Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tupper and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. Each week we talk about a different topic to do with work and discuss practical ideas and actions to help you develop in your career and be even more successful in our squiggly world of work. And today's topic is about understanding work and your identity,

what the relationship between those two things is and kind of how that works. And actually,

in a slight departure, I think, from our usual podcast style, it's slightly less tips and

tricks. And we're still going to talk about actions, but I think it's more prompts and provocations.

This episode really came from actually three or four people in various different ways getting in touch with me, struggling maybe with their identity and asking about how to really think about this.

And I thought, oh, we'll have done a podcast episode on this.

I'll point them in that direction and thought, oh, it turns out even 160 or whatever

it is episodes on, there's always new ground to cover, endlessly fascinating topic.

Unfortunately, I've not been able to work a two by two matrix into this episode.

No, you haven't, have you?

Which I'm really, I'm actually really happy about. I feel like we've had quite a lot of two by two matrix in the last month.

So, I mean, I don't even think I've got a single framework there of what will I do? What will I do for the next 30 minutes?

Imagine if everyone's just turning off because it's like, well, if there's no framework, that's it.

Let Helen have her frameworks. Come on. I think I'm going to really enjoy this episode. I think you're going to spend the whole time going, what's the action? What's the action?

Give me some bullet points. All right, everybody, I'm going to give you three bullet points

right now. I am. My bullet points for you, everybody, are like, basically, why bother thinking about your identity and work? Why should we spend some time thinking about this? So fact number one, work is a bigger part of who we are than it has ever been. And that's because our boundaries are so blurred. We're not operating in this really nice, neat 9 to 5 world.

We are working at home. Work is encroaching on our personal time and through our personal

relationships. And as a result of that, people are questioning, you know, what is this work for?

Why am I doing it? Where am I doing it? Who am I doing it with? And they're looking for

fulfilment. And it's much, much more than just money and state. doing it, where am I doing it, who am I doing it with? And they're looking for fulfillment.

And it's much, much more than just money and status for people. It has a bigger impact

on their life and it has a bigger impact on how they see themselves. So that's kind of

...