Busyness is not something that we need to or should indulge in because other people expect us to have 24 hours worth of work done in 8 hours. Let them have that expectation of you. Let them give you shade when they hand over to you. It shouldn't be that way, but let them indulge in that.

It says more about them and their psyche and what they're going through mentally and emotionally than it ever will say about you.

hello and welcome back to the High Performance Nursing Podcast. I hope you're all well. Today I'm talking all things busyness. Busyness versus boredom. And the reason why I'm talking about this today is I've been seeing this come up a lot in coaching with our nurses and myself and I saw it on one of, you know, my favourite Nursing Facebook groups, and I wanted to talk about it on a serious note and help us like explore this concept of business and this idea that we can't experience boredom as clinicians in our career and in our lives.

If you're anything like me, boredom has never really been an option. Being bored as a clinician. There are so many stories that are signed to that experience of boredom. I remember sitting at the nurse's station being like, what do I do next? And someone yelling at me being like, what are you doing sitting down?

Get back to work. There's things to clean. There's things to do. Can you resonate? I think that it's not. Something that we talk about very much this lack of ability for us to just sit with boredom. So I wanted to dive into it today and I wanted to talk about it utilizing the CTFAR model, the self coaching model that we talk about.

And as we move forward over the next few weeks, you're going to notice some things that I'm going to be talking about. I'm currently doing an advanced training in nervous system resilience. Trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. I know it sounds joyous, doesn't it? But it's actually fascinating, and I'm starting to piece together all of these things that I have struggled with personally for years, so I'm doing it selfishly for me, but I'm also doing it because What I've found to be true is that sometimes our thoughts, it's just not easy for us to change our thoughts.

Especially when we have been, or are currently in, a chronic state of high stress fight or flight. Which is every nurse, right? Like, I love all of you, but we're all chronically stressed. Because we have literally been trained from the beginning of our career. To indulge in this overwhelming stress, this need to serve everybody, but ourselves, and I'm starting to piece it all together, and I'm so excited to bring more of this to you and to really have a spin on this podcast of, okay, we can talk about how you can make all the money and how you can do all the things and how you can build and grow your career or your business, but let's talk about how we actually look after ourselves, because I'm finding time and time again, no matter what I achieve, what goals I hit in my career, in my life, in my business, I keep learning the same lessons, which is, your nervous system doesn't have capacity for this.

You are stressing yourself out. You don't know how to sit with space and time and just be quote unquote bored, and you always feel the need to be busy. I feel like we're at church. Who agrees with me? Who can resonate with that? Even your days off are jam motherfucking packed! Because you are so conditioned to believing that we have to be busy all the time.

So, I digress, but I'm really excited about talking about all this stuff. And I'm excited to see what the next six months in this nervous system resilience training brings up. And trust me, you'll hear about it. don't want you to stick around for it. Now, before we dive into this episode, I just wanted to say hello to a couple of people because I've had some beautiful messages from my episode last week.

And just amazing people that are listening. Our listenership is growing, which is so amazing. And you all keep telling me. How much you tell other people about the podcast, which I just love. I just cannot express how much it means to me. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. I wanted to say hi to everybody that's listening in Korea.

I've noticed that I get an update every day about who's listening where. Like, I don't know who is listening, but which countries. And we've been in the top 100 in Korea for self improvement. I can't imagine. Maybe there's heaps of podcasts. I don't know. I'm not gonna go there. But hello, welcome. It's so lovely to have you here.

Also I wanted to just do a shout out to a couple of people that messaged me this week. And that are listening to the podcast and I know you listen religiously. So I just wanted to say thank you, Laura, for listening. Laura and I connected probably about a year ago. We've done some coaching and Laura's incredible and she has her own podcast, which is pretty awesome.

I will tag it in the show notes. So Laura, thank you so much for listening and thanks for the support. Caitlin Caitlin messaged me this week. She's just completed our interview success course and she slayed it and she landed her dream graduate nursing job. So I'm so proud of you. How amazing for all of you that have messaged me that have used our free guides, our interview success course.

