[00:00:00] Discomfort is the currency of your dreams. On the other side of discomfort is the dream life, the dream career, the dream business, the dream work life balance that you always wanted. We have to be courageous enough to move through the discomfort in order to unlock and to make those dreams available and possible for us moving into 2024.

Hey beautiful healthcare human, I -hope you are well. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about releasing the need to know how you're going to get from A to B. So many of you come to me with this concern and fear and worry that you don't have it all meticulously planned at. [00:01:00] I was coaching an incredible clinician this week who is a couple years into her career and she came to me with a question.

I feel like I know what I'm doing in my career. I feel like I have a planned quote unquote some kind of direction, but I just really want to map out how I get from A to B. And it was causing this person a lot of internal mental and emotional drama because they were really trying to manipulate the future ahead of time and trying to identify step by step how they can get to their goal.

Now, whilst this is a great strategy to maybe regulate and Calm our nervous system. Most of us end up doing this in the sense that it doesn't regulate and calm our nervous system because we spend so much time looking to the external world for the answers that we all have uniquely inside of us. I am a great example of this.

I spent years Googling, Dr. Googling, looking at certifications, all of the things that I could do to get from A to B. And if I look back on [00:02:00] my career and I look back at all of the changes and pivots I made over 15 different career changes, I never really truly knew the how.

The Illusion of Control and the Importance of Flexibility

When we are living and focusing on how do I get from A to B, I found that what we can get into is this false sense of security of control.

I think we do it from this place of needing to control how we get from A to B. But challenge here is that nothing is linear. Nothing in our nursing world is linear and controllable. So in essence, we're trying to control the uncontrollable. Even in our day to day work, nothing that we do is within our control.

The only thing that we do that's within our control is how we think. How we feel, how we act, and what experience we create for ourselves in the world. Everything else is in our circle of concern. It's outside of us, and we can, manipulate and maybe adapt how we respond to those things. And we can influence those things, that's what I was looking for, influence.

But we [00:03:00] cannot control them. And from day dot, I feel like we've been told this lie. That we have some superpower of control over our partners. Our relatives, our family, our kids, our managers, our patients, we have no control. So all we can do in trying to identify and work out how we get to where we want to be is to release control.

It seems counterintuitive, but we need to release the control. We can loosely plan where we're going. We can map out the steps that might get us to the goal, but we also want to be open and flexible in our approach. to achieving our goals.

The Power of Diverse Experiences: A Case Study

For example, many of you know Kylie Ward. Now, I don't know Kylie Ward personally, and I've never met her.

But I have stalked her LinkedIn profile. Because I've stalked people's LinkedIn profiles. And I love seeing what people have done to get to where they want to be in their career. And I bet if you asked somebody like Kylie Ward, for those of you that don't know [00:04:00] who she is, she's the Australian College of Nursing CEO, And for those of you that like haven't looked at her LinkedIn profile, when you look at Kylie's profile, you see this diverse, combination of experiences opportunities.

Some seem a little left field, some seem aligned. And what you see through her profile on LinkedIn, I'm sure she exudes this as you get to know her as well, is this diverse combination of rich and diverse, Experiences in nursing, bedside, leadership, education, outside of nursing, in policy, in legislation, politics, in education, in national governing bodies.

You see this diverse, beautiful colouring of different experiences. And if Kylie had a very fixed mindset about how she got from A to B, she probably wouldn't be the amazing human that she is today. She wouldn't have all these incredible experiences. So, when we have our eyes set on the prize and we're very fixated on how we get there, we potentially might, [00:05:00] without us really knowing, subconsciously miss out on opportunities that were amazing for us, but we had our blinkers on.

It's like the example when a surgeon, we all joke about this in nursing, right, surgeon comes to look at the patient that they've just completed a knee operation on, and they only look at the knee. They miss the rest of the picture. They miss opportunities to use their diverse, amazing skill set to help the patient in other ways that are not just focused on cutting the knee wide open and replacing it.

The same is true in our nursing careers.

The Pitfalls of Linear Thinking in Career Progression

When we really are fixated on, I'm starting here, and I'm going to be in ICU for a year, then I'm going to do my postgrad, and then I'm going to do my masters, and then I'm going to become a nurse practitioner, and then I'm going to become the CN, and blah blah blah blah blah.

