Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk through the ups and downs of work today and help you to take action to support your development.

And one of our business values is useful and we're now producing lots of different resources every week to make your time spent listening and learning as useful as

possible. So we've got worksheets, we've got summaries, we've got live sessions, they are all free

and you can sign up for them in our weekly squiggly careers podmail email so that you can

get to everything and never miss out and the link for that is in our episode description.

So today we're talking about problem solving.

We've actually had some problem solving even first thing this morning because for the first time in

a long time we are recording this podcast in the same room, which creates new challenges.

And we've solved that problem by me recording this now with my microphone balanced on an ironing

board. So I don't usually use an ironing board,

but today it's come in very, very handy. So when we think about problem solving, we were

reflecting on what does this mean and then how can we be helpful with the ideas for action

that we're going to share today. And problems we think are perhaps different to challenges

in that challenges are still complicated,

perhaps unfamiliar, they're often more known. I think challenges you know that you've got a challenge

to overcome or a challenge to think through. And that's how we've sort of tried to make the

distinction between the two is problems are whether it's within a day or in a week or within a year, you kind of didn't

know that it was coming your way.

And I think within squiggly careers where we know those, just loads of complexity, lots of

notty moments, lots of ambiguity, problem solving is something that I'm sure everyone

listening probably does every day in some way

and I think the better you become the more tools and the more tactics you have to help you

...