing?" and you want to know as much as you can about that gap.  And that doesn't mean you're going to now resolve it for absolutely every single different variation of concern or issue, but it really allows you to see, "Well, what's going to happen when I'm not there?  Is this thing singing; is it shining; do people really immediately resonate with it; how do they use it?" 

So, The Test of Silence is simply a practice where you create an opportunity for someone to go through a wireframe or test out something.  You could sit and watch someone look at that Instagram story and see how they're reacting to it.  But the thing you're not allowed to do is explain what it's supposed to be; and literally thinking about, what would it be if you put a clothes pin on your mouth and you just didn't allow yourself to over-explain it.  Then you get to explain it at the end, but you want to first have the person really react without you biasing the kind of feedback that they're going to give you.  That's just a wonderful practice and quite practical for testing anything. 

Sarah Ellis: There are a couple of other exercises that we've had a go at that I thought we would also share with our listeners.  So, the first one, me and my sister did while we were on holiday together.  So, I got this book and was sitting on the sofa and she was like, "What are you doing?  That's quite a big book?" because it is quite a big book, and I was showing her some of the lovely illustrations in it.  I said, "Let's have a go at this one together", and we did the Blind Contour Bookend.  Do you just want to explain to our listeners what that is? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah.  So, the Blind Contour Bookend, it actually comes from a long tradition that comes out of the arts, called Blind Contour Portraits.  This is a practice in which you do a 60-second portrait of someone else, and the key is you look at their face, but you are not allowed to look down at your paper, and you're not supposed to take your pen off the paper. 

So, what's happening is you're resisting that deep urge that we have to check our work as we're going along.    Of course, what you produce is not going to be an "accurate portrait", but the practice is really about listening to, what's that voice in your head saying that's urging you to look down and check, "Did I get the eye in the right place?  Is the hair looking crazier or is it looking right?" and it's a way to actually investigate your own relationship to your inner critic and to understand what's stopping you from getting into that purely generative mode that we talked about earlier, where you want to separate the judgement and the critique from the act of generating something. 

Sarah Ellis: Sarah, we've talked about loads of different things today, but we always end our podcast interviews with the same question, which is I'd love to know from you one piece of career advice that you would share with our listeners.  This can be advice that somebody has given you that has just really stuck with you, or just some words of wisdom that you can share with our listeners to learn from. 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Well, I want to share a piece of advice that I received very earlier in my career from one of my earliest bosses, and she told me once that she'd had a long career in healthcare and advocacy.  She said, "The biggest mistakes that I've made over time are when I either moved too fast or too slow".  I thought that was really powerful and has really stayed with me.  I probably think about that at least once a week.  Am I trying to push something too fast; or, am I not recognising that this is the moment where change is possible, or where something important is needed, and I'm moving too slow?  I think there's something just brilliant about the attention to pacing and timing.  It's like this invisible ingredient in any kind of work, but I don't think we often think about that, as leaders or as people creating things, or just in work in general.  So, that piece of advice I would pass on to everyone, "Are you moving too fast or are you moving too slow, and what are the consequences potentially of that?" 

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to today's episode.  I really hope you enjoyed listening to Sarah and spending time in her world as much as I did.  Her perspectives and insights have really stayed with me since our conversation, particularly her points of view and exercises on feedback.  It's something I've thought about a lot, and I'm sure her work in her book is something I'm going to keep coming back to.  As we're getting towards the end of the year, if this has been on your to-do list for a while, we'd really appreciate it if you maybe bump us up your list, or spend five minutes at the end of the day giving us a review or rating, or maybe even just sharing our podcast with someone who you think might enjoy it. 

Sharing Squiggly is how we continue to do the work that we do.  We always really appreciate it and those reviews in particular are our favourite moments of the week.  Each time we get a new review, we really love sharing it with each other, and it just gives us that tiny bit of glow which makes us keep going and keep growing.  Coming up for our final episode of the year, of 2021, appreciate some people, lots of people don't listen to our podcasts in the order we release them, but the last one in 2021 is all going to be about focusing on curious career questions that you can ask yourself to press pause for a moment, increase your self-awareness and just reflect a bit on your year. 

It's a deep and meaningful episode, but equally at the same time, I hope it's lots of fun to listen to, as essentially you're going to hear Helen and I doing our own end-of-year reviews, which we haven't talked about before, live on the podcast.  So, that might be something to look forward to.  But thanks again for listening, and we'll be back with you again soon.