Why is professional identity important to you? For me, it helps to develop career goals, pursue professional development opportunities, and build confidence in the professional expertise I have to offer students, faculty, and library staff. As part of my professional identity, I no longer identify as an early-career librarian. If I had to pinpoint when this happened, it was around the five-year mark working as a librarian, which was earlier this year.
I was a member of our library’s community of practice for new librarians and archivists. A year ago, I stopped attending meetings, not because I don’t love talking about issues relevant for new librarians, but because I don’t feel “new.” (There’s also a suggestion in the terms of reference that ‘new’ librarians are five years and earlier into their careers).
And again, earlier in the year, there was a call for a summer research institute that caught my eye. When I read about the intended audience, it was for LIS students and early-career academic librarians, to move their research forward. Research is something I feel passionate about so I was still interested. But as someone on the cusp of leaving early-career librarianship, I didn’t want to apply and then take a spot from a student or someone who does identify as early-career. In the end, I emailed the facilitators, explained my situation, and was able to take part.
I’m currently on my first research leave, which has given me the space to reflect on my career. I’ve written before on feeling like a work-in-progress, and I think this is an important way of thinking as of course I’ll never truly know everything there is to know about academic librarianship. Like many librarians I know, continual learning is a big part of our careers; we’re curious and interested in learning. But what comes with time and experience is the confidence and expertise to perform our jobs at a higher level.
Rather than focusing on specific skills I want to develop, or situations where I thought I could improve my service, I’m thinking of a bigger picture. To bring up the building metaphor again, I’m thinking in terms of structural integrity, not just individual bricks. I’m thinking of how to sustain myself in a profession that has librarians burning out, so that I can continue to provide library services to my patrons.
As part of this bigger picture, I think about what I still want to accomplish throughout my career. The Hockey Hall of Fame has a category for ‘Builders:’ that is, individuals who have contributed to the game of hockey, beyond playing or officiating. I want to grow in the profession, but I also want to help grow the profession; like Glen Sather or Bud Poile before me, I want to be successful in both playing and building.
With all that’s going on at home and abroad, at times I find it helpful to focus inward, and spend time thinking about not only my own career, but how I can help others in the months and years to come.
This is just one milestone in a much longer journey. I’m able to think of myself moving from Apprentice to Journeyman. As a journeyman, I’m still on a journey to truly master librarianship—if that’s even possible. I’m thankful to all who’ve helped me along the way. And above all, I’m grateful to have found a permanent job as an academic librarian. Step-by-step and brick-by-brick, I’m building my career as an academic librarian.
This time of year, at my university, and perhaps at yours as well, we are preparing to submit documentation for our annual performance reviews. As I get my activity reports ready for my first cycle in this process, I can’t shake an idea surrounding the nature of academic evaluation. From report cards in elementary school to doctoral dissertation defenses to tenure and promotion procedures, the academy structures itself around the individual. There is one name at the top of the CV, the exam, the LibInsights report, this blog post. Yet, on both theoretical and practical levels, the work we do is inherently collaborative. Our efforts connect to many names, not one.
As a first-year academic librarian, I lean on my colleague’s expertise in big and small ways. In my first few weeks here, I was constantly shuffling over to my neighbor’s offices when a question I couldn’t answer arrived in my inbox. When I’m brainstorming ideas for instruction sessions my first instinct is to reach out to my colleagues who I know excel at lesson and activity planning. In November I helped with two major outreach initiatives, a conference and a multi-day medical humanities event series, neither of which would have had any hope of success if they had fallen on the shoulders of one individual as opposed to a team.
Apart from initiatives that I’m directly connected to, I see my colleagues co-authoring posters, papers, and book chapters. I see them working together on interdisciplinary initiatives and serving on joint committees inside and outside of our institution. And though I don’t have the stats to back this statement up, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to find an academic department that doesn’t lean on words like “teamwork,” “relational,” or “collaborative” in their guiding documents.
Culture of Personality
So, what’s with this dissidence? Some might argue that it’s necessary to evaluate the individual in relation to the group. That there’s no logical workaround and that this individual-centric procedure ensures accountability and ambition. Some might say that even though we go up for reappointment on our own, the work we do together is still highlighted, shining brightly on our computer-generated activity reports. Some might say that this emphasis on the individual is just life. That it’s an unavoidable symptom of existential solitude and to stop worrying about it and get back to work.
