00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:42: Day-to-day curveballs
00:05:50: Creating curveballs for others
00:07:49: Why curveballs feel hard in the moment
00:09:05: Coping with curveballs over the long term
00:16:55: Ideas for action …
00:17:04: … 1: pre-think about your ‘what to do whens’
00:22:48: … 2: buy yourself some time
00:25:47: … 3: don’t let the curveball become a snowball
00:31:57: Final thoughts
Helen Tupper: Hi, I’m Helen.
Sarah Ellis: And I’m Sarah.
Helen Tupper: 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 and advice to help you feel a bit more confident and in control of your career. And along with today’s episode, we’ve got lots of other resources for you. So, make sure you’re following Amazing If, either on LinkedIn or on Instagram, and sign up for our Squiggly Careers in Action newsletter. It’s a weekly newsletter and it has things like our PodSheet in there, our latest tools and resources, lots to help you keep learning, and also ways in which you can connect with the Squiggly Careers community.
Sarah Ellis: So, today we are talking about coping with curveballs, what to do when your day doesn’t go to plan. I feel like we’ve done a few tougher subjects recently!
Helen Tupper: I don’t know if this is career therapy for you and me!
Sarah Ellis: I don’t know if this is a reflection of us! So, I would say, I don’t know, we have had some quite big curveballs happen to us both recently. I also wonder whether we create curveballs, I suspect, for other people too.
Helen Tupper: Oh, I thought you meant for us. I think we probably do create curveballs for other people.
Sarah Ellis: I think we probably create curveballs. And I say that as I put this in our team’s chat. I said, “Oh, we’re thinking about doing a podcast on curveballs. What examples have you got?” And it didn’t take our team very long. I got a lot of responses very quickly. And then, what’s so funny is, one person who’s a bit newer to our team said, “Oh, but this is from other teams. Obviously, this is not from Amazing If”, and I was like, “Oh, it’s fine if it’s from Amazing If”. And then, other people felt they had to say, “Oh, yeah, some of these were not here”. So, it was quite funny, but we did get a lot of fast responses, which usually means people recognise it as a challenge and have got lots of examples. And what we are talking about today is very much day-to-day curveballs. So, there are those big career curveballs, which I think are the really big knotty moments like restructures, redundancies, probably things like your manager leaving, or big change in leadership, those very big moments.
But we are talking about the small ones, the ones that happen to all of us, probably quite frequently, last-minute requests, probably from your manager, or from Helen and I, if you’re in the Amazing If team. So, like the, “Oh, could you just…?” And you think, “Well, no, because when is that going to happen?” But that probably feels familiar, I would guess, for everybody. When people change their mind, I think that’s a bit of a curveball, “Oh, we thought we were going to do this, and then actually, we thought about it a bit more, we think we should do something different”. I think Helen and I would change our minds some of the time. And that, again, for the team, they might go, “But we thought we were going in this direction, and now you’ve just said something different”. Being put on the spot, this is also a very common confidence gremlin. So, we talk about gremlins in our work. This is one where everybody’s like, “Oh, I hate it. I hate being put on the spot”. And it’s not being put on the spot as such, it’s being put on the spot and not knowing the answer. It’s always the second part. It’s like, “Oh, if someone asks me a question and I know the answer, I feel really good”, it’s always the, “I hadn’t anticipated that”, or it’s just a real curveball question that really throws you. I think those are hard.
Helen and I have this one a lot, tech or logistical challenges. So, because we work for so many different companies who potentially all use quite different tech, or every room we’re in is different, to give you one example, I was in the same hotel last week delivering learning for the same company, but in two different rooms that were three doors down from each other. And in one room, the tech worked beautifully; and in another room, the tech just didn’t work.
Helen Tupper: I bet you were like, “Take me back to the other room!”
Sarah Ellis: That was honestly one of the solutions at one point. I was like, “Can we not just go back to that room where I know –”
Helen Tupper: “I’ll swap rooms with whoever’s in there. They can have my room”.
