14// The Nurse's Guide to a Purpose-Driven Professional Life (Nurse Career Growth Series)

Nursing veterans, it's time to shine a light on your unique skills and chart a course for your future that's not only strategic but also fulfilling.

This episode isn't just about nursing; it's a masterclass in career development for any professional seeking alignment with their true self. Learn from my experiences as a clinical nurse specialist, and gather wisdom on how self-awareness can steer your career decisions, strengthen your relationships, and promote patience during skill acquisition. 

Whether you're eyeing a new job or aiming to redefine your goals, our conversation is your compass to navigating your career landscape with clarity and confidence.

Transcript

Self-Awareness for Experienced Nurses

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 . Welcome back everyone . I am so excited to be going through this series . Helping experienced nurses walk through their career path and really discover what their next steps are is my passion , and then a sub step of that is helping them to understand and become self-aware of the value that they bring to healthcare and to the nursing profession . I firmly believe that if we would become a little bit more self-aware not prideful , not arrogant , but humbly walking in who we are called to be , humbly walking in the gifts that we bring to the profession , then we are able to provide better care to our patients , we are able to be better peers to one another . Then that reduces our instances of lateral violence , because everyone's not climbing and fighting over each other to get to the top . You just understand what your position is and you work that position because you know you're good at that thing in . Which brings you joy and a huge piece of self-awareness is really understanding yourself and not reducing someone else , but standing up in who you are and saying , hey , you come along with me , you come along with me and together we make this thing work together . And so I'm stepping into the second part of this series under self-awareness .

Speaker 1 2:34

So this nursing career series is going to go through several podcast episodes . So hang in there with me , because I have three under self-awareness and then I have several that will talk about building confidence and really tackling imposter syndrome . You're not going to get it all today and you're not going to get it all in one episode . You might have to relisten to it again and then hinder on it . Take some notes . I encourage you to take some notes and then , from there , really work to start cultivating that level of self-awareness and building up your confidence . All of these things together will help you in your positioning and in your career growth so that you can make what I call strategic moves in your career path . Even your strategic moves may be duds , but you're going to learn something in all of them . I just don't want you to be walking out here all willy-nilly just doing whatever , just because , and then you get further down the line . You're like what did I do with my nursing career ? No , we can't have that . So today we are going to address why experienced nurses need to understand self-awareness for their nursing career growth and to develop their nursing career path . Some of these things I addressed in the last podcast , but I'll go just a little bit deeper on today , and so I'll go ahead and start .

Speaker 1 4:20

Number one skill development . You don't know what you need to develop until you become aware of what are my strengths , what are my weaknesses , slash opportunities . I like to take my coaches , or the people that I coach . I like to take them through really a SWOT analysis for yourself understanding your strengths , your weaknesses , your opportunities and your strengths and they're really not threats but just what are those outside circumstances that will keep you from moving forward , that will keep you from or that might hinder you , that might Become an obstacle , and then how do we get around those things ? And so , if that's something that you're interested in , please feel free to Check out the show notes , and there's a link in the show notes and where you can jump on a call with me and we can start to work through this analysis If this information is really speaking to you .

Speaker 1 5:28

But skill development is one of the number one reasons why you need to have an understanding and have a level and develop a level of self-awareness . And so you start by assessing the gap between your current situation and your desired future situation or career goals . And sometimes we don't know that either . We're like I don't even know what I want to do in the , in the future . I have no idea , and sometimes you know , sometimes you know it's a feeling and sometimes you are really just I have no clue . But that I have no clue really comes from you not really sitting down and like really Taking into account . What are those things that brought me joy at the bedside ? Because you have something to work with , you have experiences , you have life experiences . Especially if you are more than three years into your career , you have enough experiences to really understand what did I like , what did I not like and , even if that is not bringing a bell , what brought you into nursing ? What is it that you liked about nursing ? There's something that you can pull from to help you more so future , pace yourself and Understand where are you trying to go .

Speaker 1 6:57

Most nurses who come to me , who are probably more than about 10 to 15 years in their career in their nursing career , they are . They are at a point of I want to make impact . Impact can mean a lot of things , and so I help them to work through what does impact mean to you and where do you want to do it in the space , like , do you want to do it in your specialty or do you want to do it within the nursing profession in and of itself , who have you seen where you are thinking in your mind I want to do what they are doing . Okay , well , what do they do ? And then how can I help you to walk through that path of Figuring out what you need to do along the way to get there ?

Speaker 1 7:44

With skill development , it helps you to have a good understanding of who you are , which will help you to make better decisions , even in your job search , like even if you're like , okay , well , I'm ready to move on to the next job . What are those skills that I need in order to get to where I want to go ? And then self-awareness Often reveals skills gaps that you need to address , like if somebody's been telling you you need to work on this , you need to work on this , and you've just been shooing it off and now you're in a position to where you're wanting to move forward but you can't because you never develop that skill . Then now we're in a place where we now need to become self-aware , we need to receive that and then we need to develop that skill . So number two Goes back to knowing your strengths and your weaknesses , and I had an example in the last episode where I talked about me being more big picture versus very detail oriented .

Speaker 1 8:49

I had there's an organizer that I listened to , an organizer and productivity expert , and her name is Lisa Woodruff , and her focus is more so on the home and you pulling your home together and developing more organization and better management skills in your home so that you can do what you are uniquely called to do . So of course , you know I like to hear somebody talk about what they are uniquely called to do . And what can I do to help me to get to what I am uniquely called to do ? Because I pretty much know generally what I am uniquely called to do . So I need the time and the space in order to do it , and that's what Lisa helps you with . She talks about it being hold apart and part to hold . Are you a learner , where you need to have the big picture first and then you will learn pieces along the way that will pull it together , or do you just need , step by step by step that will take you to the whole ? So I thought that was quite clever when she said it that way .