In the first chapter of her book, Quiet, Susan Cain succinctly traces the rise of the “Culture of Personality” in America in conjunction with the industrialization and urbanization of the turn of the century. As much of the population moved into cities where they no longer knew their neighbors, the art of selling yourself became a crucial means of survival. It was no longer enough to be proficient at your job—you had to demonstrate extroversion, charm, and an unwavering commitment to self-development. At the same time, social anxiety and compare-despair style competition ratcheted higher with each passing decade (go figure!)
Some possible antidotes
So, what is the point of voicing this qualm? Although completely restructuring the way we think and talk about evaluation, promotion, and tenure into a more relationally oriented system might be impractical for now, I still think there are steps we can take to highlight and celebrate our interconnectedness. Considering the nature of this post, I’d love to hear from others about what this idea brings forth. However, some starting points are:
Giving flowers: Recognizing the accomplishments of your colleagues and letting them know that you see and appreciate them. While my university has official channels for doing this publicly, I’ve had some of my most meaningful exchanges in informal interactions. It’s important to note that this requires us to be inquisitive and curious about the projects and activities of one another—I speak to myself here. I get so wrapped up in my own work, that I forget to come up for air and pay attention to what my colleagues are doing, too.
Reflecting on how our individual work connects to the whole: Okay, now is the point in the post where I confess that I love working alone. While I don’t completely shut off at the thought of group work, I’ll admit that the term “team building” does turn my stomach, and I revel in an afternoon without meetings. I’m an introvert and I love alone time. However, even in my most solitary moments, I still know that I am connected to the world around me. I connect to the librarians that had my role before I did as I build on the blueprints and scaffolding that they left behind. I connect to the ecosystem of my library, as I hear my liaison colleagues in meetings with students, or the Letterpress Lab down the hall boisterous with cheers from students. I connect to health sciences librarians across institutional boundaries, and I look up to the librarians that I encounter through conferences, workshops, and online courses.
Celebrating your peer’s accomplishments as your own: No, I don’t mean taking credit for other people’s work. In line with the above bullet point, I am pointing out the connection between your colleagues’ work and the work that you do. Serving our students, faculty, and staff is a group effort. I could not effectively hold a reference interview if it wasn’t for the work my colleagues in cataloging, electronic services, or ILL do. Nor could I facilitate the same level of hands-on, contextualized learning without our librarians in special collections and archives. Our Help Desk and Public Services teams are integral, and none of the events any of us have been a part of would be possible without our Marketing and Communications Team. I cannot imagine my job without our Data and Digital Scholarship librarians. The list goes on.
We are points on an interconnected web, supporting one another in visible and often invisible ways every day. In this season of my first annual review, how grateful I am to not have to go it alone.
I’m not saying I’m worried about faculty and students taking me seriously as a librarian, but harkening back to my days as a teenager who used to be a big fan of emo music: sometimes I feel misunderstood.
I’m an early-career librarian who is still sorting out what it means to be an academic librarian. I work as a liaison librarian, supporting several departments in our Faculty of Science. My entire ethos as a liaison librarian—and one that I share constantly when speaking to students—is that I want to make things easier for them, to save them time. And I do, if they and their professors let me.
I search for opportunities to talk to students about information literacy and save them time as they search for and access library resources. But there’s a misunderstanding of what librarians do. I recently had lunch with a faculty member and graduate student. We were talking about library services for graduate students, and neither had much idea of what library services are available to them. This isn’t their fault; in a lot of ways, libraries have a marketing and advocacy problem. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken with my friends, and they have no idea about the bulk of my job. I need to liaise with students and faculty in my subject areas, but if they don’t have any idea of what I can do for them, doesn’t that fall—at least in part—on me?
As librarians, we’re knowledgeable and we have deep professional knowledge. We’re the ones implementing and maintaining the systems that allow our patrons to find resources in our catalogue; we’re the ones ensuring our collections support curricula at the institution; and we’re the ones expertly and concisely instructing on how to find, access, and use all kinds of information. We need to make sure our community knows this and for more people to know what our work consists of.