Sarah Ellis: Well, that same company was still in there. And I was like, “Well, do they need that tech? Because if they don’t, can I just go back in that room?” And so, I was like that. It really made me laugh actually, in terms of so much of it had stayed the same, and yet suddenly this curveball that I hadn’t had to deal with in the morning was suddenly there in the afternoon, even though loads of stuff had stayed the same.
Helen Tupper: Well, travel, yeah, travel. You know we said tech, but yeah, travel could also be a curveball.
Sarah Ellis: Oh, I got off a train the other week that —
Helen Tupper: It’s not funny, but when you told me, was that when I was in Barcelona for work?
Sarah Ellis: You were in Barcelona and I was stuck.
Helen Tupper: And you were like, “I’m stuck in a field in Wales”.
Sarah Ellis: Well, I hadn’t quite made it to the field in Wales. So, I was stuck next to a racecourse in the middle of the UK, in the middle of nowhere, it was boiling, we’re having a heat wave in the UK, which never happens. And then I thought, “Do you know what? It’s okay, I’ll get a taxi to where I need to get to”. And then I looked, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m still two hours away. I’m still really far away from where I need to be”. And so, I think the more you travel, the more likely those kind of curveballs are to come your way. And I think this is a really common one. I’ve had this happen to me a lot in corporate life, you know, when your meeting agenda gets derailed. So, someone throws a curve ball early like, “Well, I think we should talk about this”. And everyone sort of jumps on it like, “Oh, we should”. And you’re thinking, “Oh, but I’ve got a whole agenda that I thought we were going to talk through”, and that’s sort of gone out of the window. And even if you try and get it back, you can tell you’ve lost the opportunity to, I don’t know, be able to get agreement on something that was important to you. I’ve seen that happen a lot.
Helen Tupper: I wonder whether before we get even into why curveballs create problems for us, I wonder whether you just spent a week just spotting the curveballs, the ones that come your way, the ones that you see go other people’s way. I wonder if you just wrote a list of curveballs that come up in a week. It could be an interesting little bit of insight to capture.
Sarah Ellis: Well, we said, didn’t we, because we were preparing for this, there was an example even this morning where we both thought, “Oh, I wonder if we created a curveball for someone in our team?” where an unanticipated bit of work needs to happen.
Helen Tupper: Is that the royal ‘We’?
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, but you need it too. Don’t start blaming me for the curveballs, just because I recognised that we needed something doing! I like that. Are you disowning the curveball?
Helen Tupper: I’m not throwing it with you.
Sarah Ellis: You’re not catching the curveball, you’re throwing it to me. You’re like, “You created the curveball, Sarah”, which is true. We were both saying, I wonder if you acknowledge it, or even just start using the word, like when I did put that message in Teams, everybody got it straight away. I think we all instinctively know what a curveball looks and feels like. I wonder if it just feels better if you say to somebody, “Appreciate this might be a bit of a curveball in your day. We’re going to need to create this, and we’re going to need to do it quite quickly”, does that then help people? Does it give people permission to be like, “Oh, it is a bit of a curveball, and that means that this won’t be able to get done”, or just to have a bit more of a conversation around it; and also, to have a bit more empathy for all of us around receiving a curveball is always quite hard. Whether it’s stuck on a platform, on a train platform and you’re like, “Right, well that’s a bit of a curveball happening right now”, or whether that is a meeting going in a different direction, I do think having a bit of empathy and support in those curveball moments makes a massive difference. If I think about I’ve had a few recently, where having someone by my side, even though they weren’t physically by my side, I did feel like someone was just there being like, “It’s going to be okay”, it does make quite a big difference.
Helen Tupper: So, we talked a little bit about why do they feel hard in the moment, and then also why we might need to develop this as a skill for the longer term in our times of our career. So, I’ll do kind of why it feels hard in the moment. I probably don’t need to dwell on it to be honest, because I think we all get it. When you have a curveball, particularly if you’re having a week of curveballs, that can often feel really frustrating, because you maybe haven’t been able to do the work that you wanted to because you spent so much time responding to other things that have been coming your way. And I think it can feel a bit unproductive, because I think when curveballs come my way, it depends. If they’re coming from people, sometimes I feel like other people’s urgent important might not be mine, but I have to pick it up, so that never feels great. But I think if it’s things like tech or logistical curveballs, I think it just takes a lot of resilience to keep responding to them.
