139. Exploring Compassion  Satisfaction with Kay Coates

What is compassion satisfaction and what effect does it have on those of us in the helping profession of librarianship? On this show Kay Coates – Assistant Professor of Research, Instruction and Outreach at Georgia Southern University Libraries – explores how serving others often leads to enjoyment and satisfaction, but also a need to strive for balance and self-care in the process.

Transcript

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Adriane Herrick Juarez:

This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries, and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations and strategic insights in the profession. What is Compassion satisfaction, and what effects does it have on those of us in the helping profession of librarianship? 

On this show Kay Coates, Assistant Professor of Research, Instruction and Outreach at Georgia Southern University Libraries, explores how serving others often leads to enjoyment and satisfaction, but also a need to strive for balance and self-care in the process. Enjoy the show! 

Kay, welcome to the show.

Kay Coates:

Thank you, Adriane, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #1: It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’m looking forward to our conversation as well. Our discussion today is on exploring compassion satisfaction. Compassion satisfaction is defined as the amount of pleasure derived from helping others. As librarians, we operate in a helping profession, so I’m eager to learn more about this. Can you share a little bit about this concept as it applies to librarianship?  01:30 

Kay Coates:

Absolutely. Compassion satisfaction could be considered as a simple, but yet typical measure of job satisfaction unique to individual library professionals, library practitioners, or workers who work in a library, or people who do this line of work. Sometimes they just do it for voluntary reasons, and sometimes they do it because it’s a profession. As such, it could be scaled on a spectrum where caring labor is dispensed, and the needs of others are serviced with integrity and understanding. 

Experientially, it tends to effervesce while helping and performing caring labor, which occurs at the intersection of empathy and kindness—that instinctive desire to serve, even if it requires going an extra mile, so to speak. Our work in this profession chiefly revolves around proactively catering to—and amply addressing the needs of others, or patrons.  

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #2:  It’s true that the work we do in libraries often serves at the intersection of empathy and kindness. So can exploring the concept of compassion satisfaction help librarians make sense of the ways in which we serve?  02:51 

Kay Coates:

Good question. That sense of achievement, coupled with the belief that something good, productive, and desirable can intentionally result from efforts put forth towards providing service, which can impactfully make a monumental, positive difference in the lives of those we serve—that is what is core to compassion satisfaction.

Therefore, exploring this concept is appropriately pleasant and worthwhile, especially when consideration is given to enacting a trauma-enlightened approach to service delivery. Furthermore, it substantiates the premise that serving others cultivates goodwill and that our patrons get the sense that they’re truly valued. This is especially important when considering the undesirable outcomes of when we had a recent global pandemic.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #3:  You mentioned the pandemic. As librarians we experience challenging realities as we provide service. Can compassion satisfaction help in dealing with the opposite of what we are talking about here today, known as compassion fatigue?  03:52 

Kay Coates:

Compassion satisfaction actually can be viewed as a relief valve. When you talk about compassion satisfaction it’s about influencing and being influential in so many ways in terms of helping. It actually helps to abate the effects of some of the challenging realities that can occur from time to time while we are providing service. The core values behind that are of utmost importance when confronted with less than favorable encounters or interactions.

It is all about the intentional reliance on training, empathy, and professional praxis. It is giving service with integrity—customer service delivery in the best savvy way possible. This can be translated into awareness, which calls for patience, active listening, and all the while being a participant observer who distinguishes function from feeling, and keeping the service transaction in balance.

This stance allows anyone to gently rein in the emotions that can build up to the brimming point of impatience, frustration, disgust—and even overwhelm, which eventually can metamorphose into compassion fatigue. Fatigue can occur when negativity presents, and little or no attempt is made to consciously deal with the package of unwholesomeness that comes with it.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #4:  And that is useful as we serve. How can we make compassion satisfaction a conscious process that can be beneficial throughout our careers?  05:26 

Kay Coates: 

Good question. Through practice which helps us to consistently embrace being the best versions of ourselves—by helping people, our library patrons, acquire the resources and information they need to be the best version of themselves in return, that gives us a sense of purpose and connection. 

Empathy is so important because it’s innate to us. It’s beneficial to our self-care. It begins with awareness—the function, the population we serve, the goals and the standards of our institution and our profession, and our own personal approach to our job. Intentionally it’s like a full loop—the benefits to the patron and the service that we give to them, and how we do that in the process. 

