Today I want to talk to you about the topic of being an instant millionaire to stir up some feelings that you probably been suppressing about your current nursing career. If you won a million dollars today, how would your life change? Would you quit your current job?  The difference between a job and a career is that a job is you exchanging your time for money, and a career is something that you would do even if you received no monetary reward. 
A good career assessment can simply begins with this question, and if you find yourself in a job because of the money or because you have bills to pay, then the next logical question to ask yourself, is why are you accepting this situation?  Nursing is a very rewarding profession, but can also be very stressful. Taking control of your nursing career involve being alert and aware of your work environment, being able to manage stressful situations, and having a well thought out career map. 

One of the things that a career plan will do for you is to give you the freedom to choose.  A career map will give you the freedom to choose your schedule, your employer, your pay and even your dream position.  The main reason that people remains in positions that are not the best for them is because of fear of change. 

Do not let fear tie you down, but begin to imagine the possibility of you landing your dream nursing position, allow yourself to do whatever that you want to with your career and let your true goals emerge.

    

As we are facing yet another brutal nursing shortage nursing leaders should thrive to pass a really important leadership test, which is the law of legacy.  
Legacy means to pass something immaterial from one generation to another.  The ability and willingness for nursing leaders to reproduce themselves in other nurses is very important in our efforts to attract and keep people practicing the nursing profession. 
Leaders who seek to reproduce themselves in younger nurses should do so very early in the career of the younger nurse. They should be pro-active in looking for the future nurse leader to cast the vision of reproduction in becoming leaders.  Future nurse leaders can be found in every unit during any regular working hour waiting to be discovered by someone in leadership. 
If you are looking to make a difference in nursing, reproducing yourself in someone else’s life is a great place to start.  As a leader in the quest for future leaders be intentional, and take the opportunity to handpick the next generation of leaders in nursing.           

    

According to Brian Traci, “Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history is the power of your mind to create almost every aspect of your life.” Everything in your life today started as a dream, a wish and a hope.   If you are unhappy with your current nursing position you have what it takes to turn it around.    The best place to start is to figure out what you want in regards to your career, focus on how to achieve it, and top talking about what you do not want, the problems in nursing, or blaming others for your lack of success.

Make clear achievable goals and keep your mind on them if you want to make significant progress in your career.  You do not always have to leave your current employment or nursing to find success.  You can remain exactly where you and achieve what ever the goals that you set your mind to achieve.  That is the power of “you become what you think about most of the time”.  If you desire to be number one in your place of employment or want to be recognized as an expert in nursing, it will happen simply by deciding that is what you want.

If you set little goals, you will achieve little.  It is completely up to you, if you set large goals you have the ability to achieve goals of any size, and scope. Go ahead set goals to turn your nursing career around.  I believe in you, and you can do it.  I believe that you can get from point A to point B even if you do not know where point B is, you only have to believe that there is a point B.

    

Nursing is great, but it is a very stressful profession to be in. As a nurse, we are consistently being pulled in different directions. Everyone seems to think that we have the answer to all their issues and problems, and usually we try our best to service everyone, every department or physician who seeks our assistance.

At the end of a long day or stressful week, it is not uncommon to find many us complaining about the job or the profession. I have been a nurse for over 17 years, and I have never known a time we were not facing a nursing shortage, which is one of our biggest issues in nursing today. The chronic shortage is the cause of a domino effect of an endless list of problems such as the working condition. As nurses we usually work long hours on our feet with very little time for lunch or bathroom breaks, we are always being ask to work over time or extra shifts and the list of issues can be endless.

With all the issues that we face in the profession, I believe that the biggest enemy of success or happiness can be rooted to the degree of your negative attitudes or emotions that you develop over the years. Your negative attitudes have the power to hold your career back, tire you out and rob you of all your joy in nursing. If you want to start enjoying this great profession, one of your goals this year should be to free yourself of negative attitudes and emotions such as fear, self-pity, envy, jealousy, feelings of inferiority and anger. Once you make up your mind to replace those negative emotions with more positive ones, I believe that your career will start to move up to a whole new level.

    

I have been a nurse for over 17 years, but it was not until about six to seven years ago that I began to take responsibility for my own career development. I always relied on my nurse manager to prompt me to what I needed to do for career advancement. After many years of working long hours, overtime and bonus shifts, I realized that I was not growing and nursing was becoming very boring.
If you are facing the same issues today, I want to encourage you to make 2008 the year that you take control for your career growth. Everything good that will ever happen to your career is going to need you to take the initiative. No one can possibly know what you want, your dreams and your aspirations.

You are responsible for your nursing career, and no one else will come to your rescue. When I made that realization, the first thing that I did was enrolled in a masters program. I always wanted to return back to school for my masters, but I never had the time or the money. I am still working at obtaining a master degree even though it is taking me a long time to finish, but I am never going to give up.

Make up your mind to go forward with whatever you want to achieve this year and commit to see it come to flourish cent. When you start to take responsibility for your career, you will be surprise of what you will do. I have met many unhappy nurses that are always complaining, and blaming nurse managers and directors for their dissatisfaction with nursing. If you continue on that path, you will never discover true fulfillment in nursing. Nursing is a great profession, to really find contentment you have to start taking charge of your career.

    

I was working with my husband last week in the small office that we share in our home, and while we were working I encountered a specific problem in a project that I was working with. After trying to solve the problem on my own, I turned to my husband for some assistance which he also had no answer for.
Later on that night he contacted his brother in Georgia to elicit some advice which also did not help us solve the problem but brought us closer to a possible solution. Well to make a long story short, by the end of the evening we found a working solution to our problem, and this week I am half way finishing the project.

I thought about the steps that brought on this resolution, and I can only conclude that’s the power of coaching. With coaching you have two minds working together for the same cause, which means that you cannot fail, and you can only succeed. In this scenario if I insisted on solving the problem on my own, not only it would have taken longer, but it is possible that I would not be able to solved the issue.
The decision to partner with my husband in this project made available to me resources that were not available to me before. For that reason I know as nurses begin to make the decision to partner with coaches for career advancement, I can assure you that the possibilities are going to be endless.

    

Couple years ago when I decided to return back to school for a master degree in nursing I was amazed to see many nurses at the bedside were not very supportive of my decision to return to school. Master prepared nurses that I worked with at the bedside told that it was not worth returning to school mainly because the pay is much better at the bedside than anywhere else.

It is true that the annual income for nurses at the bedside today is considerably higher due to the chronic staffing shortage, but it is not necessary because they get pay more than nurses in non-clinical settings. The reason is the basic principle of supply and demand. There is a greater need for staff nurses at the bedside than any other nursing position, so to attract nurses many facilities offers sign on bonuses as high as $20,000, bonus shifts as high as $200 for an 8 hour shift.

With these kinds of offers, today many nurses are working as much as 80 hours a week. It is easy to see how a staff nurse can make $100,000/year comparing to a master prepared nurse making $60-$70,000 dollars/year. I see many of these nurses today very dissatisfied with their jobs, they may be making a lot of money, but they are very unhappy people. They are chronically tired, moody, grumpy and after many years their career stagnated because nursing suddenly become a job where they exchange time for money with no satisfaction or fulfillment.

Returning to school whether for your BSN or your master, will open new set of opportunities for you, the reward may not be monetary in the beginning, but you will be a happier person.