AI Skills Sprint: How To Make Networking Easy with AI

0:01Helen:Lululemon's new drop of daily essentials feels like a deep breath of fresh air. Breezely is a collection of drapey pants, shorts, and tanks designed to mix and match with your wardrobe as the weather warms up. It's all made in our lightweight, stretchy, swift fabric. Throw on these everyday staples after practice and bring an airy feel to your daily moves. Shop the Breezely Collection now at lululemon.com. Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too Comfort Inn It's calling your name Save on the stay Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim Well, I hope you like my little song Book direct at choicehilletales.com 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 skills sprint that's the 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 summaries link in the show notes email us 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 of advice 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 um 70 of people's roles come through a connection so if we are not creating the connections we're not building the 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 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.

2:26One, you like helping people, we like helping people, results 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 prompt that we're going to start

2:59Helen: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 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 people just being annoyingly positive yeah that too we'll come on to that in a second and also I think sometimes finding difference can feel hard to do you know people with different perspectives people with different experiences maybe someone at the start of their career maybe you just don't come across that many people just starting out maybe you don't work with anyone who's got 20 years more experienced than you so i think we all benefit from those different perspectives but sometimes it can feel those people can feel quite hard to reach and this makes it very easy and so what we're asking an ai to do here and i did use chat gpt and claude for this one so i just did it at the same time in both of them worked well in both i said act as my personal career board take on different personas including challenger questioner supporter ideator connector and empathiser.

4:13Helen:My current career dilemma is how to make sure I'm balancing enough time learning for myself with spending time supporting other people to learn. What questions or statements would each of these people ask me and show the data in a table? So I guess before we get into Sarah's insights and answers if you're copying and pasting that prompt the bit that you might want to personalise is the challenge. So Sarah put the learning challenge in you put whatever challenge is relevant to you. And so you do get a very neat table I would say which was which was very helpful and it gave the personas and it also gave it it categorized the voice and focus so for example challenger direct bold high standards uh supporter encouraging affirming emotionally invested so actually it sort of described the roles a bit for me and if you read any of that voice and focus and thought oh that's not what i want the focus to be yeah you could obviously amend it and say oh have my challenger to have the highest standards of anyone you could imagine you're like even higher you can kind of push it in different directions so I kind of like that ability to adapt and then it gave me the prompt or the question and I think here what's often helpful is very quickly you've got the range and then you can dive deeper into what feels useful for you so for example my challenger asked me if you're not learning for yourself how can you credibly guide others what are you avoiding and I was like oh I know I know it was quite confrontational but for me really helpful as someone who isn't like I'm not naturally very confronting in my in my style actually having that prompt to myself around credibility that really hit home and I was like well it really matters to me to be credible so that that kind of really worked the supporter one you give so much to others what would it look like to give that same caring energy to yourself I was like don't care that one support dismissed support dismissed you can leave my board but I think I find that I just found that less motivating yeah just less less useful people that might be the role that they relate to like nice people I imagine much nicer people than me I think what I've often found when I've tested this tool live with lots of people who kind of learn with us in workshops is you're often missing maybe you've got three or four of these in real life but maybe there's one or two that you could really do with their perspective but you haven't got them yet again we're not saying replacement for real people the advantage I guess of this is it's immediate and it fills the gaps you've got for now yeah I still want a challenger but those questions were really good well what I did was I did copy and pasted the prompt that Sarah had said but I personalized it with my challenge and then I said I want to have a one-to-one with my questioner and that for me was like this extra level of usefulness because it was then I was having a direct conversation because you get a list of questions with what Sarah showed which are really useful but the one-to-one I felt like was just a it's just a really helpful discussion like really really helpful and and then I felt I think I would have been much more confident having that conversation with an actual question yes I kind of thought through in advance and so we've got one extra tool for you to try out today controversial yeah we're a bit divisive we don't Sarah doesn't like it I found it quite useful so the tool is called crystal nose and you just go to the website you will download it'll put like a little thing on your toolbar and and you can well A, it has some surveys for you which are kind of interesting but the thing that is useful in the context of your community is you can attach it to your LinkedIn and then when you look at someone's profile it will use AI to basically tell you how to communicate with that person, what their likely disk profile is which is like a personality tool that you can use to profile people, how to email that person, you know if you're presenting information, it gives you loads of detail on how to engage with them.

