 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, webcast, online show. You'll find these kind of things called all sorts of different things over the internet. But whatever you call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We also record the show every week so that it is available on our website later. And I will show you after at the end of today's show where those archived recordings are available. We include the recordings, any presentations, so these PowerPoint slides will be available, any handouts, which those of you pre-registered, I did send you a handout. For those of you coming on the fly, there is a handout on the main session page for today's show. Not a required thing to have, but just to give it to you ahead of time. And if there's any websites that are mentioned, we also gather those up to share them with you as well in the archives. So I will show you where all of that is after today's show. Both the live show and our archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So if you have any topics you think anyone else may be interested, any of your colleagues, friends, family, neighbors, anyone you know who might be interested in anything we've had on the show, send them links to our upcoming shows or any of our archives that are welcome to check them out there. We do a mixture of things on the show, presentations, book reviews, many training sessions, tours of websites. Basically anything and everything you think of, the only criteria for a show is that it's something library related for the Nebraska Library Commission, so we do things for libraries here. And any type of libraries, public academic school, special libraries, museums, we've had things on about. So anything library related, it's really our only criteria, so it's pretty broad. So you can find all sorts of interesting things on our show and on our archives. We have sometimes Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations on things, services or programs that we are offering specifically here out of the Library Commission, but we also have guest speakers that come in as we have today. Sort of a library commission staff, anyway. But you don't work here in our offices. Yes. Anika Ramirez, right here next week. Good morning, Anika. Good morning. She is the director of our Three Rivers Library System here in Nebraska. We have in Nebraska four regional library systems for geographic areas of the state that are like, they are funded by the Library Commission. They're kind of our on the ground people, consultants locally for the libraries in their areas. So it's a service of the Library Commission. And she's director of Three Rivers, which is the northeast corner of the state. Eastern. Eastern and northeast corner of the state. We recently redesigned them, so there's different areas people are covering. And she's actually based out of Omaha now. I came down here to Lincoln to do this presentation for us. This is a session, Feelings Are Messy, How to Build Emotional Intelligence, and specifically in Libraries. Yeah. In Library. Which of course this could be used anywhere. Yeah. We try to keep it in the professional realm just for the sake of it. Yeah. So a couple of examples and things will be things that you encountered in libraries. And this is a session that you did at, it was at the Training Extravaganza, right? Our Southeast Library System, another system does an annual Training Extravaganza. They call it where they have presentations throughout the day. And this is one that I saw Nika do there and then invited her to come on in because it's live to recreate it here for, to expand the information. So I'm just going to hand it over to you to take it away from what you have here for the presentation. Thanks, Christa. And actually I developed this originally at the request of a library director, a public library director for their staff day. And so it kind of has grown out of, out of that. So yeah, so feelings are messy. We're going to talk about emotions and how we can use that information for our professional lives, for effective outcomes and constructive outcomes. Just to start off, so I've been director with Three Rivers Library System for two and a half years now. And it's been a fun experience. I am by no means an expert on emotional intelligence. What we have today is kind of a tip of the iceberg thing. So you get an overview of emotional intelligence and some tools to start putting in that toolbox. So as you go forward in your journey of building emotional intelligence, you have some things to start off with. There's tons of information, research, all sorts of stuff out there about emotional intelligence. And that's what the handout is that you can grab off the website. It's just some resources that I've used. It's definitely not a comprehensive list. It's just things that I... It's a good start, yeah. Some things are books or things you have to get a hold of. And some things have links right to websites where some of these articles and things are online. Yeah. There's a podcast link on there, invisibiliates, NPR. It's a really great podcast. Anyway, let's jump into it. I could talk about that. Okay. So event plus response equals outcome. So just to give credit, this is not an equation that I came up with. I got this from Jack Canfield. And he is a success coach. And he uses this as a way to help guide people toward success, which I thought really easily dovetails into emotional intelligence as well. So our lives are made up of a series of events. They're big, small in between sizes. We tend to think only of the big events, like a promotion at our job or layoffs or graduation, weddings, those big things. But really if we think about it, every moment in our lives can be seen as an event. And we also experience all of those events differently and simultaneously with other people throughout our lives. So there's all generally speaking, there's more than one player in every event that we're experiencing. So the good news, well, let me do this. So if you ever react to a situation and then