PeMento

Steve Thomas: Lindsay, Maurini, Ashley, and Rachel, welcome to the podcast.

ALL: We’re so excited to be here.

Steve Thomas: So, briefly how did you get started in librarianship in the first place? What was your interest in becoming a librarian when you grew up?

Lindsay Cronk: I can go first. This is Lindsay Cronk. I got into libraries because years ago, distant memory at this point, I was a grant writer for a nonprofit during the financial crisis of 2008, and it was a slog and it was hard all the time, and I knew my work was really valuable, but I also felt a huge amount of stress around it. I was a pretty young person and it was eating me alive, but I was doing pro bono work cause I’ve always been a person who’s very committed to community service. And I was volunteering at the local public library, doing some pro bono work for them, and one of the local librarians said, “Hey, have you thought about librarianship? You have a really great transferable skill set for it?” And the rest of the career basically wrote itself from there, but it was all because a librarian saw in my work and translated it for me, which sort of laid the groundwork for everything that came.

Ashley Chase: This is Ashley Chase. So my story is actually sort of similar. I was also working in a job that was eating me alive. I was a family law attorney, the worst kind of attorney to be. And the job was horrible, right? But I loved the pieces of it that translated into librarianship: the research and the writing. Our paralegal at the time had an MLS and she said, “You know, you seem really unhappy,” which was an obvious read, and she said, “have you ever thought about library school?” And I didn’t even know that was a thing at all. I mean, I’d graduated from law school with the intention of being some fancy lawyer. And I was like, “No, I hadn’t thought about it.” Immediately went home, researched a program, applied that night, and started school very soon after that and graduated quickly and got a job right after I graduated, and I’ve been at Stetson since the beginning of my librarianship career up until now. So it was the same sort of a path for me.

Rachel Fleming: I’ll go next. This is Rachel Fleming. I started maybe a little bit earlier I worked in the library as an undergraduate. After graduating I got out in the world and was working in office and it was a bad situation for me. I remember literally thinking to myself, “Well, I didn’t hate working in the library, maybe I won’t hate being a librarian.” And that’s how I got here.

Maurini Strub: Similar to Rachel, I actually got my start as a student in libraries, graduated after having an existential crisis about what I wanted to be when I grew up, but finished my degree and ended up continuing working in a paraprofessional role, for about eight years and then gone through a series of promotions. And my dean at the time, I’m really thankful that she had the conversation with me. She’s like, “Have you thought about library school?” And I was like, “No, like I’m not a librarian.” And she says, “I can’t promote you anymore without the degree, and I think you have the skills and competencies to be one. Why don’t you go to school?” And like Ashley, within two weeks I’d taken my GRE and started a winter cohort in January of the following year.

Steve Thomas: You know, It’s interesting. I’ve done this podcast for, how many years? 12 years. And I don’t think anybody has ever said “I wanted to be a librarian when I was a little kid!” It’s always sort of, you got into something else, or at the least, maybe I think high school, you worked at the library or you worked at the library in college and then you kind of came to it.

Maurini Strub: So the people who tell me that when they were a kid wished they were librarian, never actually went into librarianship at all.

Lindsay Cronk: Well, I do think it’s sort of one of those archetypal professions, it’s like a policeman. Like for a specific style of a slightly bookish young person is, in general, my read of everyone who’s ever told me they thought they would be a librarian, which I frankly love because anytime I can visualize a person as their younger self, that’s a delight.

Ashley Chase: My oldest daughter told me that she wants to be a singer, a gymnastic-er, and a librarian when she grows up. So we’re hitting the threefold.

Steve Thomas: My son for a while was librarian, and then at night he would be a ninja. There’s no conflict there really.

Lindsay Cronk: No. Ninja By Night is also a great name for podcast, Steve.

Rachel Fleming: Good enough for Barbara Gordon.

Steve Thomas: So that listeners are all on the same page, how would you define mentorship or mentoring?

Rachel Fleming: I think, for us, the key part of mentoring is that trusted advisor role, where it’s somebody that you can turn to who’s gonna give you advice, that’s not catering to you. It’s their own wisdom that they’ve come to in their life.

Steve Thomas: So it’s different in that way that is not a coach in that they’re specifically trying to coach you in these certain behaviors that you’re doing now, but it’s more of a professional role model?

