As I wrote the article for her blog, I discovered that, although nursing was not a career choice that came from my own inspiration, it has turned out to be one that has gifted me through my life in many ways. For those of you who didn't see my original article on Angela's sight, I am reposting it in more digestible segments, and hopefully with more clarity than the original version. May it inspire you to reflect on the gifts your own career and life choices have brought. Enjoy!
10 Reasons I Love My Career
When Angela emailed me about writing for Nurses’ Week this year I was quick to jump at the offer! You see, I’ve been a nurse for nearly 35 years (I graduated in 1978-I know, I’m old!) I and I love writing!
So here I am, sitting in Starbucks with my writing group just an hour after her invitation. Although I don't always outline when I'm writing fiction, the first thing I did for this article was take out my pen to create my list of ten.
So what are my 10 Reasons for loving my career? Here's the short list:
1. Job Security
2. I get to Save Lives!
3. It helped me Find My Talent
4. Leverage and Job Variety
5. Longevity - the ability to remake my career
6. Strengthens Self Esteem
7. Add Value to society and the world in general
8. People Skills & Social Interactions
9. Knowledge of Human Response Patterns
10. Spirituality/Holism and cutting edge thinking
Now I’ll be honest, the intention of this article is not to convince you to be a nurse or that nursing is a great career. My only intention here it to share with you the skinny on what has made nursing a great career for me. It is my hope it will inspire you to take five minutes to jot down the top 10 reasons you love your career and reflect on the gifts it brings.
Here are mine.
JOB SECURITY
From the time I graduated nursing school and was licensed as a registered nurse, I have never gone longer than a few days without landing a good job. In these economic times it is easy to see why this one was the first to come to mind. The fact is, I took this for granted a long time until I became more aware of how different this is for many other people. Granted, I interview fairly well which helps, but that skill came with experience and undertanding that I had a lot to contribute.
SAVING LIVES
One of the things I had the opportunity to learn early in my career is that we each have unique strengths that we owe ourselves to discern. If you'd like a way to begin that process for yourself check out the StrengthsFinder website. I bought the book which included an online evaluation. It may be as empowering to you as it was to me.
As for saving lives, I had the fortuitous opportunity as a new graduate to accept a job in a rural, community hospital as the charge nurse in the intensive care unit (ICU) on the night shift. One reality of rural hospitals is that, at best, they have a single contracted doc to man the emergency room (ER) if and when someone visits. There are no regular doctors in the house. There is only a skeleton crew of nurses with little to no ancillary staff. In fact, the charge nurse in the ICU is often presumed to be the most skilled nurse in the hospital and, at a minimum, the emergency backup for other units and situations that arise throughout the hospital.
Suffice it to say, I wasn’t sure I could do the job, but what I learned could never have come without this experience. Over my 33 years in nursing I’ve been involved in saving dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of lives. Even so, the significance of it never dawned on me until one evening at a networking event with other young professionals, mostly oil and gas managers and ‘up and comers’. Inevitably the conversations at these events always came down to “So what do you do for a living?” For some reason that night, and without a second thought, I simply said “I save lives.” The young man I was talking to got this smirky grin on his face and said “No, really, what do you do?” In that moment I knew what I did was incredibly special and powerful!
...next up, more on Finding my Talent (Reason 3) and Leveraging my Job into Incredible Variety
I look forward to hearing from you and the reasons you have for Loving Your Job!
