Squiggly Skill Sprint: Reflections

For the month of August, I joined in with AmazingIf on their Squiggly Skills sprint. Rather than the usual 30-40 minute podcast a week, this entailed 20 short podcasts, one every weekday in August. These were tight 7-minute podcasts that discussed a career development topic, gave two pieces of advice, and suggested some supporting material.

The intent from Helen and Sarah was to build momentum around learning for a month, and to build some community around it. I can say that in both regards, that worked for me.

For me, I was obviously at a loose end after a redundancy, and Helsinki is quite quiet in the summer as many people are off on holiday. My approach, as anyone that follows me could see, was to use the podcast as a writing prompt to produce a LinkedIn post every day.

This was great for me, as it gave me a solid task to do every day, that was public and driven by others.Otherwise I could very easily end up being unproductive when I had nothing else pressing to do.

It was also lovely to do some writing every day. It’s something I have not had the capacity to do for a long time, so simply getting the creative juices flowing was great.

Most importantly for me, I am obviously a great fan of Helen and Sarah, and often use their material when coaching and advising. Doing my own posts meant taking what they said in the podcast, and putting my own personal twist on it. For me, it was really rewarding to have that constraint on me, that what I wrote had to come from my own experiences in some way. It was a great confidence boost for me to count up at the end and see that I’d written almost 8000 words off the back of the Sprint.

I also gained a lot of really nice connections on LinkedIn, who have similar interests, and had some lovely side conversations.

Overall, this was an interesting way to tweak the existing routine, that came at a good time for me when I had the bandwidth to engage consistently. It’s a great example of the simple mantra of doing a little bit every day to make improvements.