Rachel Fleming: Yeah, it’s often, we meet folks who we can envision ourselves as them. One of my first relationships was like, “Oh, you’re someone who seems like me dispositionally and you’re in a role that I see myself in the future. So let’s get to talking, and I wanna know how you got to where you are and kind of your thoughts on what’s going on in my career and any struggles or challenges that I’m facing right then.

Maurini Strub: What I’d like to add to describe what Rachel’s describing there is accompaniment, right? We’re along with the person in their journey of discovering who they are professionally, where they’re struggling, where they’re doing their self-reflection. I see mentoring largely as an accompanying journey, not meant to instruct or tell you this is exactly how you do it. More like, this is how I did it. These are the tools I found helpful. Maybe these things might be really useful for you, too.

Ashley Chase: For me, mentoring is a lot more honest in some ways than coaching can be. A coach is trying to tell you that you can do things that maybe you can’t do because you’re paying them or because they’re in a position where that’s their whole job is to get you from A to Z. But a mentor can say, ” You seem really unhappy. Maybe you should take a different track.” Whereas a coach is gonna try and get you on a defined track, and so I think that mentors have the power to be honest, sometimes brutally honest, in ways that coaches don’t necessarily. I think that that’s really valuable, whether it’s like a lateral peer mentoring or whether it’s top-down mentoring at any stage of your career.

Lindsay Cronk: Yeah, and I would say it’s different from friendship too. I would say a mentor sits somewhere between a friend and a coach. Like certainly as mentor, you affirm one another, but you also are telling truth to Ashley’s point. I think Maurini is the one who taught me this, like, sometimes when you sit down with someone who is both your friend and your mentor, the good question to ask is, “What do you want from me today? Do you want me to help you brainstorm or do you just want me to listen?” I think a lot of being a friend sometimes is just listening and being like, “Yeah!” even when you know that person that you love very much isn’t necessarily right. Like, you know, I have “ride or dies” in my life, people for whom I would not do things that I would speak about on a public podcast, but like, the mentor relationship, part of what makes it special is that we’re not coming into this with a specific interest. Certainly wanna help you achieve your goals, but we’re also speaking to you set your goals for yourself, which is a little bit different from a lot of the power dynamics in those other relationships.

Steve Thomas: The things you do with your “ride or die” people, we’ll get into that on Ninja By Night later, okay?

Lindsay Cronk: Exactly. That’s the special bonus Ninja By Night segment.

Steve Thomas: I think most people feel like this is an important thing, but all the pushes that usually happen are all, you know, early career stage stuff. It’s all, “Oh, well you just stepped into this role as a supervisor, so you need to speak to another supervisor to be your mentor to show you how to do this new thing.” And it implies that once you’ve learned how to be a supervisor, this person can transition out of your life. But that’s not what we’re seeing, and I think that was a little bit behind what you guys were thinking with PeMento.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah, what we see in the industry, and I think probably across many industries, is there’s a lot of focus on early career and professional skills development and a lot of focus on going into leadership positions and management positions, and there’s a lot of other things involved in your life than your career, and there’s a lot of other things that people want to do other than get into management. And sometimes people are already in management and they still need that mentoring relationship.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, cuz sometimes you’re in the middle of your career and you’re like, “Oh, I feel like I should talk to somebody about this!” We’re seeing a lot of this now, I don’t wanna say post-pandemic, this period now, post-beginning-of-the-pandemic, before it becomes endemic and whatever, so whatever period we’re in now in 2023, there’s lots of burnout, but I think a lot of that could be relieved with mentors. It is nice to have that in your professional life no matter where you are in your career.

Lindsay Cronk: A lot of folks, like even before the pandemic, something that I was really noodling on, was how lonely it feels to do a lot of the work in librarianship, how often in library work, folks, in particularly folks in mid-career, you are the only person in your library doing the thing you do, so you don’t necessarily have that sort of natural practitioner community. That was something that definitely started the thinking process around PeMento, but with the pandemic and endemic and whatever we’re in now, Steve, to your point, that was inherently exacerbated. When we envisioned PeMento, part of what we envisioned was a community that was created by and for people to come together without the expectations of the workplace, you’re gonna take this learning and you’re going to immediately apply it. Like, there’s something that is inherently, I think, a little transactional about a lot of professional development that with PeMento, we have really tried to dismantle.

Ashley Chase: So much of the mentoring that’s out there for librarians and for people in other fields is organized through an institution or an organization, so you see ALA mentorship, things. You see AALL mentorship things, where it’s like you’re given this person who’s in a more senior position to you whether or not they’ve even had the same position as you at any point in time, right? It’s somebody who has been in the field longer, who has advice, who is more of a coach, right, and they’re calling that mentoring and it is, and that’s great. But then it’s tied to your participation in this organization and you are going to get this mentor so that you can lead and do better things within the organization.

