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happynurses Problem Page. Challenge No. 1 – Lack of Confidence

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

Background – B is a ward manager who was having trouble in her role. She felt a lack of confidence in her role and had recently cried in front of a consultant who had been verbally aggressive to her. She felt embarrassed about this and also wondering whether she wanted to stay in the role.

Session 1 – We discussed the incident in particular as this had a debilitating effect on her confidence. We talked about what had actually happened and took some of the emotion out of it by looking at other ways she could have dealt with the situation. The use of humour helped her to see that the consultant’s behaviour had been inappropriate and her reaction was just that, not a reflection of her abilities generally. She was encouraged to keep a notebook with her and write down all the activities in her role that she felt she did well, and those that she had difficulty with.

Session 2 – In this session B felt much better as her journal had begun to show that she could do a lot of things well. She also began to see the one difficult episode as just that – one incident in a manager’s day. She had worked with other professionals at that level who treated her with respect and consideration, so began to get some perspective on the incident. She identified that she needed more support and some extra skills, especially IT and decided that she would look for a mentor on a different unit who could support her, and look for IT courses to increase her abilities.

Session 3 – B was much happier this session as she had found a mentor in a ward manager on a different unit who had worked at her level from some time. She had arranged to have regular updates and calls to support each other. She had found some IT courses but was nervous about following them up. She was keeping the journal most work days and found it a really positive experience – it showed the balance in her role and looking at what she did well gave her a sense of achievement.

Session 4 – B had found the coaching sessions and the diary very positive. She decided to keep noting down good experiences, and getting help and support in her new role from her mentor. She was getting ready to start her IT course and felt more positive through taking specific action to address her problems instead of letting them affect her confidence further. She assessed herself as being far more confident in her promotion and looking forward to the future instead of dreading it, as she had felt at the start of the coaching sessions.