11// Finding Nurse Career Clarity: Tips for the Experienced Nurse to Identify if Perfectionism is Holding You Back From Career Growth

Have you ever felt trapped in pursuing your career, fearing any move away from where you are might lead to disaster? As a clinical nurse specialist and your career coach, I, have lived through the very challenges you face. 

This latest episode strips away the layers of career perfectionism that plague many experienced nurses, offering insights into why now could be the perfect time to reassess your professional trajectory. I share stories from my own 19 years in nursing, highlighting strategic career shifts over sticking to a rigid path, and the importance of prioritizing your well-being in the process.

Struggling with the fear of a career change is a silent battle for many nurses, and it's one that I tackle head-on in this discussion. I delve into the nuances between purposeful career navigation and mere job hopping, bringing my journey to the forefront as a testament to the possibilities beyond traditional nursing roles. 

The conversation pivots to the critical topic of decision-making, dissecting how perfectionism can lead to paralysis and prevent experienced nurses from taking bold steps that could enhance their careers and personal lives. 

 This episode isn't just a conversation; it's an invitation to connect, explore, and support each other as we navigate the complexities of a nursing career. 

Thank you for allowing me into your professional journey, and I eagerly look forward to the diverse discussions that lie ahead.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the Ambitions Nurse podcast, where I provide tips, tools and resources for the experienced nurse to put in your career bag to help you be a better person, a better leader, a better professional and, most of all, a better nurse. I'm your host, bonnie Meadows, a career coach and a clinical nurse specialist with over 18 years of experience in healthcare and nursing. It's my passion to help experienced nurses develop their careers to impact healthcare and their communities. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:46

This episode today is very near and dear to my heart because I'm kind of in this place that I'm going to discuss today. I'm going to talk about perfectionism and perfectionism when it comes to our careers. I will say I'm very strategic, but I'm not a perfectionist when it comes to my career, because I understand the importance, testing the waters, figuring things out, especially at certain points in your life. But I have a lot of friends who are perfectionists when it comes to their careers. They're overthinking everything, they're trying to work through everything and, honestly, sometimes they help me to pause before I make a move in my career after talking to them. Because, yes, I do talk to other people about my career, because even career coaches need somebody to talk to. I am just very honored to be able to talk to you all and to share lessons that I've learned over the years, in my 19 years of nursing, as to how to navigate through your career.

Speaker 1: 1:57

And so making a shift in your career as an experienced nurse can feel very daunting. It's less daunting when you're in the two to five year range, maybe even the two to seven year range, but it can feel daunting at any point. When you're trying to make that transition, what's the next best thing? On one hand, you're restless and you're wondering what's next. The other hand, you stay because the process then seems just too overwhelming and you're like there's just too much. What am I supposed to do? I don't really have an idea, or I thought I knew.

Speaker 1: 2:36

I'm talking to a lot of nurses now who are like I thought I knew what I wanted to do. They're about in year five or year three and they're like I thought I knew what I wanted to do and I was the same way. I thought I knew what I wanted to do. But now that's changed. And so even them, I'm just encouraging them, listen just. And I'm not.

Speaker 1: 3:00

And here's the thing. There's a difference between job hopping and testing the waters out to navigate your career, because usually when you're job hopping you don't have a rhyme or reason to what you're doing and where you're going and you're more than likely led by the money. To me that's job hopping. You have very unrealistic expectations of how a work environment should be, because you're always going to have to navigate politics wherever you go, and so it's just a matter of do I like the work enough to navigate politics that I'm in Now? Sometimes that politics turns into lateral violence and then it's like well, I like the work, but this here I can't tolerate. I've been there and so you want to be able to make a decision, make your best yet and go for it and figure out what is best for you or figure out how to navigate your career.

