Yearly Archives: 2013

The Great Library Purge of 2013

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When my son was at a small Montessori school for elementary, I volunteered to help with the student store and field trips. During that time I also spent 5 years as a committee member and board member of The Parenting Center in Ft. Worth. When my son started middle school my term on the board was expiring, and I was ready to spend my volunteer time in a different way.

I decided to volunteer in the library at his middle school a couple of times per month. It takes me about the same time as the twice monthly agency meetings did, except I spend much less of my time driving and much more directly serving.

Volunteering in a school library is very different from organizing young kids who are planning and running a snack store or helping keep up with a group of children at a tree farm or a museum. And it uses a totally different part of my mind than what I used as a board member and committee chair. Thank goodness!

Usually at the library I do part of a project that involves organizing, arranging, labeling, or inventorying books or magazines or videos. Sometimes I run the laminator to plastic coat materials teachers have made for use in the classroom. Sometimes the librarian asks me for my opinion on a project she’s creating. Nothing is very challenging, and when my shift is over my part is done and I know what I’ve accomplished.

It’s usually calm, simple, and low-stress, even when the line to check out books backs up and I have to move the kids through quickly. But today was different. Today was the first time I have had a difficult assignment .

Since the school library exists for instructional support, one of the main measures of quality is the average copyright date on the reference books. Reference books in a school should be as up-to-date as possible. It’s a very different standard from a library that has an archiving responsibility.

My job today was to go through a section of reference books and pull off the shelf any that had a copyright date before 2000. The mythology book from the Joseph Campbell Institute was tough to pull. I mean, mythology is thousands of years old so it doesn’t change in a few years.

Pulling the huge Roget’s Thesauruses bothered me, too, even though there were newer versions left on the shelf. Pulling the dictionaries was rough, too, in spite of there being several “updated” versions to replace them. I sighed pretty deeply as I pulled the book of idioms, especially since there wasn’t a newer version.

The librarian came back from lunch, saw the stack, and had the same reaction I had. Her eyes opened wide. That many? The thesauruses?? The dictionaries??? We were both twitchy fingered Gollums not wanting to let go of our precious word books.

We both know that online reference catalogs are replacing printed reference books, and that they stay much more up-to-date. We talk often about the trend of digital publishing replacing physical books, especially in K-12 education. But we love books, and we especially love books about words. We’re word nerds.

I’m also a mythology nerd, thanks to my love of Jungian psychology. As the librarian was looking through the books I had pulled, she saw me gazing wistfully at the book from the Joseph Campbell Institute.

Turns out the books pulled from the shelves are offered to teachers to see if they want them as resources in their classrooms, and then they’re offered to other people. The mythology curriculum is for 6th grade, and 6th grade is at an intermediate school now instead of the middle school, so none of the teachers needed it for instruction.

I called dibs!

Where Are You?

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I am called to serve people who feel trapped in their lives, stuck in a rut dug by masses following someone else’s dreams instead of their own, shoving themselves into boxes (or cubicles) designed for someone else. Someone else who is very different from them, someone else who is very much “like everybody else,” someone else whose greatest aspiration is to fit in. My heart is drawn to these people. My mind is tuned to their struggles.

Like the sonar technician in the submarine listening carefully to hear clues in the echoed pings, I listen for hints in people’s conversations that they’re plodding along unfulfilled. That their talents are wasted, undeveloped, maybe even undiscovered.

Some of these people are on the fringe, not quite fitting in with the groups around them. Others are in the group, playing along, but not feeling connected. They’re just going through the motions. The lost on the fringe and lost in the crowd people are pretty similar, actually. Whether they’re by themselves or surrounded by people, because they aren’t engaged with people like them, people who really “get” them and encourage them and celebrate them, they’re pretty lonely.

They feel like they’re not getting enough air. They feel like they’re just wasting time. They feel like there is meaning and purpose to life, but they’re not connected with it.

What I understand is that the isolation, the suffocation, the lack of purpose, and the lack of engagement are all part of the same problem. They happen because people aren’t using their core strengths. They’re not developing and expressing their talents. They’re not engaged in communities of people who recognize and respond to their strengths and talents the way improvisational musicians or actors or dancers do, with intuition and ease and enjoyment.

They aren’t connected to the core of who they are, so their core self isn’t thriving. It’s withering. It’s not getting the nourishment, water, and sunlight it needs. It’s under too much pressure, left unprotected in the freezing cold or blistering heat, dried up or flooded, blocked from the light.

That’s what happens to your core self while you’re stuck in a rut or trapped in a box. It slowly atrophies, but it pitches a whopper of a fit as it does. I hear the longing of a closed off core self in wistful “what ifs” and “could have beens.” I hear it in the resigned despair of a person who can’t figure out what’s missing or what needs to change. And I hear it as the frustration building in someone who is craving escape.

