How Are You Spending Your Time?

There are always going to be people who are smarter, healthier, skinnier and wealthier than you.  The only equalizer is time.  We all have 24 hours in a day.  Time is the only equal playing field.

It is what we do with those two dozen hours that separates us as individuals.  Couple that thought with a study in England that shows up to two-thirds of nurses have thought about quitting their job at some time because they realized that life is too short to work someplace where they were not happy.

If we go to work each day and are unhappy with our job, that says a lot.  It then boils down to three options:

1. first, we can change our attitude as to how we look at the job and create change to improve it (See Special Report: Thrive in Your Nursing Practice);
2. we can leave that job or;
3. we can sit around and complain about the situation.

Any type of a change is a daunting proposition in this day and age because nursing is a difficult job market.  Many nurses don’t leave their jobs even if they’re unhappy, because they feel a loyalty to their patients and don’t want to get out of their comfort zone by trying something new.  Eventually we all realize that, in order to have something be different, we must change.

Recently, I have had several clients who worked as nurses in the same position for more than two decades only to find themselves terminated.  I believe they were fired because they were on the top of the pay scale which made them targets when the hospital was forced to make budget cuts.  As bad as that sounds, the change had come to each of them.  But, not without result!

Each client found another job in a different hospital environment.  Several have told me that, had they known it was so much better at their new job, they would have left earlier.  Even though change can be a scary feeling, it can be for the good.  You can make positive changes at work and keep your job or go to a different environment because, like I said, you only have 24 hours in a day and it makes no sense to spend them somewhere that you are not happy.