So this happened.
I'll be blogging again about it as an audience member, since I did make copious notes on the day, but this is going to be my "holy heck how did this come off" post.
It all began in the summer of 2016. I'd been back at work for about 8 months, finding myself in a bit of a CPD rut, having not been able to go to any of the conferences the previous year and feeling like I was being left behind. Meg W emailed round, looking for volunteers for the next Cambridge Libraries Conference, and I thought it would be a great way to kickstart my CPD, and to give something back to the community that I've gained so much from. So I signed up, and she seemed delighted, and I went along to the first meeting.
The more we talked, the more I thought "yes, I can contribute in some small and very minor way," and we tossed around ideas for themes, before going away with strict instructions to sign up for a job on the committee list (I immediately went for internal speaker lead. Not too scary, hopefully). Weeks pass, and still no one has signed up to chair, so I bite the bullet and stick my name down there too, along with Tom, my partner in crime, and Martin and Helen G, who both offer to help shoulder some of the burden.
As I look back, it's hard really to see what I actually did. Yes, I contacted a few of the speakers in the first place, but then handed this job off to someone else. I weighed in on a few debates, made suggestions (I think I may even have been the one to first suggest the themes of superheroes and failure!), and pushed for a couple of things I wanted to see - like the opportunity to talk about failure as a positive thing, and the Castle of Reflection (totally not the Fortress of Solitude): a space away from conference information overload which would allow people to gather their thoughts again. But it was definitely other people who made it happen!
It was funny, because I'd talked to my line manager about getting involved, and she was very encouraging. We had my staff review recently, and discussed how it was all going, and I mentioned I'd sort of ended up co-chairing it. She surprised me by saying "that's not surprising, you're good at that sort of thing," and it's funny because I hadn't realised that at all.
Then I thought about it.
In 2014 I got married. We had about 80 for the ceremony, about 160 guests for the rest, and my soon-to-be husband and I organised that all ourselves. And a few years before that, my not-yet-husband and I organised the BUSA (now BUCS) National Student Archery Champs. Which was attended by about 250 people. And in between those events I'd organised, or helped organise a whole host of other archery events, at local and regional levels.
I don't know, the word "organise"...it just seems so intangible, doesn't it? What it feels like to me is that I was there, just watching while other people did tasks. Observing, but not acting. It's hard to pin down what it was I actually did, and at points I think I took on too many other trivial tasks in an effort to prove I still had value as a committee member. The badges were completed at a ridiculously late hour the night before the conference, the posters with the timetable not long before that; both could quite easily have been delegated to others.
Going back to archery, I've done a lot of coaching in my time. One thing we teach at the very beginning is how to pull arrows out of a target. We have these dense foam bosses, rather than straw, and it can sometimes be really hard to pull arrows out. So one of the things I teach is that it is far, far easier when there are two of you pulling the same arrow. Until you've ever had to do it, you don't realise what the difference is - pulling on your own is exhausting, and you can really wrench something if you're not careful, and then you get someone else on the end and all of a sudden it's like a hot knife through butter, and you actually have to be careful not to pull too hard and come flying back with the arrow.
I guess I'm trying to say that hopefully it wasn't that I did nothing while everyone else worked. Hopefully the reason I found it so easy was because we were all pulling together!
I'll be blogging again about it as an audience member, since I did make copious notes on the day, but this is going to be my "holy heck how did this come off" post.
It all began in the summer of 2016. I'd been back at work for about 8 months, finding myself in a bit of a CPD rut, having not been able to go to any of the conferences the previous year and feeling like I was being left behind. Meg W emailed round, looking for volunteers for the next Cambridge Libraries Conference, and I thought it would be a great way to kickstart my CPD, and to give something back to the community that I've gained so much from. So I signed up, and she seemed delighted, and I went along to the first meeting.
The more we talked, the more I thought "yes, I can contribute in some small and very minor way," and we tossed around ideas for themes, before going away with strict instructions to sign up for a job on the committee list (I immediately went for internal speaker lead. Not too scary, hopefully). Weeks pass, and still no one has signed up to chair, so I bite the bullet and stick my name down there too, along with Tom, my partner in crime, and Martin and Helen G, who both offer to help shoulder some of the burden.
It was funny, because I'd talked to my line manager about getting involved, and she was very encouraging. We had my staff review recently, and discussed how it was all going, and I mentioned I'd sort of ended up co-chairing it. She surprised me by saying "that's not surprising, you're good at that sort of thing," and it's funny because I hadn't realised that at all.
Then I thought about it.
In 2014 I got married. We had about 80 for the ceremony, about 160 guests for the rest, and my soon-to-be husband and I organised that all ourselves. And a few years before that, my not-yet-husband and I organised the BUSA (now BUCS) National Student Archery Champs. Which was attended by about 250 people. And in between those events I'd organised, or helped organise a whole host of other archery events, at local and regional levels.
I don't know, the word "organise"...it just seems so intangible, doesn't it? What it feels like to me is that I was there, just watching while other people did tasks. Observing, but not acting. It's hard to pin down what it was I actually did, and at points I think I took on too many other trivial tasks in an effort to prove I still had value as a committee member. The badges were completed at a ridiculously late hour the night before the conference, the posters with the timetable not long before that; both could quite easily have been delegated to others.
I guess I'm trying to say that hopefully it wasn't that I did nothing while everyone else worked. Hopefully the reason I found it so easy was because we were all pulling together!