PeMento is all about figuring yourself out and the benefits that are derived from PeMento are for you. They’re not for an organization, they’re not for the place that you work. As evidenced by the fact that we had a handful of librarians leave librarianship after completing PeMento. This is all about the person who is taking the time and the ownership of the process to engage in peer mentoring and self-mentoring.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah. With other mentorship programs. It’s also kind of a roll of the dice, whether or not you have a good vibe with the person you’re set up with, and that is such an important part of a long-lasting mentorship. I met Lindsay and Ashley, like, almost 10 years ago now, and it was just one of those moments where I was like, these people are interested in what I’m interested in, and I’m gonna vibe with them, and we kind of came together. When you’re just on paper mashed up with folks, that doesn’t always happen. So what we’re trying to do is create environments where people have the chance to meet other people who are also looking for these kinds of relationships. So like a first-year freshman dorm, all the doors open, maybe I’m gonna find somebody that I can have a really close relationship with.

Maurini Strub: And that close relationship, I think too, also kind of got guided or grounded on how we’ve structured some of our cohorts. So building affinity groups based on shared challenges, shared problems that we see them having, or when they fill out an interest form in joining, there’s some preliminary questions that we ask them. We really use those very heavily beyond institution type, beyond geographic location, to really make sure that you are in the right group of people. And actually maybe later we’ll share one of the times where we thought we did a good thing with one of the little groups that we build that ended up snowballing into something bigger. But that’s a story for a later time in this conversation, I think.

Steve Thomas: Before we get too much into it, how did it come together where you actually decided, “Okay, this is a thing that we’re gonna do, not just, you know, oh, we’re just kind of talking and we have some ideas…” like, we have you guys listed as the founders and then Lindsay and Brianna as co-creators, so talk me through that origin story.

Lindsay Cronk: Yeah, it’s a great origin story. I love it very much. It started as I reconnected with my longtime friend and, I would call her a peer mentor, personal inspiration, Brianna Marshall.

And she had just been promoted into a position. She was looking, I was looking, and we were both feeling just kind of really frustrated, particularly in librarianship. There are challenges if you are younger and ambitious. And I say younger, very deliberately here because as I mentioned in my sort of introduction, I had a whole life and career before I ever, ever got into libraries, and so young is relative and the sort of ageism that we were experiencing. There was a really great article post recently in CRL from Dustin Fife, and Annie Pho on this topic of like, you’re moving all the time, you’re a little bit of a mercenary, and as a result you are constantly taking yourself out of the community that you’re building. So we were talking about that, and we just started to think about it and we were like, “We should do something about this because if we are feeling this way, right, so many people are.” So we started that conversation. We started to draft materials and then she got a job and had a baby.

And so she couldn’t help bring it forward and I knew exactly the people to get in touch with about making it a reality. By the time we’d started talking about it, I had fallen so in love with the idea of PeMento that I just couldn’t let it go, you know? And despite having been elected to a few very serious service positions, picking up a few professional responsibilities, it was something that I could tell was needed. And it’s something that I personally needed, is something that I wanna throw out there. During the pandemic, as an extrovert… I know, I’m so annoying… I knew I was dying and I knew that without like a community around me, I was already feeling the mental health effects.

Like, I’m joking, but I’m not joking. You know what I mean? And so PeMento was a personal passion project and it has meant the world to realize the potential of that very simple idea that it doesn’t have to be so lonely and so hard with these three incredibly talented individuals, other volunteers that have contributed over time. And it’s just been wonderful to see an idea and a prototype come to life.

Rachel Fleming: Once Lindsay got us on board, we have her to thank for her commitment to ideation and design because we were like, “Oh yeah, let’s get into it. Let’s design it, maybe, you know, in six months or so.” And she was like, “No, no, no. We’re gonna do this, like, next month. You know, we need it now! Let’s go!” So we did, I think. We started in December and we launched in March. We really got it out there as the pilot and we had such overwhelming interest. We said, like, “Let’s just put the sign up out there on our own personal Twitter” and within a week we had like a hundred signups on a first trial situation.

So, like Lindsay said, the need was definitely there, and it hasn’t stopped since. In the COVID time it was very, very needed, but it still is extremely necessary, with the kind of burnout that we see in the profession, having some colleagues to talk through that with is so, so important.

