Every career will teach you something, but some jobs are definitely more edifying than others. Nursing is one of those professions that will help you learn a lot about yourself and other people. Between interacting with patients, co-workers, and the family members of patients, you’ll get your fair share of socialization in a unique setting that people who aren’t healthcare professionals don’t get to experience.
If you’re aspiring to become a nurse practitioner, your personality probably already has a solid moral and logical foundation because this is a career path that is obviously going to involve helping people. Thus, you might feel like you don’t really need any new wisdom. Nonetheless, whether you ask for them or not, here are 10 valuable life lessons that most nurse practitioners will eventually learn:
1. You’re Reminded About What Truly Matters
As a nurse, you’re constantly reminded about what your top priorities should be and what really matters as you see people dealing with illnesses and challenges every day. When you see someone on the brink of passing or in critical condition, it reminds you that it’s the little things like health and family that we take for granted. It helps you prioritize and re-think what you really want in life. It also gives you a good sense of self-guidance as you have to decide which medical specialization you should be pursuing: primary care, family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, psychiatry, etc. Many registered nurses advance their careers through family nurse practitioner programs online.
2. People Just Want Someone to Care About Them
This seems like an absurdly simplistic and obvious realization, but it’s one that you’re reminded of every day in the field of healthcare. It’s also a valuable lesson to hold onto because it can help tremendously in your personal and business relations. In the field of nursing, caring for your patients is often thought of as a responsibility of altruistic character. Often, the people we are closest with (let alone in our business relationships) don’t have the same passion for the kind of work we do as we do for ourselves. But they care enough to ask for our advice and to try and understand what we want, and that’s exactly how patients interact with nurses in many ways.
3. Respect is Given by Default
You’ve probably heard the saying “respect is to be earned.” Nurses don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing which patients they’re respectful to as it’s literally part of their job description to have good bedside manners. As a nurse, you’re bound to encounter patients who simply don’t have respect for medical staff. Even if a patient is being disrespectful, you can’t let that stop you from being a professional. The situation may change for the worse quickly, but nursing is not the place to fight, scream, or otherwise express your disagreement. In the meantime, stay calm and handle your business as best as you can. In other words, you learn to do what you have to do and understand that your feelings may be interfering with your ability to respond in a calm and collected manner.
4. Listening is the Most Valuable Skill
When you’re just starting out at your first nursing job, you’ll want your life as a nurse to go as smoothly as possible, and you’ll also be excited to showcase your skills. However, you’ll quickly discover that it’s not about what you have to say and what you want to do – it’s about what the patients need and what they have to say. In nursing, a lot of times you’re caring for multiple patients simultaneously, so you have to learn to listen to each of the patient’s voices at the same time. The number of people that can be speaking at once in an emergency room or other hospital settings can become overwhelming to the extent that you’ll need to develop the skill of honing in on what one person is saying, comprehending it thoroughly even when there’s a lot going on around you.
5. Panicking Never Helps
If you’ve ever known someone who has been working as a nurse for many years, you’ve probably noticed that they tend to have a relaxed and calming demeanor. That’s because they’ve already witnessed and been a part of so many stressful and even life-threatening situations that anything else seems like a walk in the park. As a nurse, you learn that succumbing to panic will only decrease the patient’s chances of survival. In emergency situations, nurses need to be able to act intelligently without letting fear or stress cloud their judgement. This isn’t something that you can pick up in your first few days on the job, but after being under pressure dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times, the thought of panicking will eventually no longer pass your mind.
6. The Ability to Endure Lengthy Work
If you’re the type of person who has trouble following through on short-term goals, becoming a nurse could eventually help you conquer that shortcoming because you’ll become accustomed to working long shifts. In fact, it’s widely known that nurses have some of the most demanding and potentially exhausting jobs. The current nursing shortage is only expected to get worse over the next few years, which means that nursing units will continue to be short-staffed. When you’re used to working 10-14 shifts on a regular basis, most other long stretches of work will seem easy in comparison.
7. The Importance of Teamwork
Being a nurse also shows you just how crucial proper teamwork can be in high-pressure situations because everyone has to work together in a precise and accurate manner. Without an effective team, a single mistake can lead to a patient being injured or worse, so it’s imperative that every team member is completely dedicated to the job. Working as a nurse in a hospital or emergency room can be mentally and physically demanding, so it always helps to have co-workers that can help shoulder the burden.
8. Believe in Yourself Responsibly
Nursing teaches you to believe in yourself because you know that someone’s life could be in your hands on any given day. Lacking confidence in a situation like that will only cause you to hesitate and doubt yourself. There’s no room for doubting your abilities in a life or death scenario like that. You need to be able to move from one task to the next fluidly without second-guessing yourself. Time is often of the essence. Behaving confidently and not showing any signs of distress or uncertainty will also help to keep patients at ease as they may start to worry if they can tell that you’re doubting yourself. After all, nobody wants to be taken care of by someone who doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing. At the same time, however, you can’t let over-confidence lull you into being careless about double-checking your own work.
9. Some of the Most Necessary Jobs are Some of the Most Neglected
As an actively employed nurse, you’re reminded every day of the severity of the nursing shortage. However, you’ll also learn about other skilled worker shortages in the medical field, such as the lack of physicians and paramedics. It becomes clear that some of society’s most critical jobs are being pushed aside by the vast majority of the general public. That’s a somewhat saddening realization because it can make you lose a little hope in our level of ambition as a species. On the other hand, it also makes you realize that you’re doing a great service by being one of the few people who actually steps up to the plate.
10. Accidents Happen
Experienced nurses are generally cautious people because they get to see first-hand what reckless behavior or sheer bad luck can do. Aside from illnesses, injuries caused by accidents are some of the most common issues that nurses deal with. While you can never learn to avoid every possible mishap, you do start to develop a sense for what’s risky and what isn’t. You also learn how to respond to such accidents at home when one of your kids, family members, or friends gets injured, so you’re developing skills that could also prove to be valuable in your personal life.
A Senior Nurse Could Probably Teach You a Lot
If you think about the impact that learning the lessons listed above can have, it’s easy to see why senior nurses are often some of the wisest and kindest people you’ll meet. While you could learn quite a bit by just speaking to a senior nurse, there’s really no substitute for experience. This is because they have all had to work through these challenges on a daily basis for years. It’s also important to keep in mind that senior nurses are likely to know more about this topic than just about any of the patients in your care, so you can learn just as much, if not more, through your interaction with other nurses and medical staff as you can from patients.
