 Please welcome our third and final speaker, Erica Rose, Library Science Instructor at University of Nebraska, Omaha, with her session called, Skill and Disponditions for 21st Century Librarians. So happy to be with all of you today. It's kind of risky business to be three out of three because at this point in the day, you've had a lot of information, so I'm gonna try to use it the next day. It's kind of interesting. I want to start out with what I'm talking about today, which is the disposition of communication by asking you guys a few questions. And you may want to just write them down. If you want to shout out your answer, great. I would love your feedback throughout this because I think more minds are always better than just one and you all live and breathe this every day. So I just want you to think, how many emails would you say you write in a day? I know, it's such a big number. You can't even say it, okay? How many phone calls? We're double digits, right? Let that in face-to-face interactions. Let that in the component where we might have some confrontations that we need to deal with. Patrons who are upset. We'll fire to put out between coworkers, that kind of thing. And then we have this whole other piece of this as we bring in social media, which requires a whole other set of skills. So when you think about all of those things, I'm going to be so bold as to suggest that you might even spend a majority of your work day handling these things. So my next question is, and I think you're all gonna raise your hand, how many of you participate in continuing education for libraries on a regular basis? I mean, you're here today. It's obviously important to you. Some of us have formal libraries like education, conferences, all kinds of things. Out of all of those various things that you have attended, how many of them focus on communication? One is good. One is actually probably the most I've ever heard anybody say. This isn't something that we talk about a lot in libraries. Despite the fact that a majority of our work revolves around our ability to communicate with people. Rightfully so, we spend a lot of time honing our craft, talking about our resources, our facilities, our organization of our collections, whether or not people can access our resources. But I would challenge you to consider the notion that all of those things are only as good as your ability to communicate their value to your patrons. That your work as an information professional is only as good as your ability to have productive working relationships with your coworkers. That's a lot of pressure. It's a big task. And so I feel like it's worth spending some time really thinking about how we can be effective in a way that we communicate with people. I don't have any conversation about libraries that don't ultimately lead back to what's good for our patrons. I think that absolutely every single action that you take should ultimately lead back to whether or not this has a positive impact on your patrons. And that can be minutiaed to those big strategic planning decisions. And it's also hinges on how well you can communicate with them. So I will be so bold as to say that you are all expert communicators or we're aspiring to be expert communicators by the very nature of the job. Our libraries do not exist without our patrons. And so we have got to be effective at the messages that we're sending to them. So the reason this whole thing came on my radar is because I teach a reference class to graduate students and we're talking about the reference interview. How do we effectively conduct a reference interview? And as you all know, patrons walk in the door, they think they know what they need but they don't really know what they need. So you have to determine what they actually need. That is more challenging than it sounds. And in order to effectively do that, you have to really be conscientious and intentional with the words that you're using, with the questions that you're asking. You're looking at that patron and you're saying, I can see by the deer in the headlights look in their eyes that they have no idea what I just said to them. Or they're using lingo that does not match with the actual assignment that they're trying to find information for. There's all kinds of these subtle cues that you're picking up. Or you might have a patron who looks like this and you can tell that they're terrified about whatever it is that they're talking to you about. You are picking up and reacting to all of those cues from people. So it's really important to have an awareness of all of those things. Not only from the person that is giving off those signals but from yourself as well. So I'm just gonna put a pause in all of this before I dig into this content and say that this quote is really important to me. To understand that you are 50% of every interaction in every relationship. Not more, not less. So be fully accountable for your part. So I did this presentation a couple months ago and then at the end of it, a lady said, I found that so freeing to know that I am only 50% of every interaction. And I was so glad that she had come to that realization and understand that she can't do a little thing. But the piece of this that I find really meaningful is the part where it asks us to be fully accountable for our part. It's really easy to sit in presentations like this where we talk about this and everybody's thinking it, right? You've got that person in your mind who's thinking it. If only Marvin was here. Man, he can't communicate for anything. He is so difficult. I wish he could hear all of this. It absolutely is probably true. But the thing is he's not here and you are. The only person that's going to change based on anything that you hear is yourself. You