The prompt sheet

1Start with the list

List every time in the last year someone asked for your help with something work-related. Do not judge the list and do not tidy it. Include the small things and the favours.

2Then the prompts

Work through these against the list rather than against your ideas. The list is evidence. The ideas are guesses.

• Which requests came up more than twice?
• Of those, which were the same underlying problem wearing different clothes?
• Who asked? Someone senior to you, junior to you, or outside your organisation entirely?
• What did they try before they came to you? That is what you would be competing with.
• Which of these could you do for someone outside your employer, without using anything that belongs to your employer?
• Which one would you be willing to be asked about every week for two years?

3Four ways this tends to go

Illustrative rather than actual people, but the shapes are common.

• A site manager listed eleven requests over two years. Nine were the same problem: work starting before the paperwork was in order. The offer was not construction advice, it was a pre-start check.
• A payroll administrator found nearly every request came from someone in their first month at a company. The pattern was onboarding, not payroll.
• A nurse manager noticed the asks were almost all rota disputes. The underlying problem was that nobody had written the escalation rules down.
• A logistics coordinator kept being asked quoting questions by small hauliers who did not know what to charge. The problem was pricing, not logistics.

4Picking one

Choose the one with the most repeat requests from people outside your employer. Not the most interesting one, and not the biggest.

Then write the sentence: I help [who] with [problem] so they can [outcome]. If you cannot fill in the first blank with a specific kind of person, you have a topic rather than a direction — and the next fortnight is better spent talking to people than building anything.

The examples here are illustrative — composites of situations that come up often, not customers, and not testimonials.

General information to help you think things through. Not regulated financial, legal or tax advice.