I wrote a blog post for my work’s staff intranet that I’m posting here as well, because I think it is a great post and I’m proud of it. I wrote it at the request of my job’s RiPL team. RiPL stands for Resiliency in Public Libraries.

For those of you who don’t know – working in a public library can be incredibly hard some days. It’s not all unicorns and pigeon books. The Public Library serves everybody – and some of the people who come into the library have some heavy needs (and behavior issues, and addictions, and bad attitudes, and…. fill in the blank) – which can suck a lot of energy from even the most caring of individuals, leaving staff with little energy by the end of the day. One of the things that the RiPL team does is acknowledge a staff member once a month for being resilient, in hopes that this will lead to more staff becoming and being resilient. A few months ago, I was recognized as a “Resiliency Star” at my branch. I got a gold balloon that I took home and shared with my son (and a bunch of chocolates).

Here is my blog post:

Resiliency and Vulnerability

If resiliency is the ability to bounce back from hardships, how does one become resilient? You can type this question into google and get many results – far too many. Some articles have lists of things to try – like this one and this one.

Something that gets missed in these lists sometimes is the importance of vulnerability. In this article this concept is listed as “10. Run at the Dog”.

It’s something that I have been trying to do more of in my life and it can be downright hard at times. It’s doing the hard things – the things that make you want to say “hell, no”, the things we avoid due to fear of failure. Most people don’t like the feeling of failure and will do everything they can to avoid it. To truly learn from our mistakes and get better at life, we need to fail (sometimes many times) first.

In Thor’s words, it’s running towards one’s problems because “that’s what heroes do.”

So when I was asked to write something for the RiPL blog (along with other resiliency stars), I said yes. Not because I particularly wanted to, but rather because I want to keep challenging myself. I am trying to do the uncomfortable things in life because this is how I will succeed in my life goals.

What I have found in my life is that once I make a decision to do a hard thing, often I get help from unexpected places. Have any of you read Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly?

It’s a wonderful book about how the universe really tries to help us and how there are no coincidences.

So when I agreed to write a post, I really had absolutely no idea what to write about. Over the past couple of months, the universe has helped guide me. Once I started thinking about the idea of vulnerability (and risk taking and bravery – since they are all linked), the universe told me in its own special way that this is indeed what I should write about.

How did it do this? Netflix put Brene Brown’s new talk front and center in one of my carousels when I turned it on one night. If you don’t know who Brene Brown is – she is the expert on vulnerability. She has a very famous TED talk and a website (with some very impelling articles).

And what does this have to do with resiliency in public libraries? Well, if we are making conscious decisions to do the hard things, of course it will be a challenging road. And we might fail – but it’s only a mistake if we don’t learn from it. If we try, fail, and try again. That right there is resiliency.

“Each moment is an opportunity to make a fresh start” Pema Chödrön (The Places that Scare You, p. 83).