Who Are You?
One of the main reasons I became a nurse was to help people. I absolutely, 100% feed off the feeling of being needed. Not many people feel this way, or maybe their feeling of being needed is expressed in a different form rather. I want to feel helpful. I want to feel useful. I want to feel like if I wasn’t here, your life would be worse-off.
Pretty complex concept. I rarely do anything that doesn’t have some aspect of being helpful. I love nursing, teaching, volunteering, mentoring. I realized pretty early on that the best way for me to help is to be empathetic and understand exactly what a person needs in that exact moment in time, accounting for their history, expectations, and fears.
For that reason, my external emotional intelligence is pretty strong. I’ve been working on improving my internal emotional intelligence, only recently learning that I have other needs besides being helpful that dictate my ability to be helpful. What a concept. I need to eat right and recharge through reflection and the gym to feel like I can give myself to someone else.
For whatever reason, the way I was raised, the way I was trained, the way I feel when someone thanks me, I take it upon myself to treat every patient like my child. Even the subtle difference of treating someone like a child and not an adult, makes a difference to me. It’s hard to teach an adult who doesn’t want to learn. It’s hard to teach an adult who has past experiences that interrupt the purity of the lesson. It’s hard.
So I choose to think of every patient as my child. Not only are they weaker than me, dependent on me, and un-objectively trusting in me, but I am solely responsible for their well-being and health through education and role modeling.
While it takes a village to raise a child, it only takes one bad experience to change their trajectory. I am the one that teaches right versus wrong, the only one that can constantly and consistently role model the right way.
Pretty complex concept. I rarely do anything that doesn’t have some aspect of being helpful. I love nursing, teaching, volunteering, mentoring. I realized pretty early on that the best way for me to help is to be empathetic and understand exactly what a person needs in that exact moment in time, accounting for their history, expectations, and fears.
For that reason, my external emotional intelligence is pretty strong. I’ve been working on improving my internal emotional intelligence, only recently learning that I have other needs besides being helpful that dictate my ability to be helpful. What a concept. I need to eat right and recharge through reflection and the gym to feel like I can give myself to someone else.
For whatever reason, the way I was raised, the way I was trained, the way I feel when someone thanks me, I take it upon myself to treat every patient like my child. Even the subtle difference of treating someone like a child and not an adult, makes a difference to me. It’s hard to teach an adult who doesn’t want to learn. It’s hard to teach an adult who has past experiences that interrupt the purity of the lesson. It’s hard.
So I choose to think of every patient as my child. Not only are they weaker than me, dependent on me, and un-objectively trusting in me, but I am solely responsible for their well-being and health through education and role modeling.
While it takes a village to raise a child, it only takes one bad experience to change their trajectory. I am the one that teaches right versus wrong, the only one that can constantly and consistently role model the right way.
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