Shirley Phillips writes in a recent Globe & Mail opinion article, that librarians she knew would “literally search the world over, using their knowledge and uncanny problem-solving skills to find needles in haystacks. But they also helped high school students with their homework. No matter the question, there was no judgment. They went out of their way to put people at ease, ferreting out their true needs, especially those who were ashamed to display what they thought of as ignorance in a knowledge-based institution. It was public service at its finest.”
ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Jenn Monnin, Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Health Sciences Library, West Virginia University.
Last October, I had the opportunity to attend the Mid-Atlantic Chapter Conference of the Medical Librarian Association in Durham, North Carolina. The theme was Rising to the Occasion, and talks ranged from information management in emergency planning to building your own ILS system. One of the plenary speakers was Dr. Will Bynum, a shame researcher at Duke University. Physician suicide is, unfortunately, a common tragedy, and Dr. Bynum is working to counteract this by normalizing a conversation around shame in medical education. Near the beginning of his presentation, Dr. Bynum asked us to participate in a Poll Everywhere by texting our responses to the question: “In 1-2 words, what has triggered shame or imposter feelings in you (or could in the future).” Our submitted answers would appear on the screen in a public word cloud.
Uncertainty
It’s amazing just how anxious that request made me, as this was my first professional conference and all four of my immediate coworkers were in the room. I was extremely self-aware of my identities as a new medical librarian, a new academic librarian, and as a new librarian. I began my current position a month and a half before this conference, and spent the previous two years as a public librarian. I just got the hang of managing the collections and all programs for adult and teen patrons for all six library branches, had established partnerships with all four local afterschool programs offering Girls Who Code Clubs to their students, and worked consistently with the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation and the local OhioMeansJobs office to offer In-Demand career services to the county. When my family moved, I had to get settled in a new position all over again. Now, at the very last session of my first conference as a medical librarian, I was being asked to publicly reflect on what made me feel so behind in my career. That felt like a lot to ask. I didn’t want to send anything in, and thought I’d leave the imposter-feeling explaining to people who knew more about librarianship than me. Thank goodness I was sitting alone so my coworkers wouldn’t see me not participating!
As words started appearing on screen, I saw my own anxieties, fears, and insecurities reflected in real time. The more a word was texted in to the Poll Everywhere, the larger it appeared. Since I saw concepts that so completely described how I felt in my new position being sent in by others in the room, I decided to send in my own thoughts. Dr. Bynum posted a picture of our completed word cloud to his Twitter account shortly after the conference.
Early on in his talk, Dr. Bynum pointed out that when dealing with a professional at any level, it’s possible to trigger something that disrupts their professional identity. In our profession this could happen when presenting in front of peers or encountering new library jargon, for example. This causes what he refers to as “a shame reaction,” and has the potential to cause the person to feel shame and/or react defensively because their identity has been threatened. Any time a shame reaction is triggered it is possible for the person to respond “I am bad; I must fix myself” instead of “I did a bad thing; I must improve at ____.” The first response, or the internalized shame response, is anti-learning and impairs belonging. When the shame is prolonged, it can turn especially destructive. The second response is a guilt response, and according to Dr. Bynum, when properly harnessed guilt can be motivational and lead to the healing of whatever caused the shame reaction in the first place.
Many librarians are already talking about shame and impostor syndrome in librarianship, and I had been completely missing the conversation. Some great examples I’ve found recently are Zoë McLaughlin’s great reminder that “we are faculty members too, so there’s no reason to feel lesser,” Veronica Arellano Douglas’s amazing internal monologue about her own impostor syndrome, or the important light that Yoonhee Lee shed on the difficulties of even learning how to introduce yourself “in a succinct but engaging way.” More and more librarians are being vulnerable and opening up about their impostor syndrome, and how it affects their everyday life.
Millennials
After Dr. Bynum posted the word cloud to his Twitter, I noticed that two words to the right of mistakes, is the word millennials (it is written vertically and can be easy to miss). The inclusion of millennials surprised me. Up until this point, my perception of impostor syndrome, or more like my desperate hope, was that it had to disappear at some point in your career. There had to be some threshold where, if only I knew this much, if I could only go through this imaginary gateway, then all my impostor syndrome would simply be cured. The longer you’re in a field the more you know about it, so clearly one day I will get to a spot where I feel secure in what I know and never suffer from impostor syndrome again. The truth is the longer you are in a profession the more changes you will have to walk through, each one presenting a new opportunity for impostor feelings to arise.
