Your nursing career is yours to create, and every nurse’s path can be unique, innovative, and distinctive with proper care and attention. At the same time, all of your obligations and responsibilities might steer you away from your uniqueness and lead you into a rut of choosing the easier way, the path of least resistance.

There are many strategies for choosing a career journey that fits with your vision of who you want to be as a nursing professional, and it’s worth exploring those strategies to move forward confidently.

Thoughtfully Assess Your Career

There are plenty of questions you can ask as an excellent place to begin your career self-assessment:

Looking back, how and why did you make confident career choices?
Did you take a med-surg job right out of school because everyone said you should, even though it went against what you truly wanted?
Have you tolerated bullying or incivility because you didn’t think you had any other choice?
Did you accept imperfect jobs for fear of not being offered anything better?
Have you avoided going to back school even though you know you need an MSN to accomplish your goals?
Do you need to be in a different specialty or working with the wrong patient population?
Would you prefer to be in a non-clinical role?
What skills, knowledge, and experiences do you most value?
What are your greatest gifts, and have you found ways to use them in your career?

So many factors can lead to poor choices; sometimes, the worst choice is doing nothing. If you’re suffering from boredom, job dissatisfaction, or burnout, you may be stuck because you haven’t had the energy to do anything about it; instead, you continue to slog it out day after day.

They say that a life well-lived is the best life of all. A well-lived career is one where you choose based on your deepest desires, not what professors, colleagues, family, blogs, books, and articles say. When contemplating your nursing career, is it what you want it to be?

Make a Plan

Only careers advance with effort. If you have ruby red shoes that can instantaneously transport you to the job of your dreams, good for you. But for most of us mere mortals, we must do the dirty work to get there.

If you’ve asked yourself some of the questions above, perhaps you’ve realized that changes must be made to move forward with self-assurance and grace. So, how do you make a plan to do that? Once you’ve answered the difficult questions honestly, you must face the music and proactively initiate change.

For example, let’s say you’ve spent the first eight years of your nursing career in med-surg, telemetry, and stepdown, and now you realize that hospice is what you’ve always wanted but have been afraid to explore a non-acute setting. What proactive steps can you take? You can call a friend who works in hospice and ask if you can pick her brain. You can also ask if she can introduce you to her manager so that you can ask for an informational interview to learn more. And you can hop on LinkedIn and reach out to hospice nurses and nurse managers in your area.

Meanwhile, you can consume journals, blogs, podcasts, and other media. You can attend an in-person or virtual hospice conference or seminar for further research. These valuable activities may lead you to great clarity, more questions, or maybe a realization that hospice isn’t a good fit for you.

Speaking of not being a good fit, sometimes we can reverse engineer our career reinvention by identifying what we don’t want to do and crossing those off our list. In this way, we narrow the field to what catches our attention, and then we can take a deeper, focused dive into those potential paths.

A Creative Career Trajectory

A creative and innovative approach to your nursing career is critical to long-term satisfaction. You can easily fall victim to “groupthink,” the tendency to go along with the crowd and do what “everyone” seems to think is the “right” thing, even when your gut tells you otherwise.

It’s not necessarily easy to go against the grain, but many nurses have carved a distinctive path, beginning with the godmother of modern nursing, the courageously innovative Florence Nightingale. With Ms. Nightingale as your model of a nurse who didn’t flinch while carving out her journey, you can look your career square in the eye, assess who you truly want to be as a nurse, and then take thoughtful steps toward bringing that vision to fruition.

The post Thinking Innovatively About Your Nursing Career Development first appeared on Daily Nurse.