Hi, I'm Sarah. And I'm Helen. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. And this is the fourth episode of our Squiggly Career Skillsprints. That's a halfway point now. Unless you start today. Oh yeah. In which case, you've got a few other episodes to catch up on. And it doesn't really matter too much. What order you do them in? It's more that you are trying things out, that you're experimenting and quick reminder, just in case you are starting with networking, you do need the Daily Skills Sprint Summories, link in the show notes, emailers, Helen and Sarah at squigglycareers.com. If you've not got them, the reason they're so important, it's where you'll find the prompts that you can literally cut and paste. You'll find examples of the tools and all the links to learn from. So it will make your life so much easier once you've got them. And today we're talking about the skill of networking. I know it's a bit more than I. I know. Devices. Everyone, some people are like, I hate this one. Don't skip. Just skip because it's really, really important for your development.

In fact, squiggly stat time, 70% of people's roles come through a connection.

So if we are not creating the connections, we're not building the relationships we need,

we have less access to roles in the future.

And that is a big part of what makes your career

resilient in a squiggly career that we've got more than one opportunity. We've got more than one

option. What we need to do is build our networks in a way that feels authentic. So the way we

frame this in our work is think about this, not as people knowing people. So it's not, you know,

the amount of connections you've got on LinkedIn, for example. It's not that. It's people helping people. And this works for a couple of reasons. One, you like helping people. We like helping people. Resorts in something called the helpers high in our brain. Makes us feel good, makes us feel valuable. So it's a better place to start from to think, how can I be helpful?

And then the other reason that this works is it results in reciprocity.

So if I help Sarah, she's much more likely to want to help and support me in the future.

And if this is the sort of principle that you use to build these relationships,

it results in what we kind of term career karma.

Good stuff comes back to you over time. And that's what we really want from these networks. So the prompts that we're going to

start with today is all about building your personal board. So we did a podcast episode and this is a

tool that we often teach in our workshops around, you know, make sure you've got the right people

around you to support you in your squiggly career and also make sure you've got the right people around you to support

you in your squiggly career and also make sure you've got a range of people around you.

Because otherwise, you know, there's that risk of, if I have lots of people a bit like

Helen, you get an echo chamber trap of people just sort of reinforcing the same things.

I can say people just being annoyingly positive.

Yeah, that too. We'll come on to that in a second.

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