#594 How to increase your autonomy

Hi, I'm Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast and you are listening to one of our weekly Squiggly Career shortcuts. These episodes are designed to be quick to listen and full of simple and effective actions to support you in your career. And today I want to talk a little bit about autonomy and how you can earn more of it at work. Maybe before we get into the how it's useful to talk about the why, why do we want to bother earning more autonomy? Well, the research around this shows that the people who have the highest levels of autonomy are the people who have higher levels of well-being at work and they are much more satisfied with the work that they do.

I think as a topic, it's something that I probably first started to consider when I came across Dan Pink's work on drive. And he talks about drive as a as a different way of talking about motivation. And the people that have the most motivation are people who have purpose, so the why behind the work, mastery. the skills to do the work and autonomy, the freedom and space to do the work in the way that works for them. And so today I just want to talk a little bit about, well, how do we, how do we earn more autonomy if that's the payoff we get when it's present in our work?

The first thing to think about is autonomy. It is something that you earn rather than you ask for. So there are certain things that we need to do to make it easier for us to get it at work. And the first thing is trust.

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