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. This squiggly skill sprint is all about assertiveness. So assertiveness helps you to

communicate clearly about how you want to grow in your career and why.

So it's a really important skill when we're trying to personalise our progression and squiggly careers.

It also means that we're better able to protect our boundaries.

So there's going to be loads of things that are going on in your life and at work that will sometimes feel like it might be compromising you and your career. But when you have a strong assertiveness skill, you're able to

push back on people and those situations that might be compromising you and those boundaries. And it

also means that you're better able to make your work work for you. So if I have a skill of assertiveness, it means that I can

be open and honest when I'm talking to Sarah about where I want to take my career and what I

want to work and how I want to work, which means that all those hours I'm putting into my work,

not only work for the business, they also work for me too. So we thought we'd start the ideas for

action with two,

I suspect, quite common scenarios where we're probably not as assertive as we would like to be.

So the first one is when you are asked to do some work under very kind of tight deadlines. And then

the second scenario we're going to talk about is when somebody usually more

senior than you disagrees with you. So we thought we take each of those scenarios and just talk

...