You've been in our GCLP. Our GCLPers are killing it. And Emma, well done, congratulations on landing your job in paediatrics in Queensland. Like, what is happening, people? It's so exciting. It literally, this is why I do what I do, helping nurses see the potential. And this nervous system stuff, and what I'm going to talk about today, is really going to help you take it to the next level.

Today is more about just you just asking yourself some questions and exploring where this could be true for you. And just, I just want to invite you to be open, open, curious and really just think about how this applies to you. So this post that I saw this week, let's get back to talking about being busy and being bored in nursing.

This post I saw on the Facebook group is a great post. It's a great question. And I think that it's one that many of us have asked in our careers at some point in time. And the whole premise of it was, I'm in a job. I've just finished a certification. And I'm I have some things going on in life and I'm getting to a point where I'm feeling bored in my job and I'm looking for another course to do.

And of course the comments were flooded with like, why don't you do this course? Why don't you do that course? And in come I. And I said, why is boredom a problem? What if we would just allow ourselves to sit with boredom? What if boredom is exactly what you're supposed to be? Feeling and experiencing right now.

What if you can increase your capacity for boredom, my friend? What if it's okay to be bored? What are you making it mean that you're bored? Right? Like, there are so many questions that we can ask ourselves when we really tune in and get curious about what could be true for us in experiencing boredom.

Now I have my own theory about this and there's not been a response and I don't Comment on these posts for responses. A comment to give a different perspective. So if you're a SamD that loves commenting and is building a nursing business and you're like in these groups, go and offer value ahead of time.

Go and talk to people, go and question and curiously, kindly, respectfully question their beliefs and see what you come up with. it's super fun. I'm a bit weird, but I enjoy it and I enjoy adding value and I, you know, there's absolutely no intention there. It's just to help people see it through a different lens.

So I asked all these questions and then I was thinking about it today because I've been running around the house. Liam's traditional Saturday routine is I'll wake up and I'm like, I've got the whole weekend. And then within three seconds. I'm frazzled because I'm like, oh my god, I've got so much to do and then I need to clean the house I've got to go to the markets.

I've got to get the shopping done. I've got to go to the gym It's a weekend. There's no excuse and I don't even have children. I don't know how any of you that have kids do it How do you live? How do you do life? You're incredible I take my hat off to you But I say that because as I was running frantically around the house this morning during my cleaning routine Luke's sitting on the sofa and I'm like, oh it must be nice.

I Get into that place where when I'm busy Right? When I create busyness for myself, I get into this, like, resentful, nasty, horrible place where I turn into a demon. And it made me laugh because it made me think about when I was a clinician running about the unit, and anytime you ask somebody how their day is, I want you to test this at work.

How's your day been? Oh, busy. Oh my god, it's been so busy. Right? And look, it's factually true. Like, we could argue it's factually true. We are pretty busy. But I think we've been conditioned to just be chronically busy. And I wanted to just plant that seed, or that thought for you today, is how could that be true for you?

What else could you be experiencing other than busyness? And I used to joke about this as a nurse unit manager with my team, I'd say, okay, everybody, you know, we've got 30 patients, we're going to have a great day. I'd really try and prep us at the start of the shift, try and get us into a state where we're feeling supportive, we're feeling ready to rock and roll, even though the world might be falling down around us.

And I'd say, you know, it's going to be busy, but today, like, busyness equals productivity. We are here to work. Like, we're here to go. We're here to serve our patients. And some people would roll their eyes and they'd be like, here he goes again. But other people would like, really like that reframing of busyness.

Because I don't know about you, but when I think of busyness, As a clinician, it doesn't bring up a feeling that feels good to me. It's like a hurried, rushed, unsafe emotion. When I think, oh my god, I'm busy, I'm so busy today, it creates this Like, lack, feeling like this scarcity, there's not enough time, I'm so worried and concerned about what I'm going to be able to create today for myself and for my patients.

