Introduction
Individuals’ subjective understanding of their professional roles, crucial skill sets, and the opportunities for transferring other skills to a specialized task can permeate their professional identities. Thanks to focused self-reflection, nurses can build deeper connections to their intrinsic goals and beliefs. This essay presents my reflections on the profession’s meanings, personally relevant skills, career aspirations, and crisis communication experiences as an asset relevant to nursing.
Personal Definition of Being a Nurse
From my perspective as a professional and an individual, being a nurse means applying a combination of clinical and interpersonal competencies to serve as an intermediary between physicians or specialty doctors and patients. In other words, for me, nursing is about translating the complex language of diagnostic medicine into efforts and narratives that would benefit patients in a timely manner while fostering better self-care skills. This translation can be achieved through optimal adherence to medical professionals’ orders or providing patient education, whether individual or collective (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, n.d.). In the context of the information delivery component of nursing, fulfilling this professional role is inseparable from being aware of how various factors promote or limit the client’s reception of information. It is essential to consider a person’s age, culture-specific philosophies, positive or negative affectivity, life experiences, linguistic competencies, health literacy levels, and social determinants of health. Therefore, to me, being a nursing professional basically means bridging the gap between doctors and patients by providing the latter with care-related, informational, and emotional support that will promote improvements in holistic well-being.
Skills Making One the Best Colleague and Nurse
Hard skills, compassion, and open-mindedness would support me in becoming the best nurse and colleague and fulfilling my potential in both patient care and teamwork aspects of the profession. Regarding the so-called hard skills, good manual dexterity and the habit of learning from anything result in exceptional clinical competencies, ranging from physical assessment and medication administration to fall prevention (Lynn, 2018). In terms of compassion, staying empathetic to patients’ pain and suffering without over-identification with another person’s emotions would assist me in building trusting and healthy connections with healthcare consumers. These two skill types would enable me to protect patients’ safety both physically and psychologically, thus acting like a true professional. Being an open-minded person, including the lack of superficiality or too prompt judgments based on coworkers’ external characteristics, would promote being the best colleague by ascertaining adaptability to heterogeneous teams. These qualities, if instrumentalized with wisdom, would improve the chances of success.
Being a Good Nurse and Leadership Skills Required
To deal with the professional role successfully, I need the type of leadership skills linked with self-perception, including self-efficacy and self-awareness. Leading other nurses or being part of multidisciplinary hospital teams involves much room for conflicts caused by small misunderstandings and misinterpretations of emotions and attitudes behind colleagues’ utterances. Concerning self-awareness, to avoid interpersonal crises, I have to develop a habit of keeping track of how temporary emotions, stable personality traits, and changing needs affect my self-expression and how external observers might misinterpret it. Self-efficacy, also known as self-compassion, involves a persistent belief that one is capable of performing novel tasks and “coping with adversity” in the various domains of functioning (Jaworski et al., 2022, p. 2). This leadership competency can expand my value as a decision-maker due to promoting encounters with various and complex clinical situations. Self-perception-related skills are, therefore, conducive to clarity in communication and ongoing learning.
Future Goals as a Professional Nurse
Some goals I wish to achieve within the next years include pursuing an MSN degree and becoming a clinical nurse educator in my current workplace or another inpatient facility. My current responsibilities involve direct patient encounters and helping clients recover from serious conditions. However, I feel a passion for improving the quality of care through teaching others, which is why following the said career progression path can elicit my potential even more. Completing an MSN degree in the future and seeking relevant nurse educator certification from the National League of Nurses would support my career development while maximizing my competitive advantage in the field of practice. Realizing these intentions will, however, require patience, concentration, and determination.
Life Experiences in Relation to Nursing
My life experiences, such as volunteering at search and rescue events sporadically, have encouraged me to bring skills peculiar to communicating with people in distress to nursing. Before accompanying the family of the missing traveler in the search, I was instructed to give the pride of place to listening, communicate respectfully, and redirect the suffering person’s attention to productive action when appropriate. Similar principles have been helpful in dealing with patients that are deeply traumatized in addition to experiencing functional impairments. Apart from the obvious benefits of listening and demonstrating respect, motivating positive action, including starting restorative exercise or changing self-care habits, is helpful and eliminates excessive emotion.
Conclusion
To sum up, my understanding of nursing’s meaning is inextricably connected with communication and intermediation. I value both care skills and psycho-emotional competencies, including self-perception that is conducive to behaving and making decisions like a thoughtful leader and the ability to find connections between nursing and non-nursing competencies. With these values and attitudes in mind, I am going to continue professional growth and finally succeed at teaching new generations of nurses.
References
Jaworski, M., Panczyk, M., Leńczuk-Gruba, A., Nowacka, A., & Gotlib, J. (2022). The trend of authentic leadership skills in nursing education: The key role of perfectionism and self-efficacy. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 1-14.
Lynn, P. (2018). Taylor’s clinical nursing skills: A nursing process approach (5th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (n.d.). Nurses shatter the stereotype [Video]. YouTube.