Maurini Strub: The urgency that we’re describing here makes us sound like Lindsay was being a task master. But as you can probably tell, having just talked for the last half hour, was done with all of the charm and like, it’s very infectious. So it was very easy to say yes to it as well. And I just wanna say, I appreciated that because sometimes you can get stuck in wanting it to be perfect, and as a group, we’ve really committed to treating this as perpetual pilot. So, we can make these constant tweaks, and zigs and zags to set the course of the program over the course of a journey. And I just wanna thank her for that actually here in this space.

Lindsay Cronk: Maurini, you’re gonna, but I do, I feel very selfish about the whole thing, to some degree. And that feels good, is the other thing I wanna acknowledge. Cause there’s also a selfish sub-interest in this, which is I’m tired of libraries being miserable. I’m tired of every conversation about library work being a miserable conversation. And I think that we can get through that. Chase, though, I want you to chime in.

Ashley Chase: I was just gonna echo everything Maurini said. I was going through a sort of, uniquely difficult time. I mean, we all have difficult times in our jobs, but I think there were some things happening for me at work, and when Lindsay brought this up, I was like, holy crap in a can, this is the thing that’s gonna save me. And it did. Like I would’ve gotten this peer mentoring regardless from these three people in a way that was super meaningful and would’ve changed the course of my life for sure. But, PeMento took it the next step further and I mean, I’m not a librarian anymore, because of PeMento and so this program changed my life and that is largely thanks to Lindsay subtly cajoling us into doing this without us even knowing it. And I love her for that. And I love this team for making that happen.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah, I often describe PeMento as life changing. It feels really weird to say that, but I have to say it because people tell us that it has changed their life and being a part of people being able to make that next step in their lives and hopefully improving their lives, it’s awe inspiring, honestly, I’m so privileged to be a part of that.

Steve Thomas: The great thing is, if you rewind the podcast just a little bit, you can see Lindsay knowing you all and her leadership in action because a second ago, after Maurini finished, she was like, “Chase, say something!” basically, but it was done in a way of, you know, “I know you have something to add to this, so make sure you say something now, like this is your turn to say something.” But again, like you said, not task mastery, just…

Ashley Chase: She’s the glue that holds us together.

Lindsay Cronk: I think that one of the challenges of our current moment is, and I get where it’s coming from, people do, they need to preserve themselves. I’ve also had some really tough lessons in the body keeping the score recently. However, this is the stuff that gives you something back. You need to be thinking about what is the piece that is giving you something back, that is improving you not for the sake of your workplace, not even for the sake of your career, though your career is an expression of some of that… just for you, you know? You gotta get that energy, you gotta get that feeding, you gotta get that care, and it’s another thing we saw as absent, and it’s a big part of the reason we brought PeMento into being, and it’s been a non-stop joy. Even the headaches are fun headaches because they are the ones that we invented ourselves.

Steve Thomas: So, how does the program work as a whole? Like, if you get into it, what happens?

Rachel Fleming: Well, it’s a co-creation experience, so when you sign up for it, you’re signing up to make the PeMento experience yourself. What we’ve tried to do is put some guiderails on the experience. So you’ve got the other folks who have signed up for the cohort and you’ve got the seven-week schedule where we have meetings with everyone who’s in the cohort, and then weekly or more frequent small group meetings where folks have chance to talk.

We start with a check on your balance, and then we start talking through what are the issues in your life, and by we, I mean the people who signed up for it, we just tap the ball and let it roll down the hill and create the avalanche. And then checking in in the middle and then checking in and making sure everyone’s got a good send up and wrap off.

 I know some of the groups that have started in like the last cohort we did last spring are they’re still meeting. So it’s hopefully finding some folks throughout that experience, asking some tough questions, helping other people think through their answers to those tough questions, and finding some folks who can be those peer mentors for you.

Steve Thomas: You all are putting together the cohorts at this point, but you do have it under Creative Commons license, so someone could just take PeMento and go off and do their own little version of it as well.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got the schedule and we’ve got some of our major worksheets all available on our website. So if you’ve got a group of four friends or four people who aren’t your friends who you think might have a good impact on your life, you can grab those worksheets and you know, what it’s all about is taking some time with yourself, and having somebody else to help you do that, is what is been very valuable for folks. So anyone can take it, run it with anyone they want. We have been now running it annually, I would say. We did two cohorts in the first year and then we’ve been doing it annually since then.

