Your nursing career deserves your focused intention and regular attention. How can you turn that dynamic around if you haven’t been giving your career what it needs?
Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
It’s a cliche to say that energy flows where attention goes, but sometimes cliches are undeniably true.
If you spend your working hours focused on how dysfunctional your management is and how terrible your colleagues are, that level of attention to the negative will keep you locked in a pretty cynical mindset.
Likewise, if your marriage is falling apart and you have little personal bandwidth for considering what to do about your career, then your “attention hog” of a marriage will continue to dominate your consciousness and your energy.
Having said this, everyone has their own personal life circumstances, some of which cannot simply be brushed aside. A disabled spouse or child will certainly require a great deal of your focus, and that’s as it should be.
Likewise, aging parents can drain your personal resources and time, and any number of life situations or conditions are not readily changed, but some creative thinking can move you towards a life that feels more balanced between your responsibilities and your needs for “me time.”
I often hear from nurses who feel beaten down, demeaned, and exhausted by their work environment. I also speak with those who have personal problems standing squarely in the way of their career growth. Another cohort of nurses is those who’ve ignored everything about their career for far too long and need to get their career train out of the station again.
Whether your career roadblocks are personal or professional, they can be overcome with the right amount of attention. We can all run headlong into life circumstances and personal issues that stand in our way, and these can all be dealt with if we have the courage, stamina, and powers of insight to dig deep and resolve them or at least mitigate them to whatever extent we can manage.
Let’s Not Forget Intention
Attention is a powerful force in the ongoing feeding and watering of your nursing career (and your life, of course). You can focus on physical health, exercise, parenting, gardening, or any other areas where you want your energy to flow.
No matter how focused your attention may be, we each have varying attention spans for certain areas of our lives and careers. For example, when it comes to earning CEUS, you may pay precious little attention to the kind of learning that feels mindlessly done in order to renew a certification or license. Then again, working with your nursing mentor may be a place where you apply rapt attention and personal resources.
Attention can be short, moderate, or sustained, and one way to get it to pay more dividends is to imbue it with your most specific and targeted intentions.
Your intentions regarding your nursing career may be varied. You may have a keen intention of becoming a Clinical Nurse Specialist focusing on pediatrics. Or perhaps you intend to go back to school for a Master’s in Nursing Leadership, but that’s about as far as you’ve gotten in that process. Intentions can cover anything from your smallest goals to your loftiest professional ambitions.
An intention (such as becoming a pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist) can be a powerful motivator. You may also have powerful de-motivators on board, including but not limited to anxiety, fear, financial worries, and low self-confidence.
Setting an intention means stating what you want to accomplish out loud and/or in writing (preferably both). At this point, you may recruit an “accountability partner” whose responsibilities include keeping tabs on your progress, offering encouragement and feedback, and facilitating the ongoing focus on your goal(s).
As mentioned above, having a dedicated mentor is one way to move things forward, and I highly recommend this type of targeted relationship for shifting your nursing career into overdrive.
Intention + Attention = Forward Movement
The cultivation of both attention and intention is crucial for your nursing career. As discussed above, your attention can only be fully sustained when your intentions are fully realized and clear.
Energy does indeed flow where attention goes; if you dwell on the negative aspects of your nursing career and/or personal life, those negative aspects will remain your psycho-emotional focus. However, if you can change your focus and bring your attention to other key areas of your life in need of energy (e.g., your nursing career), you can then use your crystal-clear intentions to move those areas of attention in the direction of true change.
Intention and attention are the keys to the equation. Are you ready to add up the ingredients and catalyze change and growth in the interest of your nursing career?
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