think, why did I do that? Why did I just say that? Why did those words leave my mouth? Emotional intelligence is something that you can work on. To sort of help you choose a different response to a specific event, right? So this event solicited a response that you suddenly think, oh, I didn't want to say those things. And you get an outcome that probably is not the most constructive outcome for the situation that you were trying to deal with. It ends up escalating or something like that. So the good news here is that that response, while sometimes it feels like we don't have any control over it, we actually do have control over our responses to these events, whether big or small. So our response really is a choice. And emotional intelligence is what helps us to choose that different response. It helps us to choose a more appropriate response because, especially in the workplace, there are appropriate ways of responding to people and situations for the most constructive outcomes. So I just really like this quotation. And if you follow brain pickings, awesome, I really like them. They're really great. So just a small plug there. So this is where emotional intelligence comes to play, right? I do want to point out, I'll use the term constructive outcome frequently because the most constructive outcome maybe doesn't appear to be the most positive for every player involved. So a really easy example of that would be if there's someone in the workplace who is contributing to a hostile work environment or something like that and they're eventually let go, that's maybe not the most positive outcome for that particular person. But it can be a really constructive outcome for everyone involved. They can choose to take a lesson from that. And the workplace then can also rebuild and reconnect after someone has left who has been really negatively affecting the environment. So that's why I choose the term constructive outcome versus positive. And it's all about perspective, which we'll kind of get into. All right, let's see. So very simply, emotional intelligence is the internal management of feelings and reactions so that they are expressed appropriately. And as you intended, very important, especially when you're stressed or angry. Emotional intelligence, that skillset becomes very necessary and also very apparent when we're experiencing situations of high emotion. That can be high excitement, those can be like just really, you know, super excitable people sometimes say or do things that they don't actually intend. But especially in the workplace when we're dealing with our communities whether it's students at a university library or the public at a public library, anything like that. We can find ourselves feeling really stressed, frustrated, angry and that sort of thing. So that's why emotional intelligence is really important for the work that we as librarians do because we work with people. So it's really this skillset of self-awareness, self-management and self-control. You know, and I think oftentimes in the workplace we assume that our emotions need to be left at the door. And if you're in a really positive, if you have a really great work culture, that may not be true for you, but I think oftentimes we assume that our emotions are not meant to be brought into the workplace. But we are emotional human beings or humans are emotional creatures. And so that's really difficult. And so when you're working in a library with the public, your situation of who you're dealing with is going to change daily, maybe hour to hour. If you just work in an office with the same people every day, you know how to deal with them. When you've got a new person coming in the door every 10 minutes with a different knee door and you may react differently too, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And so if we can sort of start to shift our perspective to see that emotions are really just information for us to use to navigate our internal and external environments, we can start to really just make use of those emotions in those unknown interactions that come up. So I think that emotional intelligence really recognizes that emotions are information and that we can work toward a realistic assessment of ourselves. And that means non-judgmentally that we truly look at our own reactions, the responses that we have to different people, different situations. And just look at that honestly, you know, and that might be kind of tough sometimes given certain situations. So there are four areas of practice that I kind of like to focus on. And there is a bit of an order to them but we don't live or work in a vacuum and so you will find that they really don't necessarily feel like you can just say, well, I'm just trying to be aware of my emotions right now and so I'm going to yell at you but just know that I'm trying to be aware of this. So we can maybe think of these as focus areas as well. So I can focus in on my self-awareness. I can focus in on my self-monitoring and or management. I can really focus on my awareness of others and I can focus on building relationships. We can practice those areas of focus, right? So self-awareness. I just love quotations so every one of these has something that I have found that I just really enjoy. So developing self-awareness really comes in three different parts. So your physical reactions, your mental reactions, and I wish I would have actually changed those. I'd like to say response, physical responses, mental responses, emotional responses. I feel like there is a difference between those two words. Reacting and responding, yeah. Reacting makes me think of knee-jerk. I'm not thinking about it. I'm just acting on whatever I'm feeling whereas response kind of conjures up an image of taking some time and that's what implies more thought going into it. So just change that in your mind since you're looking at this slide. You'll update that for the next time you do this presentation. So becoming aware of your physical responses to situations. Say a supervisor calls you into the office to talk about some