So, also, if you’ve had quite a few of those in a week, like your tech goes wrong on a Monday, then your trains are rubbish on a Tuesday, and then there’s something going on with your kids on a Wednesday, the cumulative impact of curveballs I think requires a lot of resilience to respond to. So, by the end of the week, I think you’re just quite tired, and that is, in the short term, why I think we need to be able to have ways in which we can cope with them so you don’t end up at the end of the week depleted. But Sarah’s going to talk about actually why maybe over the long term, having ways to cope with them is also quite useful.
Sarah Ellis: So, when we reflected on curveballs in the context of Squiggly Careers, we think they are more likely, which makes the skill of coping with them and being able to stay calm and make sure they don’t zap too much of your energy even more important. Because I was reflecting on kind of ladderlike world of work, ladderlike careers, you’d got predictable weeks, more fixed tasks, probably one boss that you reported into, that one person mattered, more in a kind of silo, limited tech. You’re using tech, but probably the suite of tech would be smaller than it is today; Squiggly Careers, uncertain days, uncertain weeks, more complexity; flexible roles, so less fixed tasks, more working across different projects, probably with more different people, you’ve perhaps got multiple leaders that matter. So, rather than just one person, you’re going, “Well, actually, there’s five or six I’ve got to manage. Rather than these silos, you’ve perhaps got, I always think of it as a bit more spider webs, like you’re connected in lots of different ways to lots of different groups, maybe working in lots of different countries. And rather than limited tech, we’ve kind of got limitless tech. So, it’s like we’re always connected, you’ve potentially got that collaboration overload.
So, I’m like, “Oh, there’s more people who could create curveballs for you. There’s more uncertainty and complexity; that creates more curveballs”. And then you’re like, but I’m working in a much more flexible way and things are changing much more. So therefore, again, more curveballs are more likely to come my way. I was thinking actually about, and maybe it’s a little bit the nature of the stage of your Squiggly Career, but the amount of curveballs definitely increased the longer I was working for. And I don’t think that was just me or about how senior I was. I think it was just like, that’s how work was changing. Things changed a lot more and there was a lot more kind of unexpectedness to my days, and the same now.
Helen Tupper: So, without getting into our tips to help people cope with curveballs, what do you think you do naturally, and where would you rate yourself naturally on your curveball capability?
Sarah Ellis: Oh, I like it, ‘curveball capability’! So, I think I’m a natural five out of ten. So, I am not spontaneous, I like to be strategic and planned, and I’m really thoughtful about how I imagine a day panning out. And so, yeah, no thank you. I don’t want any curveballs, ideally. And so, I don’t think I am naturally wired in a way that makes me brilliant at this, like my own personality; and then, I think I’ve learned it. So, I actually now would rate myself at a seven. And I think there’s two things that have really helped me. One, working in a team where there was millions of curveballs all the time. So, I worked in a corporate affairs team where their job is basically, quite a lot of the time, dealing with crisis, stuff going wrong, unexpected things, and they are so good at it. So, you’re like, “Oh, I’m suddenly working with people who are so good at something that I’m not”, so you learn by watching and a bit by osmosis, and then obviously, I had to do some of it myself. And I think you’re really good at it.
So, I think that has been a forcing function. You know, when you do see someone, I think because I’ve also seen you do it, I’ve seen what you do in that moment, I’ve just copied you, like as in actually imitated. And now, some of those curveballs that come my way, I honestly do think I’m like, “Right, well what would Helen do?” And I have to slightly fight against my natural tendency, when a curveball comes my way, because I will try a bit, but because I like things to work in a certain way, I’m so tempted to give up. I’d almost be like, “Well, this has just gone wrong now. So, we just have to accept it’s gone wrong”, and almost like, “we’ll try again another day or we’ll try again another way”. And then I watch you in action who does neither of those things, and I’m like, “Oh, there is a different way to cope with curveballs”, which I think is way better.
