Launching tomorrow, Wednesday 2 February, Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future podcast welcomes Sarah Ellis, co-founder of Amazing If, a Sunday Times best-selling business author, and co-host of Squiggly Careers podcast.
Amazing If is an award-winning career development company. Sharing what it’s mission and core values are, Sarah tells host Jimmy: “Our purpose is to make careers better for everyone. We want people to have a career as individual, and as brilliant as they are.
“Our number one value is to be useful – we want to help people in a very practical way. The work we do is thinking about how we can help people navigate their ‘squiggly careers’, in a method that works for them.”
Following the success of their Sunday Times business best-seller, ‘The Squiggly Career’, Sarah and her business partner Helen Tupper recently launched their newest book ‘You Coach You’, which prompts their aim to make coaching accessible for everyone.
Talking about what coaching actually looks like, Sarah says: “It’s all about helping people to help themselves. It’s less about advice, points of view, or answers. It’s more about asking really good questions, being a brilliant listener and giving people the space, and time to think through their own challenges, and problems for themselves.
“It’s important as a coach to stay very neutral, and that you don’t share your advice or your points of view. My job is to ask you really good questions that unlock your thinking, help you to get unstuck, or help you to uncover new ideas.”
Sharing her experience of transitioning careers, what questions you should be asking yourself if you’re on this journey, and why we need to scrap the culture of having a side hustle, Sarah highlights: “A successful career change always happens incrementally, we know this from research.
“If you’re thinking about trying something new, I would always encourage you to think, how can you experiment? What experiences can you gain?
“If you try something new, but it stays a hobby, that’s absolutely fine. I don’t think we should put pressure on ourselves to feel like we must have a side project, or hustle at any one point in time.
“For us, we had an idea and just started to test it because we enjoyed it. It was amazing to see the feedback we got from our workshops, and we grew from there. Fundamentally, the reason we were doing it was because we were enjoying, and learning from it. There wasn’t an expectation of what it would give us, there was no pressure of the project delivering a career change, or financial benefit.”
Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future is available on Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, and all major podcast platforms.
