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If you visit your local librarys Instagram page, chances are good that youll find book drive announcements, event notices, and calls for volunteerslikely formatted akin to a pamphlet youd find at the front desk. When residents of Milwaukee check out their librarys social media accounts, it’s a different story. Theyre met with memes, thirst traps, and a multipart cinematic video series parodying the oeuvre of Wes Anderson. For the past three years, Milwaukee Public Library (MPL) has been diverging from the typically staid online presence of most public libraries by going full-send on TikTok trends and video-first content geared toward a younger generation. The librarys accounts look more like the social media-savvy pages of companies like Duolingo or Sour Patch Kidsand its working. [Screenshot: Milwaukee Public Library TikTok] MPLs current Instagram follower count is nearly 240,000an 1,497.5% increase since it began rolling out quirky videos in 2022. And, since starting on TikTok the same year, the library now has 150,000 followers on that platform. Its pretty obvious why a for-profit company like Duolingo might make social media engagement a priority, when it can directly drive product visibility and sales. But for an institution funded by taxpayer dollars, the goal of going viral on TikTok is a bit less clear. According to Melissa Howard, MPLs communications and community engagement director, embracing a TikTok-forward strategy has actually driven the librarys mission in a number of ways, including by opening the door to new community partnerships, boosting database use, and getting younger readers back into the library stacks. @milwaukeepubliclibrary When you’re around I got arrhythmia (literally). I’m on multiple medications for it. #Girlfriend #HemlockeSprings #OldPeople #Elderly #Manga #Comics #Anime #fyp #FlippingOff #Birdie #MiddleFinger #FlipTheBird girlfriend – hemlocke springs Is this my public library or a meme page? In the summer of 2022, MPL was struggling with a dip in patronage that started during the pandemic. Fawn Siemsen-Fuchs, the librarys volunteer coordinator, decided to test the waters with more experimental social content to draw in young readers from communities like BookTok and Bookstagram. MPLs first TikTok videoa parody centering around returning a book to the book droptook off almost immediately, notching over 3 million views and 500,000 likes. We were one of the first libraries to get on Tiktok, have some fun with video content, and not have that more commercial tone, Siemsen-Fuchs says. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Milwaukee Public Library (@milwaukeepubliclibrary) Since then, MPL has experimented with a broad range of social video under the umbrella of what Siemsen-Fuchs describes as its personal brand of unhinged, heartwarming content. That includes a sensual thirst trap to promote the librarys blood pressure machines; a video featuring a 90-year-old patron reading manga (with more than 3 million views across platforms); and, most recently, a five-part series inspired by Wes Andersons portfolio. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Milwaukee Public Library (@milwaukeepubliclibrary) This last project incorporates layers of lore, carefully thought-out artistic direction, and a cast of characters pulled from the librarys staff. Siemsen-Fuchs says its inspired many followers to become personally invested in the storyline. People are like, Oh, my favorite show is on, or theyre sending popcorn gifs, she says. I would say, in general, our viewership is just so kind and so supportive, and they love the library. @milwaukeepubliclibrary Try one or try them all #AEHolidayCard #LetsGo #IntuitTouchdownDance #LibraryTok #LibraryToks #LibraryTikTok #LibrariesForAll #LibrariesRock #BeautifulLibraries #BlackFriday #BlackFridayDeals #fyp #fyp – ‘this is how u get the youth to read’ MPL certainly isnt the only library thats dipped its toes into the TikTok universe: Columbus, Ohios Columbus Metropolitan Library runs its own Law & Order-inspired series on TikTok, and Australias City of Marion Libraries page stars Denise, an employee who has become a fan-favorite character. Still, its not exactly commonplace to see libraries leaning into internet humor so wholeheartedly. Its been our observation that many public institutions do face hurdles when it comes to building a social presence that resonates, whether its from risk-averse cultures, siloed teams that make it hard to tell a unified story, or simply not having enough staff to keep up with the pace of digital