breathe….blow out the stress, breathe in the relaxation!
This month we are talking about ways to handle stress in your workplace. While working in a library is wonderful in a lot of ways; we all know that it also brings us some stressful moments.
You need to take less than five minutes, right now, and just have some time to breathe and let your mind wander in happy directions. Take a nice deep breath in, hold for a second, and then breath out with gusto. Do this another time or two, and just let your worries fade to the background for a while. (They will be there later; so you can just forget about them for right now!)
Stress reduction can be enhanced by watching nature. So if you are somewhere you can look at fish, stare out the window at some green space, or pat your dog or cat – do that. And if you want to just relax and let nature come to you, we have a nice video of the Acadia National Park in Maine. Let it inspire you to go out after work or over the weekend and do your own walking around in nature, for the best relaxation!
“Work simply. Live fully.” This week CMLE focuses on the following work productivity tip from Work Simply, Carson Tate’s popular book. At CMLE, we’ve boiled down Tate’s wealth of knowledge from Work Simply to a few key points; please see the book for more detail and resources. At the bottom, see links to earlier tips in the series! Let’s all be our best selves….
This week’s activity: Free yourself from the pull of constant “busyness” by focusing on achieving your best life.
In the final chapter of Carson Tate’s book Work Simply, she describes an activity she uses with her clients. She has them imagine their lives with all aspects – personal and professional – just the way they want it to be. She has them think how this would look, how they would feel, who they would be with. This exercise creates feelings of “excitement, joy, fun, meaning, and purpose.”
Want to make that fantasy a reality?
Take all the tips and strategies you’ve learned from this series, and put them into action!
In case you need a quick review: Set your READY goals: Realistic, Exciting, Action-oriented, Directive, and Yours. Take a look at the tasks you complete each day and evaluate whether they will help you come closer to achieving your goals. Next, learn better ways of investing your most valuable resource, time. Finally, ask for help! Realize that you actually don’t need to do it all yourself, or all on your own.
Looking for more resources for streamlining your life and living with more meaning and purpose? Check out www.carsontate.com for more strategies and information.
If you missed it, discover your Productivity Style with a simple assessment. See our earlier posts in the series for personalized tips on working with your Productivity Style in order to transform your work and personal life.
Stress affects everyone, and end-of-year stress can be particularly difficult. Many of us are struggling to finish up all our work for the end of the semester, or celebrating holidays and all that comes with it, in addition to dealing with every single other thing that was already driving us crazy all year long! Patrons have less patience, money is suddenly tighter, and all kinds of extra programs can just cause even the best-balanced library person to hit a breaking point.
CMLE is here to help you. This month we will provide all kinds of information about stress, to help you learn more about it, and learn some strategies for managing stress. You cannot stop stress from happening, but we can all learn better ways to increase our resilience so stress does not knock us out!
One easy way to help is to listen to podcasts.
Of course, there are all kinds of librarian podcasts out there, and we recommend those as nice way to keep up with interesting things happening in the profession!
We all feel it, and the end of year can bring all kinds of extra stress for us with the semester winding down and holiday celebrations winding up. Working in libraries is no protection against workplace stressors; in fact, working with patrons – which is generally rewarding – can provide a significant amount of stress in our daily work.
I have spent a lot of time talking with library people across the country about workplace stress, and it was pretty depressing. Most of us are here because we enjoy our jobs, they provide us with a lot of professional satisfaction, and despite the problems we face libraries are still great places to work!
But minimizing discussion of workplace stress just minimizes the real problems we face. It is better to face the issue, and to help ourselves and our staff to resolve problems that can be fixed and to get some training to handle problems that cannot. Stress causes all kinds of problems, from an uncomfortable workplace to workers suffering from burnout and never able to return to their jobs. Employee health is an important part of providing good service, and stress can just torpedo that.
Everywhere I went to conferences to talk about stress, people would come up to me and whisper that they were glad someone was talking about this. They thought they were alone in it, that they were doing something wrong because they were feeling stress.
Ignoring stress does not make it go away!
Thinking that “real” librarians wouldn’t get stressed is incorrect!
Acknowledging this is an issue in our profession is important – and the best way to help us all to overcome it. We need to think about ways to manage workplace stress on the individual level, in our library organizations, and across the profession.
So this is our December Monthly Topic: Stress Management. We can’t fix everything in your workplace, but we hope we can give you some tools to work with and some ideas to think about in your library. Continue reading Stress Management: Why Bother??→
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