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Top Tip No. 4  Focus on the Positive Aspects of your Work

Featured Author:

Claire Westwood

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“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

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This is about where you choose to focus your energy. You have already identified what you do in your job, so now look at just the good bits!

When life is difficult it is easy to get very overwhelmed by your responsibilities, and to think that everything about your job is terrible.

However difficult things are, there will always be positive things, and it’s focusing on those that can get you through the difficult times. Go back to the last exercise and remind yourself what you do in your role. Look at the things you like to do. Remind yourself what brought you into nursing in the first place, or which little bits of each day you actually really enjoy. So you can leave the parts you don’t like, and change your focus to the positive aspects.

It might be having a cup of tea with your colleagues and having a bit of a laugh in the staff room. It might be the feeling that you get when you wave somebody off at the door and they’ve gone home having been in hospital for several weeks. Or it might be doing a practical procedure really well. People get satisfaction from all different parts of their jobs.

Nursing should be an inherently rewarding job to do, because it is involved with nurturing and caring for vulnerable people. It is a rewarding job to solve people’s health care issues, to make people clinically better, to make them feel emotionally better, to teach them and to nurture them. A lot of that can get lost in the day-to-day busyness and aggravation. When we start to focus on what nursing is really about for us, and why we actually wanted to be nurses in the first place, then that’s when you can start to feel more positive.

A question that I really like as a coach that often facilitates solutions is: “how can I?” It’s a really good question. Ask yourself, “ How can I enjoy my job? How can I spend more time communicating with my patients? How can I spend more time…”

Even if a question like, “What aspects of my job would I love to do day in, day out if I had the opportunity?” could be a great question, because it helps you focus on the things you enjoy.

Another way of doing it might be to be able to think about designing your ideal job. If somebody asked you to design your own ideal job and create a job around what you’d love to do – what would that be? Unleash your imagination – there are no rules, it’s just to get you thinking.

Next: Are you in the Wrong Job or Career?
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