Rising to the Occasion
Comparison is the enemy of community, and comparing myself against someone who has been in the profession for their entire career ultimately serves no productive purpose. Similarly, it is no help for experienced librarians to compare themselves to new librarians. At the end of the day there are far more ways we can support and learn from each other if we actively create those environments where all people can grow, freely express themselves, and put down roots.
Thankfully, Dr. Bynum left us with some practical advice on dealing with our shame and the shame we see in others. I would say this advice can also be applied to impostor syndrome:
Know what shame looks and sounds like, because it is often hidden
Ask “how are you feeling about yourself today?”
Actively identify when you or someone you know feel shame, and be aware of the feeling
Explicitly say “let’s take the blame for this mistake and put it on this other thing” so you can accurately process what went wrong and how to keep it from happening in the future
Speak up and break the culture of silence
Create environments where people can grow roots and freely express themselves
I am fortunate enough to work at an institution that supports early career librarians, and have plenty of experienced colleagues who want to learn from me as much as I want to learn from them. I have yet to open up a conversation about impostor syndrome other than with a few trusted, early career librarian colleagues, but that may be the next step for me. Yes, it is difficult to break a culture of silence. Yes, it means we have to be vulnerable with each other, which is not easy and opens you up to getting hurt. But when we break the culture of silence, when we actively love and care about the well-being of people around us, when we work together and harness our impostor syndrome instead of fear it, we are far more equipped to handle change and will be far more successful than if we had tried alone.
Like a good old millennial I was Gchatting with a friend, a fellow old millennial, and asked, “Can a person die of imposter syndrome?” And yes, I did misspell “impostor” in that question.
I was met with a “hahahahahaha” and some emojis, along with a much needed pep talk. No, it didn’t end that feeling of panic that was making my shoulders ache and my throat tight. I still felt my stomach flipping and my face heating up. My particular flavor of Impostor Syndrome manifests physically, and is a strong mix of embarrassment, anxiety, shame, and excitement. I once asked Library Twitter if it ever goes away, and was met with a resounding NO from the women I idolize. It may change, but it never goes away.
I’ve been told to own my expertise, fake it ’til you make it, and remind myself that I belong here. I’ve tried to replicate the actions and approaches of colleagues and friends I greatly respect in hopes that I’ll manifest some of their confidence and air of authority. It’s not me. It feels false and a bit painful, honestly.
Articles and books abound to help women and people of color, my own intersection of identity, thrive despite impostor syndrome, deal with it, and even cure it. I’ve tried them all, but the feeling persists, and I am starting to wonder if it really is such a terrible thing.
I mentioned shame making its way into my Impostor Syndrome expression, and I think that shame is less related to “feeling like I’m not good enough” and more related to feeling the Impostor Syndrome. When I teach I try to encourage students to embrace confusion, ask questions, and generally feel ok not knowing answers to things. I need and want to do the same, but often feel as though there is no room for this kind of “novice culture” for women of color in the workplace. Our Western workplace culture tends to conflate vulnerability with weakness, a desire to learn with incompetence, and questioning with a lack of knowledge. So when self-doubt and “not knowing the answer that I feel like I should know” make their way into my brain, I feel weak, unworthy, and even more down.
My feminist brain screams: EVERYONE HAS FEELINGS AND NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEM IS AN INSIDIOUS SIDE EFFECT OF THE PATRIARCHY. FEEL YOUR FEELINGS.
My work brain chimes in with: You need to be more confident or no one will take you seriously.
But then I think back to some of the leaders and colleagues I’ve most admired, and what stands out is their ability to say, “Wow, I don’t know anything about that. How can I learn?” Or, “You know I am feeling a lot of self-doubt today and could use some encouragement.” They were/are strong enough to fully own and express those feelings and use them to grow as people. So maybe it’s not Impostor Syndrome that’s the problem, but the way that it is vilified. Yes, it’s important to not continuously drown in a pool of your own self-doubt and anxiety, but part of swimming out of that pool includes sharing those feelings and acknowledging that it’s ok to feel that way. It was so encouraging to hear expressions of “me too!” and “same here!” from my heroes online, and I want to do better about expressing those feelings, too. I want to stop worry about it impacting my professional image (whatever that means) and embrace the range of emotions I want all learners to feel. Feel your feelings, y’all.