can only control yourself. But you will be surprised, I think, about how much your reaction to things influences other people's behavior. So I'm going to ask you all to be really objective as you listen to this and try and apply this to yourselves and not give into the temptation of only thinking about an entrance of other people. And it's really hard to do. I myself believe that there are people in my life who would tell you that I can work on my own listening skills. So it's something that we all have to continually strive for. It's just a scary part. So this is the Shannon and Weaver model of communication. And I'm not normally a big fan of throwing up resources from 1949. That's not a good library chip. However, this is still the basic model that we're using at the Foundation of Communication Theory right now. So what you see there, if you can really see it at community learning, oh, it's pretty good there. So we have an ascender, an encoder, a channel, a decoder, and a receiver. Now this is being used in communication during a lot of levels, right? They use it when they were working with the invention of the telephone. They use it in terms of technology. But it's also really useful in terms of face-to-face communication. We're just going to modify it a little bit. Before I show you how I've kind of changed this for our purposes today, I just want to define those terms for you. So I try to kind of put it in terms of what we might deal with every day. So you have your sentence. This is the originator of the communication. It's your library director. It's the person who opens the conversation. It's whoever makes the initial communication. Your encoder is whoever is receiving it. That's the person that you're trying to communicate with. Your decoder is whatever medium they're using to figure out what you're trying to say. My email, my e-mail, my telephone, my facial expression, and the words that you're using. And then you have the receiver. Then there's this thing called noise. And I put a lot of big question marks there because that's really at the heart of what we're going to talk about today is the noise that's involved in all of this. In fact, we're going to break this down and just talk about the sender, the noise, and the receiver. If you're interested in more, then you can go to grad school and get pasted in communication through a different presentation. And I will be so fascinated by it because I think this is really interesting stuff. So what is this noise that we're thinking of? So right now, if you want, for me, the creative process and the reflection process is really useful for me to write things down while I think about things. So if you're interested in tackling it that way, as I'm going through these, really personalize this and think about, okay, what are these kinds of noises in my personal life, in my library, in the challenges that I'm having regarding communication in my own life? So there's four types of noise that we're going to talk about. Physiological noise, physical noise, psychological and semantic. Really briefly, physiological noise lives inside you. It's completely from yourself. Internal factors that affect how you feel and think. Physical noise is going to be around you. It's in your environment. Psychological noise is in your head. And then semantic noise are things that maybe society might affect your interactions. Better just say, you know? Kind of like, again, you know. Sorry, I'm just trying to respond to the ding, I'm like, have love, darling, anyway. All right, so, here are some examples of physiological noise. You're hungry. That sounds ridiculous, but there are a lot of us who don't always get a break when we're supposed to at work. You're tired, you have not enough sleep. You have a headache. You don't feel very well. You're cold, things like that. That can really affect the way, like, if you're as anybody familiar with the term hangry, is anybody get hangry from time to time? Right, so if you think about that, if you're hangry at the moment, that it really, a patron that sort of grates on you decides to come through the door and demand 45 minutes of your time, your reactions to them might be a little bit different if you were just serving up, you've had coffee, you've had a fangle, and everything is lovely and wonderful in your life so far. It really does affect how you interact with people. So, in addition to those physiological factors that you're gonna be dealing with, oh, and remember, it's not just yours. It's theirs too, so you're both bringing both of those pieces to the table, and you don't know what their physiological obstacles that they're trying to overcome are. You also have physical noise. This one is really important to me to talk about in libraries because we have a ton of physical noise in our spaces that are affecting how we interact with people. It's your phone's ringing, it's the chatter of your coworkers, it's the crying baby in the corner, it's the clatter of a card of books being thrown down or whatever, and so those things, when the phone rings and you're talking to a patron, what happens? Well, I just reacted to the email ding, I wasn't even mine, that came over to the sounds and completely threw off my train of thought, right? So those things make a difference in how you communicate with people too. I would also go so far to say, and sometimes it's not noise, sometimes it's visual space in your space. Right now, I consider this podium and those tables that are between all of us, noise. Because, and I'm sorry, for those of you who are listening online, I'm doing a Visible Demonstration here, where I'm walking out from behind the podium and I'm gonna go and sit down by one of the people who are in this presentation. When I'm talking at