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 and get started with your learning straight away. Now let's get onto today's episode.

B (1:03)

Hi, my name's Sarah, and in this squiggly career shortcut, I'm going to be talking about why I think we should ban the word busy. When I ask people to describe their week at work in one word, pretty much 90% of people will say busy. It is our default, it's our go to word now to describe what work feels, feels like. But it is quite a vague term and being busy can mean lots of different things. And I think when we say busy, it doesn't really help us with what we might do differently or do more of the same. So we want to be more specific. If we're going to use a word that helps us to reflect, that helps us to be more relevant and helps us to get better at the work that we do. I think we want to challenge ourselves to go busy beyond busy. We also know from the work of a psychologist called Dan Siegel that if we want to work with words, we need to name them to tame them. I always really like that phrase. Really memorable. Name it to tame it. So if you want to change those words, if busy for you means actually you're having a really difficult week and you're feeling really overwhelmed, the more specific we can be, the more chance we have of kind of working with those words in a constructive way and useful way. So rather than saying busy, maybe as you're watching this now think, if I wasn't allowed to use busy, how would I describe my work or this week in one word? Maybe you feel confused, maybe you feel overloaded, maybe it's progress. So you could start off with busy, but actually when we dive into what busy means, what that looks and feels like for all of us, it's probably quite different. It can be positive, it might be neutral, or it might be a more negative, much more difficult word. But the more specific we are, we can then do something with those words. So once you've got your words, let's imagine it was progress. We can then work with those words. So if it feels like a positive word, it is worth just pausing for a minute to notice, well, what am I doing? Well, if I've made really good progress this week, what has helped me? What could I do again next week? What are the repeated habits that have been really helpful for me so that we are intentional about kind of continuing to kind of create an environment and ways of working that kind of really work for us? So if your word is a really good one, like why is that? Ask yourself that why question. If your word is a more challenging one, let's take a couple of examples. Let's imagine it's overwhelming. I imagine we all have weeks where we feel overwhelmed. What that then might do is to prompt you to ask a question like, okay, I do feel overwhelmed. What's the one thing that matters most today? Or what's the one thing that matters most this week? And so we force ourselves to prioritize and to turn that overwhelm into, well, I've got to make some choices, I am overwhelmed. There might be quite a lot of quantity, but I've got to make some choices. So maybe we just ask ourselves some coach ourselves questions to help us to move forward. If you're feeling confused, slightly different to overwhelm, confused, maybe you're not sure where to start or you feel like you're second guessing maybe other people or what you're meant to be doing. You might ask yourself instead, what will help me to create clarity? Would a conversation help me to create clarity? Would a mind map, a one minute mind map help me to create clarity? Would just writing down what I don't know, doing a bit of a don't know notebook, would that help me to create clarity? And ask yourself, what has helped me to create clarity in the past? That might have been useful because we've all had those moments where we feel a bit confused about work and so it will encourage you to ask some different questions, but also think about the tools and the techniques that can help you. We don't want to stay confused for too long. We don't want to stay overwhelmed this week and next week and the week after. And so there's a great quote from a philosopher which I always like, which is the words that we use frame how we see the world. And so I think by just asking ourselves this question, how's my work been this week, in one word? And then thinking about how do I work with that word to do more of what's good and to maybe make some changes if things are not working for me? It is a much more kind of useful way of, you know, learning and growing in our squiggly careers. If you want to dive a bit deeper into a Squiggly careers episode, episode 29. So that is at the start of the 500 plus episodes that we've done. So I'll be fascinated to hear if any of you do, then listen to that one. Whether we're very different or very similar to how we are today. Yeah, episode 29 is all about managing stress. So not directly on busy, but if your one word perhaps is stress or I feel stressed, that might be a good one to dive into. I hope you found that helpful. And please do email us. We're helenand sarah squigglycareers.com if you've got any feedback or if there's any ideas you've got for squiggly shortcuts that would be useful for you.