Speaker 1: 3:57

So if you are a person who has a master's degree now and you're looking forward to getting that master's degree to just kind of settle you out and you might be one of those people who just kind of settles out right there in that master's degree and then you decide to do other things outside of your work, because we are not our work, we are a conglomeration of several things, so our work doesn't define us. Our jobs don't define us. We are here to make an impact, and sometimes that impact goes beyond what we do on a daily day basis on our job. But I digress. Some of us have been in the gang for about 15 to 20. We've gone through graduate school, we have master's degrees, we have established career, and where we are is not necessarily where we want to end, because if you're 15 to 20 years in, you're more than likely still looking to, as I say, go deep at this point in time and not wide, and it's. And you're thinking well, how do I do that? And so you can get stuck in trying to figure out how to do that by thinking about it in a perfectionistic way. And then sometimes you are limited by your salary and you just don't even go there because you're making so much. So that limits what you can do, where you can go, and not necessarily limits it. Let me not say that word, because that doesn't really limit it. In this day and time, your choices are much more selective. Let's just say that. And so I get that. I've been there and I'm actually kind of there right now.

Speaker 1: 5:35

So we get all find ourselves getting paralyzed by the perfectionistic tendencies, when we are looking to make a more shift from what we've always known, or what's familiar to us, what's comfortable to us, and so starting something new can be both exciting and yet, at the same time, make you richer. Some people just jump in to test things out and others stay where they are due to perfection. So my question for you today is which one are you? How do you know if you're stuck in perfectionism, trying to make the right decision, or if it's just not the right time for you to make a move? Now I'm just going to tell you for many of you, it's more than likely the right time to make a move, but you haven't stopped and paused enough, or you've been pausing and you're still not moving. You're more than likely have an answer and you're still not moving. So I want to encourage you in these next two episodes, because I have two episodes that will kind of cover vision making and professionism, and this one really gets to the root of finding am I being a perfectionist about my career? And then the next episode is going to really walk you through how do I make an effective decision going forward? You just want to make an effective decision. You want to make sure you are making a decision based on your best, yet Not what can go wrong. What is your best? Yes, what works well for you mentally, physically, financially All of those factors need to come into play when you're making your next decision, and so in this episode, you will learn how to get nurse clarity by identifying if you are being a career perfectionist.

Speaker 1: 7:17

So when I was preparing to make my initial shift from the bedside, all I wanted to do was learn more about hospital operations. That was one thing that I knew, or what we called hospital business at that time. I knew what I did want to do. I knew I didn't want to. I was working in a CTICU at that point in time. I knew I did not want to be RNA shout out to my nurse and I know the shout out to I love them. I didn't want to do that, knew I did not want to be a nurse practitioner. Love my nurse practitioners and work with them every day, love operating with them, have friends who are there, but just know where, where you're not called, where you where. That's not where you fit.

Speaker 1: 7:53

There are a lot of people and I say this all the time there are a lot of people who are nurse practitioners, who probably should not have gone back to school to be an earth practitioner because they don't like it, but they did it because everybody else was doing. Oh, that is what I feel like I am called to do to help people not do what other people are doing just because everybody else is doing it, but for you to walk in your own calling and to make the impact that you were made to make within nursing, within your career in healthcare or maybe it's not some healthcare you might discover, listening to those podcasts, that there ain't even in healthcare. I don't know, but I want you to make a decision. Oh, I knew that there were more options than being a nurse manager or practitioner CRNA. I actually knew that the clinical and specialist option was available, but I thought it was all focused on education and I didn't want to just be focused on education.

Speaker 1: 8:46

At the time, I had an inkling and a desire to just know the other side of healthcare when it came to quality improvement, pay, your source and just all of those things that most people don't like to know. And I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. There was always in my plans even before I started nursing school, but I just didn't know what all of the options were that were available. So what did that mean? I had to test the waters and figure out what was right for me, what was the right path to go. But I also had to be very strategic in my tests. So I knew that I was okay with working five days a week. I knew that, ever I did, it had to be something in that led to quality.

