Hello and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast. This is a weekly podcast where we try and help you to take practical action to navigate through the ups, the downs and occasional knotty moments of a squiggly career. We've got over 270 episodes to help you. And if there is ever a topic that you need support with, which you don't

think that we have covered, then please get in touch. We will either find you the episode or we'll put it on

our list of things to record. You can email us at any time, Helen and Sarah at squigglycareers.com.

But today, I'm not joined by Sarah. Instead, I have somebody else in the squiggly careers hot seat Seat. I have Pritess Chowen, who is one of the people who are part of our Squiggly Careers advocate community. And this is a group that we created, a community that we created once we'd done our TED Talk last year, because we decided that one of the things that we wanted to do was to create a group of

people who are connected by this desire to make careers better for everyone because we

recognise that that was how we would increase our impact and also how we would learn more

about how to how to make careers better for everybody and so today's podcast episode is going to be all about

how we create communities around our career and why it's important to. The starting point actually

is that a community is different to a network. And I think there's a really nice definition from

quite an old Harvard Business View article, which we'll link in the

pod sheet from Henry Mintzburg. And he said that we are social animals who cannot function effectively

without a social system that is larger than ourselves. This is what is meant by community, the social

glue that binds us together for the greater good.

And this is really why I mean that a community is bigger than a network. A network of people

is people that know you and that are connected to you, but a community is social glue

binding us together for the greater good. This is a group of people around what you do,

not just you. And when you have a community that have social glue that are connected by desire

for greater good, it enables you to increase your impact, it enables you to build your brand,

it enables you to accelerate your learning, it enables you to accelerate your

learning. And so in the conversation that Pradesh and myself are going to have today,

we're going to talk about the experience that I've had in creating a community and also

Pradesh's experience in creating communities because as well as being part of the Squiggly

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