Hello everybody and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is a weekly

podcast to help you navigate through all the ups and downs and ins and outs of your careers where we hope

that we can provide a community of people all working on their squiggly careers together and give you

some ideas of actions to support you

as you progress your way through it all. And today we're talking about, I think, quite an

uncomfortable topic. One that when we've mentioned to a few people are going to talk about it,

you can see people wince and get a bit tense, but you know, never want to shy away from a difficult

challenge. We're talking about ego, ego at work. Your ego, other people's

ego, what it means. Sarah's ego. Yeah, to be honest, when we've tried to design today,

we tried to make it very practical. So the only way to do those with lots of examples. So this is

going to be fun. Let's see how I feel by the end of this. Probably not great about myself.

And when we think about ego and its relationship with squiggly careers, it's interesting because

Helen and I had quite different initial reactions to the relationship between ego and squiggly

careers. I actually felt really positive. I thought, oh, maybe quite a lot of ego is tied up in command and control environments,

being more hierarchical. There is a relationship, I think, between ego and power. So perhaps as

our organisations get flatter, ego might be a bit less of a challenge. Maybe everybody can

sort of feel more confident in themselves

and it's less about the kind of position that we are on an organisational chart. So I was feeling

really upbeat about that. And then Helen had a different perspective. It's quite a bit more

challenging, weren't you? I feel like that sounds like I was really negative, which is not

normally my normal stance. But I was thinking, well, if you get rid of the hierarchy, I don't think that automatically means that you get

rid of ego because you have to have a deep rooted sense of self so that you are confident in

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