But I can only feel the pleas of the core self when I can hear or read someone’s words, or hear their tone of voice, or read their nonverbal cues. My sonar is close range. I have to have some kind of interaction with a person to be able to feel their core self reaching out for help.

I’m on a mission to liberate people stuck in careers and lives that drain the joy out of them. But I’m not sure how to find them. The ones I’ve met don’t have common careers or backgrounds or life experiences, other than not really feeling alive on the inside. They’re in all kinds of work, all kinds of life stages, and all kinds of places.

I know you’re out there. I know you’re desperate to find the thing that will make a difference, the missing piece that will bring excitement and purpose and joy to your life. I’d love to help you. I know what we can do to figure this out.

But I don’t know where you are.

Online Scheduling

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The latest lesson I learned from my commitment to learn more about sales is another technical one, similar to the first lesson I learned.

It’s about how to use an online tool for scheduling meetings. I’ve heard of people using online scheduling for a long time, but I’d never looked into it. That’s because I heard it in the context of a coach or consultant directing ongoing clients to an online system to schedule appointments.

My clients and I schedule the next appointment at the end of a call, or make a plan to follow up and set the appointment later. An online scheduling system didn’t seem useful to the way I work with my clients.

With my journey into sales, I discovered that an online scheduling system makes it easy for a person to schedule a first conversation to get more information. In an automated plan, a lead generating message can direct people to an online sales letter or a recording, and from there to the online scheduling system to set up a call to get more information.

Now that I’ve used the system for my sales-based business, I’ve set it up for my coaching business. Not for scheduling ongoing clients! We still do that together. But I’ve added it as a choice in the plan I use to offer people a complimentary coaching call.

I’ve just set it up, so I can’t give you any results yet. But I imagine that, at least for some people, it will be an easier step to go online and choose a time for a complimentary call with me than it is to email me or call me to set something up.

I know that having more options means I’m removing some of the resistance people will have to taking that first step. So, while it’s a technical skill I learned, it’s all about making it easier to make connections. That is what it’s all about for me!

The 2nd Thing I’ve Learned From Sales

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I committed to learning more about sales recently and sharing the lessons that might be helpful to other people. The first lesson I learned was about technical skills.

The second lesson is of a very different sort. It’s more philosophical and not at all technical. It comes from the fact that sales is about conversations, and conversations invoke the heart.

I noticed someone who is uncomfortable with sales lacks confidence talking about the product or service, so that person comes across as unsure, or even as apologizing for bothering the listener by talking about it.

That message turns into a shaming message. It makes it seem like there’s something wrong with the product or service, which tells the people who need that product or service that it’s wrong to need it.

Let me say that again. When a person is uncomfortable talking about their product or service, it makes it seem like there’s something wrong with the product or service. That leads people to believe they shouldn’t like it, so there must be something wrong with them if they want it or need it.

Holy $#!+! This is big!

Have you ever been in a situation like this? A person sheepishly says something like, “I’m sorry to bother you, and you’re probably not interested, but I [fill in the blank: sell these products, offer this service], so you can talk to me if you’re interested.”

Your response? If you’ve ever struggled with sales, you might feel sympathy for the person, but you probably feel really uncomfortable, too. And you probably wonder what’s wrong with the products or the service or the prices to make the person apologize.

And on a more subtle level, if it’s a kind of product or service you’re interested in, I believe you wonder if there’s something wrong with you for being interested in that sort of thing.

I noticed this based on other people’s sales conversations, but I pretty quickly recognized myself in it. The core of my coaching is promoting personal growth and development through the skills and techniques of coaching and my knowledge of psychology, especially positive psychology and developmental psychology. I realized that I assume people will be skeptical of personal development as “fluff and nonsense” and uneasy about psychology because of mental health stigmas.

That’s when I knew I’d let myself down. This isn’t who I am. I don’t defer to people who mock personal development. I don’t side with the people who think there’s something weak or shameful in talking about thoughts and feelings.

I am a champion of people understanding their thoughts and feelings and getting comfortable with who they are. I did that for years as a therapist, and then for many years more running educational and recreational programs for kids.

Understanding our inner lives is the most human thing we do. It’s not a sign of weakness. It takes great strength. And it takes enormous courage to stand up to society’s messages that shame people (especially men) because of what they feel. Many times I’ve had to say this with conviction and let someone borrow my certainty and my strength as they learned to be comfortable opening up and sharing their own heart.

This was a huge lesson for me, and I intend for it to stay learned. People need what I offer them, because they won’t be able to enjoy life, truly and deeply and meaningfully, if they’re being pushed around by their critical automatic thoughts and limiting beliefs and if they keep their feelings wadded up in a jumble in the corner.

The work I do is essential. It touches the essence of being human. It matters in all aspects of a person’s life. It matters.

And that completely changes the way I will talk about it.