It’s a tough time for libraries, and people in customer service. And while we don’t want to veer into any toxic positivity, it is good to spend a little time focused on building your happiness level. We are not going to solve people’s serious mental issues here. But bringing some happiness skills to your week can be helpful to everyone!
Mondays can be a little hard, even when things are going fine. Use this small injection of a happiness skill to your week. We are here to support you, and to help you to be a little happier in the library.
No matter how much all of us works on our happiness levels, bad things happen, we have hard days, and there are challenges all around us. We can’t stop that, but we can work on building up our resilience to get through these issues with the least damage to ourselves.
Check out this excerpt from the article: Build Your Coping Skills and Capacity to Manage Stress
“Think about difficult situations in your personal life or work in which your belief system played a defining role in how well you were able to cope. Think about the coping mechanisms that were at your disposal. Did you choose to use them? Why or why not? How effective were you in coping with the situation?
Now ask yourself a more fundamental question: what guides your coping skills? What basic principle or principles underlie your decision-making in complex, challenging situations? To be sure, it can be difficult to articulate these deeper ideals and values in our lives. If nothing definitive comes immediately to mind, jot down your initial thoughts on this question for later use in framing a more complete answer.
Ponder also the times when you observed people who were guided by their coping skills in difficult decision-making situations. You can probably identify cases of extraordinary resolve by your co-workers, family members, or friends during times of hardship—personal or professional. Although these situations, of course, may not have been as catastrophic as that experienced by Viktor Frankl, they may still have been formidable challenges to overcome or survive.
In the workplace, for example, it is clear that some individuals are able to cope more easily than others with the outpouring of professional and occupational changes in today’s job market. Corporate downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, new technologies, career or job shifts, new working arrangements, and the trauma of unemployment are all part of our work lives.
All of us can tell stories that illustrate the many ways in which people respond to these challenges. In the end, the most capable, responsible, and resilient individuals have adopted, consciously or unconsciously, a coping maxim and skills to guide and drive them toward meaningful resolutions.”
You can read the entire article here.
CMLE can be part of your support network; we are here for you, and support you in your library work. Take a nice deep breath in, and whoosh it out; it’s going to be okay today.