problem or something. You can start to become aware of how you're physically responding to that request. Does your heart rate speed up? Does your jaw like clench? What's happening in your body? Maybe that's something that does not faze you. So you just notice that like, yeah, okay, we're going to go do this. And your body's reacting accordingly. Your mental responses, so same situation. Your supervisor calls you in to talk about something. What starts going on in your head? You can just take note of it. It's, again, that non-judgmental point of view. Just taking note of do I start to get really worried and playing through all the worst case scenarios? Do I start immediately as they're talking to me in my head starting to shift blame to them? Am I saying, well, you're not even out there watching us anyway. Are you taking it as constructive criticism and truly looking? So you can just start to take note of how you are mentally responding in those situations. And then those are sort of, can be red flags for us to our emotional response that's building. So if my heart starts racing because I'm going to have to go talk to my supervisor, excuse me. And my mental response is following suit. I know that my emotional response might be one that's going to potentially come out through my words inappropriately or escalating the situation or some such thing like that. So we can just pay attention to those as red flags for us. Emotion is really nuanced. And the more we can name those emotions. So once we're paying attention to these different responses, we can start to really put more names to those emotions. And that allows us to expand our emotional, we'll really expand our emotional knowledge of ourselves. So we're going to do a little exercise everyone. We have a few examples. And what I want you to do, this is just a quick little exercise to just help us start thinking about our emotional vocabulary. If I say I'm sad, that gives me some information about my emotional state. But if I say I'm morose, that gives me more emotional information about myself, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be running to the tosaurus for this kind of a thing. But we can kind of see how just being able to name those things in ourselves can help us dig a little more deeply. So what I want you to do, I'll put up a scenario. And then in the, is there a chat box or is it all just questions? The questions box. Okay, so in your question box, or if you want to use your microphone, I just want you to give me some different emotions that you or someone else, you can kind of just think about the situation in general if you want, that some emotions that might come up for people as they're dealing with these situations. I, because we're kind of trying to stay really focused on ourselves in library land, these are library related. So don't think about the policy or the procedure that you would follow for any of these. Just think about how you would feel in each one. So the first one, an agitated patron approaches a circulation desk to complain about a block on their car due to unpaid fines. So, sounds like it happens a lot, right? And if you don't have unpaid fines, just think about an agitated patron approaching the desk. A circulation desk or coming to your office or whatever, however you need to fit this to your specific library. The, I think the main thing is that there's an agitated patron and they have some kind of a complaint. Those are the things there. So just go ahead and start typing in. Yeah, type in your question section what you would feel when you see this person coming at you. Yeah, I suppose. We've got some people saying here, oh, surprised, impatient, stressed, anxious, fear of the confrontation. Oh, sure. Definitely, that's what I get. Yeah, I'm like, I hate confrontation. You're anticipating the confrontation. Defensive. Oh, sure. That would be a great thing. No person says nothing. Good. That's great. If you just say, I'll just deal with them the other day. Concern. Concern, yeah. Well, I guess you don't know what they're coming to complain about yet. You're not sure how you should feel except for a little, I would feel like, I don't know if it's emotion, but ready to go like, all right, I can see the look on their face. This person's not a happy person coming to me. Yeah. I'm going to steal myself or whatever's coming to me. I'm not sure what emotion that is. And that might be your version of defensiveness a little bit, you know, putting your walls up. Deja vu. Deja vu. Yeah, that's funny. It's just yesterday. Someone else is bringing it up. Yeah. I know the rules. I know what to deal. And that's if you do have, I know you said just to talk about your emotions, but if you do have good policies in place and rules and how these things work and how you are supposed to do, why these fines appear and then what you, as the person on staff at the moment, what kind of power you have to deal with it. Do you have to just say, sorry, it's your fines and you got to pay them or are you given the power to say, you know what, in your situation because you explained or something, I can waive them. I mean, if you've got something to set up like that where your director or somebody has given you that kind of ability on the fly, make your own decisions and just diffuse the situation, maybe you'd have less of these stressful. And I think that's a really good point that your library culture, which you can find lots of information about as well, your library culture can really help also to build emotional intelligence or at least support people's emotional lives in some way and give them confidence. So they don't have so many of these bad. Yeah, and it's good to know that this is part of just being able to name what you might be feeling is that if you know that you're going to be impatient when you see somebody approaching and they look like they're agitated and we'll get into this, but there's things you can do to just take a breath and move through that impatient so that you're still able to communicate with that person. So it's