Reflections on a Career Chosen by Default: Part 4

Today is the final part of my 'things I love about my career' series.  So much has happened since I last posted two months ago.  My hiatus was filled with wonderful opportunities.  The first afforded me the opportunity to embark on and complete a book proposal for the transformational writing contest organized by Chistine Kloser, the transformational author catalyst.  The second was the opportunity to spend a full week in Ohio with family and friends, something which happens only rarely.


Both opportunities touched that part of me that is passionate about inspiring hope in others and contributing to their well being, fulfillment and satisfaction.  It is my desire to write in a way that invites you to take the next step and move your own life to the next level.  So get in touch with that still, small voice inside and learn to trust the evolutionary being that we are.  


Make a difference in your world, more of the time...and when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.  Remember everything confronting you on your journey through life has potential for both opportunity as well as crisis.  It is how we choose to see it that makes all the difference.  So, "When life presents you with a fork in the road, take it!" and navigate it to the best of your ability, avoiding crisis and maximizing opportunity.  Which is exactly what  I did these past two months.

Part of living a life of 'no regrets' comes from taking advantage of the what happens every day of our lives.  In re-tooling these posts from my original article for Angela Brooks my hope is to inspire you to spend five minutes jotting down the top 10 reasons you love your career and reflect on the inherent gifts in them, and in so doing begin your own adventure that will take you to the next level of your own life.  


Without further delay, I leave you with the final things I love about a career chosen by default.


HUMAN RESPONSE PATTERNS

Many wonderful gifts have come through my career as a nurse but one of the greatest, by far, came unexpectedly when I stumbled across the Handbook to Holistic Nursing Practice and began pursuing my certification as a holistic nurse.  Aside from my own spiritual awakening during that time, which was monumental, the paradigm shift accompanying it transformed my consciousness in a way that allowed me to see people as evolutionary human beings in an ever changing environment.

I had been using a process to develop plans of care for my patients developed by NANDA (formerly the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association) for most of my career.  To explain it simply, nursing diagnoses are clinical judgments about human experiences and responses to health conditions and life processes that help focus on methods and strategies for helping a person achieve better or greater health.

Having used them as a matter of routine, imagine my surprise in discovering those individual diagnoses such as alteration in comfort, relocation stress syndrome, etc. were actually built on something called human response patterns, 9 of them to be exact, that informed everything I knew or had intuitively grasped while caring for people.  It was like a light bulb suddenly went on in my mind and the bigger picture of human potential and growth became clear.

Those 9 human response patterns, with a short explanation, are:

EXCHANGING - physical and chemical processes/homeostasis
COMMUNICATING - sending messages
RELATING - establishing bonds
VALUING - assigning relative worth
CHOOSING - selecting alternatives
MOVING - activity
PERCEIVING - receiving information
KNOWING - meaning associated with information
FEELING - subjective awareness

From that point on, I began to understand that all patient behavior, symptoms, lifestyles, choices, etc. coalesce into recognizable human response patterns.  ‘Pattern recognition’ became my buzz word for bridging the science and the art of nursing and expanded my ability to take people from point A to point B more effectively.  How wonderful it was to learn and use a deeper, broader,  more effective base of nursing knowledge and wisdom, and how much more satisfying my interaction became with people from all walks of life.

SPIRITUALITY/HOLISM/CUTTING EDGE NEW THOUGHT

It was this path into holistic nursing that literally transformed and launched the second half of my career.  The holistic nursing program occupied two and a half years of my life and become a strong plank in the foundation I used to make sense of the spiritual awakening I was undergoing.  It formed the organizing principle behind my understanding of life and the world at large.

In 1989, a critical juncture in my personal and professional life, I was seriously considering changing careers altogether.  I had owned a small healthcare consulting business and made more money than I'd ever dreamed possible.  I was clearly at a juncture in my career but, after working a few months as a grocery checker, for which the manager pointed out I was sorely overqualified, I took a position in a rehab hospital.

I had gone to a medical bookstore for a care planning book to brush up on my clinical skills.  While  walking down an aisle in the nursing section, a large, pink volume literally fell off the shelf as I approached...The Handbook of Holistic Nursing Practice.  Now I had witnessed a number of amazing events in emergency rooms and intensive care units, things that at times seemed truly miraculous because they defied explanation.  But that day it struck me as odd that a book would seemingly jump off a shelf in front of me as if trying to get my attention.

In hindsight I know there are no coincidences and that things always happen for a reason.  Picking up that book changed my life and the journey that followed is really beyond the scope of this article.  Nevertheless, I began to see and become aware of a realm operating behind the day to day world with which we are more commonly familiar.  The health challenges people were presenting began to show me how consciousness was an emerging, expanding, transforming process occurring in each and every individual, a process in which we are all participating but which is most often seen during health crises.

Helping my patients navigate these challenges and assisting them in ‘seeing’ with a new set of eyes the transformation within their challenge taught me that health is expanding consciousness and that every health challenge brings an invitation to expand, grow and develop the next level of who we are becoming.  It  became obvious that evolution doesn't just happen over thousands and thousands of years, it happens in every moment, with every choice, in every interaction with another, and with every thing we do and think.

Nursing, once again, became the vehicle for my own next level of growth and development.  In hindsight it is easy to see that my nursing career did NOT live up to the expectations I had placed on it when I was forced to abandon my initial career choice in journalism.  But, how could it?  Those expectations were far too small for the journey.  Nursing had its own plans for me.  Bigger plans.  Better plans.  Plans I could have never dreamed.  It has taught me and shown me the depth and breadth of emotion and the heights of transcendent moments.  It has made me a bigger and definitely better person.  It has been a career that has changed me and allowed me to learn to love, to live with the unseen and to trust in the unknown mystery that always lies before us.