It’s about also, utilizing assessment tools like perhaps an empathy map. There’s a measure, the Compassion, Satisfaction and Fatigue Test that can be used, the ProQOL 5. If we actually take that—an actual fact at our work, we’ve done it. We have a sense of where we are in terms of our own personal health. It gives us a sense of how we are doing. If we aren’t doing well, then we can’t serve well. It gives us that sense of, Okay, let me take count of what’s happening. Let’s be aware that these things go together. If I am my best self, then I can give my best service. 

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #5:   Awareness and assessment are definitely useful in this. Do you have any personal success stories or case studies of compassion satisfaction helping transactions in library work?   06:58 

Kay Coates:  

Absolutely, absolutely. For example when a patron has a specific need, in my case usually it’s a grad student, maybe a first generation student—a student who would have been a transfer student and is not quite conversant with the operations in our library. What we do is—for example, a student comes in and says, I want to borrow a book. You look up the title of the book and say, Okay, this is an ebook. The patron says, No, I don’t want an ebook. My professor says, I have to have a physical book. 

This is where empathy kicks in. You start recognizing that, Okay, I have the material and the resources this person wants, but it’s not in the format that they want it in. So what we do is go the extra mile and say, Okay, look, I can do two things. If there’s a particular chapter in this book that you want, I can download the chapter, I can print it off and give it to you. And, or, I can put in an interlibrary loan request. What do you want me to do? 

Usually the patron will say, You know what, I really want this chapter, but I still want to have the book. So in doing both things, we would have accomplished the need—the need presently, and the ultimate desire to have this physical book. 

What I find sometimes, especially with older adults, they want the book not because the professor really needs the book, but it’s this feel of just having a book in their hands and being able to use a bookmark, a tangible bookmark so they can bookmark the page. So yeah, that happens so often.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #6:  It does happen often to all of us. And I like that empathetic approach of working to give the person what will work for them. Is there anything else you’d like to share?  08:48 

Kay Coates: 

Yes. The stuff with being a librarian and working in this field really brings you to have a look at being human, the whole element of humanity, and showing greater kindness to ourselves and others. Even though satisfaction, however, is a pleasurable and fulfilling thing, I would recommend utilizing the tools that I mentioned earlier, the ProQOL 5 which is an assessment intended for anyone working in a service oriented profession like ours, to be mindful of the kind of self-care that is required to boost our wellness, or mental agility, and just overall wholesomeness. 

This reminds us of the duality of compassion satisfaction. Too much can lead to less than preferred outcomes. So it is advisable that we, being helpers and caring professionals, to understand our limits as it pertains to our workload regarding the work we do, and the service that we provide to our library users and patrons.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #7: That healthy balance and self-care are so important in this process, so thank you for mentioning that. Do you have any favorite management or leadership books or resources and why?  10:02 

Kay Coates:

One of my most favorite books is called Managing in a Time of Great Change by Peter Drucker. It offers so much—so much deep wisdom. It gives advice to leaders and executives for thriving in a global environment. We actually live in that environment. When you’re in library science, or you’re in a professional librarianship, you have to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world. This book covers such topics as team building, and having foresight as it pertains to management and those service protocols. 

Another book I want to mention that I enjoyed reading is called Joy at Work: How to Find Fun, Happiness and Meaning in What You Do, and it’s by Steve Noble. It is about the culture of work, and the reframing of belief systems that we hold about making a living. The author makes the point about learning to trust oneself and being determined as it relates to how we cope with stressors in our lives.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #8:  Kay, in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally?  11:16 

Kay Coates: 

Personally, my gosh, libraries are a space of utmost possibility. It’s about knowledge sharing. It’s about the discovery and enterprise, those voluminous resources that are available to you. It’s about recreation. It could be about refuge as well.

But for me, most of all, it’s about just that joyful exploration and the happy enlightenment that you can get from just being in the space itself, and having access to these resources that normally you can’t personally just have in your home. There is this place that welcomes you without any restrictions. You can just turn up, and everybody there is trained to help you and willing to help you—and that’s what I enjoy most about libraries.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

Question #9:  That’s right, about libraries being about the utmost possibility. They provide a place where everyone is dedicated to that principle and is trained and willing to help others find what they need. Compassion satisfaction explores what that means in our profession, both by finding fulfillment in providing the utmost service and balancing that with self-care and wellness. I’m so glad you were here to share this topic. Thank you.  12:09 

Kay Coates: 

You’re welcome. I enjoyed talking with you. It’s been a good experience. Thank you so much.

Adriane Herrick Juarez:

I enjoyed it, too. Thank you. Kay. 

Adriane Herrick Juarez: 

You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right to your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. 

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