you, there's a lot that's coming up. If I come here and I sit down here, that's a completely different interaction that I'm having with nobody. I have just removed all of those barriers between us. This formalizes things quite a bit. Those are important things to keep in mind if you're looking to try to make somebody feel comfortable or if you're in a situation where you feel very uncomfortable and you need to put some space in between people. It can be used either way. When we design our spaces, that becomes really important information to think about as well, right? These are reference desks that are disappearing. The roving reference model is used a lot more often because we know that when we get out there and stand next to our patrons instead of across from them, we develop different relationships with them. We have different conversations with them. And the same can be said for your coworkers. If you have to have a conversation with somebody that you think is gonna be difficult, it may not go over as well if you put a whole bunch of distance between you. But if you sit down beside them as an equal partner in the conversation, that can change the dynamic of what you're trying to do. So there's a whole bunch of other stuff too. Our lighting, the space that we put between our bodies, the temperature of our buildings, all of these things, all part of physical noise. Just pausing to make sure that I don't go through stuff that people wanna talk about. Do you have any questions at this point? Not a requirement to have a question. Just checking in there. Okay, psychological noise. These are the voices in our heads, right? There are so many things that are affecting how we view people, things that you're not even aware of. Your past experiences, our unconscious prejudice, which I know that especially I love about librarians that we work really hard to not have that, but we all do just by human nature. We're preoccupied with our own lives and everything else that we have to do. We're defensive about certain situations. We have our own passions regarding certain issues, things like that. There's all of those psychological factors that can affect how we look at people and how we deal with them. So if somebody walks in and they're triggering an experience that you have with another person who looks similar to them, that can automatically taint how you're gonna interact with that person. If you don't really love children, that can be hard when you have to get down on their level and try to effectively interact with them and get them the resources that they need. So you need to take some time to identify what your own issues are. And some of the therapists might say that, but it's useful and we all have them. And your patrons have too. So when they walk in and you maybe trigger something for them, it can affect the way that they approach you as well or maybe it means that they're not gonna approach you at all. And then there is also some man-ticking ways. And this exists when the language is not mutually understood. There's a lot of semantic noise sometimes in generational gaps. We have all of this lingo that maybe teenagers are using and I might not see the other day for me he was gonna do woolly with his friend. And I think it has something to do with some whoppers in the back of his car, but it was foolish. That's a language barrier. There's also the fact that there are language barriers. Sometimes people are not, English is not their first language and so they're not quite as familiar that can affect your interaction. Sometimes just the age difference or any kind of demographic differences make that difference. Technical lingo is something that we need to be aware of because we know what we're talking about. I was having this discussion earlier with one of my library friends and we talked about how she's working with an attorney. They have so much lingo, you can't understand anything that they're saying. We have our own lingo and we tend to throw it out there. Our patrons don't know what our D.A. is. They don't know, a lot of them don't even know what an online catalog is. I worked with somebody recently who didn't understand what a database was. You cannot assume those foundational pieces are in place all the time. Okay, so as you're evaluating your noise I wanna talk a little bit about this notion of first impressions because a lot of the noise that I've identified are things that aren't necessarily having anything to do with the conversation. You haven't even spoken yet. You're just dealing with all of these other factors that are affecting your ability to communicate. A lot of our patrons walk through the door. Maybe don't say anything to us. They just go right to where they are. Some of our patrons, we might get the chance to greet, hello, how are you? Maybe not, maybe we just get a wave. They are forming a lot of their impression based on those initial experiences about you, about your library and about what they can expect as a patron. Just through those initial first impressions. So, we see here that first impressions are so powerful that they're more important than that. I don't know, I hope that's not true, but it's a powerful statement that's worth thinking about. Positive first impressions lead to social cohesion. Negative first impressions leads to bias within social prejudice. Again, really important that we get it right when we consider how many new people we have walking through our doors, how many new people we meet all the time. So, I wanna know what you guys think, how long do you have? Creative first impression. