A Look Back at PLMI....

Our week at PLMI went by so fast! I think I put in more hours than a regular work week...and that's saying a lot! All joking aside, it was truly a great experience and I am so happy to have had the opportunity to get to know my fellow Directors as well as Heather and Laura. Although I learned a lot about what I am doing right and what I need to do, I think what I found most beneficial was the time we took to stop, breathe, and THINK. I was able to reflect on how far we have come in my library in only a few short months, and I was able to take the time to really ponder where I want us to go. The time away from family, work, and cell phone service was probably the greatest advantage to last week, as time is so short in our everyday lives.

I am happy to say that I am attempting to use my Pomodero and had relatively good success today. I actually did accomplish quite a bit on my to do list. The hardest parts are the interruptions that come along in the day to day...board members stopping by, customers who want to say hello, etc. and those people you just cannot control. I am going to keep trying it and hoping it works well. I am actually going to give it a-go with school work as well.

My staff and I are planning a staff meeting soon so that I can relay to them the new mode we are entering and I will be finding ways to expand their education in the areas that interest them. Let's face it, we are much more productive when we do things we enjoy, right? They are aware that I am going to be working on policy and procedures and have been great about offering up ideas and comments on items they do not feel are clear within the existing policies. We have a lot of new and exciting things that are in the planning phase right now and I am hoping to successfully capitalize on their momentum.

I will say that immediately upon my return I sent out an email to my board and attended a special meeting tonight with my Friends group. After hearing some of the stories from other directors I realized how incredibly fortunate I am to have a board that is proactive and incredibly supportive. I never feel alone and we have a great working relationship and I began to see how very important that is and how much I had just taken it for granted, assuming they must all be this way. I took some time to attend the Friends meeting tonight so that I could tell them thank you for all they do. Now knowing that many of our libraries either have no Friends group or have those that are not effective I feel so fortunate once again to have a very active and successful group that manages to achieve incredible feats for the good or our library. Again, we have a great working relationship and they are so proud of where we are and are without doubt my number one fans. They have recently recruited several new, young members that have brought a new energy and creativity to the table and will be working on some great new projects. One of these new members is a good friend of mine that also has an MBA and a brilliant business mind. She has agreed to help me with my strategic planning so that I can lay out plans that are more like business plans in a nice presentable format. Being so intertwined with the library she can also help to keep me grounded (as I tend to want to seriously overachieve) and lay out realistic one year, three year and ten year plans. Again, I am terribly fortunate.

So, overall, at PLMI I re-learned something...I am bad ass (that one is for you, Heather)! Yes, I think we established that I probably have a little too much confidence, but we can all blame my mother who never wasted a minute of my life telling me that I have to love myself and believe in myself because sometimes I maybe the only one who does. Moreover, one must be confident if one wishes others to follow. While I have managed to achieve great things in the past 6 months or so (a $38,000 increase to operating funds to name one), I have several tricks up my sleeve that I now feel are more manageable and doable. I am going to seriously focus on training and creating my ideal library based on the vision I see at the horizon. I also learned that in general we librarians tend to not think ourselves to be great or important, and we need to realize just how incredible we are! I mean, it takes someone special to do this work. We certainly don't do it for the money or the glory! We do it because, as we discovered, we have all had something happen in our lives that brought us here and informed our hearts that we are meant to serve a greater good and in some small way change our little part of the world for the better.