And whilst, you know, that could be 100 percent factually true, your day is like hot mess express, I want you to think about how does it feel for you when we are running around and we are really indulging in this busyness. And what I want you to think about is what are you thinking and feeling that's creating busyness.

I have an apology to make. Last week, in the podcast, in my rant, in my one hour preach, for those of you that stuck around, thank you, I spoke about busyness being a feeling. And then my amazing podcast team sent me a clip, and I looked at it, and I went, Busyness isn't a feeling. Busyness is an action. If we plug it into the CTFAR, Circumstance Thought Feeling Action Result Model, busyness is an action.

So, apologies for the confusion last week. I did not put that post out because I thought, no, my coach friends that listen to this as well are going to be like, Liam. Were you drinking when you recorded this episode? So, we all make mistakes, I'm sure none of you even noticed, but I just wanted to put it out there and correct it, because busyness is an action that comes from our feelings and our thoughts.

Okay? Maybe we're thinking, I don't have enough time to get everything done today and we're feeling scarce and worried and our actions is like, we're just so busy. We go into hyper busy mode and we run wild and we're delegating and we're trying to do all of the things. Instead of us just thinking like, Yeah, I have 8 hours today, I have 6 patients.

It's, yeah, it's gonna be busy today, but I only have 8 hours. So I'm feeling like confident that I can tackle my workload, my allocated workload, within the eight hours. Now I know some of you are going to say, but then what happens when John and Jane come on shift and then they, bitch at me? That's a whole different ballgame, and that's got more to say about them than it does ever have anything to do with you.

Okay, so for the grads that are listening, Busyness is not something that we need to or should indulge in because other people expect us to have 24 hours worth of work done in 8 hours. Let them have that expectation of you. Let them give you shade when they hand over to you. It shouldn't be that way, but let them indulge in that.

It says more about them and their psyche and what they're going through mentally and emotionally than it ever will say about you. Okay? So, I just wanted to rectify that because busyness is an action. And it comes through our thoughts and our feelings. So I really love the reframe, as I mentioned earlier, that busyness, like when we go to work, like we are busy.

That's kinda like the point, right? And I think sometimes I, like, busy shame people. Like, I used to do this with Luke, and I used to be like, but really, like, what do you do all day? I'm so confused. Like, you sit So terrible. You sit in an office? And you, like, you send some emails, you go to some meetings, and I was, like, so perplexed.

Because I'd never worked in that world before, and I just thought, but how's that busy? And the more that I learn about my nervous system and stress, and it's so hilarious, like, we learn all about this at uni, but we don't implement it, we don't apply it to ourselves, the physiology and the anatomy of it.

of stress and nervous system regulation and dysregulation. And the more that I learn about it, the more I'm like, Oh my goodness, that was me coming at Luke from a dysregulated place where I have been trained and conditioned that stress is a normal state of being. Without even knowing it. Think back to your student days.

Think back to being on placement. You've got to prove yourself. You've got to prove your worth. You've got to demonstrate. You're going to do all of these things. You're going to jump through all the hurdles and the hoops. You're going to work for free for three years. No wonder our grads are getting to, you know, their first day on placement and they're like completely dysregulated.

Most of them, I read a study recently, 50 percent of graduate nurses leave within the first three months. Oh my goodness, 50 percent leave within the first three months. And it's because I believe, now that I'm doing this work and looking into the data and the pathophysiology of stress and nervous system resilience, it's all to do with the fact that we're coming into this profession dysregulated.

And I mean that with love and kindness. Like, we can all agree we're dysregulated, we're chronically stressed. And when I say we, I'm generalising, and if Brown ever listens to this podcast, I apologise, Brené. It's a global we. But that has been my lived experience across three countries, you know, 15 jobs and 12 years is that we are kind of like a group of dysregulated, beautiful, amazing human beings.

And the sooner that we can kind of like see that and realize that, the quicker that we can become more regulated and we can look after ourselves more. And we can then look at how we show up day to day, how we indulge in the busyness, and what we make all of that mean. Probably getting a little too deep, but I just wanted to touch on that because there's connection points there.

