Hi everyone, I'm Helen Tupper and I'm Sarah Ellis.

And you're listening to The Squiggly Careers podcast where each week we talk about a topic to do with work,

something that we think is relevant for most people right now and share tools, tips and ideas for action to help you with your career.

And this week we are going to be talking about the topic of

inspiration. It's something we've talked about before on the podcast, but actually we think

that it's a bit different in our current context. So Sarah and I are going to talk a little bit

about maybe how the last 12 months might have affected people's ability to get inspired at work

and how we can take a little bit more ownership for

it ongoing and maybe reconnect a little bit with our inspiration. And I think where the idea

for this topic came from was like my own realisation. As normal, it's basically just

therapy. So where this started was I was thinking, well, I was feeling not particularly inspired.

And because of what we do, we're always like writing articles and sharing things.

So I can tell when I'm not feeling inspired because it just makes that all a lot harder to come up with ideas.

And what I realized from myself personally was that I have been consuming

more information than I have inspiration, i.e., everything that I have been absorbing has been

sort of to do with my day to day to help me get my job done. But I haven't really been consuming

more unrelated articles and research that isn't sort of directly part of

my day to day. And I think that's where the best ideas come when you spend time reading

different things and talking to different people and even in different places. And I shared this

on Instagram and somebody, a lady from Spark Unlimited, said to me in our chat, she said,

oh, Helen, you have to collect the dots to connect the dots. And I was like, yes, I need to do

some dot collecting so that I can come up with new ideas. So I think that's what we're trying to do

...