Helen Tupper: Well, yeah, maybe not better in every situation. So, I guess, to Sarah’s point, what do I do? So, I would probably, it’s got its challenges, but my natural coping with a curveball, I’d probably rate myself a bit higher, maybe an eight on my ‘cope with a curveball’. In the moment, I think I stay very calm and I adapt very quickly, in the moment. So, I don’t panic. And I actually had a family curveball last week, when something came and my first response is, “Don’t panic, this is what we’ll do”. And so, I kind of have that response to most curveballs that come my way. And so, it is good, and there’s some things that I’ve learnt in order to do that, which we’ll talk about with the ideas for action. But I would say the only challenge with my way of coping with a curveball, which is a common reflection from my style generally, is that it takes me quite a long time to then go, “Oh, I’ve had that curveball before. I should actually do something more long term about it”.
So, I’m very, very good at repeatedly coping with curveballs in the moment so we can move forward. But what I’m less good at is almost looking at the root cause of the curveball so that it gets resolved over the long term. So, I’ll kind of hold that as an ‘even better if’, but generally of some of the things that I do, you can throw me a curveball and I will help you work through and respond to it pretty quickly.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, you’re a good person. Like, when I was stuck on a platform in the middle of the UK by myself, you were in Spain helping me cope with that curveball. And it was so funny sort of having you in a very different reality, like what was happening to you was very different, but you are very good at just staying very calm. And I’m there going, “I think I might do this or I think I could do this”.
Helen Tupper: I was so impressed by you though, because I was there obviously thinking, “What can I do to help?”
Sarah Ellis: Not much!
Helen Tupper: And I actually got to the point I was like, “Oh, I don’t know how much I can help you and it’s probably going to get more annoying, me trying to help. And so, when you sent me a picture, you sent me a picture about 15 minutes after this, of you, I think you were in a Starbucks, or somewhere, weren’t you, just doing some work, having a drink, and obviously just kind of going, “Well, the best way I can cope with the curveball right now is to sit this bit out until the solution is resolved. But normally, it might be a bit flappier, a bit panicky. And I was like, that was the best way of coping with the curveball that moment. You’d kind of created another opportunity from it, which is just, “I’m going to create a bit of space, I’m going to get something done, and then this will be resolved”.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I think I said, “I’m just going to reset”. Because I felt like, you’ve kind of got a choice, haven’t you? You can get more and more wound up by curveballs, or it’s how quickly, I think, can you accept the curveball, and I think that’s what I’ve got a lot faster at, because I want to fight it because I don’t want it to be true. But most curveballs, you can’t fight. They’re usually out of your control and they are happening. And so, I think the window between a curveball and acceptance for me is now — like, yours is almost instantaneous, I would say. Almost you’re like, “In the moment, I’m there, I’ve accepted it, let’s go, let’s follow it, let’s sort it”. Mine is not quite as quick as yours, but I think it’s now really short, but that’s taken so much practice. Also, to be clear, I also don’t enjoy it. I would like everything to work all of the time. But also, back to the Squiggly Career thing, I think you just also understand of course there are going to be curveballs. And so, actually, I think it becomes better for you to take control if that window can be shorter.
Helen Tupper: So, we’ve got a couple of different ideas for actions now, three different ones, so that when a curveball comes your way, you’re able to respond to it. Sarah, do you want to do the first one?
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. So, action number one is pre-think about your ‘what to do whens’. So, this is a bit about anticipating curveballs, because I think you often can. Like, it’s really easy to name the curveballs, we came up with those quickly, our team came up with them quickly. I then put one into ChatGPT to see what examples it gave me. The one that I used was, “What do I do when a manager or someone else senior asks me a question I don’t know the answer to?” And I put also a prompt, “I want to stay calm and credible”, because I was like, “Well, how do I want to show up in that moment?” So, I tried to give it a bit to work with. Also, I like that ChatGPT often gives you positive feedback. It’s like, “That’s a great mindset”, that’s the first thing it said to me. I was like, “Thanks!” So, I’m weirdly needy for praise from ChatGPT!