Speaker 1: 9:36

My first stop was case management, and that was me learning more about discharge planning, and I learned insurance and cover and options and resources for patients once they leave the hospital, and so that was a great learning experience for me. But coming from the CTSU to case management, I'd pretty much wrapped it up in my and I'm a smart kid, so I'd pretty much wrapped up knowing how to do it, not fully, like I'm sure I could have gone deeper, but I figured out within six months that I'm like okay, this is not going to give me the full challenge that I would like to have, but I stuck it out for about a year and survived, and then I got me a job in risk management. Most of you have heard the story before. I'm just trying to walk you through, like I didn't know, like I didn't go into it, just thinking, oh well, I just want a job in risk management. I tested the waters and I said risk management, that would be nice. I like investigating, I like problem solving, like I'm putting the pieces together, but in the back of my mind I know I want to do something with quality.

Speaker 1: 10:44

Quality improvement was still calling my name, and so, from there, risk management allowed me to grow so much. I was able to sit at tables that I never would have sat at before, having conversations with chief medical officers and vice presidents and presidents of hospitals and assistant vice presidents and them coming to me and asking me for my advice on different patient situations. That was awesome and I actually lean on some of that even now, some of what I learned in risk management. But it was a good opportunity for me to really build up confidence, to walk in what I know. And so, from there, because I knew I still wanted to go the quality route, I finally got a job in quality and again, this is test drive got the job in quality and was able to pick up so many skills within that. So I said all of that to say that finding the right career path is like dating, like sometimes it takes you being in a few jobs to really know where your true calling lies within nurse.

Speaker 1: 11:54

And today I can truly say that I am at a place in my life where I want to do the work that I enjoy doing when I walk in the door. But I see my work as a nurse beyond the work that I do every day, and because I've been able to be active in my state nurses association, the North Carolina Nurses Association, and learn so many things by being on the board of directors and learning how to strategically think about, how to improve, impact the profession of nurses. That's where my mind has shifted to and that's where my career has shifted to. And so I got to a place where I was shifting so much in that and learning how to be a leader and how to grow in that area that it was like, okay, well, whatever I do for my job yes, it still has to be nursing. Yes, I still need to like it. It also needs to provide me the flexibility to be able to do what I like to do outside of this building. That does, yes, impact my organization. It impacts nursing, but it doesn't impact their bottom line directly.

Speaker 1: 13:03

And so your next job? It doesn't have to be your forever job, it's just time for you to test the waters, to see what's out there, what would interest you. So if you've had your head down in patient care for the last couple of years and you haven't looked up to see what's out there, now's the time Like there's no other time like the present, especially if you have that feeling that you want to move on. I had a friend of mine who called me one day out of the blue. I mean, she's just, I get phone calls like this, which is fine by me because it helped me to identify that this is obviously something that needs to be shared with others. But she started talking about wanting to go back for a doctor degree. Now she talked about it before and now her kids were just a little bit older and she's like am I wrong for starting for, for, like thinking this through? And I'm like, well, no, you're not wrong for it, because this has come up for you, because you now feel like you have the capacity to do it. So I said all of that to say also don't think that you are wrong for thinking beyond where you are and thinking about different goals and aspirations that you may have now that your kids are old, because that pretty much means that you more than likely have the capacity to think about it, to think beyond where your current situation is or think beyond where you were thinking when it came to your kids and when it came to your family.

Speaker 1: 14:36

Also, to say that I also want to say that the path of your career will not be linear. You actually don't want it to be. It's not always going to be linear. Some people there's a small percentage of people where it is straight, linear, but more than likely to have a career that you enjoy. I'm just going to say personally I could be wrong. I'm sure there's a small percentage out there who just have a very linear career and they enjoy it, and I say heads off to them, but most of us, we want to have some fun along this career journey, which means that it will not be linear. Some of it may be lateral. The more experience you gain, the more you'll be able to choose what speaks to you and what brings you the most joy and love of work. So what's your dilemma? Are you avoiding making a move because you're afraid it won't be perfect.

