Education >> Browse Articles >> Happy Nurses

Top tip No.1  Self Awareness,

Featured Author:

Claire Westwood

“Claire Westwood is a trained nurse and inspirational life coach. She has been a nurse since 1985 and has worked in a variety of areas in adult and paediatric care.

She is now a life coach and the founder of “happynurses” with a mission to create a million happy nurses. Claire works with individual nurses who feel overwhelmed and ‘stuck’ in life, enabling them to create fulfilling, balanced lives for themselves. She also enables employers who have high levels of absence or high staff turnover to raise their staff morale and reduce sickness and stress amongst their teams.

Take a look at Claire’s e-book The Happynurses Guide to Being Happier at Work: 6 Top Tips. It was recently given a four star (out of five) rating by The Nursing Standard.

For free happiness tips go to www.happynurses.co.uk and leave your email address in the box!

Claire can be contacted on Claire@happynurses.co.uk 07794 990 258

More articles from this author:

• How to Create a Balanced Life while Nursing
• Coaching Skills for Nurses
• happynurses Problem Page. Challenge No. 1 – Lack of Confidence

Knowing ourselves is crucial to being able to create a happy life and fulfilled life for ourselves. This is always the first step to take whenever you are planning your future.

1. Books. There are many coaching and personal development books available which can help to initiate thoughts of living your life a different way, or to look at what you may really want in your life. Whether or not you read the whole book or do all the exercises – which is the best way to use it – each one will open your mind, however much or little you do.

2. Listening. If you are too busy to read, or don’t like reading much you can now listen in the car, or at home, to CD’s or mp3 downloads. You can download thousands of audio tracks for free from the Internet.

3. Courses. There are personal development courses and seminars. Some take a day or a weekend, and others last for a year, or include a holiday. www.themoneygym.com www.tonyrobbins.com www.christopherhoward.com www.nick-williams.com www.thepeoplewhisperers.co.uk

4. Life experiences. You can learn a lot about yourself from doing activities that are nothing to do with traditional personal development courses and learning. Go back to who you were when you were younger. Complete a self-audit. This means to look at your passions and interests, look at the things that you hate and you would never want to do. Look at your talents that are being utilized, and those that you feel are not being utilized.

Knowing who you are will help you to find something that’s a good fit for you.

One of the important aspects of feeling happier at work — and we’ll come onto this later on — is to actually be happier in your life in general. If you don’t know who you are and what you enjoy, that’s an impossible task. If you do know who you are, what you enjoy and how you would choose to spend your time, then you can purposefully choose to spend your time doing those things you enjoy and spend less time doing things you don’t enjoy, both in and out of work.

If you don’t enjoy what you do, why are you spending 40 years doing it?

If you don’t enjoy what you do it becomes very emotionally and physically wearing on both you and everybody around you because you can’t keep giving and helping and nurturing other people if you’re ‘empty’ yourself. If you have no emotional or physical fuel to keep going — and I’ve been in this position myself — it’s just an impossible task.

If you know what you enjoy and what gives you a feeling of fulfilment, even on the busiest days, you can focus on the thing that’s rewarding and that can really be helpful. You have to know what that is for you, because it will be different for other people.

If you’re a great communicator and you love teaching, try and do more of that. If you really love the feeling of one-to-one kindness with your patients, make time to fit that into your day, and really be in the moment, savouring what it is you love to do. It can be difficult when you’re busy, but if you know that it is what you need every day to feel happier, then find some time to make it important. You need to go home at the end of the day feeling that even if you only had that feeling with one person, it was important to both you and them.

Next: Look at what you actually do in your Current Role Return to: Six Top Tips to be Happier at Work