awesome if you're confident and not afraid of confrontation. I think a lot of us struggle with that, I do. And so that's awesome if you can do that, but if you can't, it's good to know where you struggle so that you can work on moving through that and that's what this is. Where your line is as well as someone else's. Yeah, exactly. So there is no right or wrong answer to any of these. So a parent or guardian wants to file a complaint about a title in your collection. Again, you can change this to however you need to fit. If it's a student who's coming to complain about something, I know I've heard stories of this on universities where books are even being challenged. I think mostly from reading lists in classes, but a librarian might also deal with that. Can you say that? Sure. Because I have that one written in too. The first one that came in was a wrote pissed. I mean, how dare you? Yeah. Anybody else have any other feelings? That one just covers it. Yeah, irritated. Yeah. This would be one I would feel defensive. Yeah. We know what we're doing here. Not that you don't know, but I think that might be my first reaction is I've got to be, I've got to defend the library and the intellectual freedom of these, whoever needs to read these and the why if we do this and everything. So getting your guard up right off the bat. Yeah. I'm annoyed, guarded. I mean, but you do have to be defensive. But because I was trying to say our first reaction would be like, but then, all right, I know my field. I know how I need to respond to this because there's policies and procedures. And okay, here's the form you need to fill out to do that. Fill that out and hand it in. Yeah. We'll get back to you. We'll take that into consideration. Yeah. I guarded, annoyed. A co-worker received. Someone wrote, was writing a lot longer thing. I too would be defensive, especially having been on a selection team. Oh, sure. Yeah. But I hope I could also say, I see we do have a process. Here's the form. Right. Right. So choosing that response and not acting on that initial emotion. Yeah. Of defensive use or irritation. We did this for a reason. And again, pulling in those that physical response, you know, when you're defensive, whether you want to or not, if you're not paying attention, your body language can still communicate that. So all these things go hand in hand with being aware of them. So a co-worker receives accolades on a project in which you also contributed to the final product or result. So someone else is kind of getting credit for some of the work that you've also done. Yeah. Because this emotional intelligence, all of these things, it's important to bring to our co-workers as well. You know, we talk a lot about customer service and serving our communities. But when you're working day in and day out with somebody, you know, being able to have that kind of a relationship is really important. Yeah. And when someone else is praised for something that other people were involved in, a lot of them should do a group project or something else as well. I don't know what the word is for, but my first thing would be, well, what about me? Right. Who was there too? Somebody said, I would feel ignored, offended, irritated, degraded. And yeah, it depends on the situation. I would feel happy for them unless they never say I had help and then ticked off. Right. Yeah, that's the thing. I think this is one, this particular situation may have more steps to it because sure, they get the praise, but then I would actually say, Oh, what about me? I'm going to wait and see what happens. Right. Because maybe that co-worker is going to step up and say, Thank you. However, our whole team where me and so-and-so did this together. Yeah. So it wasn't just a me thing. Yeah. And giving it time and not responding right away. Yeah. Someone says the opposite. I'm more likely to get upset if it was another co-worker that didn't get acknowledgement, like hurt you being the co-worker that did. Oh, sure. Getting more injured. Sad, a bit insecure and lost. Yep. And happy for them though. Yeah. I would be happy because it was a project that I worked on. I was very proud of. Right. And in some ways that means the project that you worked on is successful. So there is some. But yeah, I would feel sad and left out and like defeated maybe. Said, you know, I did all that work and nobody even noticed. Why do I bother? Yeah. Kind of situation. Yeah. All right. So you were promoted to a new position. Yeah. Right. It's not all just about negative. I mean, yeah, scared. And this is me talking because I was just recently. Yeah. Oh, what is it? Imposter syndrome. Oh, yeah. It's a thing that's mentioned a lot in, I know in library circles and I'm true. I got this position, but am I really good enough? Right. And what if I don't do, you know, what if they think I'm better than I am? And so nervous. Yeah. About making mistakes. Yeah. Someone on here says proud. Definitely proud. Nervous. Nervous. Okay. So there's the little second part to this. So you received a promote, you're promoted to a new position in which you will now supervise people who have been co-workers for many years. That changes things a little bit. There is something, what's worse than nervous? It's the next hijack from nervous. Okay. That's definitely a thing. Yeah. Flustered a bit overwhelmed. Maybe even as Christa says insecure and nervous. All right. So thank you. I'm going to move on just so that we can get all of these things in. But thank you all for participating in that. Someone did say about the being promoted somewhere, you supervise people you used to be. Someone said this happened to me and I reassured them. Oh, sure. And say, this is going to be fine. That's what I tried to do too is say, don't think I'm going to suddenly become some crazy dictator or something. I personally don't have that in me, but we'll work this out. And I think it's going to depend on your situation too. What was your relationship with them beforehand? Was it a good relationship? Was it already contentious? Was it a competitive