102: How to be Happy as a Nurse
How to be Happy as a Nurse
As healthcare providers, it's easy to forget to prioritize our happiness as we care for our patient's well-being. I delve into 5 common ways nurses inadvertently outsource their happiness and offer 5 valuable strategies for internalizing it.
By exploring what happiness means to each individual and recognizing where we may seek it in the wrong places, clinicians can take meaningful steps toward a more fulfilling personal and professional life.
Take advantage of this thought-provoking discussion that will inspire you to reflect on your own happiness journey.
Key Takeaways:
12:10 - Buying material possessions
13:26 - Outsource happiness to food
14:50 - Consuming drugs and alcohol
16:52 - Seek validation from others
18:25 - Outsourcing happiness in social media
19:39 - You can consult other people, but generate and drop on your wisdom
20:48 - Understanding and accepting yourself
22:10 - Developing emotional flexibility, emotional intelligence, and emotional fitness.
25:46 - Embracing the human experience
26:53 - The Importance of setting and monitoring goals in life
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**This transcript was automatically generated using Descript.**
Look around at your life. Look around at what you have. Stop focusing on what you don't have. Focus on all the incredible things that you have and see how differently you feel. See the truth in your situation, in your thoughts, instead of indulging in those thoughts.
I don't have enough. I need another certificate. Cause when you think like that, you're not gonna feel happy. But When I think about, I haven't achieved my goals yet. I haven't done this. I haven't lost a weight. I had a glass of wine yesterday. I said I wasn't gonna do it. I don't feel happy. I only had wine, glass of wine yesterday and last week I had six.
I'm proud. That's amazing. See what thoughts are coming up for you.
hello, beautiful humans. Welcome back to the High Performance Nursing Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed episode 100 with all of our amazing 10 top lessons from a hundred episodes. If you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to it today. My beautiful friends, we are talking about. Something that I personally have struggled with my whole life, which is how to be happy. How to be happy as a nurse in particular today, I wanted to explore and start a conversation about happiness in nursing because the reality is I think a lot of us are feeling like we're maybe not happy in the work of the life that we're doing, and I'm taking that pure.
As data and factual data from the wild west of Facebook, I'm seeing lots on lots and lots of people that seem to be very unhappy in doing their job. And I'm here to hopefully give you a perspective on happiness that maybe you haven't heard before and give you some ideas to take away about how you can integrate this into your life and how to be happy as a nurse, because I think that it's totally possible when we actually break it down and underst.
So today, let's talk. Happiness as a nurse and why it is so, so important for us as clinicians to consider. Think about it. We spend our whole day providing happiness to others. We literally serve happiness on a plate, we rock up to work at 7:00 AM and even though we feel absolutely terrible, we're parading around the ward and we're smiling and we're giving them that vibe, the patience, the happiness vibe.
Bottle it up and we dish it out as we move through our day and our patients hopefully pick up on that. And that improves their experience within the hospital. And hopefully that happiness is infectious just by contagion, just by exposure to your amazing happiness. But that doesn't mean that we genuinely feel happy.
Some days I'm hearing some of you say I don't feel like that. I hear you. Let's talk about. What in particular we should be thinking about when it comes to happiness? Okay, so we all have this, I don't know about you, but I definitely have been kind of fed this lie that, you know, You should be able to find your happiness and happiness is available to you.
And I spent my whole career trying to find happiness. But what I've identified is I was looking in the wrong places. And I have a belief that I deserve to be happy, I'm sure you might have something similar. And I truly believe that we do. And I think that it's important that we acknowledge our quest for happiness. Instead of doing what most of us do, which is like, I'm secretly unhappy, but I'm gonna parade on social media and all of the things that I'm actually happy. That's something that I pride myself on here at High Performance Nursing. I will tell you if I'm not happy, and I'll tell you and we'll work through it together.
But, the reason I bring this up is because we get so many people coming into our coaching calls that want to explore how to be happy, and a beautiful coaching client that we have in our application support program recently said, I just don't know that I'm ever gonna be happy. And when they said this to me, it hit me because I have held that belief as well.
I have believed that to be true in my life and my career. And I'm curious if you have too, am I ever gonna be happy? When will I be happy? If you're asking yourself those questions, today's episodes gonna be absolutely amazing. So the one thing that I want us to start off with and think about is the fact that when we think about happiness, I want you to just question what comes up for you?
How do you define happiness? Have you even thought about what that looks like for you? Because there's textbook versions that I could spit out to you today, but I'm not gonna do that because it's subjective. Happiness for one person is very different for another. For most of our patients, happiness is usually getting out of the hospital.
