61// The 5-Minute Exercise That Can Change Your Nursing Career Direction

In this episode, Bonnie shares a simple 5-minute reflection exercise that helps you gain fresh perspective on your career path. Whether you’re an RN, APRN, or nurse leader, this quick practice guides you to notice the moments that bring the most fulfillment—and points you toward nursing job opportunities that truly fit.

Key Takeaways:

• Why clarity doesn’t require hours of career planning
• A 3-step journaling exercise to highlight what energizes you
• How to match your skills with new nursing career opportunities
• The importance of choosing roles you enjoy—not just those you do well

👉 Download the free Nursing Career Growth Roadmap in the show notes to take this exercise further!

Transcript

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Are you feeling stuck in your current clinical environment? Do you want to make a change in your nursing career, but not sure what to do next? Exhausted, burnt out, and maybe even ready for different leadership? I'm Bonnie Meadows, a board ified clinical nurse specialist, influential leader, career coach, and wellbeing coach. Being in the nursing and healthcare profession since 2004, I have felt stuck and unsure about what was next for me. I wanted to be fulfilled in my purpose, to have a voice at the table and to be a resource for others. I kept telling myself I wanted more, but didn't have the direction I needed until I found clarity and career growth strategies for experienced nurses like. Me. In this podcast, you will find simple tactical steps that allow you to gain the clarity you need solutions for how to grow even without supportive leadership and guidelines for setting boundaries at work so that you can grow purposefully in your career as a nurse with a graduate degree who makes a huge impact in the profession. So get ready to trade your scrubs for yoga pants, pop in those earbuds and let's chat. Hello everyone. Welcome back. I hope all is well with you I will say as I'm recording this, I am getting ready for, Memorial Day weekend. I'm pretty sure that this will come out way after Memorial Day weekend. But just happy to take the time to connect with you, through this podcast and, give you some more tips on how to grow that nursing career, how to get some clarity in your career. So let's get to it. What would you do if you had just five minutes to figure out your next career move? Just five. Like you didn't make it complicated, but you just took five minutes to sit and really ponder on your nursing career, your next nursing career move, not when you are transitioning to one place to another, but. You sit outside, you get present, you pull out a journal, and you just do a five minute exercise. It might take you 10 minutes, but you can do it in five. I'm gonna share a simple, yet powerful exercise that can bring you into clarity. It can get you at least one or two steps, maybe even three steps closer to clarity in your career. So I participated in a nurse peer group discussion, about a professional practice model. So, I was, selected to be able to participate. It was more so like a focus group where we were, putting words into how to develop this professional practice model and what did it look like, what did it embody and. One question that came to us, or that was asked of the group, made me think about my career journey. And I was asked to think about a time when I felt the most freedom in my work. Like when I felt like this is truly, I, I am doing what I was truly called to do. Like I was humming. Like this is it. And when I thought about it, I thought about a time when I was at the bedside. Now let's be clear. It is no longer my calling to go back to the bedside. It's my calling to encourage those who are at the bedside. This will unfold as we go into the podcast. And some of you may, you know, you know, you're not going back to the bedside, but this will unfold. So I'm, I'm going, I digress. I was a charge nurse and I was teaching during a code and managing. And facilitating a code. And I see today how it correlates with my career path and my joy. I love to facilitate and coordinate projects and classes and so that's really what this five minute exercise is all about. It's finding what is it within nursing, you've had some time. Within your years to just, you've done this, you've done that, you have a prospective thought process of what you would like to do, what you think and believe you would like to do, as I'm thinking about this off the top of my head, you have those skills that you have done, that you have performed. Or these moments in times where you have, you have done these things or you've had this particular situation and the role that you played in that situation, you felt like, oh, if I could do this all the time, I would be great. The role that you play, the skills that you used in that situation. So we've we're, we're, we're juggling that on top of. Juggling the separate area of, oh, I've had a taste of this thing. Not I have skills in this thing, but this is something that I am very interested in and I'd like to pursue that thing, whether it be leadership skills, whether it be you wanna be a data analyst, you wanna write articles, whether it be you wanna develop policy, those are two different things, but they both play into really