media, Howard says. Weve been able to break through by trusting our small, creative team to experiment, take smart risks, quickly jump on trends, and develop a clear vision and voice to connect with people who love the library as much as we do. And while MPL doesnt exactly have sales data to demonstrate the impact of its social accounts, Howard says there are a number of ways that the librarys online presence has boosted its goals. Several videos have correlated with spikes in database use, Hoopla checkouts (a digital book catalog), job applications, and merch sales. In fact, one reel promoting the librarys T-shirts led to its highest merch sale month ever, an 180% increase over the previous month. @milwaukeepubliclibrary #fyp #bookdrop original sound – Freddychase The accounts have also led to new partnerships and civic collaborations, including work with tourism boards, other libraries like the New York Public Library, local bookstores, magazines, and the mayor of Milwaukee. The social media team even earned a Peabody nomination in 2024 for promoting stories that matter. And, while Howard says readership has not yet returned to its pre-pandemic highs, it has increased in the last couple of yearsa change that she attributes, at least in part, to the social media accounts’ success. MPLs social media presence shows that theres plenty of opportunity for public institutions to carve out their own dedicated niches online. For those with the added benefit of baked-in goodwill, like the public library, its a move that makes even more sense. The overwhelmingly wholesome comments on MPLs pages are a case in point: Considering moving to Milwaukee for the library, one Instagram user wrote. Another added, this is how u get the youth to read.”
Category:
E-Commerce
You know that moment when someone asks you a question in a meeting and your mind goes completely blank? Or when you’re sitting in a high-stakes presentation and you feel like you can’t move, can’t speak, can’t think? While it can feel like your mind and body are totally betraying you, what’s actually happening is that your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do when it perceives a threat. Picture this: It’s Monday morning, you’re in the quarterly review meeting, and your boss turns to you and says, “So, walk us through what went wrong with the Johnson project.” Your heart starts pounding, your breathing gets shallow, and suddenly it’s like your brain has been wrapped in cotton wool. You know the answeryou’ve been thinking about nothing but this project for weeksbut in that moment, nothing comes out. You just sit there, frozen, while everyone stares at you. Sound familiar? What’s Actually Happening When You Freeze What you just experienced is what researchers call the freeze response, and it’s one of the most misunderstood reactions our bodies have to stress. Most people have heard of fight or flight, but freeze? That’s the one we don’t talk about, even though it might be the most common response in workplace situations. Here’s what’s happening in your body: when your brain detects what it perceives as a threatand yes, an unexpected question from your boss absolutely counts as a threat to your nervous systemit triggers your body’s alarm system. Your amygdala, that little almond-shaped structure constantly scanning for danger, sends out a distress signal. In that split second, your body has to decide: do I fight this threat, do I run from it, or do I freeze and hope it goes away? And here’s the thing about workplace situations: you can’t exactly punch your boss or sprint out of the conference room. So freeze it is. Freezing looks different from fight/flight. When you freeze, your sympathetic nervous system floods your body with stress hormones, but instead of mobilizing you to fight or flee, these chemicals essentially hit the pause button (parasympathetic override). Your muscles tense up, your breathing becomes shallow, and most critically, the blood flow to your prefrontal cortexyour thinking braingets reduced. That’s why you suddenly can’t access information you know perfectly well. It’s not that the information isn’t there; it’s that the pathways to reach it have temporarily shut down. The Science Behind the Response What we know from solid research is that the freeze response is characterized by reduced body movement, muscle tension, and what researchers call “tonic immobility,” basically, your body’s version of playing dead. This response evolved because sometimes, when you can’t fight and you can’t flee, your best survival strategy is to become very, very still and hope the predator loses interest. The