Success Strategy: Permission to Return to Your Dreams
We are born with so many dreams!
Some are pursued.
Some are suppressed.
How did you get to where you are today?
Was it a series of easy choices when opportunities presented themselves?
The path of least resistance?
Did you find you find yourself caught in the current of your life's lazy river? Or was the river turbulent and full of rapids?
How much of your life has been deliberate despite knowing the path may be risky, but appealed to your true desires? And how much occurred because you chose the easy way out?
Most nursing is not easy. It is infinitely hard. But the sheer numbers of practicing nurses makes it seem attainable. First thoughts of applying to nursing school may be, "if they can do it, so can I."
But, the same thought didn't make you look at Sir Richard Branson or Oprah and set you on a immediate path to emulate their success.
You didn't have to reach higher, you could just become a nurse (for non-nurses unhappy in their career insert your career anywhere I talk about nursing).
I say this with all sincerity - for some, nursing is an exciting reach and a calling. But, for many it is a choice out of a place of fear.
Fear of lack of money, fear of choosing the wrong college or university career path, fear of choosing the unknown and unfamiliar, fear of instability, fear of failure.
And, we continue to do what works from a place of fear until we hit rock bottom and realize that doesn't work.
When your passion does not align with your career and you leave your workplace feeling drained, dreading your return the following day you will become burnt out. When you give of yourself to others without taking care of your needs first you will build resentment.
Something in your child-hood or teenage-hood or adult-hood led you to nursing.
Perhaps an interaction with a nurse as a young child or maybe a parent or grandparent - more likely a female role model - was a nurse. If you chose nursing later on as a second career your choice may have been out of desperation to leave another unhappy, underpaying career or to support yourself after job loss or divorce.
You can not have a satisfying nursing career if you continue to operate from the wrong place.
If you are constantly focusing on what you don’t have - money, stability, success, happiness - you will create more of what you don’t have. It’s the law of attraction!
Bring yourself back to your earliest dreams and desires.
What have you been suppressing or ignoring that you know will bring you joy?
Did you want to be a ballerina or an astronaut? Travel to Peru? Have a pony?
Think any of those things are silly, frivolous and unrealistic? You aren't dreaming yet!
What is that thing that at a fundamental level brings a smile to your face and boosts your mood only by the mere thought of it?
How can you bring those things back into your life?
How can you combine that joyful thing with your career in nursing?
Brainstorm as many things as you can imagine and give yourself time to have ideas pop up in your mind in the quiet moments in your busy life. This process can take ten minutes or weeks. Be prepared. You never know when the right idea will come to you. Make sure to write down the dreams that pop into your mind no matter how insignificant or strange or unlikely they seem.
Practice keeping an open mind.
Do not judge your dreams.
Your judgement comes from a place of learned rules over the course of your life that may not really be serving you.
Eliminate ideas that don’t bring you joy when you think of them.
Then, give yourself permission to do a lot of different things out of the gate to learn by trial and error. Try various roles. Try various settings. Try various work schedules. Day shifts, night shifts, 9-5. Work in an office, work in a hospital, work in a long term care centre, work from home.
Expand your options, do everything you can to have a lot of experience and over time be more selective.
As you learn about yourself based on your experiences ask yourself: What is most aligned?
You may think you’re doing all of the right things, but you aren’t because you’re not getting the result. For example, I see this all of the time in my weight loss clients. They say their diets are excellent and they’re doing what they know they should do, but they can’t lose the weight.
There is a degree of denial that has to be broken through.
The true Aha lesson has to be learned!
Nursing can be a personally rewarding career, but you need to bring back the joy you left behind so long ago when you learned either by being out right told or through early observations that you had to follow a certain path to be successful.
The path is non-liner.
Every nursing career is unique.
Make yours uniquely rewarding by incorporating your dreams!
If you're ready to give yourself permission to return to your dreams reach out to me to book your first coaching session!
