How do you practice gratitude in your personal life and at your work setting? About this time of year, I am always reminded to slow down, be thankful, and even express my gratitude to others! I am thinking about incorporating more deliberate steps for gratitude in my daily life, so I was intrigued by the following blog post.

According to our friends at Edutopia, “our ability to feel gratitude is a muscle of sorts — it’s a habit our minds can develop — we just need practice.” And according to Elena Aguilar, here’s the thing… “Our brains need to feel gratitude in order for us to want to be at work. Our brains are like Teflon for positive experiences and like Velcro with negative experiences. This means the negative comments, interactions, professional development (PD) workshops, and so on, cling to our brains. But if we spend a few minutes in appreciation, recalling those fulfilling moments in a day or encounters with supportive parents, or the segments in workshops when we felt we were learning, our brains create new links between neurons.” There are very deliberate steps we can take to exercise our “gratitude muscle” and they are included in Elena’s blog post .  Please don’t be put off by the title being specific to schools…these strategies would work in any library/worksite.

So, I will go first…..

I appreciate engaged library staff (like you) who continue to use our services and engage in our programming. Whether you are reading and/or commenting on our weekly blog posts, liking our Facebook page, retweeting our Tweets, writing book reviews or other blog posts, suggesting ideas for programming, applying for scholarships, participating in our Quick Question Polls, or attending our events, you are the heart of what we define as resource sharing!

CMLE staff  are thankful for the opportunity to serve your needs, and to work with you to increase the capacity of all types of libraries in Central Minnesota! It is our privilege to work with talented and engaged library staff and we thank you for the opportunity!

Gratitude Programming Tip: We suggested this tip last year, and several libraries really loved it, as it is very easy to do. Use a whiteboard in the library with a “What are you thankful for?” heading, then sit back, and observe a showplace of thanks not just for this week, but consider continuing this through the new year. Please consider taking a close up picture of your whiteboard and sharing it with CMLE! Let the gratitude begin!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Patricia Post, CMLE Director

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/kdkqc9m, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0