7:59So I did this with Sarah, I thought who can I test this with you get five free goes I I wanted more once I'd got in I was like I want to do this on more people um so I did it with Sarah she came out as an initiator visionary charismatic and dynamic just based on her LinkedIn profile and it gave me do's and don'ts so focus on high level summaries when I was reading this you were the one that I was like oh I don't know because you're so you're just a bit of everything you're a bit AI finds it hard to analyze you well I guess this

8:26Helen:is also it is a bit based on your LinkedIn profile so I suppose I well it's a lot based on that So I don't do very much posting on LinkedIn. I mean, there was lots in there. I mean, I do think the visionary charismatic dynamic, I mean, dynamic's probably debatable. But to the point of I don't post that much, so it's making some of it up, right? They haven't got that much data to work with. I did it on Adam Grant because I think, you know, we'd like to get Adam Grant on the podcast. I was like, can it give me a few tips on how to engage Adam Grant? So do be expressive, enthusiastic. Get the best response from Adam using this example.

8:57How would you feel about dot, dot, dot? I was like, maybe try some of those. and I did it on my husband. So I thought, let's see how true this really is. And actually, I mean, it was pretty accurate. I'm not going to read them. But it's useful. You get five goes. And I think, you know, if I was going for an interview or I was working with a new stakeholder on a project, I mean, it's not that helpful for me to do it with you, to be honest. I know you really well. But if there was someone I was working with for the first time that I wanted a bit of insight into to inform how I communicated with them, Crystal Knows is a good tool.

9:26Helen:I think my reservations... Yes, Sarah. where I was like I just don't want people to lose critical thinking that's true um and actually when you and I looked at some of the things for me like some of it we were like well that's not right that's not right that's not right so you have I think you've got to be a bit just like always apply your own kind of critical thoughts to thing and also relationship building you know feels like something you still want people to be able to learn and I was like I don't want people to see it's a substitute don't it's like anything right don't outsource your learning and development to an AI or to other people yeah and don't outsource your ability to build relationships and I do think I suppose because I see at the moment you know you can tell sometimes when things are written by AI I would hate people to start sending emails to build relationships with people where you're like oh this is clearly in AI we get them right for people sometimes wanting to come in the podcast I'm like that's not a person yeah that's written that so it's just like some watch out so we'll watch out caveat don't be a stalker all the things that Sarah would say as an introverted networker but if you're thinking I think just get just give it a go like you don't just try it out see what it tells you see how useful it is for you and so as a team how can you talk about this together other than maybe doing each other's LinkedIn profiles I mean it definitely makes you think about your LinkedIn profile that's what it made me think about so as a team one of the things you could do is talk about one thing you want to learn so you might say one thing I want to learn is how to use AI as part of my everyday or one thing I want to learn is what is systems thinking I hear people talk about it but I just don't know what it is one thing I want to learn is more about being a brilliant leader or more about prioritizing or time management there's some common ones that come up and then you can have a discussion about well then who can help you and also then who could you help I think actually when you start to put your community around your learning or around your career based on your development it's so much easier as a filter and actually when I do this often with groups they'll say I want to learn about all of those things I just said and then I can be helpful straight away I can be like oh well if you're thinking about time I love Oliver Burtman's work but then someone else will chime in and say oh have you seen that Pomodoro thing that's free and here's the app and here's the link so everybody starts helping everybody and you know your point about reciprocity when we started I just see that happening and I think that's easier if you've got a kind of goal a learning goal and it doesn't have to always be learning but that's just a good place to start I think that sort of stuff just reframes how networking feels but that is the end that is the end of today's day four of the squiggly career skill sprint which means that tomorrow is our final day and we're going to be talking about how you can use ai to help with your future possibilities