Librarians With Lives Podcast Interview

I was recently interviewed by Jo Wood for her new Librarians With Lives podcast where she interviews people who work in the library and information profession about their career history, their passions, their dreams, and some lighter questions too. Jo approached me a few weeks ago and we recorded the interview in August. She did give me an idea by email of the sorts of things we might discuss, though I didn’t prepare too much so a lot of the conversation was spur of the moment (though Jo did an excellent job at steering the conversation so when I listened back it seemed a lot more structured than it felt at the time!). I had a lot of fun doing the interview and it helped me think about some of my career experiences, the things I’m passionate about, and the things I want to share with other people to help them.

The recording is available directly from Soundcloud or embedded below:

We discussed all sorts of things including:

  • My career history (including roles in public and academic libraries, and my research post)
  • Projects I’ve worked on that make me most proud and that I have enjoyed
  • My current work (including training, coaching, and learning development)
  • My voluntary experiences (including chairing committees and organising events)
  • My experience with CILIP Fellowship (more to come on this in a future post – my application was unsuccessful but I learnt a lot from the process) and CILIP Chartership
  • Learning to prioritise and say no to things
  • My work on developing the Mindful Leadership for Women programme (and our first course on Overcoming Imposter Syndrome)
  • My current focus on being rather than doing
  • Learning about authenticity
  • What does it mean to be a librarian?
  • My ideal library train (including Ryan Reynolds and Wonderwoman, obviously)

I hope you enjoy the interview. You can subscribe to the podcast (via Soundcloud or using the RSS to add to your podcast software); Jo will be publishing new interviews on a weekly basis. I’m really looking forward to listening to the other ones.

Related links

Blog posts about my career

Conference planning experience

Mindful Leadership for Women

The L Word