Maurini Strub: I think the other thing I wanna add to is that Rachel talked about anybody can take it. We literally mean anyone, right? So it can even extend an organization. So if you as an organization want to have this opportunity or a space for your staff to do this as part of a learning development thing, but not tied to merit, not tied to structures like that, this would be a wonderful thing for you to adopt and we even experimented in the early days with a quizlet that we thought might help us with sorting by identifying what kind of pepper you were. Not just a PeMento, but it didn’t quite work as the way we thought, but I think there’s opportunity to offload some of the work that goes into the pairing or the groupings, if you are a large enough group.

Ashley Chase: That’s one of the things that we’ve learned that we’ve had to change over the years is the grouping together, right? The making of these cohorts took us a lot of time because we put a lot of care into making these groups. In our first iteration of PeMento, we had people who had identified as being burned out, and we put them all together in a cohort and, oh, buddy, was that a mistake! Because the negative energy just fed on itself, so the burned-out people recognized that other people were burned out, and then they got angry about their burnout, and it just kind of snowballed in a way that we, I don’t think quite thought through. So in the next iteration, we did not put all the burnout people together and we tried to organize people by where they lived and positions, things that they wanted to work on, so that time zone wise, they could meet in times that worked well for them, and that worked pretty well. But then we started to hear from the public librarian folks that they were having troubles with scheduling because their schedules are not like academic schedules and there’s different things there. So then in the next cohort, we tried to change things so that the public library folks could get together a little bit more, and people who were thinking about leaving librarianship could bounce ideas off of each other, plus the time zones, so every time we’ve tweaked it a little bit to be responsive to the things that we see as facilitators in running the program as well as we send out a survey at the end of every cohort to get feedback from the people who have participated and we take that feedback very, very seriously when it’s not mean for no reason. Let me make that very clear cuz nobody likes a mean for no reason response to a survey. But we have taken all of the feedback that we’ve received very seriously and fed that into the next cohort of PeMento.

So I know in the cohort that we are launching right now, it’s gonna be smaller, right? We’re gonna have smaller cohorts. More time hopefully for us to participate with smaller groups and get to know the people who are participating. Then hopefully that will help us overcome some of the time zone issues and the library type issues and things like that. And then we’re also toying around with the idea of having a library type specific PeMento experiences. And I think that the consortium that the LAPL is running right now may be helpful in guiding us in that way, but we really do take the feedback from all of this very seriously so that we can further iterate the program and make it better each time.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah. Another thing that’s developed, along with how we offer our scheduling is that we’ve kind of grown our printed materials. Librarians are stereotypically an introverted group. So we were running into folks who are saying, I’m maybe not getting the most out of this discussion as I could, or we don’t know how to break the ice in our group meeting. So we put together the schedule, we put together some things that you should thinking about and some reflection prompts, and I think that those also have a growth potential.

Lindsay Cronk: I think huge growth potential, Fleming. I do think part of what we enjoy about running something that feels like a perpetual prototype is the vast opportunity to recognize and celebrate different to lift up that piece and say that because this space is for you and made by you, it is co-created. Reflection takes many forms, but ultimately this is again, creating the time, space, and support for the kind of reflection that helps people, helps anyone, right? Whether or not it’s as concrete as you’d like it to be.

 We’re all messy, like, is the other thing I love about PeMento. I do not have it figured out. These people sitting with you today, Steve, they are amazing. They have many things figured out that I do not have figured out that you do not, it doesn’t mean that we all have to be great at everything, right? PeMento is meant to also dismantle that sort of terrible illusion of the archetypal librarian of needing to know everything. Please, let’s put that to sleep forever.

Steve Thomas: How many cohorts have you had so far?

Lindsay Cronk: We’ve managed three, we’re going into four now, but we have had two self-managed major cohorts: the Boston Library Consortia and the LAPL, which is still running. Our biggest cohort was more than a hundred people. Our most recent cohort, we kept to, I wanna say 50. Which I thought was a good number. The other thing that’s tricky is you have to bake in for attrition, right? Because even like, again, people are amazing, they’re extraordinary, they wanna participate and something blows up in their lives. This is a very natural, unfortunately, thing that happens. So the other thing we bake into the process is it’s okay to quit. You can come back again. This will be run again.

Steve Thomas: And the LAPL one, they’re running it themselves, but that’s all their staff, right?