And I think that what I'm learning slowly is that through my career as a clinician, not only have I been in a dysregulated state probably most of the time but I've brought that into my personal life, into my relationships. Into my relationship with myself, into my relationship with my body, my self-love, my self-care.

I think it's why a lot of us are resistant to self-care and to giving back to ourselves. I think that it's not until we have that first episode of burnout, and this is just my hypothesis, it's not evidence-based, but it's not until we have that first burnout that kinda like first dark night of the soul where we begin to see how dysregulated we've become.

It makes complete sense to me because some people are running around the units like a headless tuke, right? They're so busy all the time, and they've got that such high energy, high stress state. And we all know we can only run like that for a certain amount of time. And then we hit a brick wall.

But I think what's unique and different about clinicians is that we have been kind of trained to operate at a chronic stress level for a prolonged period of time. And busy has become part of our language. And busy... In my mind, it has a negative connotation. It's like, I'm arguing with reality. It shouldn't be busy, but it is busy.

Like, I used to have staff that would say, I work Sundays because it's not so busy, and then I'd get a report from the after hours manager that would say, Oh Liam, your staff yesterday were like, complaining how busy it was on a Sunday. Like, they thought it shouldn't be so busy on a Sunday. I just was like, don't we close the doors on a Friday or something, like what happens?

Like why would we think that we shouldn't be busy? Because we are busy, because it's our job to be busy. Now, are we overly busy? Are we working in the unsafe patient loads? Do we have increased demands? Should we be paid more? 100 percent preach. Amen. I'm with you. Okay. But I'm just talking on the micro level just for you.

How do we lay out and add and compound to the busyness that we already experience? Are we making our busyness more complex than it needs to be? And how can you make that connection between being in that chronic? State of fight or flight, and our actions are showing up as busy all the time. So, as I ran around the house this morning, busy, busy billy, I'm cleaning the house for the last two hours.

I'm looking at Luke and I'm saying, Oh my God, what's he doing? Why is he doing that? But it's like, I think we forget sometimes, I certainly forget, that we choose our busyness. I chose to do that. No one forced me. No one like held me at gunpoint with the vacuum and were like, You gotta do this cleaning. I chose to do it.

I chose to do it at that intensity, that level, for that period of time. Right? And I chose that. And I think that's maybe one of the first steps of like self regulation is like, I chose this busy. You know, like reclaim a little bit of the power. Because when we're thinking like we're busy because of all of the things external to us, we give away a bit of our power.

So, I wanted to just let you think about busyness and how that plays up in your life, where it comes in. And, like, what if it's okay to be busy? What if busyness is totally normal? Are you shaming yourself for being busy? Are you beating yourself up for being busy? Like I do. You shouldn't be busy. I argue with my own reality and then I realize, oh my goodness, I created the busyness.

I do it in my business all the time. I'm like, oh my god, I've got to create this new guide. I'm like, no one said create the guide, Liam. You wanted to create it. You wanted to put it out there. So I have this like internal chat with myself. So I'd love to hear from you what And then on the other end of the spectrum is boredom.

Now boredom, boredom is a feeling, I'm pretty sure that boredom is a feeling, it's a state, okay? And I wanted to plant the seed of like, thinking about boredom, like what if it's okay to be bored? What if the reason why we really struggle to sit with boredom is because we have been conditioned to be highly stressed, fight or flight?

In active, super active mode all of the time, even on our days off and boredom has these connotations, maybe again, negative connotations or connections, neural pathways that we've within our psyche over time, where to be quote unquote bored or to feel or experience boredom means What? What are you telling yourself?

What does your brain make it mean? What does your subconscious brain make being bored mean? So if boredom is a feeling, what's the thought that's creating that feeling of boredom? And are we allowing ourselves to actually experience the boredom, right? So boredom for me is a challenge. I will tell you here and now.

