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Top Tip No. 2  Look at what you actually do in your Current Role

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

The first tip was about who you are. This is about what you do.

From getting to work in the morning to going home on an average day, if there is such a thing, what tasks do you do? Who do you interact with? What aspect do you find rewarding? Start to be aware of what it is that you spend your time doing. When you’re very busy, and if you’re not used to looking at yourself and what you do, it’s difficult to have the detachment that you might have if you were looking at somebody else’s job. Find a buddy and talk about it together. Help each other to ‘step outside’ your roles and look at them from a distance.

I’ve coached some nurses on this aspect. The first action is to just to write everything down, every single thing you do. If anything comes to mind about how you felt at the time, write that down as well. Sometimes people have no awareness of what their day-to-day lives involve, because they never really look at them. They’re so close to it, and they’re living it. They never take a step back.

Learning and growing

One of the issues that can affect how you feel in your job is that you’ve been in the same role for a long time – you’re not growing or learning. Every task you do, you’ve done many times before. When you first started doing the job, it might have been the most thrilling and rewarding thing ever, but now you’ve done it for lots of people, and you really need to change. How many tasks that you do involve something in which you’re learning or growing?

Next: Look for Solutions to Challenges and Start Making Changes
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