understanding your next steps and getting clarity in your career. So I'm gonna give you three tips that you can use in your five minute exercise to really help to get your wheel spinning with what. We will help you to get clarity in your career and lead you into a little bit more career direction. The first step, when you're sitting down for this five minute exercise to journal, I want you to think of three moments when you felt fulfilled in your nursing career. When were there times and moments of joy, or when you walked away from the situation feeling like you made an impact. Really expand your thought process with this. It doesn't always have to be a patient experience story. It could be helping another nurse and making a connection. Or it could be helping a family or a patient connect a dot. It could be working with equipment to find a more efficient way to work. The work of the nurse faces so many facets of healthcare. It could be the process of completing a project at work to implement something new. It could also be you taking the time to do research and develop a full policy and helping to implement that policy wherever it may be. These are just nuggets of things you take for granted that you do, but these are pieces that really brought you joy. In your work, I'm gonna share with you one example just to get your thoughts going. I'm gonna go back to the example, that I shared earlier. When I was a charge nurse, I was working in the C-T-I-C-U. A patient had come into us straight from the or I was working night shift and we knew the patient was not doing well after surgery. And so the patient came up probably around 11:00 PM We were giving blood products and on Max pressors. The surgeon pretty much told us, this will likely not end well. As they know because they've been working on the body now, God knows all. So all things could have been reversed. Where we have the privilege and the honor to do our best to support God in that work and to do what we need to do as far as evidence-based practice is concerned. So while doing that, we checked to labs, giving blood products. Doing all the things, or doing hashtag all the things. I was one of the more experienced nurses there that night with about four years of experience. One of the nurses working with us, this was her first time being in a code. Now, if you are a nurse who's never worked in the ICU, one thing I can tell you about the ICU, and a good working team is that codes are not frantic. They just run smoothly because you're used to that environment. You're there to help people recover, but you're also there to help save lives not that you're not saving lives on the floor, but in the ICU, the codes are much different than on the floor. And so. The newer nurses was what she was, she was in there, she was helping us to help run what many would call a slow code. So we weren't, there wasn't much. We were escalating, but we were treating the patient and I was teaching as we were implementing. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career to connect the dots for the new C-T-I-C-U nurse calmly. That nurse is now A-C-R-N-A not that I had anything to do with all of that, but I am thankful and blessed to have had the privilege and honor to nurture her in that moment, which could have been a.in her, in her career. Um, but that moment I had the opportunity to help her understand what was going on, why we were doing what we were doing, and then give her instruction we were literally loading up a, level one rapid infuser. If you don't know what a rapid infuser means, it is something that we, is a machine that we use, to put. IV fluids and blood products in quickly, like within 10 seconds to keep the patient alive. 'cause as we were giving, it was coming out and you have to try to match the volume given. Otherwise you're working from behind and you're in a hypovolemic state. You're already hypovolemic, but you gotta replace what's coming out so that you can get to a normal emmic state. That moment, taught me how much I loved about nursing. How much I loved about mentoring, how much I loved about connecting the dots and training in real time fast forward, I entered into a role I thought I loved, but it took me further away from the opportunities to mentor nurses, and that's when I got clarity about what my work needed to incorporate going forward. So I had that moment. That moment was probably back in 2011, maybe 2010, and I left the bedside shortly after that. And then I started getting into other roles. But those roles eventually took me so far away from nursing, and I was at a turning point in a toxic environment. Where I thought to myself, this is not what I wanted to do. I actually liked the work that I was doing. The environment enlightened things to help me see and evaluate. Is this something I wanna do long term or what is it that's really giving me joy? This is giving me a little bit of prestige. Some experience, that was the role where I was having conversations with system CMOs and presidents of organizations, and that's all great and good, and I can use those. I'm using those skills now. But it was that position where I thought it was a dream position was literally just a skill builder position. And so I was at a crossroads of what am I gonna do next? And I had to go back to that thought process of what is missing