I struggle to just sit here and be bored. I am buffering, or emotionally numbing, or mentally numbing myself with all of the things. Okay? Legal things. All of the legal things. Like TikTok, Instagram. I'm always online. I'm always looking at stuff. I'm always active on my phone. I'm in my emails. Maybe I'm reading a book.

Maybe I've got a couple of minutes and I quickly clean the house. Then, and I'm not saying this is bad, I'm just saying let's raise our awareness to it. And let's just get curious about what would it be like if we just started creating space and allowing ourselves to be bored without numbing ourselves with all of these things that we think we should or could be doing when the reality is we get to decide all the time.

We get to decide. Now, some of you, your lifestyle, are led and sometimes dictated by little ones and family members. And that's a totally, like, you know, the same rule applies to an extent, but of course you've got other things you need to mean with your loved ones. But how could this be true for you?

How could you indulge in boredom and allow boredom, and just sit there with the boredom, and... See what comes up for you. What is your brain telling you about being bored? Why do we need to go out and get another certificate when we have a bit of space? What if we looked at boredom as this space where we create brilliance?

What if when you're bored, and you're in a job that's tedious, and you're doing it for the next six months, but you're working towards a bigger goal, like setting up a business? I know some of you are thinking of that. You're in a job where you don't like it, you're feeling bored, you're not challenged, but you've kind of got this future goal, and you're working towards it.

What if boredom is a perfect emotion for you to be feeling like that? What if boredom is what creates the next move for you? What if creating space, and just allowing yourself to be bored, unlocks the next level of genius? I have personally found this to be true. And this year in particular, I was just talking to Luke about this last night, I was just talking to him about the fact that, this year, I have slowed down.

I might look frantically busy from out there, but we've done a lot this year. I've travelled a lot, I've been all over the place, and we've been super busy with work and our amazing nurses. I've created more space for myself. I allow myself to go and be bored. I go to the gym. Sometimes I don't even stay connected to like a podcast or a YouTube video or anything, and I'm just like bored in the gym.

Right, maybe I'm not even really doing a lot. But in the moments where I just allow boredom, and I create space for boredom as a clinician who is so used to being so busy all the time, I begin to get answers. I don't know. Call it woo woo, call it spiritual, call it whatever you want to call it. Call it brain BS, call it placebo, I don't know, I don't really care.

It's what happens for me, and maybe the same is true for you. I'm a firm believer in, like, when we're so busy... And we're looking for the answers, they're not going to come. So many of our amazing high performance nursing community come to me and they say, Liam, I just really don't know what to do with my career.

And before that, they've told me the story about how they've done all of these things and they've been all over the place and they've, you know, they've been in these high stress positions and they've just never created space. And I used to be against telling people to just quit a job. and leave, and create some space.

But now, now you'll hear me say it more often, like, quit the job if you can. If you can do agency or do something else, create some space for yourself. Allow the universe slash world slash people around you to guide you, to lead you. to the next level of you. I think when we're so caught up in busyness, whether you're a grad, or whether you're a seasoned, amazing clinician, when we're caught up in the busyness and that cycle that we've been so conditioned into believing is just the norm, but when you look around and you go to a party and no one else is talking about their work like you are because no one else is like chronically activated and just in this constant state of stress.

And trauma and compassion fatigue and burnout, then like, you know, it's kind of like a little red flag for us. It's a little sign. Maybe we need to create some boredom. Maybe we can indulge in creating some space for ourselves. Yeah. So when I think about boredom and why we don't allow it, I have a bit of a theory.

And I think it's because of what I've just said there. But I also think it's because we... Don't talk about this enough in the sense that I am beginning to see through my recent trainings that we, as clinicians, we see things that other people don't see. And we don't have any kind of mechanisms of support and debrief unless you have an amazing...

And through over time, we have these little traumatic, I say little, like not lightly, I'm just, you know, phrase, but we have these traumatic imprints. We have these compounding traumatic imprints that happen day to day in our professional life that, you know, contribute to this state of fight or flight and the stress response.

