Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about the ins, outs, ups and downs of work to give you some tools, some advice and some tips to help you stay confident and in control. It's a weekly show we're nearly at episode 500, which means there's lots to catch up on if it's the first time you've listened. And there's also lots of support in addition to the episode. Easiest way to access all of our tool kits, all of our one-page summaries, everything that we've got for you to help you learn, is to sign up for Squiggly Careers in Action, which is our weekly newsletter. That will be in the show notes, or you can just go to our website amazing if.com and you will find

it there. So this week we're talking about realistic responses to common work complaints.

And I'm not sure how motivating that is as a title. Both Helen and I were like, oh, usually we're

quite upbeat and we're naturally both very optimistic people. Helen's like super optimistic.

If any of you ever done those profiles where you come out as colours, Helen's like as yellow as

you can get. But do you know what? I'm not very yellow today. No, I know you're not. I feel like I'm

like, what's it like a mucky yellow colour? Ocra. I'm like, I'm like, mustard. yeah, today I'm a bit mustard. It's going to be interesting.

Maybe it's a good day to talk about complaints then. And the reason that we

picked this one is we all complain about work. I think in some ways there's quite a lot of joy in

complaining some of the time because it makes you feel a bit better and you kind of get them

off your chest.

I think getting complaints off your chest can be helpful.

But what we were trying to talk about is if you look at the really common things that we

all complain about to do with work, often when we try to then solve those things, you're

aiming for like a perfect solution and you're like, oh, if only.

I often feel like you kind of go

from this sort of very day-to-day complaint and certainly if you're me i sort of then

imagine a whole different world i'm like well i'm going to completely clear my week or like something

radical is going to change or you know like i think probably you and i probably respond to

complaints slightly differently i think sometimes you'll you'll be like we'll just stop you and I probably respond to complaints slightly differently.

I think sometimes you'll be like, well, we'll just stop it on them. We'll just stop it. You're like, well, that's not a realistic response because you've got blah, blah, blah, or whatever. But, and what's my, what do you think my default would be to just end? Just keep going. It'll get better. Let's keep at it. You're relentless in your, well, I'm going to just keep going.

But then I think you're hopeful it's just going to disappear. But without actually doing anything, like nothing's going to change, but the complaint is going to go away. Yeah, it'll be fine. It'll get better. That whole, it will be fine when it kind of never, it never is fine. And so we tried to pick some common complaints that we thought

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