A (0:00)

Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast. And before you listen to today's episode, I just wanted to let you know about some news that Sarah and I are very excited about, and that is that our new book, Learn Like a Lobster, is ready to pre order now. We really care about everybody learning and growing at work, but we know it is not easy to do, and so we're borrowing some brilliance from lobsters to help you to do it. The book takes three inspiring and surprising abilities of lobsters in terms of how they grow and applies it to how we can learn at work. So if you want some inspiration and you need some practical insights to support your learning, growth and development, this is the book for you. And if you pre order now and send your Pre order to helloearnlikealobster.com you can join the Lobster Library, where we have a community of lobster learners ready for you to learn with some live sessions. And this will all happen before the book arrives. So pre order the book now, send it to hello@learnlikealobster.com and get started with your learning straight away. Now let's get on to today's episode.

B (1:03)

Hi, my name's Sarah, and this is a squiggly career shortcut. And in today's shortcut, I'm going to be talking about three ways that you can move from complexity to clarity. So this is for those moments when work is feeling overwhelming and messy and you are struggling to make sense of it. This might just be because of volume. You've just got so much on and you're thinking, I just know where to start. That happens to me relatively regularly. Or maybe just something feels hard. You don't know what you don't know. Maybe you're doing something for the first time. Maybe there's lots of different people involved. And again, you're just struggling a little bit with seeing the wood from the tree. So you know that you need some clarity. This can also be a really good thing to do as a team. So before I go into my ideas, one of the things I often ask in a workshop is what helps you? What helps you to move from complexity to clarity? How do you make sense of things that feel hard? And people have some really good ideas. So maybe if you're watching this as a team or you could talk to your team about, well, what tools and techniques do people already have so you can borrow brilliance from different people. I love asking that question because people always come up with things that I've not thought of. But here are Three things that I do. First thing, empty your head. I often think in these moments, it just feels like stuff is rattling around your head and going in so many different directions. And I think you've got to start writing things down. Two different ways that you can do this. One, just do a mind map. Put the topic or the theme or the question in the middle of a page and just get everything down in a mind map. Second way, which I probably use more often, is I write a To Think list. And a top tip on writing it, a think list is structure that list as questions. When we write things down as questions, it kind of activates the curiosity and inquiry part of our brain. We automatically sort of start searching for answers and we start exploring. Just doing that helps us to kind of create some clarity by just having that list of things we want to think more about. So that's kind of getting everything out of your head onto a bit of paper, however you might want to do that. The second technique that I use a lot more over the last six months since I started to talk to people about this, but I really like this, this has really stuck for me, is trying to figure out what matters most. So you've emptied your head and then you're like, right, I've got loads of stuff here, so what do I do? In what order? So this is really about prioritizing. Where do I put my energy and effort at the start. And I use this technique called the bird and the worm. And what this helps you to do is to zoom out and to zoom in at the same time to have the agility to see both of those time frames. So the bird's eye view is. Is you zooming out and kind of looking ahead. So maybe asking yourself, well, what matters most over the next month? Or what matters most over the next three months? Or perhaps you're looking further ahead in terms of a project, what do I want to be true in three months time that isn't true today? That's the kind of the bird eye view. They can see how different things connect. They can see further into the future. And you then want to have the worm's eye view so that worm is down in the detail. And they can see kind of the actions that are immediate, that are urgent, and that probably you need to move forward on fast. And I think by balancing those two areas, by asking yourself both of those questions, what matters most? Maybe today or this week, and then what matters most over the next three months, it can just help you with making sure you don't do Just firefighting and troubleshooting, but that also you don't just do the work that you want to do because you're like, oh, maybe that's more interesting. But actually then you miss on some. You miss some stuff that kind of does need to move forward, like in the here and now. And I think most of us are naturally either slightly more worm like or slightly more bird like. I'm definitely slightly more bird like. So I think this helps you to achieve a bit of balance when you're trying to make sense of a lot of stuff that's happening. And then my final kind of top tip is find someone or something because you could use AI, you could use a GPT for this, who can hold a mirror up to your messiness. So until this point, you've got stuff out of your head. You've taken the bird's eye view and the worm's eye view. You've not really talked to anyone else, so you've not really kind of got any feedback. No one else has helped you to kind of make sense of the situation. So if you talk something through with someone often I think it's helpful to have someone who doesn't know the situation as closely as you do. So they've kind of got that distance and we know distance always gives you a different kind of data. Or ask some questions of a GPT. This is what I'm thinking. What questions might I have missed? What questions do you think I should be asking myself? Just so that you're getting a bit of kind of playback and a bit of feedback to stress test some of that thinking. And it's always really good to have that thought partnership. I think this is really getting somebody to kind of act as a thought partner for you. So I hope that feels helpful. I know when everything does feel like a lot, you can. It's almost sort of hard to know where to turn. But I think if you sort of have some of these, go to strategies, tools and techniques that you can kind of rely on and keep trying out, it can actually just help you to almost quite enjoy, dare I say, that process of going right. I know this is feeling difficult. I can notice that I can spot something and then I can actually, I can take some action that's going to help me feel more confident and more in control. Thanks so much for listening or watching. And don't forget to check out the other shortcuts where we talk about things like how to get a pay rise or why we should maybe band busy.