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Best Practices Newsletter
Cultivate Resilience: Essential for a New Nurse
March 27, 2006 | by supportfornurses | Permalink
Resilience: The dictionary describes resilience as “springing
back to its original form after being bent or stretched, springy”.
The operative phrase is Œspringing back‚ following the inevitable
challenges that are part of daily life of being a floor nurse.
A nurse needs to cultivate resilience to ensure job satisfaction
and longevity in a contemporary clinical environment. The
cultivation of resilience on the floor means being able to
bounce back‚ when things happen that are outside of your control;
perhapsit is being the recipient of a doctor’s irrational anger;
having a patient yell at you about a procedure she doesn’t want;
adjustingto a new policy coming from administration that creates
more work for you and confusion for the team; the list goes on
and on.
The ability to bounce back‚ makes all the difference in your
abilityto tolerate an environment where circumstances can change
in aninstant and where you are expected to adapt to the changes
when they occur.
Developing resilience all starts with an attitude that embraces
flexibility: as a new nurse, be prepared to roll with whatever
comes your way; expect that changing circumstances will be
the norm on your shift. For example, what was happening
on the floor at 9am may look very different at 11am; 1pm
may look very different from 11am and so on.
Now, I am not suggesting that resilience means that you should
repress feelings of annoyance or frustration; your feelings are
important and acknowledging them is a way to prevent resentment
from building up. The trick is to allow those feelings to have
fluidity: allow them to move through you, rather than becoming
a calcified part of you. When that happens, your ability to be
resilient is severely compromised.
Cultivating resilience may not be easy, but it is worth the effort.
Bouncingback is the best way to keep stress at bay and make some
room forenjoying your job.