thing? Because you were co-workers doing similar things. It all depends on, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And again, there's a lot of different ways each one of these things could go and more information. And oh, I know something because this is a promotion position for co-workers who've been supervising people. Fear of the previous person in that position, am I as good enough as they were? Are people going to compare me to them? I don't know what the emotion is for that. Yeah. Maybe insecure. Yeah. All right, good. Moving on. Okay, so now we're just kind of through that exercise bringing some awareness to how we might be feeling. And you can think of all the other physical and mental responses you might have had within those as well. So now we move to this next area of practice, which is self-monitoring or managing. So this is essentially taking this awareness that we've been talking about and just applying a pause button. And this has kind of come up in our previous talk of just taking some time to actually think beyond that first emotional response that we have. So pausing allows us that time to monitor and manage those emotions, hopefully ideally from a neutral perspective. If I'm feeling fearful of a situation, I don't need to further add to my fear by beating myself up about being fearful, right? So that's why that neutral or non-judgmental perspective is really important for ourselves, that we're taking care of ourselves as well as we build this emotional intelligence. So you can simply tell yourself pause. You can choose a different phrase. You can find any way that just actually gets yourself gets you to stop that reaction. Count to ten, so grounding techniques. These two areas are where mindfulness practice really can come into play, like focusing on your breathing and counting to ten. Any of those things that you might see in mindfulness practice or in grounding techniques can sort of help you just pause in that moment. I think sometimes it's hard, especially if it's a confrontation. I think that's where we really find this to be difficult to pause. But we owe it to ourselves and to the people that we're working with to find that space for the pause and to say, I just need to take a minute. I'm going to think about this for a while. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, and then I'll get back to you. Whatever you can find for yourself to get some of that space. It might be a simple count to ten and just start talking to the person or whatever. It might be I need to step away. But we owe it to ourselves for that. Here's my quotation again. First thought wrong. Some people use this. I don't think we can get into a discussion about right and wrong thoughts. I don't know that any thought is necessarily wrong. It's just information for us. But essentially don't act on that first thought that you have in those situations where you might end up escalating. Because remember, we're trying to choose a different response to get the most constructive outcome. So if I feel like screaming at somebody, I should not act on that as my first thought. So there are some things too. So you can start to pay attention to are you acting out of a programmed response? Is this just always how you've responded to confrontation or to other people's anger or whatever the case may be? You can look at that and say, am I acting out of this programmed response? Is this a knee-jerk reaction that I always have? Or maybe you're not sure and you just really don't want to talk to anybody or really want to talk to somebody. There are some things you can do for just a basic self-check right away, which is halt. This is really helpful for just checking in with yourself to make sure that your basic needs are being met first because sometimes if our basic needs aren't being met, that can lead into some emotional states that aren't necessarily the healthiest. So halt stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. So you just check in and ask yourself, am I hungry? I'm somebody that gets angry if you know what that is. When I'm hungry, I just get super angry, which is real fun for everyone. I get very hungry and I get angry, I get whiny. I'm not happy, I'm feeling... Just nothing can go right when I'm hungry. Over the years I've learned this about myself and I've made sure that I keep snacks with me everywhere I go so that if I miss lunch, which I do often, how many of you have gone through the day and been like, oh, I forgot to eat lunch today. In our busy lives, we can forget some of these things. So you can pay attention to that. Am I hungry? Do I just need to go have a granola bar and come back and talk to somebody? Angry. Sometimes that anger from our personal lives can follow us into our professional lives when we get into work and can influence how we're talking to people or how we're interacting with people. So there's things that we can do just to check in with ourselves about that. This thing happened in the morning and I think it's following me in. If you have a relationship with a supervisor or a co-worker that you can just say, hey, I just need to get this out really fast and then I can go back to work. You can write it out, tear the paper up, write out everything that's making you angry, tear the paper up and just try to move on until you can actually deal with that situation. If it's anger with someone at work, you follow whatever those procedures are to address that problem. Loneliness is not something that is always talked about, but there's more and more studies and research that show that in our ever-connected lives, people are feeling lonelier and lonelier. And so this is something that's real that you do maybe want to check in with yourself and see, am I just feeling disconnected and lonely or whatever. And lonely could be, I think what you just said, being disconnected from things is even more, because lonely people think, well, I'm not lonely, I'm not alone. Well, there's other thing, definition of lonely and being disconnected from what's going on and feeling