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. Two seconds. Well, two seconds. Well, so here's the data that I found. Of course it doesn't match, because you're dating. So, career realism says that you have 30 seconds in order to create your first impression. I found that hard. I can get any good, she and Shay. My name is Erica. Hi, how are you? Welcome to the library. Sorry. Business Insider Enforcement says that you have seven seconds to create your first impression. Okay, so at least I can say welcome to our library so that we know if you need anything. Psychological science says you have a 10th of a second to create a first impression. That's less than a blink. That's them just seeing you for the first time. And I did a little research on that and a lot of psychiatrists believe in this because they base it back sort of fight or flight response from way back in the day when we had to make decisions about whether or not we were in danger. So, there's a lot of people who think that this is a pretty legit theory. So, we have one 10th of a second to get it right with these people. So, we have to evaluate our own ways so that we can make sure that we're not mucking up those precious, precious first impressions that we get to people. So, here are the factors that we need to consider. Let's actually talk about how this played out. For you personally, people are evaluating the expression on your face, your body language, your demeanor, your mannerisms, and probably high dress. Just all of a sudden, they're taking all of that in to decide whether or not you're the guy that works there or whether or not you're another patron, whether or not you're friendly or whether or not you're dangerous, all those things. So, how do we combat all of those things? I've said it a lot and I'll say it again. I think the first thing, the first step in this whole process is just having awareness of all of this. Just saying. Yep, I know that I'm a little bit crabby today so I better keep a wrap on that. Or it's really cold in here or it's really noisy in here. This might change how things go with patrons today. Acknowledging our patrons, really at the end of the day, I think every single person in the entire world just wants to be acknowledged as a valuable person who is worth your time. And that in itself is a really powerful thing. I think it's also really important to remember what our intent is. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the minutia of a conversation or get distracted because we're irritated about something and we forget what we're actually trying to do. And then finally, the big thing in the season, the opportunity, which I'll talk about more. So, we're thinking about our awareness of this. Let's get rid of some of the barriers. In your own life, in your own interactions with patrons, what can you remove that's affecting those things? Can you get out from behind the desk more often? Can you walk people to where you're trying to send them to you more often? If you're emailing people, can you make it, maybe you need to proofread a little bit more. There's all of these things that we can think about in order to kind of clean up and tighten up these interactions with people. Approaching your interactions with your end goal in mind. What are you trying to accomplish? Am I trying to do good reference today or do I want to get in a fight about politics with this statement today? You know, I've been there. It's hard to buy at a time sometimes. I get it, but you have to keep in mind what that intent is in maintaining that really high level of professionalism. So, one thing that I find that's really useful when working with anybody is to, is that acknowledgement piece of it where you use names whenever you can. This is why the patrons love you, right? When you're working with a student, you see them all the time, hey Josh, you know, how the test go yesterday. Remembering those small details in people's lives makes you feel incredibly validated. And when people don't, I mean, you can't remember everybody who walks through your door. I am not trying to say that you failed and you can't remember everybody. But those relationships are really what make what we do special. That's what makes those people come back and fall in love with your libraries. And so being able to greet people by name I think is important when you can. And I had somebody say, well I'm terrible with names. This is a really hard challenge for me. I am terrible, like me personally, I am terrible with names. I have like the attention being a squirrel. You know, it's really bad. And so I have had to really work on how to remember people's names. So my big tip to all of you is to say their names back to them as soon as you get it. So, if I've known your name before this, I'm just illustrating my points. I'm sorry. What is your name, Cynthia? Cynthia, it is so nice to meet you. Say it right away. Reforce is a human brain as soon as you can. Empathy is another big piece of this acknowledgement with people. And I think hypergrain is really a style of this. I think we are a very empathic profession of people. I think that's why a lot of us love this work. And but sometimes we're required to have empathy for people who we don't much care for, and it can be a reach. But it's worth it, especially when you think, I don't know what noise they have in their lives that is making them like this. It can help. So I also move a fan of the apology, even when it's not my fault, because I think if somebody is having a bad experience in my library, I am sad about that. I am sorry. And I don't like it when people are feeling threatened about something. And so I can always apologize for that without necessarily apologizing for something I didn't do. But there is often a place for an apology, and that is another little bit of that validation for those people. Oh, it was worse than apology. If you start those conversations with people as, I'm