Lindsay Cronk: Everyone is eligible, and it’s been cool cuz they have, in public libraries, and Steve, you’ll probably know more about this than anyone else on this, there’s unique challenges to having hyper formalized hierarchical promotion processes. There’s challenges at work around staff retention, particularly given questions of safety. And while it’s tempting, I think to always say like, those are public library concerns, the learning we will gain through that process is going to help everyone come along and I think that we’re going to make adjustments to the program based on the feedback we get from that.

Rachel Fleming: I think one of the most interesting things and is that when we take kind of two-step specs from the issues that are plaguing us in our own lives about like our specific jobs and our specific roles, if you talk about your problems at that level of specificity, people can offer you support. But if you take two steps back and say, “I’m having this particular communication struggle,” then everyone else is like, “Oh yeah, no, I know that!”

So, early on, because we’re all academic librarians, we had a lot of academic librarians and they sure like to dive right into the weeds, but if you took two steps back, it was a much more universal experience, which I think is really exciting to us because, like Ashley works in law libraries, it’s showing that this kind of thinking about mid-career or really any stage of life taking some time to think through in a structured way is something that can get you to the next step if you’re feeling like you’re not progressing the way that you want to be.

Maurini Strub: And building off of that too, Rachel, I think part of the beauty, or I don’t wanna call it genius, but it feels like genius of the program, with these small groups is that there’s this topic, I don’t know if you guys have heard of this, I know Lindsay has, this idea called Ladder of Inference, and this Ladder of Inference considers the data. What data are you actually using to come to whatever decision, opinion that you hold. One of the things that you talk about is walking down your ladder so that you can expand the amount of data. I think that’s one of the things that the program actually does really well.

Oftentimes, when we’re stuck on our problems or our own challenges, we are limiting our data to just the data that’s in our world. But as we talk to peers, we realize, actually here’s some additional data that can inform my opinion or previously held belief. It’s almost like in joining into the conversation or entering into the conversation with your peers, you actually expand the problem. You’re able to kind of step back and see patterns and see other things that are contributing and actually leave with a different outlook or perspective on what actually may be driving a particular problem or challenge, so I think like that’s one of the cool parts of actually taking it into this small group. It’s getting you to think beyond yourself. You’re seeing the similar things happening to your colleagues or your peers at other institutions. And you just widen your mind around the idea or concept.

Lindsay Cronk: I will say one of the themes we heard loud and clear, Steve, from cohort one onwards was, “I’m miserable, and I feel trapped.” Part of what PeMento has done and that it’s part of where I’m particularly proud of, the brave folks who have moved on from the profession. You are the person who is best positioned to make sure you’re not miserable. And there are actually many ways for you to take the degree of control to be less miserable.

And the two tools that we’re giving you are community. Community of trust that is going to provide you with that truthful feedback that is going to support you and celebrate you and the time for a reflection because so often, one of my favorite mental models around this actually comes from Allie Brosh, the Sneaky Hate Spiral.

So like the one thing that tips you off that is not the thing that you’re actually upset about, but becomes that locus around which you twirl and twirl and twirl and tizzy. We try to break people out of that kind of thinking because we live in an era of incredible threats and challenges and tough times, but it’s not going to be won or lost through your pain, your trauma, your being trapped, right? The best thing for all of us is for you to break out of that as much as possible. And again, that speaks to you. I think the value and importance of PeMento is a community of trust that is all about us lifting one another up. It’s also part of the reason that I think one of the untapped potentials for PeMento that I can’t wait to see is organizational deployments that are about building trust within organizations.

Rachel Fleming: One of the things that folks run into is getting kind of hooked on a question. So it could be something like you’re feeling like, “Oh my God, I hate my job. And I kind of think I want to get outta libraries, but like, I don’t…” And then you’re just stuck right there, but you never go a little bit further. Or like, “Well, I wanna retire, but you know, I got my whole thing here.” And then you just like, think about it and you never do anything. Or like “Everyone’s telling me it’s time for me to be a department head, but I don’t think I wanna do management. And so now I’m just gonna be, oh, I don’t know what I should do. I don’t know what I should, I don’t want know what I should do.” And sometimes it’s hard to make yourself answer the question because you know in your heart, you know what it is. And having that answer means that you have to go forward with that knowledge and you’re not quite ready to go forward with that knowledge.

And that’s where mentorship being that affiliated experience where you’re like, get somebody else to be like, “Oh, come on out of that rut and let’s walk down this road two or three steps together.” And then you know, you’ve been sitting here wanting to leave libraries for two or three years, you’ve known. How can we get you on your way?