problem is, your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a saber-toothed tiger and a difficult question from your manager. To your ancient brain, both represent potential threats to your survival and status within the group. How Freeze Shows Up at Work The freeze response can show up in all kinds of ways. Maybe you procrastinate on important projects because the thought of starting them feels overwhelming. Maybe you go silent in brainstorming sessions even though you have great ideas. Maybe you avoid networking events or skip speaking up in team meetings. A client, James, was constantly passed over for promotions despite being technically excellent. When we dug into it, we discovered that he would freeze every time he was asked to share his opinions or defend his work. He’d shut down, give minimal responses, and essentially become invisible. His manager interpreted this as lack of engagement, when in reality, James was so overwhelmed by the perceived threat of judgment that his nervous system was protecting him by making him disappear. What You Can Do When You Freeze First, understand that you can’t just think your way out of a freeze response. This isn’t a cognitive problemit’s a physiological response that requires physiological interventions. When you notice yourself starting to freeze, the first thing you need to do is reconnect with your body. Try this: press your feet firmly into the floor. Feel the weight of your body in the chair. Take three slow, deep breaths, making your exhale longer than your inhale. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system and starts to bring you back into your body. Another technique that works incredibly well is what I call the grounding catalog. When you feel yourself freezing, mentally note five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. This forces your attention back to the present moment. If you’re in a meeting and someone asks you a question that triggers your freeze response, buy yourself time. Say something like, “That’s a great question; let me think about that for a moment,” or “I want to make sure I give you a thorough answercan I come back to that in just a minute?” Building Long-Term Resilience The real work happens outside of the crisis moments. If you want to reduce your tendency to freeze in meetings, you need to work on increasing what researchers call your “window of tolerance,” or your capacity to handle stress without getting overwhelmed. This means taking care of your nervous system daily. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, good nutrition, and stress management practices aren’t just nice-to-haves: they’re essential for building resilience against the freeze response. It also means gradually exposing yourself to triggering situations in a controlled way. If speaking up in large meetings makes you freeze, practice speaking up in smaller groups first. If unexpected questions are your trigger, practice impromptu speaking with trusted colleagues. Preparation That Actually Works When you know you’re going into a potentially triggering situation, prepare your nervous system, not just your content. Before a challenging meeting, take a few minutes to do some breathing exercises or light stretching. Visualize yourself staying calm and grounded. Remind yourself that you belong in that room and that your perspective has value. Breaking the Shame Cycle When you freeze in a meeting, resist the urge to spend the rest of the day beating yourself up about it. This shame response actually makes you more likely to freeze in the future because now you’re dealing with both the original trigger and the fear of freezing again. Practice self-compassion. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend who was struggling. Remind yourself that freeze responses are normal, human, and actually quite common. Your Next Steps Your freezeresponse in meetings isn’t evidence that you don’t belong in leadership. It’s evidence that you have a nervous system that’s trying to protect you, sometimes in ways that aren’t helpful in modern workplace situations. The goal isn’t to never freeze againthat’s not realistic. The goal is to understand what’s happening, develop tools to work with your freeze response, and gradually expand your capacity to handle challenging situations. Start small. Pick one low-stakes situation this week where you can practice staying present when you feel the freeze response starting. Practice your grounding techniques. Give yourself permission to take up space. Remember that every time you interrupt the freeze response, you’re literally rewiring your nervous system.