Importance of Self-Awareness in Career

Speaker 1 9:54

But having self awareness allows you to take advantage of your strengths and deal with your weaknesses . If , for instance , you are a person who enjoys seeing the big picture when making decisions but are not as good at paying attention to the details , you might not want to seek out a job that has a more detailed focus or ensure that you have colleagues around you who are more thorough in their work . The combination of a big picture oriented person and a detail oriented person can result in a high quality product . That also says don't beat yourself up . Don't beat yourself up because you don't work like Sally does , because , guess what ? Sally is missing a piece that you have at the table . So don't walk away from the table because you don't have what Sally has or you don't act just like Sally acts , because there's something about you that they need at the table . The two of you working together is like what I said is plus . Like Martin and Malcolm , like you . Just see , you need everybody at the table . Well , not everybody , but your gift will make room for you . Let's just say it like that . So the Bible says your gift will make room for you and I have witnessed that and experienced that over and over again . Number three it will help you to develop intuitive decision making skills . So people with well developed emotional self awareness which I said comes with emotional intelligence are better at making intuitive decisions . Highly self aware people are able to use their instincts to guide their decisions .

Speaker 1 11:40

For example , when I was in my last clinical nurse specialist role . I'm still a clinical nurse specialist , I just don't have a job as a clinical nurse specialist . My job is more so in professional development now and transition to practice , which I still use my clinical nurse specialist skills . So there's that I was in a position . Let me step back . When you are a clinical nurse specialist , you are more than likely in a role that is , a role of influential leadership and not managerial leadership .

Speaker 1 12:14

Well , we had had some shake ups within my unit and there was an interim manager that was covering us . Her actions and her words , they were very intimidating . So I was , she was a micromanager and I was starting to slide into another lateral violence situation . It happens , but I walked into it just a little bit more self-aware this time , and she kept asking me to do things that I wasn't really comfortable doing . And because of my self-awareness , I sat down , did some reasoning , started to think through some things , started to think through the questions that she was asking and what I . What it came down to is she was asking me to slide more so into , as she was interim and she was covering her unit and our unit . As an interim . She was asking me , without asking me to slide into of a more managerial role . No , intuitively , that is not what is right for me , that is not what the role calls for , cause if I step into that , then my flow of trust with the nurses is broken Like that . The relationship that I've built with them and I'm not here to be friends they that that wasn't . I had a professional relationship with them . I had a level of respect from them that would have been clouded had I stepped into that , and so intuitively because I was self-aware intuitively I pretty much just kind of stepped back out of that and I started to ask questions of her , which kind of helped her to think about what was she asking me to do ? Or I would just flat out say I'm not sure that's my responsibility . Flat out , I would just say that . So , again , it helps you to develop those intuitive decision making skills . Because I was self-aware of what was going on , then I was able to and I'm not necessarily gonna say push back , but I was able to voice my concern about stepping into that type of role and starting to do those type of activities .

Speaker 1 14:45

Lastly , you need to understand self-awareness for your career growth , because it helps to reduce stress . Jobs that do not match your personality are likely to cause you more stress than jobs that do . So when you are self-aware , you understand the jobs that do match your personality and you understand the jobs that may not match your personality , and so it doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't take jobs that conflict with your personality . You will , however , need to work extra hard to develop the skills for that job , especially if they are not necessarily skills that you want to develop , like there are skills that you want to develop . And then there are skills that you're like no , I'm good on that , I don't have to develop that skill because that's not the path that I wanna go . That's where self-awareness comes in . And so you think about what are those skills that you're like , yeah , you don't wanna do that , yeah , I have no desire to do that , where you don't necessarily have to develop those skills . But then there are other jobs where you do want to develop those skills , so your stress level is probably going to be a little bit less .

Speaker 1 16:07

There's always stress when you're trying to learn just new on the job skills , especially as an ambitious nurse , because you want to get it . When you are high performing , you want to get it early because you're so used to . You are coming from an environment where you got it and now you got to relearn how to get it so you can have it , and so that stress can be high or it can be low to , pending on whether you've used self-awareness to get into this new job . And then it takes a level of self-awareness to help walk you through that part of I'm going to get it . I just need time to get it . It's just going to take time to get it . That's it . So that's where I'm going to end today talking about the why you need self-awareness .

Speaker 1 17:06

And just to recap , you need self-awareness to understand your level of stress , or to reduce your stress levels when you are growing your career , because you don't want to be in a stressful situation , or in a stressful job when you are learning skills that you really don't want to learn but you put yourself in that position . Knowing self-awareness helps you to develop intuitive decision-making skills . It helps you . Three it helps you to know your strengths and weaknesses I'm working backwards . And then four , it helps you with skill development . So tune in next week where I give a little bit more of the hot . So , if you've been following along , the repetition of this information because there are a few things that I do repeat so if you've been following along , the repetition of the information is helpful for you to really understand and hone in and pick up on . What is it that I need to do to develop my self-awareness so that you can have a better chance at applying for the right jobs , for the path in which you want to go , or you think you want to go ? All right , well , hopefully this has been a blessing to you and I will see you next week .

Speaker 1 18:32

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 theambitiousnursepodcastcom . You can download my Nurse Starter Growth Guide if you want more information about how to take the next step in your career . It walks you through five steps you should think through to start working towards growing your career . Download the Nurse Starter Growth Guide at the link shown in the show notes . 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 about . This helps more nurses , just like you find this podcast . 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 . Thanks again for joining me , bonnie Meadows , on the Ambitious Nurse Podcast . We look forward to chatting with you the next time .