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Top Tip No. 3  Look for Solutions to Challenges, and Start Making Changes

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

There are probably going to be some hassles most days, but do you feel disempowered by those, or can you think creatively and be empowered about how you make changes?

Instead of waiting for somebody else to do it, why don’t you try and find a solution yourself?

It’s up to each individual to start looking at ideas, and thinking how they could start to solve the issue, rather than continuing to complain, which is what a lot of people do. It is easy to get into a cycle of complaining — and this is not just nurses; this is all sorts of people in all sorts of jobs — but you can begin to feel that that’s all you can do, to complain about things.

However, individuals often don’t complain to anybody who can make things any different.

You need to start to think more creatively. All the energy you put into complaining could have gone into forming a ‘task force’ to look for solutions. It’s about channeling energy in a different way. The first part of it is not thinking it is somebody else’s job, but thinking it could be something that you could take charge of.

So, firstly, realize you might be able to take charge of it. Then decide whether it is something you think you could do on your own, or could you sit down with colleagues and brainstorm some solutions to it? You sometimes do need to have a team of people, and you do need to get people on board who are actually enthusiastic about it.

Decide to take it on as a project, and do some simple things. Think of some solutions. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It could be something fairly straightforward.

The more people you meet outside nursing or the NHS, the more likely you are to know somebody that either knows the solution or might know somebody who does. Start to create a bigger circle of connections, which will be invaluable.

Next: Focus on the Positive Aspects of your Work
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