Ashley Chase: I think what Fleming is describing is sort of a uniquely mid-career feeling. When you’re towards the end of your career, the natural progression is to start thinking about retirement, even if you’re not sure that you’re ready for that, right? But you know what the next step is, the next step is retiring. Not making a choice to leave your profession because you’re miserable, but moving on because it’s time, because you know you don’t need to work anymore, whatever. And same with early career folks. They are not as scared to leave their jobs because they haven’t been in them.

Especially, librarianship is so vocational and people are so attached to like the meaning behind what we do and that’s lovely, but when you get to mid-career, when you’ve been doing it for 10 years, 15 years, it’s like, “Okay, well but I’ve been doing it for so long. Would anybody want me to do anything else? And can I even do anything else? What would I even apply for if I were gonna do it?” We had somebody from a recent cohort who quit their job and worked part-time as a remote librarian for a little while, and now they are running their own business and jet setting back and forth between the US and Europe and doing all kinds of cool things, and it’s like, would you have ever done that, but for this program? And that person has told me, no, they would not have done this but for this program, and that’s the most meaningful thing that I think that anybody could get out of this is just sort of like a clarification about your own path.

Steve Thomas: What is next for PeMento? I know you mentioned a new cohort, but what else is happening there?

Lindsay Cronk: So that new cohort signup is live. If you go to our brand-new URL, feeling very fancy, very sophisticated, very official, PeMento.org, P-E-M-E-N-T-O.org and you got other work at hand. Chase, you wanted to take us there?

Ashley Chase: So we are hoping to make a more significant move into working with public libraries to hopefully make the program work within the unique parameters of public libraries. What that looks like, we’re not quite sure yet. We’re sort of still talking that through when working with some public librarians to get ideas about how we could move forward with those. We’re also in talks with a librarian from Canada who’s gonna help us think about this program for later career librarians, so people who are maybe not quite ready to retire, but who are decidedly late career.

Personally, selfishly, I am looking to iterate PeMento for faculty members, for people who are not in libraries at all. To take the program and when I pursued our trademark, I purposely made it not about libraries because I wanna make sure that we can take this program and move it into other industries where it may make sense. And I think academia professors makes a lot of sense because being a professor can be very lonely, and so I think that it makes a lot of sense that way. We’ve also talked about asynchronous models of the program, recording videos to go along with so people can use the worksheets and the great printed materials that we already have available, and then add maybe for a small fee, some mentoring videos to go along with it.

And then we are working on a journal as well with prompts so that if you wanted to do like a line a day, self-mentoring journey, related to career, but also your personal life, that we hope that a journal might tie all of that together. So stay tuned for some big things for the program going forward.

And like Lindsay said, we have a great new website. I’m gonna say it again, PeMento.org, P-E-M-E-N-T-O.org. And if you want to see what has been said about the program to date, even if you’re not on Twitter anymore, I do recommend going to Twitter and looking at the PeMento hashtag. You’re gonna get half Spanish language Twitter, talking about actual PeMento peppers, and then you’re gonna get the other half people who have completed our cohorts talking about the program, and there’s a lot of really interesting on the fly information that came through on Twitter as we’ve done some of these cohorts that I think is really fun. It’s fun for me to go back and read, and I think it’s fun for other folks to go back and read too. We would certainly love to use this podcast as a way to jumpstart our next cohort, which we’ll be starting at the beginning of July.

Steve Thomas: I will forgive you for making me have to go back to Twitter to read those things.

Ashley Chase: Sorry.

Steve Thomas: I just wanted to wrap up, even if you don’t want to specifically name anyone of just who are some of your mentors that you’ve had, or if you don’t want to get even specific in that sense of what did someone provide to you as a mentor, like what’s a good quality of a mentor that you’ve had before?

I’ll start because I did have a formal mentoring relationship through AALL with Filippa Anzalone. She’s the dean of libraries at Boston College Law School, and she was incredible, continues to be incredible. This is a woman who goes on silent retreats every year and is like the most Zen human being on the planet. And, really talked me through, coached me. She’s a coach and she continues to be a coach in my life through some really challenging times.

But honestly, the biggest mentors that I have had are the three people on this call. And I said it before, but I will say it again, I vaguely referenced the stuff that I went through at work, but when I was in that space, I was like, “Holy cow, this is really messed up,” and everybody on this call was like, “You are right. This is really messed up. What you are dealing with is not, even within the realm of messed up libraries, this is something else and you need to think about that.” And they were able to pull me outside cuz I was in a spiral, like my own spiral like Lindsay described. They were able to give me an outsider’s perspective to be like, “Oh no, this is another level and we need to think about how this is impacting you and what you can do from there. And it changed the course of my life. So I am grateful above all else for the three people on this call.”

