#598 How to understand and take action with your ambition

Helen Tupper (0:00)

Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast, and you are listening to one of our Squiggly Career Shortcuts weekly episodes designed to be deliberately short, so they are specific and full of lots of ideas to help you to take action. And today, I want to talk a little bit about ambition. Yes, I'm going to try and cover ambition in five minutes. I am also going to talk about a matrix because Sarah is not here, so I'm allowed to talk about as many matrices as I like. But what I would say is sometimes it can be hard to bring a matrix to life through audio, so we'll stick a picture of the matrix on our Squiggly Careers page on LinkedIn. So make sure that you are following us there if you want to see what this looks like. This is also going to be a video on our YouTube channel as well, our Squiggly Careers YouTube channel. So if you want to see me talking the matrix through, you can either go to LinkedIn, go to YouTube, but I will do my best to describe it for you. So this matrix is a way of you understanding your ambition. And in Squiggly Careers, we are always trying to recognise that people's ambitions look different. Seniority is not the only way to succeed in your Squiggly Career. And what you want now from your work might not be what you want in the future. So we're trying to sort of reflect that in the way that we're thinking about ambition. And I was reading an article and it made me think, how can I apply that way of thinking to how people might be thinking about their ambitions at work? So this is my matrix for you. So there are two dimensions to the matrix to help you understand your ambition. The first is, what level of change do you want right now? Do you want a really big change or actually just want a small change? Like you're kind of happy where you are, you just want to do something, you know, a little bit of change. And do you want to do something that is dramatically different from the job you're doing today? Or actually, are you quite happy doing what you're doing? So these are the dimensions that we're talking about. And it leads to four different ambitions that you could explore right now. So I've drawn my matrix up. And so we're going to start with the bottom box. So this is where you've got, you're thinking about what you do right now. So you're like, I'm quite happy doing what I do right now. And you only want a little bit of a change. So you don't want to do anything kind of dramatic right now.

Maybe you're kind of stable, but you just want to do a little bit of something different. So this strategy is going to be called the build ambition. Let me just stick this on my matrix.

Okay, so the build ambition, this is to start where you are and think about how could you maybe build a strength? How could you build a relationship? Small things that you could do slightly differently from where you are right now. So it's going to give you a sense of ownership and momentum, but it's not going to feel like you're doing anything dramatically different. It will, however, make sure that you are not stagnating in your role, which is always the thing that we are trying to avoid. So if this is you, small change, kind of happy where you are right now, think about what could I build better in my career over the next three months, so you're giving a bit of a focus area. But I would start with build a skill better, and I would definitely start with build a relationship. Both of those are in your control and relatively easy to do. They're not going to be a huge investment of your time, but it will help you to feel like you're taking control, which is always what we want and always what kind of helps people fuel their ambition. Let's start to look at the next bit of our quadrant then. So this is where we're thinking about you want a small change, but you do want something that's quite new. Something you've not done before. So maybe you're starting to think beyond the job that you do today. And this is where the ambition really becomes about testing.

So when we're testing, we're trying to put ourselves into some slightly new work or a slightly new world. I think this is where sort of side projects or... And that side project can be inside or outside the organisation. So for example, when Sarah and I started Squiggly Careers, it was a side project.