Speaker 1: 15:28

I had an encounter with someone who I used to work with, a colleague and she called me. She actually reached out to me on LinkedIn and she had some questions because she was at the bedside. She was eight years into nursing and she wanted to make a move away from the bedside and I had just had a conversation with her because she was actually. The first thing she said was it's overwhelming, there are a lot of positions out here. I said, well, have you narrowed it down? Thought about. She was like well, I would like to do this, I'd like to do that. And I said, well, just interview for it. Like there's nothing wrong with interviewing for the position. And she was like well, don't I have to? I just I don't know for sure if that's what I want to do and what I can. What I narrowed it down to was that she felt like she, this decision had to be the final decision, like for her for the next five years. And I said, no, that does not have to be the final decision for you for the next five years. You have to start somewhere.

Speaker 1: 16:29

So, even if you're in this position for another year, year and a half, yeah, we want people to stay longer than a year, half a year, but that's not realistic these days. Sometimes they need to test the water. Some people will stay for another five years, some people won't, and it's okay. But if you're looking to make the most out of your career, you even need to go into the job knowing that you're trying it out, to see if this is something that you like. You have a feeling in something that you like, but you're not going to be 100%, but it's good to go ahead and make the move. So let's look at some things to see if we are.

Speaker 1: 17:05

If you are approaching your search with a perfectionistic, here's some signs that you are a perfectionist when it comes to your career. You don't take risks. I just talked about the young lady who was just not willing to take a risk on the next job. Or she was willing, she just felt like she needed. I think she just needed permission, but she just didn't know.

Speaker 1: 17:24

And there are some of you who may have had a light bulb moment at this point in time to pretty much say oh well, I can just test out a job. Yeah, go into it seriously now. Always go in with professionalism, always go in with the intention that you're going to at least stay there for three years two to three years. If you don't, it's okay, because you're still trying to figure things out. Go in with the intention. Don't go in saying, well, I'm just trying to feel things out, I'm just trying to test. The war is out here. No, make sure it's something that you thought about do. Or when you saw it, you read it, you're like, oh, I might like doing this, and then you figure out a way to present yourself in the interview, to show that you have a heart for the position, and then you go for it.

Speaker 1: 18:09

But you have to take risks. You're not going to know 100% what you want to do or if it's going to work out or whatever the case may be. Take healthy risks. Another sign is your perfectionists Everything needs to be fleshed out before you make a move. Everything's not fleshed out before you make a move. I'm just going to let it sit. Let that sit right there. It's just not. You have excessively high standards. No job is perfect. I'm just going to lay that right there. No job is perfect. So figure out what are your negotiates and your non-negotiates and then you move on from there. Every job has politics. Figure out what you're going to deal with and figure out what you're not going to deal with. Figure out what you can't avoid. Figure out what you can't. Let me tell you what a non-negotiable for me is A micromanager.

Speaker 1: 18:58

I can't stand it. Now I will say that God messes with me sometimes and he brings me micromanager along and it helps me honestly check my ego, because I first have to think about is what they're saying valid? Because I'm very laid back and that can bother some people. I'm very laid back when it comes to micromanagers. I don't communicate well and I have to up my game when it comes to communication because most people they just know me. They knew I proved new, pretty decent work, so they trusted I'm going to do the work. Everybody's not like that. Everybody doesn't know me. So sometimes micromanagers come along and they help me to check my ego, but I still can't stand them. And if you can micromanage me with the right heart, then I can probably work with it, but more than likely it's a it's that's. That's a hard. That's the person. A medium hard note for me, a medium hard note You're stressed and burnout due to the pressure you place on yourself.

