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. So in this sprint we're going to be focusing on the skill of grit. And this is really

important because we're all dealing with lots of different things and that can become really

really distracting for us and our impact because if we spend all of our days doing the small,

urgent, seemingly very important things, we don't really stick with the long term, meaningful,

harder things that are probably going to make a bigger difference to our development.

And the thing that really means that you get to do that stuff is grit.

And Angela Duckwith describes this as having passion and perseverance for long-term meaningful goals.

So we're not saying don't do the stuff that you've got to get done today,

but we're not saying let that get in the way of those bigger, more important things that you want to go after.

That's why grit is such an important skill in squiggly careers.

And as we talk about this, it's perhaps useful for you to think about something that you want to achieve,

maybe in the next six months or so, maybe even a bit longer term than that,

that is important and hard at the same time because those are the goals where typically

we need to grow our grit and it's our grit that will make the difference between whether

we achieve those goals or not. And it could be personal or it could be something at work.

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