But what is good is, I think, what ChatGPT does is it gives you a range of answers. Now, some I looked at and I was like, “Well, I’d think of that anyway, or that was obvious”. But there was one where I thought, “Okay, that’s new to me, I wouldn’t have thought of that”, which was, “Offer what you do know”. So, let’s say Helen puts me on the spot and she’s like, “Oh, do you know the latest data around the podcast for June? What’s been listened to? What are people responding really well to? What do you know?” And I would think, “I don’t know”, which is also true. So, I would be like, “Okay, well, I don’t know the answer to that”. But what I can think about is, “Well, what do I know?” And so, you’re not trying to hide from the fact you don’t know some of it. So, I might say to Helen, “Do you know what, I actually haven’t got the data for June at the moment, so I can go away, and I’ll definitely share that with you. What I do know is that the episode that we did with Jefferson Fisher, where we talked a little bit about having great conversations, I know that those videos went really well, and they were some real standout videos. So, what we should do is, particularly for those, think about why. Was it the topic; is it because he was so great, which he was, he got a lot of clarity in his delivery, really kind of personable, he’s good to watch; or is it about the guest, is it about the topic, is it a bit of both?”
So, there, what I’ve done is I have acknowledged and been honest about the fact that I don’t know the answer to Helen’s question, but I have still shared some insight, a point of view or a perspective. And I think you’re not shying away from, “Well, I still need to go and find that and share it with you”, but it still feels I’ve been part of that conversation. So, I like that, I like the, “It’s okay to say you don’t know, but it can also be useful to share what you do know”, which could just be an opinion.
Helen Tupper: And again, I think that helps you to feel just a bit more in control of the moment, because I think the curveball can feel like it takes away your control. So, anything just saying, “I do know this, I don’t know this”, it’s just you’re back in control rather than the waffling your way through something to find your answers.
Sarah Ellis: Definitely. And then, the second part of this, we’ve kind of got two parts of here. So, that’s the ‘anticipate’, you’re using a bit of scenario-planning essentially to figure out what to do. And if I was you, I would pick the curveballs that happen to you most, and if you’ve not already put those into an AI, see what it tells you. Then, Helen and I were chatting about the reality of what we actually do, and it’s really helpful to have some workarounds ready to go for your most common curveballs. And I think often we have, or my observation was, we have one workaround. So, I’ll think, “Okay, well if the tech doesn’t work today for when we’re recording the podcast, I’ve got one idea for a workaround. Okay, so we could use a different platform”, so I’ve got one thought. But sometimes one is not enough. And I think when I cope the best with curveballs is, it’s because I’ve got more than one workaround. I’ve got two or three kind almost like pulling rabbits out of a hat.
I feel I’m like, “Right, well the first rabbit out of the hat is let’s change cables”. This is how boring our life is, everybody! The second rabbit out of the hat is, “Let’s switch from this to this”. So, I think when Helen and I both do use a lot of technology, I think now I’ve got a number of rabbits to pull from the hat to go, “If this goes wrong, workaround one, workaround two, workaround three”. And as you go down those workarounds, to be honest, they get less and less ideal, but they are still something, almost to the point where I go, say for technology, there’s then a point where I say, “Well, no technology, flipchart”. Still good, because I can still do the drawings or show some of the diagrams to a group. And then, you do get to the point where you’re like, “Well, I’ve run out of workarounds. Okay, no tech, no flipchart. I do know the content so I can just talk to people”.
Even if that is the workaround, I might be on workaround four or five by then, but that did happen to me recently. And do you know what? It was absolutely fine. And I had to adapt quite a lot in the moment, and like I say, I wouldn’t want to do it all of the time, because of the energy that it takes you, because you’ve gone through all of those workarounds and they’re failing. So, you’re like, “Workaround one, fail; workaround two, didn’t work; workaround three, still not getting anywhere”. And then, there’s often a point where you have to make a call and just go, “Okay we need to think quite differently here”. But I think if you’ve only got one workaround, you’re limiting your response to that curveball. And that, I think, is what I’ve learned from Helen. She’s just relentless in her workarounds!
