Hello and thank you for listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Sarah Ellis, one of your hosts,

and welcome to our second Ask the Expert series. The idea of these conversations is to continue

exploring specific skills that we really hope will help us all as we continue to navigate our careers

and a world of work that

has got a whole lot squigglyer this year. And to start series two, we have my conversation with

Mary Portis. Mary is the chief creative officer at Portis, the creative agency she leads. And I'm

sure lots of you will have watched her on a TV shows and be familiar with her government work

and campaigning for people like Save the Children. I saw Mary speak at TEDx Women on the topic

of kindness and felt really inspired that day by her insights and her actions. She's definitely

somebody who doesn't just say things. She definitely does them as well. And so I was really looking

forward to our conversation and she didn't disappoint. And just before we get started, I wanted to say

thank you to the Bupa Foundation for continuing to support our Ask the Expert series. We wouldn't be

here without them. They're an amazing charity whose purpose is to help people live longer, happier,

healthy lives. And they've

got a new podcast. So if you've got some extra time for some listening in your life right now,

they've launched something called Resilience Brilliant. And it's a series of stories of

resilience from everyday people achieving some really extraordinary things. It's such a humble

and heartwarming listen.

I've listened to the first episode and it's brilliant.

And in the first episode, you can hear Ben Levinson, who is a primary school head teacher

and he shares his story of coping with COVID, how they did things like support the local community

with things like food banks, and also really relevant to today's topic

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