It creates a physiological stress response within us. And as we build our careers and as we. Build and grow and we move to the next levels. It kind of becomes harder to create and find space to be bored, because you're just adding more to your plate. We moved to CN level, we need to get a certification, we need to do X, Y and Z, we should, we could, yada yada.

I moved to CNC, now I've got a team of 30 people, and 50 people and 30 staff and a budget of 5 million, and now I've got even more little microtrauma imprints, and I'm burning out because I haven't built the capacity within my nervous system to be able to manage this. And I've been in high stress for years, maybe decades for some of you.

And I've never really had that lot, I've never really had that time because I've been working so hard to get to this point. Not even thinking or considering all of the stresses that we have in our personal lives. Can you see how that could be true as we build our careers? That we kind of move further away from allowing ourselves to experience boredom as an emotion?

Just sitting with it and allowing boredom, creating some space for boredom in your calendar, your day, your week, your month. As we build our career, we just kind of move further away from that until we are forced. And we're forced through Barnett. We're forced through experiencing the dark night of the soul, or whatever that looks like for you.

We get physically ill. We have physical manifestations in our body of this continued, persistent, chronic fight or flight high stress. I just made this connection recently and this might make a connection for you. In learning about chronic stress and being in a state of dysregulation, probably for the last 12 years, if not longer, because, you know, trauma didn't start when I was an arse.

Trauma was part of my life as a kid. We all have micro and macro trauma imprints on our, our, personality and our psyche and our experience on this earth from the minute that we're born. We just don't really talk about it, right? And as we built, as I've built my, my life, my career, what I noticed was when I started up leveling my career from clinician on the floor, where I felt pretty safe and I felt like I knew what I was doing, even as a new nurse between year one and year kind of three, four, when I moved to Australia and the first job that I took was the next level up, which was a clip.

An advanced life support trainer, my nervous system, like, whoo, hit a brick wall. And it was almost like my body started telling me signs and symptoms that I did not pay attention to. For example, when I took that job, and I had more time to be bored, I had more time on my plate, I didn't have to be busy, I literally just had to put on an advanced life support training once a month.

Once a month, that's all I had to do for like 20 people. But what did I do? I couldn't sit still. I went out and found different projects within the hospital to take on, which was great for my CV, but I burnt out multiple times in that role. My nervous system didn't have the capacity. I hadn't trained myself to manage the next level of stress.

So it's super interesting. I'm just riffing here, but the more that I think about, do we need experience in order to move to the next level in our careers? I would say no. I would say experience is nice and it's great to have, but I think that what we need to focus on is how can we build, and this is our responsibility, we can't ask for it from, from the hospital.

They're never going to give it to us. That's the reason why I say we can't ask for it. We can advocate, but they're not going to give it to us anytime soon. So we have to go out and create it for ourselves. Let's think about instead of going out and getting experience, Which you're accumulating anyway.

What if it's all about us building capacity within our nervous system? What if it's about us allowing ourselves to feel the full human emotional spectrum? You know what I'd say. What if it's about us feeling bored and sitting with it and it being okay? And us not making it mean anything. But us noticing 10 minutes.

And how can we normalise that? How can we just notice it and allow it and process it? I think maybe I think that nervous system like resilience building is like super complex but I think it's just actually getting in touch with our emotions. It's getting out of our mind and into our body. It's getting out of that busy mentality and allowing ourselves to feel centred, safe, compassionate, loving, respectful, bored.

Tediously bored. It's allowing ourselves to just experience the full human emotional spectrum. Because if we haven't allowed ourselves to feel that, and we have to fill our time and space with collecting more things, when we add another layer of crap in our careers, another layer of life and professional development and all of that, We're just compounding the traumas, we're compounding the compassion fatigue, we're compounding the burnout, we're compounding the nervous system dysregulation because we haven't mastered level 1 so we go to master 2, level 2 and we wonder why we're burning out.

And we start to make it mean that we're not capable. But we are capable, we just haven't built the bandwidth yet. And I think the bandwidth comes with us getting back in touch with ourselves. Because what is the first thing that happens when somebody burns out? They have this like, come to Jesus moment.