Helen Tupper: I do, I think I’m probably aware of my most common ones, aren’t I? I think I just have a list in my head that I’ll just cycle through. But I think the other thing that helps me is the second idea for action on coping with curveballs, which is buy yourself some time. So, there are things obviously other than tech that create curveballs, but if I just take that one, because it’s such a common one for me and Sarah. What I will often do is I don’t particularly want people to see me cycling through my workarounds, I would find that a little bit stressful. And so, what I will tend to do is I will go off camera. So, I’ll say to people, I’m just going to take two minutes to fix this. And I’ve said that to groups of 500 people before, because I know that if I’m trying to stay smiley on camera and fix all of this stuff, it’s not going to be possible, and it’s going to take me a lot longer. So, I will often say, “I’m having a bit of a problem at the moment, I’m just going to take two minutes, fix this and come back”. I put my camera off, then I’m in a right flap going through. I’m like, “Okay, try one, try two, try three, try four.” But when the fourth one works, I put the camera on and I’m calm again.
I think however you buy yourself some time, so sometimes it’s, “Camera off, let me come back to you”; sometimes, it might be, and this is a very learnt thing for me which I’ve seen other people do well, is if I get a question that completely throws me off, and sometimes Sarah and I definitely get those questions from people, I will say, “Oh, that’s a really interesting question. What’s your perspective?” And I’m basically buying myself time to think. I’m also seeing what the other person’s agenda is. Like, sometimes people just ask you hard questions because they’ve already got an opinion.
Sarah Ellis: Or they’re asking a hard question, because they want to tell you what they think about it.
Helen Tupper: They’ve had a very clever thought on it. So, it gives you time to work out where they’re coming from. But it also gives me a bit more to work with. You know when someone asks you a hard question out of nowhere like, “What’s your perspective on how this political thing is going to affect the business?” I’ll be thinking, “I have got absolutely no idea”. So, I might say, “Oh, really, gosh, that’s a big question. What are your thoughts?” And they might say something, and then that just might give me the hook for me to kind of catch a thought. And so, I think creating yourself time in order to sort of, I always think hold the curveball just for a moment, just hold it so you can work out, “How do I want to respond to this?”
Also, I always want to come across quite obviously with energy, but in situations when I’ve been thrown a curveball, I want to come across as calm, confident and in control. So, what I will try, what I will do is anything that is not that as a response. So, if I’m panicking inside, I will often just breathe. I’ll often be like, “Okay, breathe”. If I’m panicking outside, I will often put my camera off, because just for me, my response in the moment to the curveball is very important for the impression that I create with people. Like, I want them to see I can hold this, I’m not panicking, I’m not flapping. That’s going to make me feel worse, and it’s probably going to make me look worse. So, I’m just trying to hold the curveball just for a moment so that I can do whatever it is I need to do to stay calm, in control and confident. And then I’m just better able to go back to it, whatever it is.
Sarah Ellis: Which I then think gets us to the third. I almost feel these are a bit like stages of a curveball, because I feel there’s a curveball process that sometimes takes five minutes, but sometimes can take five days, depending on what kind of a curveball it is. And the third one is a bit of a watch-out. What we don’t want these curveballs to become, Helen and I decided in potentially a moment of late-night thinking, we don’t want the curveballs to become snowballs. So, what we don’t want them to do is once this curveball has happened, we want to deal with it and go, “Right, that’s it”, put the curveball in the corner. We don’t want to give it any momentum and we don’t want to give it more attention or headspace than it deserves.
I often think when curveballs do come your way, or where I can see I’ve probably thrown curveballs to other people, it’s how you respond and what happens next that matters most, not the fact that it has happened. So, as Helen was saying, I had a week of really bad travel, logistical stuff going wrong, almost everything you could imagine. There was a fire at one point. Honestly, loads of weird stuff happened in one week. And so, the stack of curveballs was going up and up and up, and I really could have started, yeah, actually I think I could have really started to feel sorry for myself. I think that’s the temptation.
Helen Tupper: Or cried. I think you probably could have cried!