sorry that I said this in a way that you misunderstood it. It really helps take down defenses and it helps people open up to what you're going to say. And I think we have celebrate the good moments and we do this right, because we do this right a lot. I know I'm coming in here and talking about ways that we can improve, but I think that we have a lot of good moments happening, and I think there are a lot of times when we do get it right. And so when it works, then we have this fantastic reference interview with somebody and we nailed it, or we got that kid the best book, or you get the hug from somebody who came to a program that was amazing. You can just stop and say, yep, did that right. And what made that so good? Think about that. Think about how you can then use it with other people as well. Another piece of acknowledging people, and I apply this particularly to situations with coworkers. We're very busy. We have a lot of our plates to communicate a lot electronically, which is difficult for me sometimes because you take out that whole component of body language, which means it can be sometimes hard to communicate sarcasm or, you know, knockouts, and so having the time and consideration to articulate why to people, to just take a little bit more time to say, you know, I need you to do this. Oh, but tell them why so that it doesn't just feel like you're trying to deny somebody, or if you tell a patron you can't use the computers. Tell them why so that they don't feel like they've been personally selected as, but people not allowed to use the computers. Those, and that doesn't take very much time. It's just those little nuanced things that help people feel validated. So I've already said it, but all of these things that we do can change the game. I, one of my employees once came to me after a horrible interaction that she had with the patron. I mean, he was so mean to her. And she just, and she had the best spirit about it, and she said, you know, it was great. It's a challenge for me to change his mind. And I thought, that's amazing. And when you look at that, as if every single interaction that we have is an opportunity to either change a negative perception or reinforce a positive perception, that's incredible. That's the best marketing you can possibly do. So, here are a few ways that you can play this out. How many do we have on time? Yeah, 700 minutes is still 40. Perfect. So we can practice active listening. Active listening is listening with all of your senses. Right? I mean, I see active listening right now. Like Nancy's not in her head. Active listening right there. I can see that she's hearing what I'm saying. Active listening can also be, you know, when you're making verbal or auditory noises, like mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I get it. It sounds really cheesy when I say it. I don't care, I understand that. But it's the truth. And as a teacher, you get really in tune with the active listening process because this is not active listening. Like this scary head, and then like the eyes start to close. Yeah, you become very sensitive to whether or not people are active listening to you. So there are those nonverbal and verbal signs that you can add in just to show people that you're hearing what they're saying. And sometimes we're repeating what they're saying. Well, I just heard you say that you need Friday from 12 to four off. That's a really good practice because they know that you're listening to them. You just reinforced it so you don't get it wrong. It's good for everybody to hear it twice. Asking questions about what people are saying. Right, this is reference interview 101, right? This is what we do in a reference interview all the time. It applies to everybody that we talk to. And then after you have an interaction, going back and kind of reflecting on that is very useful as well. Okay, so those are the things, those are the noises that you can make, right? Well, I heard you say yes or no. That's great, I'm really happy for you. I'm so sorry, those kinds of things. Then there's all this nonverbal participation which is really tricky because this is the stuff that you do subconsciously that you probably don't even know. I was recently told that when I'm just daring at somebody, I look really mean. Yeah, I do not know that. And then I kind of tried it out and looked in the mirror and I thought, why, I do look weird irritated. And so that was a problem. I had to really kind of work on, I'm still working on it. So eye contact is something that's scary for some people but eye contact is really important because that's another piece of that validation where I trust you, I look at you. That's a very direct line of communication. Your facial expression. And then there is also what's called paralanguage which is the pitch, the tone and the speed of your speech. So when I get nervous, I talk really fast and I have to tell myself to slow down because I want to just get it all out because I might forget something. It's pretty common. Our voices tend to raise in pitch and all of a sudden you've just told everybody else that you're nervous and you're kind of losing control of your game. We pick up on all of those things. Proxemics are how close you are to a person. Anybody have any close talkers in their library? No, there's like, listen man, I need 12 inches and you're in about three. People who work with toddlers know that there's no personal, no proxemics involved there. But you send messages with those things to be aware and people will send you cues as to what they need from you, right? They'll stand farther away from you if that's where they need to be in order to be comfortable. Your posture. This one is huge to me. I think people are unaware of what a strong message