Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:27: Idea for action 1: contrast questions

00:04:31: Idea for action 2: regular journalling for reflection

00:05:31: Go-to guru

00:05:49: Relevant podcast episode

00:05:56: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  This episode is part of our Skills Sprint series.  We've recorded 20 episodes, each of them are less than seven minutes long, and we hope they'll help you to build some career development momentum.  In every episode, we talk about a Squiggly Skill, what it is and why it matters; we share an idea for action from each of us; and give you a go-to guru and a podcast episode so you can learn more. 

We'd really like you to turn your skills sprint into a learning streak.  And so for everyone who completes 20 days of their streak, we'll be offering you a free Five Skills to Succeed in a Squiggly Career virtual workshop in September.  If you post about your progress on social and you tag us @amazingif, and we'll be in touch to tell you more.

Helen Tupper: And in this sprint, we're going to be talking about self-awareness.  And self-awareness is a really important skill in a Squiggly Career because there's so much happening, we can get distracted by other people's opinions and expectations, there are shiny objects that look really appealing on the surface, like job titles and grades and all that kind of stuff; but unless we dive a bit deeper and we understand what's really driving us, they aren't always the decisions that are going to make us happier for longer. 

When we're talking about self-awareness, it's not just about understanding yourself, which I think sometimes is the assumption we make, it's also about understanding how other people see us too.  It's sort of a two-way thing we're trying to work on with self-awareness.

Sarah Ellis: So, my idea for action here is something that I think you can do by yourself, but also works really well within a team, and that's to ask yourself some contrast questions.  So, these are questions that are designed to almost be at either end of the spectrum to help reveal something about you and also about all of you, and you get to choose what you share with other people. 

But we thought the best way to bring these to life is to have a go at them and you hear us talk about ourselves.  So, we'll do a couple live now as an example. So, first contrast questions, "I'm at my best when…?"  "I'm at my worst when…?"  So, Helen if you're answering those what would that be, let's say within your working week, "I'm at my best in my working week when...?"

Helen Tupper: So, I'm at my best in my working week when there is something that needs to be moved forward fast.  And then if I was going to answer the second one, my worst when, I'm my worst when there is a decision to press pause and talk and reflect, because that urge to keep moving forward, that's quite jarring for me, so I think I can sometimes find that quite difficult and probably respond in quite a difficult way to it.  What about you?

Sarah Ellis: I'm at my best when there's lots of space for ideas and developing and creating in a week.  I also love loads of variety in a week, so I like no two days to be the same.  I'm at my worst when I feel rushed, or that maybe I'm not thinking something through properly, or I'm worried about things going wrong.  And so even there, you can hear in both what Helen and I were describing, you know if you just say to someone, "Be more self-aware", and people talk a lot about that in organisations, "We need everyone to be more self-aware", but then I don't think we are practical enough about then, well what does that look like; and then what's the "so what", "What's the 'so what' from that self-awareness?" We talk a lot about coupling awareness with action. 

And so even if you just listen to Helen and I there talk about ourselves at our best and at our worst, it doesn't mean that you can't ever have the bits.  I can't get rid of sometimes needing to make decisions fast or sometimes needing to make progress when things are not going to be perfect.  But I think it helps you to be agile and it helps you to adapt because you've got that awareness.

Helen Tupper: Well also, seeing it and hearing it from other people's perspectives helps you to understand and support them a bit more and also spot where there could be some conflict.  So I would say Sarah's best is my worst and vice versa.  So it's either complementary or creates conflict, but even just, you know, it's about how you see yourself, how other people see you.  Just being able to have that conversation is a really good starting point for this.

Sarah Ellis: So a couple of other contrasting questions just to give you a few more examples, "The thing I'm looking forward to most is…?" and, "The thing I'm looking forward to least is…?" so, look forward to your week and just see what you're getting excited about and what's draining your energy.  And then perhaps something to look back over, so to reflect back on, and you might do this over the past month, "The thing I'm most proud of is…?" and, "The thing I'm most disappointed by is...?  So again, those are just self-awareness questions that will just help you to understand yourself a bit more, and then you can start to figure out the "so what" that goes alongside that awareness.

Helen Tupper: And I think Sarah's questions can link really nicely with my idea for action, which is all about regular journalling for reflection.  So, as a person who doesn't find it easy to press pause and reflect in the moment, I do find that having a regular routine of journalling really, really helps me.  What I tend to do is just free-write.  I have a nice pad and I have a nice pen and I always just do one page and I just free-write what's going on at the moment.  But sometimes a bit of structure can be really useful. So for example, you could use those contrast questions that Sarah has said and just spend a couple of sentences in responding to each of them, that would be really useful.  Another thing that I do sometimes is I'll do facts and feelings.  So if I'm journalling because I've got a lot going on and my head feels a bit messy, what I find really useful is to write five facts that are going on right now, like what are actual concrete facts, and then five feelings.  And even when I've written it all down and got it out of my head, I can read what I've written and I feel like I get more self-awareness as a result.  And it's just a healthy exercise for me to do quite regularly.

Sarah Ellis: So our go-to guru on self-awareness is Tasha Eurich who has a brilliant TED Talk that I'd really recommend watching, and that's where we borrow our definition of self-awareness from, this idea of not just understanding yourself, but how other people see you too, which is why the other Skills Sprint on feedback is particularly important to go alongside this episode.  And if you want to learn more by listening, episode 246 of our podcast is Six Ways to Accelerate Your Self-Awareness.

Helen Tupper: So thank you for listening to this Skills Sprint.  We hope you found this and the other episodes in the series useful.  We'd love your feedback, you can email us, we're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on an episode in the sprint.

Sarah Ellis: So that's everything for this sprint, bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.