But for us, like that's also maybe a good thing, but that's maybe not driving us as a driving force, towards greater happiness, greater purpose. And I think when we talk about happiness, we often attach it to purpose. Like, what is my purpose? What am I here for? What am I doing? We're getting very deep today, so I want you to think about in question why you haven't yet defined what happiness looks like for.
I know that's a big question, but really think about it. How do you define happiness? How would you even know if you were happy? Okay, how would you even know that? And I think the reason why a lot of us still do it is one that it told work. One, we actually have to think about it, and our brain doesn't like that.
And two, because we just assume that it should just be this thing, ? Like happiness is just gonna arrive, it's just gonna come, and I'm gonna be happy one day. And until then, I'm gonna keep pushing forwards. And I want to challenge some of those thoughts today. The other reason why I think that we have happiness challenges and we maybe don't find our quote unquote, don't find our happiness, is because we are emotionally unfit.
I heard this term recently and it blew my frigging mind and it explains me in a nutshell, over the last 10, 12 years as a nurse, think about it. We spend most of our time at work in the midst. Micro and macro trauma events every day we are exposed to things that their normal human on the street would never understand.
And what do we do? We put on our emotional resilient face, and some of us might not, and some of us might emote, and I'm not globalizing here, but most of us, Tend to put on that, like, I'm a nurse, I'm a professional, I'm here, I've got this. And we kind of put up our emotional kind of brick wall, and we've got that like transformer effect as Brene Brown talks about.
And we go ch ch ch ch ch. And we've got our emotional kind of safety armor on, and we dive in and we do the work because we're resilient and we're strong and this is what we're here to do. That's amazing and there's a time and a place for that. But what that doesn't teach us on the other end is how to manage the emotions, how to manage what actually happens day to day.
Don't know if you've ever considered this, but when I think of my nursing career and I think of the things that have stuck with me through my whole career to this state, they're microtraumas and macro traumas, you know, patients passing unexpectedly and emergency crash call. Even the little things like making a mistake.
These are all microtraumas that we hold in our system, in our nervous system and we flash back to, and we think about and we feel. And when we are not emotionally fit, and by emotionally fit, I mean, are we willing to experience all of our emotions? And are we practicing feeling all of them and processing them and working through them to get at the other side of them so that we can become a emotionally stronger human being?
Okay. And I think that if you're honest with yourself, most people are not willing to feel the full spectrum of human. Most people avoid fear, worry, stress, anxiety. They might invite it in, but they don't really go and process it , or maybe they're reluctant to let themselves be excited or happy.
So I think that's one of the challenges when we're pursuing happiness is that happiness is an emotion. And if we're emotionally unfit and we're not willing to allow ourselves to one, accept and acknowledge what we're experiencing in the moment, like, holy shit, this is fear. I am experiencing fear and I've been here before, and even though fear in my body feels scary, It's an emotion, it's a vibration in my body, and I've practiced accepting and just allowing and processing this emotion.
The same is true for happiness. If you're a high performer, I guarantee you, please message me if I'm wrong. I guarantee you that you do not allow yourself to indulge in being happy. If you're anything like me, you will sit there and you will come up with every reason why you can't celebrate your success.
So I want you to really think about what that looks like for you, and does that resonate? Do you allow yourself to be happy? Are you allowing yourself to feel the full human emotion spectrum? But here's what most of us do. This is what most of us do when we're thinking about becoming more happy in life.
And this is not a bad thing, by the way. There are pros and cons to this, but when we think about it, I want you to think about all the ways in which. This activity is not serving you. Okay? We're all about growth here. I'm not gonna sit here and be like, tick, you're doing this amazing tick. We're gonna explore all of the things.
So what I'm talking about is when we outsource our happiness, and I think this is one of the biggest reasons why most of us are not happy, let me tell you a little story. I spent most of my adult life so far believing that happiness existed in the external world to me, so let me reframe that. I believed for my whole adult life that the things outside of me would make me happy.
Who is resonating with this let me know through Instagram, social media. Tell me. Tell me, tell me quick stop, pause, covered message me. Yes. If you are somebody that is outsourcing your happiness, I want you to know that you're like the 9 billion other people on the earth, ? Everybody does this and there are times where we definitely want to do this and there are times where we just want to get aware of it and we want to acknowledge.
That we're doing it and we want to question whether or not it's serving us. So what do I mean by outsourcing? We are literally looking for the external world to make us happy. We're waiting for that day when the job's gonna come, that's perfect and it's just gonna solve all of our problems, ? You're gonna get the pay that you want and it's gonna make you happy, and you're gonna get the hours that you want and it's gonna make you happy, and you're gonna get the work-life balance and the manager's gonna be gorgeous, and you're gonna have all of the things that you've ever dreamt of anybody resonating with that who's wait.