Speaker 1: 19:57

That is another sign that you are perfectionist. Let it go. Let it go. I am a cardiac surgery nurse. I have been at the bedside Somebody's heart literally in my hand. I'm massaging it to help them to come back to life. Nothing is more important than that. Let it go. And sometimes I can get into this fear that, oh, we might lose our job or this and the other. You're a nurse. You can get another job quickly. I know I'm making it sound real easy, but I'm just. I just I want to just help you to just let it go. I know, just let it go, take the pressure off.

Speaker 1: 20:34

Here's some reasons why you allow perfectionism to hold you back, because it's like well, why? Why are we perfectionists? Why do we allow it to hold us back? We might have a fear of failure or a fear of success. What if I fail? What if I don't like it? What if they're not able to work with me? What if this, what if that? Or what if I do well, like? What else are they going to ask of me? Fear of failure, fear of success? And so those are some reasons why perfectionism has creeped in Lack of creativity and innovation. When you try to make sure everything is perfect. It does not allow for creativity and innovation, and so those are. That's the reason why you, why perfectionism, holds you back, because you can't even think beyond. You're so busy trying to get it perfect, you can't even think beyond the thing that's right in front of. Imposter syndrome is one of the reasons why perfectionism holds its back. We think we have to have it all together and we don't.

Speaker 1: 21:29

I was just listening to a session with one of the VPs. It was a black nurse and we have a black women's group at my organization and she came to speak to us and she, straight up, I'd never heard anybody give this perspective on imposter syndrome. But she was just straight up, like it's not, it's not real. She said it's just anxiety. She wouldn't be mean about it. She was very soft spoken. Well, she was very commanding of the rule and she was not being mean about it. She wasn't being sassy about it, but she was being very empowering about it. To pretty much say that's just a name, that we've put on something to pretty. To say, oh, you're afraid. Well, you have to get over that fear, which that's pretty much what it is Like.

Speaker 1: 22:21

You think you're, you've talked yourself into saying that you're a fake, or that you don't have, or you don't this or you don't that. When you do have, you might be feeling like a fake, but you have what you need in order to do the work. You have what you need in order to step into a new career and step into a new level of work. You have what you need. You have the will to work, you have the work ethic. You have the critical thinking to do the work, as long as someone is willing to train you.

Speaker 1: 22:50

So don't allow imposter syndrome to cause perfectionism. Everybody's figuring it out as they go along. Everybody is yes, we have the skill set to do what we are supposed to do in our job, but you still have to put those pieces together. And, lastly, you're stressed out and burned, which also goes back to the science that you're being a perfectionist. But if you just let it go, maybe just let it go Now. Try to be in control and you can relax enough to just make a decision and flow with it. Flow with what works best for your family. Flow with what works best for you emotionally, what works best for you physically, what works best for you financially? If it gives you joy, just try something new. Go for it, leave me. You can always either come back or find something else.

Speaker 1: 23:39

So I encourage you to review this list, see which one applies to you, and if one on this list applies to you, that's great. At least we've narrowed it down and this is where we can move. If not, then maybe it's something else and, believe me, I will more than likely touch on it at some point Next week. I'm going to talk about the various ways that you can overcome these perfectionist tendencies and make effective career decisions. Talked about earlier about how my decisions have always been very strategic, and so I want to give you some tools on how to make strategic, effective career decisions and so that you can walk away knowing that every person can get out of career perfectionism mode and just take the next step to gain that career clear. I hope to see you next week, thank you.

Speaker 1: 24:33

Thanks for joining us this week on the ambitious nurse podcast. To review the show notes and any links mentioned in today's episode, please go to the ambitiousnursepodcastcom. If you enjoyed this conversation, follow or subscribe so you don't miss a future episode. Also, please consider leaving a rating, review and or comment about what you want to hear. This helps more nurses, just like you find this podcast. Thank you for joining me, bonnie Meadows, on the ambitious nurse podcast. I look forward to chatting with you the next time and remember you don't have to grow your career alone. As iron sharpens iron, one person sharpens another. Thank you for letting me sharpen you as you take this knowledge to sharpen the next.