As we move down that pathway, we don't allow for flexibility. We don't allow for our personal needs and wants to evolve and grow. As you build and grow your career, your needs and wants differ. They change. And When we're fixated on it needs to be like this, we cause ourself more [00:06:00] mental and emotional harm than we would if we were just open to the opportunities.

Embracing Change and the Grief Process

I coached some yesterday on this and we were talking about how their vision for where they were going has changed and that that is part of a grief process. You're grieving who you thought you would be. You're also grieving who you are currently because in order to make space for a new version of you, That's on the way to the goal, you've got to grieve the loss of who you were.

Because who you were got you where, to where you wanted to be. But who you want to be in the future needs a new evolution. It needs a new version of you. Some of us just do this subconsciously, many of us need to consciously work through it. And that's where coaching is awesome. So for me in my career, I used to really fixate on how to, how do I get there?

How do I get there? And what I did was I put all of my power into the external things, thinking that they would fulfill me and make me feel whole and complete, and get me to the goal faster, quicker, easier. Getting a master's, getting a [00:07:00] postgraduate qualification, you know, brown nosing my manager, all of the things that I did in order to be able to get.

Now, I thought that it would be linear. I thought I would just build my career up through ICU and become a nurse educator. But that's not what happened for me. Because I was open to the opportunities that presented in front of me. And I built trust and capacity within my system to flexibly respond and say, you know what?

This is so left field, moving from ICU to, well it's not that left field, but moving from ICU to work as an advanced life support trainer, it felt like a huge jump for me. And it might feel like that for you too if you're navigating a change. So, being able to flexibly respond to that, mentally and emotionally.

And our nervous system feels like it's not a complete threat to our whole existence, allows us to take that opportunity and to create and open new doors, new pathways you never considered possible. This is reflected in a lot of the work that we do.

The Role of Discomfort in Achieving Goals

A lot of the coaching that we offer [00:08:00] through the podcast and through our work is all about helping people build their capacity for discomfort and uncertainty.

To build their capacity, to experience the world as it is. Instead of fighting against it, we accept it for what it is and we build resilience within our internal mental and emotional systems so that we can flexibly respond in a way that serves us better. Always about us, but it serves us better. There is no point going out into the world, busting your guts for 20 years, waiting for the time to come, on this path that you planned out, that a previous version of you planned, and now you've got three kids, and you don't want that anymore.

Because you want a work life balance, and you want Monday to Friday. That old version of you tried to set you up for success, but in thinking that that's the only way to do it, by having linear thinking and not creative and open and critical thinking, we actively block ourselves from opportunities.

The Importance of Critical Thinking and Emotional Resilience

So I want you to think about where in your nursing career, where in your life, do you think [00:09:00] that it's linear and that it should just be step by step, very clearly laid out, and this is the path.

Where can you introduce a bit of mental and emotional flexibility, some nervous system flexibility? Where can you sit a little longer with the discomfort? of not knowing how you're going to get to the goal while still believing 100 percent that you will get to a version of that goal. I could never have imagined that I would be living in Paris on my 12th year of being a nurse, living in Paris, travelling to 10 different countries, working from Portugal, working from Miami, from New York, coaching nurses globally online, making money online.

There was no how, there was no path that led me to the, like, there was no how to guide. I just was so open to exploring opportunities.

Creating Your Own Path and Embracing Opportunities

We talk about this a lot, being opportune, and it's really about building capacity within your nervous system to sit with the discomfort and the uncertainty of knowing that [00:10:00] it's okay to take a left field step, it's okay to take a side step, or to take a totally different specialty pathway, and trust that you can still get to the goal.

Right, what I think makes an incredible high performing nurse is a diverse variety of experiences lived experiences, personal and professional, the ability to think critically and creatively on tap, on demand, the ability to regulate and manage your nervous system, the ability to feel all of the feelings on the human emotional experience spectrum and not think that something has gone wrong and that there's something wrong with you, to take actions without you knowing that the result is guaranteed, and then to live and learn from that place of like, I've tried it, I'm so proud that I've tried this.

