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This past Friday, 15 Aug, I celebrated the first anniversary of my last day as an academic librarian! 🎉
I’d like to invite you to celebrate with me – I’m offering a free coaching session to the first 5 people who reply to this email (limited to those who haven’t had a free session before)!That’s not a sneaky way to get you on a video chat for a sales pitch… At least not directly! The best way to understand the power that coaching can have is to actually experience it, so I guess there’s that indirect aspect to it! When you’re actively considering a coaching package, the first step is to schedule a “chemistry call”. Those calls generally include some discussion of what goal you’re working toward, a shorter sample coaching session, and discussion of what next steps for working together would look like. But this offer is for a session that just focuses on the coaching because I enjoy purely coaching! This past year has been a whirlwind!My path from librarianship to here started earlier, in January 2022. As I rang in 2022, I was an academic librarian with tenure and full professor status. I led a department and co-chaired a campus committee tasked with reworking the general education curriculum. I had a pretty comfortable salary for the cost of living in Atlanta. But, I had a sense of moral injury from the way the University System of Georgia and the state of Georgia in general responded to covid. And there was some significant legacy toxicity in my library and an increasingly toxic university administration above the library. In mid January, I realized I just wasn’t happy where I was. So I started exploring my options, and came across some videos about becoming a book coach… And that led me down a rabbit hole of research about professional coaching. In July 2022, I enrolled in a professional coach training program that’s accredited by the International Coaching Federation, and started practicing coaching that fall. I graduated in May 2023. Meanwhile, I was exploring my options to move abroad. I was able to work fully remotely from mid February through mid April 2023, and spent that time exploring Portugal. I fell in love with the lifestyle in Portugal, and set a goal to move here. In May 2023, I taught Coaching as a Leadership Skill for Library Juice Academy for the first time. That was the most fun I’ve ever had teaching a class!Working with leaders who truly care about creating a healthier workplace for their team is the most amazing feeling. But, four weeks of asynchronous content is just a wham-bam overview, and doesn’t provide much support to make long term changes. And that’s what inspired me to design a longer, more intensive, small group program, Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership. I started promoting the program in July 2023, after I put in my notice but before I was officially fully self-employed. The pilot program started meeting in October. I will forever appreciate the small group of folks who took that chance on enrolling in that untested pilot program! Writing out all of this lead up feels reasonable and strategic… But then the rubber met the road and a whole lot happened all at once since last August! Some of the other highlights of the past year include: ❤️ Making revisions, promoting, and running the second cohort of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership 🧡 And making more revisions, promoting, and starting the third cohort! 💛 Selling my house and getting rid of most of my stuff 💚 Getting my visa and moving to Lisbon, Portugal! 💙 Teaching Library Juice Academy courses on a wide range of topics: Coaching as a Leadership Skill, Managing Your Workload, Writing for Publication in Scholarly or Trade Outlets, Writing or Editing an Academic Book, Exploring career options outside of libraries, and Examining Institutional Racism in Libraries 💜 Clarifying my vision of who I want to work with as a coach and what obstacles I want to help people work through Celebrating all of these achievements is important, but I’m just as excited to look forward to what’s next.I’ve already done a major revision of the webpage for Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership and am considering renaming it to something catchier. Look for a poll with some ideas in the next edition! I’m also brainstorming more webinar topics. On a personal level, I’m planning to put more energy than I have been into learning to speak Portuguese. And, I’m curious whether you’re interested in getting to know others who are interested in leading from curiosity, using more of a coaching approach. Should I create more spaces for us to get to know one another, and if so, what format works best for you?
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