This current series in the ‘staff nurse to nurse consultant’ column is focusing on surviving your nursing career. Does that seem too negative? It certainly would not make a suitable strap line for nurse recruitment: ‘Join our nursing team and we will help you survive your work.’ But the realities of working as a nurse in today's healthcare environments mean that survival techniques are not only useful, but essential. Many of the articles in this series have examined specific events and challenges that confront us during our working lives, but this month's focus is on you as a complete person: your holistic survival.
What are your holistic needs and wants?
Spend a few moments thinking about yourself; that in itself is a challenge for many of us who spend most of our time serving the needs of others. Get a cup of coffee, shut the door, take a piece of scrap paper and a pen and write down your holistic needs and wants, focusing on the next year or two. Try to use a few key words rather than long sentences. Here are my thoughts:
The above are not meant to be the ‘correct’ list, they are just my own needs and wants at this moment in time. If you are at the start of your nursing career and you have a young family, then yours will be different—I suspect that ‘get a full night's sleep’ might be one of your needs. Or, if you are single, friendships will be important to you. The main point of this exercise is to take time out for yourself and identify what is important for you that goes beyond the routine jobs and demands of the moment.
Reflecting on your holistic needs
As I review my own nursing career and that of many of the colleagues I have worked with I would suggest that an important word and important principle for surviving holistically is ‘balance’. Balance is not necessarily about giving ‘equal’ weighting to each of your holistic needs and wants, but it is about acknowledging the importance of each and identifying how you are going to meet each one, bearing in mind the demands of the others.
If you live and work in London you may find that you need to work an extra ‘bank shift’ most weeks to earn enough money to afford rent and general living costs. If income is less significant an issue for you then you may think about reducing your hours to part time and working in a voluntary role that you feel passionate about, or helping with child care for grandchildren. Alternatively, you may be a person who is so committed to voluntary work and ‘good causes’ that your personal relationships and family care suffer.
Take a few more minutes to reflect upon your list of holistic wants and needs and identify how much energy and time you spend on each, and then indicate on your list whether you feel that this is too much, too little or about right. Try to be honest with yourself—many of us focus on one area of life to avoid committing to another.
Adjusting the balance
Using the principles of balance and compromise identify one or two areas of your life where you want to adjust the balance. This will probably mean cutting down on one area and increasing another with the focus being on your holistic needs, not just the needs of others. In terms of your nursing career, it might mean creating some space to undertake a developmental course that you want to do. From a relationship perspective, it might mean committing to a night out each week with your partner or groups of friends. Looking at your personal wellbeing it might mean taking up some regular exercise and cutting out some junk food.
What we mean by ‘survival’
Although many of us will have developed lifestyles that are concentrated very heavily in two or three areas at the expense of others and have become ‘successful’ in those particular areas (which could be money, promotion, relationships, voluntary service, a particular hobby…) there comes a time when we realise that there is something missing in our life. Surviving holistically is about recognising where we concentrate our efforts and resources, reflecting on what is important to us and taking active steps to correct the balance. Spend the last few minutes as you finish reading this article identifying a change that you want to make, then take steps to make it happen. Holistic health is not just for our patients.