Category:
E-Commerce
Arthur Brooks is a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School and the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the weekly How to Build a Life column. The author of 14 books (one of which he coauthored with Oprah Winfrey), he is known as one of the worlds leading experts on the science of happiness. Whats the big idea? Happiness is really all about the business of life. Your life is like a startup business, and you should manage it as such. Youre the founder, and you need to be able to take risks and know what the currency is of the fortune youre trying to accumulate. The Happiness Files shows how to become more successful in getting what you truly want by seeing your life in this way. Below, Arthur shares five key insights from his new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. Listen to the audio versionread by Brooksbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Manage yourself In the startup of your life, youre the most important employeeso you better manage yourself. Self-management is a skill that successful people have. More importantly, its a skill that happy people have. Some people are very successful in managing their professional lives, but managing their personal lives is a different kettle of fish. In the first section of my book, you will learn why these things are different and why some people find self-management more difficult than professional management. This section also talks about philosophy and religious faith, friendships, family, romantic relationships, and how these dont have to feel different than getting ahead at work. You can treat them in much the same way with a few basic ideas that are taken from neuroscience and behavioral science. This section also deals with burnout. Are you spending time at work on boring or inconsequential things? Do you feel unappreciated? What do you do about that? You need to understand yourself and why youre stuck in unproductive patterns. This section walks you through each problem that blurs the line between personal and professional in such a way that you can resolve some of these issues without feeling burnout. By the way, what is happening in your brain during burnout? Youll find out, and this will help you put on your own oxygen mask first so that youll be more successful in your job and in your life. Then we can move on to how do you build your career once youre able to be a great employee to yourself. 2. How to build your career A lot of people think of their twenties as the building phase of their career, but the truth of the matter is that in the business of your life, building is an ongoing operation. A career is always a process of exploration and discovery. Youre probably different than other people, and this part of the book will tell you how to identify yourself. Do you have the kind of linear career where you go from one thing to the next, where everything that you do is bigger and better and grander than the last? Maybe youre more of a spiral, where your career is a set of mini-careers of 7 to 12 years, and sometimes you make more money and sometimes less, but youre setting it up as an adventure of your own making. This section will also help identify when the right time is to switch jobs. A lot of people struggle with this. Theyre afraid of these kinds of changes. I dont like my job, but will I be happier? The data says you probably will be. I hope that this part of the book will give you the courage. If youre considering a career change, well discuss how to trust your instincts. As a matter of fact, I will give you a rubrica tool that explores what you should be listening to in your own feelings. 3. How to communicate and connect with others One of the most important skills to develop is the ability to deal with other people. Communication and connection, at both work and home, are about managing the enterprise of your life and having an enterprise that gets better and better as the years go by. This is the third section, where youll learn how to give and receive criticism, based on the best communication literature and social psychology. What does good criticism look like? Also, how do you give a great compliment? How do you talk to people that you dont know? If youre an introvert, how can you sometimes act as if youre an extrovert? Another thing youll learn in this section is where you should not connect and communicate with other people, if possible. The answer is meetings. Im going to arm you with data that shows you should eliminate as many meetings as possible. Want to be happier? Stay away from meetings and avoid making calls whenever possible. 4. How to balance work, life, and relationships I hate the expression work-life balance because it sounds like you have to balance two separate things. The truth is, if you want to be happy in the enterprise of your life, your work and your life are part of the same phenomenon. Work should be part of your life. That being said, it shouldnt be all of ityou should have other things in life that are not involved with your job, such as family and friendship. Instead of work-life balance, I talk about work-life integration. We want work and life to work together. As it says in The Good Book, iron sharpens iron. Your work and the rest of your life should be the iron that sharpens each other. In this section, youll find out how successful people do it, but more importantly, how happy people do this. What are the boundaries? Where does work stop and life start in a way that actually makes both work and life better? Whats the best way to work with people that dont understand this? What do you do about colleagues that might make life a bit worse? 5. How to define success Success is what you want. At the end of the day, with any kind of startup, youd better know what the end goal is and youd better keep it in mind. If youre starting a little company, you might say success is getting bought by some bigger company or getting to the initial public offering. Well, how do you define success for the startup of your life? What does success mean to you? Hint: dont denominate it in dollars if you want to be a happy person. This is not to say that money is unimportant. Quite the contrary. Its very important for doing all kinds of things, but it is not a great metric for understanding our own personal success. Success can lead to misery if youre only focused on money, power, pleasure, fame, prestige, titles, or positions. Those things are intermediate goods to what we really want, which are things like love, satisfaction, or faith. How do we define that kind of success? How do we measure that kind of success? Picking a meaningful metric will not make you lose your edge. On the contrary, when you know the success that youre shooting for and how to measure it, boy does that make you want to show up for work and do your very best every day. Then, it makes you want to go home and do your very best at home as well. For the business of your life, you need to always be making progress. How? Ill talk an awful lot about that in the book. Its been useful to me because my life, like yours, is a startup, and I want you to be able to make yours the most gloriously successful startupyou can possibly imagine. Thats the job of this book. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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