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. And in this skill sprint, we're going to be talking about strengths, which is one of our

squiggly skills that we featured in our book, The Squiggly Career. So this is one that we talk a lot about

and we've got lots of different ideas for you. So we've had to work really hard to only focus

on two. But let's just focus on what they are and why we need them for a moment, if it's not already

obvious. So strengths are the things that give us energy. And I think it's really important that

we don't say strengths are the things that we are good at because there may be some

things that you do that you actually are quite good at that you don't really enjoy doing.

And so you don't want to be defined by those things.

Being defined by things you're good at that you don't really enjoy doing is not a great

recipe for success in your squiggly career.

Starting with what is the work that gives me energy that I really want to be known for.

That's what we're talking about when we're thinking about strengths and school with careers.

And when those are the things that stand out, when they're the things that we get known for,

it means that we get to do more of the work that we enjoy because people are basically spot

opportunities for us to use our strengths. That's a bit of a win. And it also means we increase our impact because the more we do, the better we become at it. So really thinking about

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