left out would be part of lonely. And sometimes that's your reaction to things caused by that. So take a moment and go wander the stacks and engage in some customer service and really connect with your patrons or set up a dinner after work or maybe seek outside help if that's something that needs to happen. There's nothing wrong with that. So just taking care of these things. Of course, if you're just doing a quick self-check, some of those might have to wait, it's something to consider at least. And tired, you know, you can't go sleep in your car in the parking lot. I don't think. But you know, you can stand up, you can do some chair yoga, you can stretch. Take a walk around the stacks. Exactly, any of those things that might just kind of jolt you awake. People who are tired tend to not be able to manage their emotions as effectively. Because your body's tired, it just, for me, that's when I'm tired and when something emotional or serious happens, for me, tired leads me to angry. Sure, yeah, these tie-in. So many times I've had arguments with my husband or someone and he's like, what is going on? I'm like, no, it's not real. I'm just tired. I'm going to go walk away and take a nap because it really has nothing to do with what I'm actually saying. I got four of us asleep last night and I'm exhausted and I just can't think. So I'm lashing out. Yeah, and so we can take steps to kind of choose a little differently so we don't have to apologize. I'm one of those people, I'm like, I'm going to say I'm sorry again because I was really hungry. I'm sorry for what I said when I was hungry. And that's a valid thing. That's why the word angry has become a word in our society. I'm really upset with that one, but I do want to make sure that those things aren't getting in the way of my relationships with people or in the way of my interactions with customers or patrons or however you want to talk about them. So over time this pause, this self-check is not like something that you have to spend a lot of time on. If this practice, the pause becomes a little bit more first nature rather than second nature, and you find yourself just doing these things already. So it's not always a struggle to do them. So then, if we're doing this really quick self-check of HALT and addressing some of these needs, then we can check back in with ourselves and say, okay, do I still feel the need to talk about this? Am I still upset? And sometimes you might find that, no, this actually wasn't that big of a deal. I just had some other things that I needed to address first. I think that managing your emotions is probably harder than the awareness part. I can be aware of a lot of things and not change any of it. So if I'm aware of my emotions, but if I'm aware that I'm irritated or frustrated, but I'm not applying a pause button, am I really practicing self-management? If I'm not choosing a different response to be a part of that constructive outcome, I'm probably not really managing myself or monitoring myself. Okay, so we got a little tired. Awareness of others. So the emotions and responses we choose in any toward any event will elicit a response from those also involved in any given event with us, right? So for me, and I think sometimes for a lot of us, the biggest part of this is just recognizing that the responses of other people are also valid within the context of their own lives, and we can take that neutral perspective, that non-judgment that we've been using toward ourselves in our awareness of ourselves and apply that to other people. Everyone else gets to do this too. So if you and a co-worker are replaying the same event with each other or a volunteer is frequently disappointing you, a patron is infuriating, whatever the case is, you can reframe your perspective and allow that that other person is also experiencing the same event from their own life, their own perspective, and they are entitled to the same range of emotions and responses as you. So this allows us to bring compassion into our vision of the event. And you can then find a little bit of that space, that detachment from it. It's not personal, and you can ask how you are affecting the event. What are you choosing to focus on or how are you choosing to respond to this event that's also contributing to this outcome? What you focus on grows. So we can choose to focus on another person's inappropriate response and address that, or we can look at our responses and see how we are first affecting that outcome. Because we don't have control over other people. We don't have control how someone is going to respond to us or another event. Other people say a lot that I can't control what you've said or done, but I control my responses to it. That's all we really have control over. Take your separate yourself from what they're doing and just think about what you are going to do. I'm just going to read this off my notes because I really want to make this clear. Follow proper procedure for complaints or guidance if their behavior is directly affecting you. In no way does this focus mean that you have to accept unacceptable behavior. Simply that sometimes what we perceive as unacceptable behavior does not in fact directly affect us. You do not always need to take immediate action unless it's violent or harmful to yourself or others. If it is violent behavior, if it is harmful to yourself or your coworkers or other patrons, yes please follow proper procedure and you can use all of these tools to help guide you through that experience. It can be really stressful, it can be traumatic to deal with someone's violence. These tools will still come into play, but I'm not suggesting that you have to just say, well you're being belligerent and calling everyone around you names, but that's just how you choose to respond. You don't have to just do that. You can stand these delusions. But these tools will still help you to move through that because it's still an event that you're experiencing. You can still use this to move through that experience for that constructive outcome for yourself, for