This didn't give me the result that I wanted and now I'm going to re evaluate and try again. I think that when we think about how we get to a goal, we need to ditch linear thinking and we need to open ourselves up to creative, [00:11:00] opportunistic thinking and action taking so you can create the nursing life and career that you want.

The Role of Emotions in Pursuing Your Goals

The only thing that is stopping so many of you that listen to this podcast from doing what you want to do is the emotional experience of going after what it is that you want. And I know, like, it's hard. Feeling our feelings and our emotions is difficult. But there is no dream life without going through the discomfort.

It's impossible. It does not exist. Everybody that wants to do something... Whether you want to work on the floor, and that's what you want to do, or whether you want to build your nursing career to be a director of nursing, or maybe you want to be an academic, or maybe you want to be a nursepreneur and build something online, or set up an agency.

Whatever you want to do, in growing and developing towards those goals, the path is not linear. The curveballs. It's going to be really difficult and challenging. You're going to have lots of thoughts that don't serve you. You're going to have lots of feelings that come up that are just experiences [00:12:00] that you've, drawn from in your past lived experiences.

And you're going to have to navigate through them. I truly believe that the missing piece in nursing and humanity is our ability to critically think and to feel and allow ourselves to feel all of the emotions. everything that we experience because our dream life is on the other side of feeling and sitting with and experiencing the discomfort.

So many people think that we need more confidence. Before we do something. Confidence is an emotion, but we don't need more confidence. We need to be courageous We need to take courageous action in order to then feel confident in something that we pursue moving forwards And trust and know that the thing that seems a little left field that maybe feels like it's pulling you off path Maybe that is the path for you.

Maybe like there is no off path. Maybe there is no path Maybe just maybe you create your own path I was [00:13:00] saying this yesterday to the person that I was coaching and they had a little aha moment and they were like, oh my goodness you are so right, this is my path there is only one version of me. I'm trying to create a result in my life in my nursing career based on other people's dreams and expectations of me, not what I want.

I want you to really sit with that. So powerful as we move into 2024, what do you really need and want from your nursing career? Who are you without the label of nurse? How can you integrate all of these questions and these answers into establishing what nursing looks like for you in 2024? You don't have to make huge changes, but you might open yourself up to being more flexible and more open to opportunities that present themselves.

Knowing that the worst thing that can happen if you do take a left field opportunity or a slight deviation from your path, the worst thing that can ever happen is an emotion. [00:14:00] The worst thing that can ever happen to you when you go after what you want or something that arises that is an opportunity is an emotion.

And if you build resilience and you build your skill set in experiencing emotions and not making them mean something about you or your capability or your worth You, my friend, are unstoppable.

The Power of Failure and Rejection in Personal Growth

When I first started my nursing business, I was not open to feeling all the emotions. I would get rejection after rejection after rejection.

My coach said, you need to fail a hundred times in order for you to be able to grow and develop and to build resilience. I had never failed in my life before. I'd never really experienced quote unquote failure. And I was failing day after day after day. But through that experience, through being willing to expose myself to failure and rejection, now I have great skill sets and now I'm able to navigate rejection like that.

I don't care. I do not care. I still have thoughts about it. I'm still so curious as to why people [00:15:00] reject what I have to offer or what I say. But I also am now able to hold space for myself and hold space for them to see that that's just part of the human experience.

Conclusion: Discomfort as the Currency of Your Dreams

Not everybody will like what I have to say and that's totally fine And I don't need to make their disapproval mean something about me So the same is true in your nursing career when we can sit with the discomfort and we can sit with not knowing how we're Going to make something possible but trust and believe in our capabilities to do the thing Anyway, you're unstoppable my friend and I want to leave you with this.

It's my favorite quote from my coach and she says Discomfort is the currency of your dreams Discomfort is the currency of your dreams. On the other side of discomfort is the dream life, the dream career, the dream business, the dream work life balance that you always wanted. We have to be courageous enough to move through the discomfort in order to unlock and to make those dreams available and possible for us.

Moving into 2024. I'd love to know what you [00:16:00] think about this episode. Let me know if you're gonna shed the how and Flexibly and openly allow yourself to explore what is possible for you next year and to alleviate that pressure of needing to have it all mapped out and stop lying to yourself in control of our careers, our patients well being.

We're not in control of any of that any of it We are only in control of ourselves all the time