and what is it that I really loved to do? One of the things was mentor nurses. That's not everything, but one of the things was mentor and encourage nurses, and I gotten far away from that. And so that, number one, I hope that was helpful for you, but think of three moments when you felt fulfilled in your nursing career. Number two is identify the skills you used in those moments. Thinking about those three moments, list the skills you used in that moment. So in that moment, in C-T-I-C-U-I use skills of skillful communication, providing clear, direct and clear feedback without bullying. Skills of facilitation and influence to get the team going in the right direction. I was also giving strategy by looking at the big picture and understanding what needed to come next. I was using critical thinking skills. I was problem solver extraordinaire, and that is what I love to do. I love to help solve problems and encourage the people I work with. To go in the right direction. Number three, we're wrapping it up. So take those skills you've identified next, look for roles that allow you to do more of that. Now that you have that list, analyze it. What roles do you know of that would match this role? You may not see it. That might be something that you can probably try and chat GPT, put it in chat, GPT and say, I have these skills. What nursing jobs do you feel will fulfill these skills? You could do that search with those words for jobs that may match the description. One thing I wanna caution you about is when you're looking at those skills, you want to be mindful that you're not choosing skills that you are good at, but don't like to do regularly. Don't we do that? Uh, we know what we can do well, which gives us confidence, but we also know what we wanna grow in and what we can, what we'd like to grow to be. We have an idea. We might say we are clueless, but we, we have an idea of what we would like to grow to be, and we might not, but we might not be able to put a name on it just yet. Don't get yourself in trouble doing something that, yeah, you're good at, but you don't like to do that's not gonna get you anywhere 'cause then you're in misery. Most people would say that if they sat in a classroom with me, they'd say I'm a great teacher. That may be so, but I have no desire at this time to be nursing faculty That does not draw me in or bring me any clarity. It's like, okay, well yeah, I could teach. Do I like to teach? Yeah, I like to teach. I also like to problem solve and in that situation, as a charge nurse, I was working as a problem solver. So I teach in other ways. I find other ways to teach what I don't like. Is all of the stuff that comes along with teaching. Let's just be real. I may not be one of those people that likes teaching in a structured setting. But I do like to teach. I do like to educate, and there are so many ways that I can do that as a nurse outside of being nursing faculty. Now, there are some who love the administrative piece of it and love being in the classroom, whether it be online or somewhere else. And I say walk in it. I say, walk in it. That's just about the same as somebody who loves to do l and d and I like cardiac walk in it. Neither is wrong, neither is wrong. And so I just wanna encourage you to find what you love and do more of that. Yes, you're going to find roles where there's much of it that you love, and there's some of it that you're just like, I can leave that on the table. I can leave that on the table. It's not gonna be an all encompassing, like, we're just not all gonna get everything that we want, especially when we're working for someone else. Your goal is to find that role. That allows you to use those skills that truly bring you joy. Find leadership that will support you in that, and then find other ways outside of work to maybe do some other things that you like to do, but you can't find a job that will let you do that thing. That's your goal. So as I wrap up, I want you to take five minutes and work through this exercise to see what you come up with. Here are the steps for your next career move. Think of three moments when you felt fulfilled in your nursing career. Identify the skills you are using in those moments. Look for roles that allow you to do more of what you love. If you need a bit of structure to pull this together download my nursing Career growth roadmap. It's A PDF document that gives you a structured way to go through this exercise. Click on the link in my show notes. It will ask you to sign up for my email list, and then from there you will get the download and it will guide you through this practice. And then come back, listen to this episode. If you know another nurse who has that question of, I just don't know what I wanna do next, have them to go through this exercise, share this podcast with them, get them to sign up for the roadmap. It will help them. See you next time. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with another nurse who may be unsure of where to go next in their career or maybe need some career clarity? Also, please leave a quick review for the show on Apple Podcast. It brings me so much joy and so much encouragement to know this podcast is helping you now go get the career you want and not the one you settle for. And I'll meet you back here next Thursday for another episode. See you soon.