your patrons who are maybe there, whatever. I just want to make that really clear that I'm not suggesting we put up with that, but we just become aware of other people, of their own right to their own emotions, and we can start to recognize other people's emotions as well, separate from our own. I'm almost done here. It's about 10.53 on my clock here. As I said, officially the show goes from 10 to 11, but we didn't start a little late. I'm about five after. We'll just keep going until Anika's done with everything, and if anybody has any questions, if you do have to leave right at the top of the hour, because that's all you are allotted for this, that's fine. We're recording. You can always come back and watch whatever's left over that you missed later, but we'll cut things off by 11 just because it's that time. We can go as long as it's necessary and get it all on the recording. I'm not saying we're going to go for two hours, but we go over often times here. So the next area of practice that we move into then, right? So we're aware of ourselves. We're practicing this pause where we can start to manage our own emotions, and then returning that and becoming aware of others and their emotions and how we're interacting with them. And from that, we can build relationships with people, right? I lost my train of thought after all of that. So when I start with respect and dignity and allowing that other person the dignity of their own responses, of their own emotions, we can really have more healthy and open relationships with people. And this doesn't necessarily have to be like over a years of working with someone and building a relationship, a quick interaction with a student in your office or a young family at story time or whatever. All of those things give us an opportunity to build relationship. So it doesn't have to be a long-term relationship or anything like that. We can look at every interaction as building relationships. So this is practicing empathy, right? Of allowing each of us, all of us to go through this process, this emotional process on our own terms and recognizing our part in it for practicing empathy. And it has to start with us. So it's really easy. And I think we might hear this quite a bit in some stressful situations where, well, this person was acting this way, so I acted this way. This person's anger caused me to respond in kind. And we really risk a lot when we use that perspective, when we use that approach. So it has to start with us. What happens when this person's angry? But I use the tools that I have. Use my pause button. I'm aware of this person and allow that they're allowed to be angry. I may not like it. It may not feel great towards me, but they are allowed their anger. And I still choose to act from that place of respect. What happens? Can we get to the most constructive outcome? It doesn't mean that we're changing people's minds all the time. That person may still walk away angry. But if I can say, I've done the best I can, I brought this response to this equation, this event plus response equals outcome equation. And I think we've got to the most constructive outcome. That's all we can do and hope that there can still be dialogue sometimes or whatever. It's not easy. None of this is easy. But we owe it to ourselves and to our communities to start engaging in these things. So how do others feel when they respect their ability to choose for themselves? That's awareness of others. That's that key in building respectful relationships with people. So in the end, I love this. I love this a lot. We all have the capacity to improve our emotional intelligence. It will look different for each one of us. We're all at different levels. Whether you know it or not, you're probably on this journey already. If you have emotions, you are. Exactly. And especially if you said, I'm going to take an hour out of my day and sit down and listen to somebody talk about emotional intelligence, you're on this journey. So there's lots of resources and everything out there for you to continue this. It's a conversation that we can start talking about more openly about how we feel and how we are dealing with things. So we're all free to make choices and change our minds, but so is everyone else. So this skill set of emotional intelligence provides each of us the opportunity to choose our responses to events, make a conscious impact on the outcomes in our lives, whether we're at work or home or wherever we are in the world. Oh, we're good. I talk fast sometimes. That's all I have. Are there questions from the audience? Okay. Let's see. All right. Thank you. Was this the last slide then? Yeah. Let's make sure. Contact information. Feel free to talk to me about this if you want to. Yeah. Does anybody have any questions, anything you want to expand on or get some more definition or discussion about? Type them into the question section of your GoToWebinar interface as you were before. Have you had any situations maybe that you've been in that you're wondering, what could I have done? What should I have done? Do you have any advice about anything? If you don't, that's fine, too. Like I said, I attended this session with you before. I thought it was really good. I'm sometimes wary of these ones that say there's going to be audience participation and then it starts handing out. There was a handout at this session. Wrote on or something? Yeah. There's another handout. And I was like, oh, audience participation. But it was actually good. Yeah, it was fine. And a lot of these things, I think, I always mention things in my own career and things here in previous jobs that I recognized in this. But also things that it's, I mean, this is specific to library land. But I know there's a lot of these things that I probably should be using better in my personal life, too. Well, and I think sometimes, like in the professional world, I feel like I'm not perfect at this. But I think I'm pretty good at this. But there have been moments in my personal life where I'm like, shove that back in my mouth. I didn't mean to say