Sending out that last edition of this newsletter was really scary. It’s a lot easier for me to talk about coaching skills than it is to talk about myself like that. I don’t even have words for how much I appreciate those who responded with messages of support.

And fewer people unsubscribed than I feared! So thank you for quietly supporting me by still being here!

Two weeks ago, I was feeling frozen.

Every day since has felt like another barrage of bad news, and it would be easy to still be overwhelmed.

Instead, I’ve been working on compiling a set of my favorite coaching exercises to share with you.

Use these 4 exercises to reclaim your sense of agency in situations that feel overwhelming and scary and far beyond your control.

They’re all great to use for yourself, to help you refocus your energy and find those ways that you can make a positive difference. Three of the four can also be used to help your team refocus on how you want to respond and move forward.

All of these exercises are pretty much common knowledge in the coaching world, so you may have come across some of them in other contexts.

A couple of them are pretty popular in contexts that focus on “building optimism” and “positive thinking”. There are times when that’s great to focus on, but right now that feels kind of like whistling past the graveyard.

My spin on them is to make sure you take the next step forward. We’re not here to build optimism just to feel good.

We’re focusing on the good things so that it becomes a little easier to notice opportunities to make more good things happen, so that you can take action to make things a little bit better.

Maybe that's thinking through a communication plan for your patrons. Maybe that's identifying some small acts of resistance (Simple Sabotage Field Manual) to protect the diversity of your collections and your patrons' privacy.

I have to admit, though, that I didn’t quite get the document polished into a final draft in time to send them out to you today.

But I want you to have these tools today!

So, here’s the link to download the exercises in a pretty basic format today. The content is there, it’s just not as pretty as I’d like the final draft to be!

Because this is still in draft form, I would really love any feedback that you have. If you notice a typo, please let me know! If any of the instructions aren’t entirely clear, please ask me to clarify!

And if you try any of these - either on your own or with your team - please let me know how it worked out!