Maurini Strub: I’ll go next. I think for me, I’ve had some tremendous mentoring relationships going back as early as high school, I’d actually say, some of them informal and some of them formal. But the shared characteristic that I valued above all else is that they were fundamentally listeners and watchers. So they listened. There’s some people who get into mentoring. I’m gonna say this in the kindest way that I can think of it, but from a very egotistical perspective, I wanna share with you everything that I know, so I’m transmitting knowledge to the next generation, or it’s shrouded in altruism, but it’s also ego-driven.

The best mentors I’ve had are people who actually listen, watch and then reconcile who you are with what’s out there for me. And so, yeah, that’s how I’d summarize it, and that includes the people who are sitting here and many people in my life that have served in that role.

Rachel Fleming: When I think about mentors or mentoring moments with folks in my life, I am gonna take the same tact as Maurini here. I think about the concept of we have in Judaism, for your Torah study partner, and it literally translates as your study buddy and what makes a good study buddy is not saying, “Yeah, that’s a great point. You’re right!” It’s challenging those ideas in a constructive way. So, somebody’s saying, “what do you want to do with your life? That’s something you need to be thinking about right now.” That’s literally, like third day of my librarianship career, somebody was like, “Well, do you wanna be a library dean?”

And that was a very foundational experience to me. And I’m very glad that I was asked that, and I went down the track for 10 years and it took somebody else being like, “Well, is this gonna make you happy?” Um… “Oh, as it turned out, you know, I thought I was right, but I was wrong and let me recalibrate my whole life.” So just like having somebody who is your friend enough to ask you tough questions is the defining characteristic for me.

Lindsay Cronk: And I’ll just chime in quickly with two names, the second of which is actually part of PeMento’s inspiration, which I am delighted to have an opportunity to share. So one is Evviva Weinraub. She is the Dean of Libraries at University of Buffalo. She’s just amazing and just someone who I can rely on for amazing professional advice.

The other person I wanna name is Mary Ellin Santiago. She was actually a former boss of mine at LYRASIS, and she is the person who shared one of my favorite lessons. She said, “Never be a seagull.” and what she meant was, do not see something that is bad and just take a massive shit all over it and then fly away. PeMento is like I see stuff that is wrong. These very smart, amazing peer mentors of mine who are literally responsible for a lot of my success as well, we see many things that are challenging and wrong within the profession, but what we are electing to do and what we are encouraging others to do is to engage in the work of making it better. So, yeah, Mary Ellen, if you ever listen to this, it seems like a long shot. You’re retired in New Jersey now, but I’m not being a seagull.

Steve Thomas: I’m from Florida, so the seagull metaphor works really well, so thank you.

Maurini Strub: Can I just also chime in? That is one of my favorite Lindsay-isms I’ve attributed to Lindsay. Now I know where it came from, but the noun “seagull”, don’t be a seagull, and also, we verbed it, so-and-so might be sea gulling, like during a meeting, and as soon as you explain it, everybody gets it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t wanna be that!” So like, it’s a colorful word. I love it. I love it.

Steve Thomas: Awesome. So to wrap up, if anybody wants to sign up for the cohort or just learn more about it, where can they go to learn more about PeMento or to sign up for the new cohort?

Maurini Strub: I believe I would like you to go to PeMento.org. That’s P-E-M-E-N-T-O.org.

Rachel Fleming: If you wanna hear us talk more, which why wouldn’t you, we have an upcoming session with the GLA Carterette series. It’s called “PeMento and the Power of Peer Mentoring”. It’s gonna be on Wednesday, June 21st at 2:00 PM Eastern, so you can go and sign up for that. You can also go to YouTube and dig up some of the other presentations we’ve done. Some are available online.

Steve Thomas: Awesome. Well thank you guys for coming on the podcast to talk about PeMento and let everybody know all about it. And I hope that you get lots and lots and lots of people signing up for the cohort. It’s a great program and I appreciate it. I’ve heard about it for a long time and so I’ve wanted to have you on and I’m glad we finally got it worked out to get on and promote your new cohort. So thanks for coming on.

Lindsay Cronk: Thank you for having us.

Rachel Fleming: Thanks so much, Steve.

Steve Thomas: Bye.