In some spiritual traditions, there is a notion of finding one’s center, the balancing point upon which one’s life is balanced. In your nursing career, finding your center is an essential practice, one that remains crucial as you and your life evolve. The center of your career may very well be a moving target — are you currently in touch with yours?
A Moving Target
The center of your nursing career, the place at which you find your deepest satisfaction and soul work, is often a moving target. When you first graduate from nursing school, your satisfaction may come from performing your first catheterization or central line dressing change. The novice nurse can feel great satisfaction from mastering skills and knowledge, and that is as it should be.
As you progress deeper into your career, skills-based learning may become less satisfying in specific ways, depending on your area of practice and specialization. If you approach your clinical work with sincere curiosity and interest, accumulating new skills and knowledge may be enough for you, and there may also be times when some new types of experience are called for to hold your interest.
Being a staff nurse may be a viable option for a while. Still, you may eventually feel the need to serve in a leadership role, such as a charge nurse, or transition into management, administration, research, education, or entrepreneurship. If your body begins to suffer from the rigors of floor nursing, a desk job may seem quite attractive.
Careers don’t necessarily stagnate naturally, although some of us fall into professional stagnation through boredom, intellectual laziness, or simply an attachment to what is most comfortable, coupled with (reasonable or unreasonable) fears of the unknown.
Zeroing In
Zeroing in on what makes you tick is an essential and ongoing process. In the first years of your nursing career, certain types of experiences will make you happy and keep you fulfilled. As both your professional and personal lives morph over time, your needs as a healthcare professional will also change.
If you get married, have children, suffer personal loss, or live with physical, psychiatric, emotional, or spiritual challenges, your career-related needs will change. As a new mom, you may work one weekend a month while you raise your children. If your parent is in hospice, you may need to alter your work situation to help your parent in their final days. And if you go back to school or otherwise change your life, work must adapt.
You must constantly be assessing how you are or aren’t zeroing in on what you want and what will make you happy. Last year, simply showing up for your shifts and not harming any patients in the course of your work might have seemed like enough. However, you may now feel the need for new challenges, opportunities for growth, and the means to develop as a person.
Zeroing in is not a one-time event — it’s a lifelong process.
Your Center
You find your center as a nurse and as a human being by understanding yourself, your dreams, motivations, fears, and desires. What makes you tick? What makes life and work feel meaningful? What gets you out of bed every morning, and what gets you through the day?
Your emotional and spiritual center at 22 years of age will likely be wildly different than when you’re 52. And that 52-year-old self will naturally have different needs than your 82-year-old self. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychological model that consistently holds water. Therefore, seek to understand where you are on that hierarchy and feed the part of yourself that’s hungry.
Find the center of your life, and you’ll likely find the center of your career. Find the center of your desires and motivations, and you’ll make choices that are meaningful and life-enhancing. Understand the needs that are making themselves known in your heart, mind, and soul, and you’ll have a notion of what to do and where to go next. Rather than making choices based on what others tell you are best, make them based on what you need for your personal and professional development.
Find your center today, tomorrow, next month, and in ten years. It’s a moving target, and it’s a worthy exercise always to keep your eye on the prize: your happiness.
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