that. It seems to be easier to just lash out personally. Yeah. Because I don't know if you, I assume your friends and family will cut you more slack than your co-workers would. Yeah, right. But I know there's situations, because I've known people on other colleagues have mentioned that there's, I just can't deal with this person. They said, I said, oh, God, what do I do now? It can still happen. Yeah. Professional as well. Oh, definitely. I think these are good skills, good things too. And the thing is, I think you said right at the beginning, this is stuff you're going to have to work on and practice and the mindfulness, the word mindfulness, which has become a real big buzzword. It has. But it's not the kind of thing that you can, on the fly, remember. Oh, I have to go. What's HALT? We need to think about it ahead of time and practice it, either practice it or sit and think about it. Like I said, you decided to send this webinar for an hour and here's what I'm going to talk about. Or you're watching the recording later. You're already halfway there that you're thinking, I need to know more about this because something's happening or something could happen. Yeah. You can take a little planning and thinking about yourself. Reflection. Yes. Reflection. Yeah. It's a skill set. And any skills. It's like anything. It takes practice. But it doesn't look like anybody questions, urgent questions have come in while we've been chatting. That's fine. So I think we will wrap it up for your session for you. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming down here. Thanks for having me. And thank you everyone for attending. The show is being recorded as we speak and will be on our website, which I'm going to go here now. If you hit escape over there, we should be able to pop over. Oh, really fast. If people are still on. There is a Facebook group called Mindful Librarians that I just found. Really? Yeah. So you can ask to join if that's something that's interesting to you. I think the emotional intelligence and mindfulness for me go hand in hand. So there's, like you said, there's lots of good resources out there. Right. All right. So this is our library commission website where you can search on our website for Encompass Live or if you type in since you got the keyword type in Encompass Live, you'll notice. So far. Yes. We are the only thing called this on the Internet. Yay. So you can Google us and you'll find our Encompass Live website. Today's show is being recorded and will be loaded up here. We've got our upcoming shows listed but then right beneath them is a link to our archives. And this is where you'll be able to go maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. Depends on how long it takes me to get it. I've got it processed, uploaded to YouTube. They've got to be happy with it. It'll be here. It'll be the top one of the list here. Our most recent ones come up at the top and we'll have a link. This is from last week's to the recording. In this case, we'll link the presentation. The actual handout is already on the session page for today because I did that earlier. So for those of you that didn't grab it ahead of time, that handout that Annika mentioned, actually I should be able to. I'll link here that I'll look at fixing. But it's just a one-page handout with all of these citations and different resources that her quotes and things came from are all on there. So you'll be able to have that. So when the recording is available, I will email everyone who attended today and who registered and let you know that it's up on the webpage ready for you to look at. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you join us next week when our topic is the new NLA Intellectual Freedom Manual comes to the rescue. No pressure there. Our Intellectual Freedom Roundtable at the Nebraska Library Association has had a manual for dealing with issues. Oh, even since 2004 was the last time it was done. So it needed some updating. Yeah, so they did. And some staff from the Roundtable, our IF Roundtable, Michael, Tim and Todd will be with us here. I believe they're all coming here because they're from local to talk about the new manual and what changes are in it and how you can use it in any situations you may encounter that are intellectual freedom related. So please do sign up for that session next week and any of our others that are here on our calendar. We've got all July books. There's one for the last Wednesday and July as well. I just don't have it on the calendar yet because I'm waiting for official description. It's about what libraries are doing for the eclipse. Oh, yes, the eclipse coming up in August is cut right through the middle of Nebraska for us. So the last Wednesday and July is going to be one of our staff here, Mary Sowers, and possibly bringing out some libraries and people that are doing things related to that. So she's working on a presentation for that. So look for that in future sessions. I'll be adding here as well. So Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user and this is probably going to pop up and say, join Facebook. There it is. Give us a like over there and you will see here I had a notice how you can log in on the slide today's show. When our archives are available, I posted on here. Here's my recording from last week's session. When new shows are coming. So anything Facebook related, if you're a big on Facebook user like us and you'll get notifications over there about what's going on. Other than that, that wraps it up for today's show. We do just have some less comments coming in. Thank you. Great info. Enjoy the presentation. Very informative. Cool. I'm glad. I hope this was helpful to everyone. Like I said, I thought it was very interesting. Very useful to me when I attended it. And so I want to make sure we got this out to more people. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So thank you very much. Thank you everyone. And happy Wednesday. Yeah. I hope you'll join us next time. Yeah, see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.