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Top Tip No. 5  Are you in the Wrong Job or Career?

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

How do you know when you have genuinely got to a point where actually you are in the wrong job? Or you started off doing it for the right reasons but you’re not doing it for the right reasons anymore, and it’s time to actually move on? How do you know when you’ve exhausted the other possibilities?

It’s very different for each individual person. I have coached nurses and non-nurses who were unhappy with their jobs. Some of them have made some simple changes and realized that things aren’t so bad, and they have learned to focus on the parts of the job they still love to do, and the rewards they get from it.

Sometimes you just get a real gut feeling that you cannot do this anymore, and it’s just not you.

It could be because it’s not a match for your talents, or that you want to be more entrepreneurial, or try a different way of living.

It can be that you went into nursing because that’s what your mum did. Perhaps you should never have been a nurse in the first place, or after 10 years, you’ve done everything you want to do in that particular area, and you want to go off and try something else now.

Or there’s a big part of who you really are that isn’t fulfilled at work, which was certainly the case with me. Many nurses love nursing, but don’t want to do it five days a week. There are lots of different ways of living your life in the 21st century! I personally have dipped in and out of nursing since I qualified, interspersing full-time work with agency, part-time work, performing arts, coaching and caring for others in my family. There has not been a standard ‘career structure’ at all.

It’s about going back to the basics. “What do I love? What do I love to do?”

It may be that you love nursing, but you also love to write, or you love singing, or you love sculpture, or you love horses, or computing. If you can find some way of making enough money through your day job to support that, or working out how to build your passion into a money-making enterprise, there are lots of different ways of doing it.

It could be that it’s not going to be nursing anymore it’s going to be something else completely different, whereas it could be a middle ground – nursing a couple of days a week and something else a couple of days a week.

You, as an individual should have the starring role in your own life, and your job should be incidental within that. We would encourage you to try new things out. You don’t have to leave the NHS or leave nursing to try something new. Why not try something new where you are?

The solutions don’t have to take a lot of time. They don’t have to be expensive or complicated. Some of the best answers and ideas in the world are actually the simplest things possible.

Next: Do you Need to Change your Life Outside Work To Make Your Work Life Happier?
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