They're like, what am I doing? Where am I going? They have this internal process. Is this for me anymore? Should I keep going this way? Should I keep doing this? What if I never want to be a nurse again? And we sort of question our existence. But what if it's just because we haven't allowed ourselves to process, allow the trauma, process the trauma, not allow it, but process the trauma and to experience being bored, to experience the full human emotional spectrum and allow ourselves to see that busyness is the hard that we choose.

I choose to be busy today. Some days we don't want to choose busy, but we are busy anyway. So how can we tell the story in a way that's empowering for us in a way that protects our psyche? Because in telling the story that it's busy, we might just compound the trauma. Oh my God, work is so busy. Do we say it in a negative lines or do we say it like, well, your work was busy because work is supposed to be busy.

It was more busy than it normally is, but I'm really proud that I protected my space. Myself, I held space for myself, held space for my clients. my patients, and I was able to navigate that. Look at how much I've grown. I think sometimes when we start, we think that we should have all the emotional bandwidth and the mental and emotional capacity to deal with all of the things, but it's just not how it works.

It's something we built. We build mental and emotional wealth throughout our careers. I wish I knew that when I started. I had all these big goals, and what I've realised is that, like, the universe won't give you the goal, it won't allow you to progress to the next level of the game, unless you have built the capacity to receive.

And when we're stuck in busyness, we have no capacity to receive. We have absolutely zero space for receiving. We don't create it. So your homework, if you're keen, and if you're still here, is to go out into your personal and professional life. And I want you to think about the next time that your brain wants to tell you to go and get another certification, do something more, go and train more, and listen, I'm taking this lesson as well, even though I'm doing a certification.

I'm doing it from a place of curiosity, self compassion, and growth. And I'm doing it from a place of Continued personal development, not just continued professional development. I'm selfishly doing this course for me, but I know there will be so many strategic byproducts for all of you listening and all of our amazing clients.

I've already used this in our coaching to help our nurses see that nothing's gone wrong. Maybe you're just dispassionate because you're dysregulated. How can we get you regulated again? Let's start the journey of regulating your nervous system, your mental and emotional well being. Let's stop focusing externally and let's look inwards.

Like when we do this inward work, no one can ever take it away from us. It only builds and compounds, it's like an investment in you. And we need regulated nurses. We need regulated clinicians. Our patients don't need us dysregulated, and there's so much data, and I cannot wait to bring it to you, about the impact of being dysregulated on other people, and the results that we create with and for them.

Oh my goodness, it's, it blows my mind. It makes me really think and reconsider how we're training nurses, how we support nurses. We have one of the toughest jobs on the earth. People come in and clap for us in the street, but we don't need clapping. We need support. We need to be able to create homeostasis, safety within our culture, within ourselves, within how we treat ourselves, within how we treat each other.

And that doesn't come from A dysregulated state where we're dysregulated and we have two dysregulated nurses screaming and shouting at each other or giving each other shade during handover. Think about how you could even implement that thought process when you're at work. Not in a nasty, you know, vindictive, horrible way, but in a like, oh wow, like.

Wow, like compassion for that individual, maybe they're in a dysregulated state, maybe their nervous system is reacting right now and it's got nothing to do with me, but they're in a process and a journey of building their mental and emotional capacity to deal with the stresses, FYI, the stresses that 99.

9 percent of the population never have to deal with, okay, so that's what we're signing up for, but if we stay in a chronic state of fight or flight, In high stress? Oh my goodness, like we're cutting years of our life. We're not sleeping, we're overeating, we're doing all the things. So, the sooner that we can realise that we're dysregulated from a place of love and compassion and self care, the quicker that we can then start to build that capacity.

I know a lot of you don't like the word resilience, but I think that the word resilience is a beautiful word to really capture what it is that we're working towards. We are building our own mental and emotional resilience. For life. You can choose not to do it, but life's just going to be really hard.