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, there was that at one point. But I was like, “Well, there’s no point, I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. And actually, I’m doing some things I really care about. So, how I turn up and show up makes a really big difference”. And also, I think sometimes it’s reminding yourself that other people haven’t experienced those curveballs with you. So, as much as people have a little bit of empathy, like trains can be bad, your meeting can be derailed by a manager request, those sorts of things, nobody else has seen that. They’ve not seen the messiness of the curveball. What they see is what you say, how you show up, how you respond. That’s kind of it. Sometimes, you’d quite like them to feel the pain, I think, of the curveball.
Helen Tupper: “Do you know what it took for me to be here today?”
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, “To get here”. Whereas actually, it is really interesting, because people always ask you, like when we do travel around, people will often say to us like, “Oh, how was your journey?” and I’ll be, “Oh, it was a bit tricky getting here, you know, train tracks”, but you move on so quickly, and I’m like, “It has taken me a day to get here”. But they’ve moved on because what do they care about? They care about what’s coming. And so, you’ve got to meet people where they are, right? That’s what they care about. And that is what you are there to do.
And so, I find letting that feeling sorry for myself spiral, that’s not going to help me, it’s not going to serve me well. Whereas actually, if I think, “Oh, I feel proud about how I responded to that, and it’s not easy, I did reset, I did give myself some space, I did take a moment”, then actually you can then continue to perform well. And so, I think that’s just, it might feel often quite big for you, but you want to let it go. I’m like, “Kick it away, kick that curveball away as quickly as you can and go back to, ‘What can I control? How can I respond?'”
Helen Tupper: And then just the last thing on stopping curveballs becoming snowballs is this. What Sarah’s talked about is very in the moment, so, “How will you stop it becoming a snowball in your mind in the moment?” And the other thing is, if you spot the same curveball that keeps coming, so this goes back to my thing about, “I can fix it in the moment, but hang on, it keeps coming back”; I think if you do see the same curveball, meetings always get derailed, tech always fails, you consistently have problems with your travel. I think that’s where you kind of have to think, “Well, there is something bigger I need to do differently here. I can’t just keep coping with the curveball. I need to find a new ball or something, because this one just keeps coming back”, and there’s only so much coping that’s going to be efficient, I think, for you.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think one example of that, which is again quite boring, because it’s just in Helen’s and my world, but because we know travel is an obvious curveball, when we are traveling for work, we always go the night before. And that’s something we started probably about a year or 18 months ago, because even on those all those examples I gave around those curveballs I had in that week, there was space and capacity for me to, I could have kept traveling through the night and I would have made it. I was always going to make it to these places. And so, that comes from anticipating, and like Helen said, almost being a bit more strategic about going, “Oh, trains will break down, travel logistics will be difficult, tech will break down”. And, again, we’ve now started asking for flipcharts to be in some rooms, where if we’re a bit unsure about the tech — if the tech looks great, you’re 95% of the time it does work. But if we’re like, “Okay, that building looks 200 years old and doesn’t look it might have that much tech in it. I’m not sure they’re going to have airplay, or whatever”, actually having a flipchart, that curveball can come your way, and suddenly it’s a load less stressful.
If you’ve got a manager who’s always derailing your day, you might want to talk to them a little bit about how you plan your work. Or even using the word ‘curveballs’ as a team might be quite helpful. And so, I think it’s just you don’t want to be too accepting of just being like, yes, it’s about coping and staying calm, which is a lot of what we’ve talked about today; but there’s also that bit about, “How can you take initiative and be proactive?” Because for someone me, who isn’t a natural curveball-coper, I’m not a natural Helen, I can do the second bit. I’m good at the second bit. I’m good at thinking, “Well, what could we do differently that reduces the likelihood of those curveballs having a really big impact?” I can’t stop the curveballs, but I can stop the impact of the curveball. So, if you’re more like me, you might be more motivated also by knowing that that second part is possible too.
Helen Tupper: So, we will summarise that curveball process, how you can cope with it, the three different actions, we’ll put that in the PodSheet. You can get that on our website, amazingif.com, just go to the podcast page, or you can find the link in the show notes. And if you have any feedback or reflections, please do get in touch. We’re just helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.
Sarah Ellis: Thank you so much for listening and we’ll be back with you again soon. Bye for now.
Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.