this sends. Oh, sorry, you're cool. I can't. Yes, I can't. I think the rest of the time, this does not apply to you. Because I'm trying to get happy because I'm blinding myself to uncrossers. But I think, if I did this whole presentation with my arms crossed, I think you would notice that and I think it certainly creates a different message than when I open up my arms and I've opened my entire self up to all of you who I'm talking to. And I've listed in here, there's a really great TED talk about a woman who talks about nonverbal cues that you can give. And she talks about the power pose as anybody might know about a power pose, right? And I thought I was rolling my eyes and all these things and I tried it and I thought, oh yeah, it kind of works. So it's really interesting how these things actually do kind of work. Blinking a lot, if you get sweaty, all those kinds of things like that, those are nonverbal cues that you're giving off to people about where your mental state is in terms of their communication. And then there's refrain from distraction, which this one I think is a big one for us because we do wear so many hats, because the phone will ring, because somebody will cry, because somebody will try to pull you away from the interaction. But the minute that you turn and walk away from them, you just have sent a powerful message. Now, I know that there is some of this that is inevitable, so figuring out a way to do that tastefully and in the least intrusive way possible is really important when we're talking about patrons. Okay, I already said that, so I'm gonna keep going. So this is Amy Patti. She was a psychologist through Harvard who does this YouTube video and it is worth watching. One of the things that she discusses here is something I'm gonna talk about. Next, which is our four Asian skills, what we're saying and how we're saying it and how powerful just the tone of our voice can be. So in this TED Talk that she gives, she talks about a study that they did where they take these people and they put them in a job interview situation but these people think they're actually interviewing for a job. And some of them are very qualified for the job. They're almost overqualified for it and they can just drone on forever about all of the technical details that it got, the label and all that thing. And then they have these people who are really underqualified but they aren't incredibly passionate about the work that they're about to embark on. So then the panel of people who are going to select have to choose between these two candidates and candidates every single time, which one do you think it's true then? They're passionate. They're passionate. Yep, that is really important when you consider that in terms of trying to sell our abilities, our organizations, our resources to our patrons. Got any passion about what you're saying? Because people trust you when you're passionate about what you're doing. It's important to speak clearly, all of those little things to be sincere. And I think it's also important to speak honestly. I think most of us instinctively can slot fraud and we know when somebody is honest is that cahooie. And so I think there's a lot to be said for authenticity and honesty in our reactions. You know, we don't know. We don't know. That's not a crime. But saying, you know, when you don't know is just embarrassing because that comes out. So we talk about all of this in terms of our face of its communications and the world and all those other things we listed off like social media and emails and all the phone and all of those things. There's all nuances and all that stuff too. And we have to kind of shift gears depending on what we're doing. Because I can't email my stream of consciousness to somebody. Sometimes people try to write stream of consciousness on a paper, Smith. Yeah, it's kind of hard to get to the point. So things that I want everybody to remember is that email is forever. And I read almost every single email that has information for me in it that has written into my life probably three times. I can go back and look at it again. I save it so that I have a record of it. It is not going away. And then of course, even if you delete it, you can still delete it. And it can be brought back before you again. So if you think about every email that you craft as something that is absolutely positively permanent forever, it's maybe worth taking a little bit of extra time to make sure that you're being professional, that you've set the right tone with your words, that you've proofed it, because people are gonna make some assumptions about you based on what they see in the content of your emails. Most people know this. Ten of you know cats, that's bad. It's like yelling. Extensive use of punctuation. I struggle. That's another one that I had to force myself to not do anymore, because I really like the exclamation point. I'm a little nervous. Wait, was that? I'm not low. I'm not low. She's still on. I kind of equated to Valley Girl Talk, though you put in a few too many exclamation points. People start to think, now you're just irritating. So if this day is 24-hour turnaround, it's considered all right. Well, that's considered, consider it. I consider, consider it, because people expect that. They know that we have access to these things on a regular basis. A lot of us sleep with our phones inside our bed and people are aware of that. So I think the standard possible is that it's possible we need to try to get back to people in 24 hours. I don't know if any of you have ever encountered the carbon copy weapon, right? What carbon copy means is to send a message to a group of points, to be a little bit threatening. So I just tell people to carbon copy with care. Sometimes you need to do