Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm Helen and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. This episode is part of our Skills Sprint series. We've recorded 20 episodes each less than seven minutes long that we hope we're going to help you to build some career development momentum. In every episode we talk about a squiggly skill, what it is and why it matters, share an idea for action each and give you a go-to guru and a podcast episode so you can learn more.

And we want you to turn your skills sprint into a learning streak.

And so for everyone who completes a 20-day learning street, we'll be offering you a free five skills to succeed in a Squiggly Career virtual workshop in September.

If you post about your progress on social and taggers at Amazing If and we'll be in touch to tell you more.

In this skill sprint, we're going to be talking about critical thinking.

So as ever, let's start with what it is and why it matters.

The reason critical thinking is so important

for us in our squiggly careers is we are surrounded by so much information coming at us from

like every direction possible. Your inbox, the conversations, whatever you look at out of your

phone. We basically need a way to filter things and critical thinking helps you address things

that are like a bit confusing and complex.

So information that feels a bit overwhelming.

And it helps you to get to clarity.

And so when you're feeling distracted or the amount of information you're having to digest feels a bit difficult,

critical thinking is the thing that really helps you to cut through.

So we are not immune to feeling overwhelmed by having lots of things to digest.

Just like nervous, nervous laughter at that point. Very, very present problem. When does critical thinking

help you deal with stuff, Sarah? I think it helps me to prioritize because it makes me question,

what are we doing? Are we doing the right things in the right order? I also think it helps you to make things

better because when you approach things with a good critical thinking lens, you spot opportunities

to improve, to think what else or how else could we do this in a way that would add even more

value. Or for us, I think actually applying critical thinking also using our values as a company is really

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