Right, and if we think about what we talked about last week, like, when we're building that mental and emotional resilience, we are allowing ourselves to feel harder, we're allowing ourselves to feel all of the things, to suffer less. Because when we're dysregulated, my experience has been suffering. I am suffering.

My body aches, my mind is racing. I'm, I'm horrible to other people. I'm nasty. Right? I am. I've been growing out of that and I've been building and I've been trying my best, but I'm sure you can find places in your life where that could be true. I'm reactive. I'm so reactive when I'm dysregulated.

But when I'm in homeostasis, and I'm in that kind of middle ground, and I'm like, if you think of your modified early warning scoring system, I'm like between the flags. And everything's normal, and I'm not calling a med team. Imagine if we applied the same thinking to our state of well being, our nervous system state.

So, we've talked about a lot. Busyness. Busyness is great, but what if we're chronically busy and that that's a little red flag for us to pay attention to? Homeostasis is the goal. How do we get there? That's a work in progress and that's something that we'll cover in future episodes. Boredom? What if boredom is perfect?

What if for those of you that are just on the... cusp of a change in your career and you're feeling bored and you're feeling a little like, you know, itchy feet? What if that's okay? Allow it. Notice your brain when it runs wild. Notice your brain when it's like wanting you to go and Google. Get out of your mind and getting into your body.

Sit with the boredom. What does it feel like? Are you safe when you experience boredom? What happens when you're bored? What does your brain tell you to do? Just be so curious and non judgmental about it and see what comes up for you. And report back to me, tell me, I love messages, come and tell me what this has brought up for you in terms of your nursing career and your nursing life as a nurse, as a human.

And the last thing that I want to just mention to you here is I touched on this earlier. I want you to think about with the last couple of months left of this year, how can I invest in continued personal development? versus continued professional development. Here's the thing. I think that CPD, continued professional development, is amazing.

We all need to do it, of course. But I'm going to say it. I think that APRA needs to mandate 20 hours or whatever the rule is for CPD 20 hours of continued personal development per year. And the reason why I say that is for everything that I've talked about today, and on the 140 episodes on this podcast.

I think the reason that we're burnt out and we're facing the crisis that we face in healthcare is because we are not getting the support, the mental and the emotional support, for us to be able to thrive. not just survive in our career. And the sooner that we band together and we realize that continued personal development is just as important as continued professional development, we will see a shift and a change in the industry.

And I'm here for that day. And I'm happy to lead the way. I'm happy to be part of the change. I'm happy to be here and to advocate on people's behalf, because. For me, if I invested 20 hours a year from the start to now, I think I'd be in a very different place. I think we'd have a very different culture and we'd have such a raised level of awareness in healthcare that, you know, being dysregulated is not okay for us, for our well being, for physical, mental and emotional health.

And I'm very, very passionate about bringing that forward as we move forward. to the rest of the year. So think about where could you invest in your continued personal development? Now, if you are a nurse that is looking for navigating that world, getting some help and support, there's so many ways you can do it, right?

Like it could be a little, like going to a yoga class and just getting in touch with your body, doing some Pilates, even just doing some breath work. Right, like Hannah from The Breakthrough Nurse, she does breathwork. I love that. I'm so excited to be back in Australia to connect with Hannah and see what we can create together.

Think about, could you see a counsellor? Could you see a psychologist? Do you want to come and get access to myself, like a life career coach, my team and work with us to help you navigate Regulating your nervous system. Now it doesn't sound sexy and fun and I can see why people would rather spend 500 bucks on a repeat course.

But listen, the growth doesn't lie in the continued professional development. It lies in building your mental and emotional capacity. And when we create that space... You are then open to receive and when you build those skills you have them for life And they only compound and they only help you as you build your career as a clinician whether it's business or career Whatever path you're on I'm telling you right now Building your capacity to manage the stresses at each level is a non negotiable and is why We're in the state that we're in because we just haven't prioritized it up until this point That's been our topic this week.

Let's embrace the boredom, have fun with it, sit with boredom, schedule boredom, allow boredom, and I'll see you in next week's episode.