it. It can be very useful for you. So a really good way to make somebody get really defensive about the conversation. So be aware of that. So there's another opportunity. All of those emails, another opportunity to either change a relationship a little better or maybe we're gonna make a problem. I am going to pause at this point because you can read through my phone tips here, but I think you all know them, they're kind of common sense. And I just wanna ask about if you have any questions about all of this or how it plays out in your organization. Communication challenges any of you have faced. Probably the one with customers in our branch are the biggest challenges. Patron interactions. So which pieces, when we talk about all of those different types of noise, which ones of those do you feel are the most important to me about when you're talking about those patrons? Well, I'm thinking of a particular incident and the first thing that comes to mind is the patron's internal noise. Really noisy. Really noisy. A lot of internal noise. That was a pretty exceptional circumstance. I think we all deal with exceptional circumstances on occasion, we're working in a public environment. Right. So knowing that there's a lot of internal noise going on with that patron, how does that affect how you interact with them? In this particular case, I simply, I thought to myself, oh, I'm so glad I'm not management level and I turned around again. That's a fair point. You knew that you're gonna have to break out a big gun there, so yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you can identify that there's so much noise there. Maybe it's called police. I mean, there can be, yeah, and that's fair. And that's those communication instincts that come into play and that's really important. Anybody else? For me, a lot of times it's my own personal, I have a former military background. I was in the Navy. And so for, oh, please. No, no. So for me, I'll talk a little bit louder. So for me, it's an issue of I can be very direct and very, you know, this is, blah, blah, blah. And I get that way in my emails and when I'm dealing with patrons it's, here's your answer, talk, talk, you know, almost like a direct order. Ah! Because in your mind, you're just, you're just efficient. Right, very much so. Now my employees, once they get used to it, it doesn't faze them. But I have made a couple of them cry unintentionally before they just learned to accept it. Sometimes, especially when I get in a hurry, it gets worse. Yeah, so. So how have you helped your employees with that transition? Do you have confidence? I just sat them down and explained through them. Right? And it's like, you know, I'm not like that, I don't. And so we've talked about it and we've discussed it and yeah, so it goes much better. And my assistant has gotten really, really good on recognizing over the past year when I'm busy and I've got five or six other director type things going on and a patron walks up to my desk, she is immediately right there standing behind me going, oh, I know that Nancy is really, really busy right now. So why don't you come on over here and I'll give you a hand. And I'll tell you what, she is just a godsend because she recognizes that now in a hurry. That's great. Yeah, it really is. That's wonderful. Yeah. And yeah, five minutes. Five minutes. Anybody else? Any questions, comments, concerns? Any from our outside viewers? Anybody from our outside viewers? Any outside viewers of questions? Go ahead and type it in the box. I can't see them, but I'm sure Krista will read them. Yeah, nobody has said anything just yet, except for someone did mention what was the book that you were mentioning by Amy Cuddy. The present is the oldest self in the biggest challenges. Is that the title? Of the book? Yeah. It is the book I mentioned at TED Talk and I actually have a list of references right here. And it's Cuddy A, the body language shapes who you are. And there is a link to it. Well, my five thoughts for all of this is that there are no more questions is to remember to celebrate the good stuff because there is so much good stuff. And so I went to a presentation recently which was about trust. And one of the things that the woman pointed out is that psychological research shows us time and time again that we are predisposed to focusing on the negative. Like it's just part of the human condition. We do it over and over again. And so I hope that while I think the negative is useful because we learn from it, we also remember how important it is to celebrate the good things that we're doing because those are the majority of our interactions with people. And to remember that every communication is an opportunity and that you should capitalize on this for yourself, for your patrons, and for your profession. And then finally, I want to thank all of you for what you do because I know that it's hard to get out of your buildings to come to meetings like this. And I think it's great that you're here. And I know that you're doing amazing things in the community. So thanks a lot. And thanks for letting me be here today. Thank you. Thank you, Erica. That brings us to the end of the educational portion of the spring meeting. Thank you again to all of our wonderful speakers. And thank you to each of you for attending this meeting and for giving us a few hours of your time. We're so glad you are able to join us. Please remember to fill in your evaluations and hand them to your site host for mailing back. Or if you're attending solo, please send your evaluations to Amy Owen. Her email and email addresses are on the Paraprofessional Fiction Spring Meeting website. There is an evaluation linked off of the bottom of the ParaspringMeeting page. If any of you are interested.