For that happiness bus to come along. And just to drop off your parcel, my friends, through lived experience and having coached over 300 clinicians, we all outsource our happiness to the external world. And that bus is not coming. And there's a reason why anytime that we're outsourcing something to the external world, it is a beautiful indication that we have a duty.
To ourselves to give whatever it is that we're looking for back to ourselves. So whatever you are looking for and searching for, external to you and your happiness search, I want you to think about how can I give this to myself? For example, I want to be accepted by the industry. Give yourself acceptance.
These are some of the ones that I run, ? I want to be accepted and invited to all of these things. Invite yourself, Liam, accept yourself, internalize that instead of outsourcing, I am looking for validation that I'm good enough for this job. Give the validation to yourself in the process of applying for the job that you are good enough instead of looking for it outside of.
Think about all the aspects in your life where this might be coming up. I really want you to think about it and common ways in which we actually outsource our happiness. I'm gonna give you five of them now. All five of these are amazing things that I personally do. Okay. But there's also a flip side to them where they don't serve us, and you'll see what I mean as we talk through them.
So, number one, buying material possessions. I joke about it all the time, but that Botox, that Gucci bag that watch, it gives you happiness in the moment. Really be honest with yourself. What are you really looking for when you buy those things for yourself? Is it because you want to celebrate? And if that is the case, amazing Is it because you want to feel a certain way?
That is amazing, but I want you to be honest with yourself and know that your life could be amazing and you could have happiness without outsourcing it to those things, because those things give you a micro moment of happiness. Think about it as you move through your career, as you move through your life, as you buy things, as you gain things, as you do things, you'll start to see as you build your career that the things that you think will give you happiness.
It's called arrival fallacy. We get. there And I'm like, where's, where's the happiness? I thought I was gonna be happy here. If you've ever moved jobs thinking that it would be different there than it is here. This is the lesson that I want you to learn today, that it's not different there than it is here. You can choose happiness anywhere.
Even in the hottest of messes you can choose happiness. Why? Because happiness is an internal process. It is a feeling that is generated from your thinking Number two is we outsource our happiness to food. Oh my God. Anybody that watched little Britain back in the day, this is like, this is Mory on little bread and there's so many not politically great things that happen in that show, but this is the reason why I struggle with my weight cause I've been totally honest.
I outsourced for years, my happiness to food. And maybe wine and living in Paris by the way, does not help this. So I, you know, like many people would over-indulge if I'm feeling a certain emotion, like stress, worry, anxiety, fear, particularly in my nurse unit manager years. I would literally be straight to bloody goddamn zuki.
This is not sponsored hashtag bad coffee. But I would go to Zuki and then I would be like, I'm having a donut. I'm having three hash browns today. Today I deserve this. And what I was doing in that moment was outsourcing my happiness to the hash brown. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what I was doing. And for that moment I was like, mm, I deserve this.
This is good. And it was like a little psychological trick that my brain was playing on me. In giving me like a little hit of dopamine. But in all honesty, it was detrimental to my wellbeing cause I gained weight, ? And I felt terrible after reading them. And then of course I didn't have enough protein, all of the things, so I wasn't really looking after myself.
So outsourcing can sometimes really impact our physical and our mental and our emotional health.
The next one is interesting because I saw a post on Facebook this week about, it was a study. That said emergency nurses are consuming more and more drugs and alcohol than ever before, and I can't remember the statistic and I thought, this is really interesting.
One, I'm not surprised why? Because we are not emotionally taught in our industry how to manage all of the things that come up. All of those micro macro traumas and all of the just human experiences. We're not openly invited to share our human experience through emotion whilst at work, and there's no way to process it afterwards.
So of course, what do people. They're under high stress and high pressure all the time. They indulge, they outsource their happiness to things that give them a quick hit of dopamine and make them feel better. No judgment. Absolutely no judgment. I just thought it was interesting. But this article was like, we need to do something.
I'm like, let's teach people how to be human and then maybe they will drink less. cause they'll realize that when they drink, they don't feel. Okay. that leads to addiction. They have negative impact on their physical and mental and emotional health. They're at more risk of making mistakes.
There are so many compounding net negative things that happen when you outsource your happiness. If you have a glass of wine and you genuinely, intentionally want a glass of wine and you think you deserve it, run wilds. Like do your thing. But if you have somebody that comes back at the end of the day and you're like, that was terrible.
That was horrible. It was so bad today. I hate my life. I hate my job. I'm never gonna be happy. And then you reach for a glass of wine. Just know, just be honest with yourself. Why question? Why am I outsourcing my happiness? And if you're totally fine with that, rock on. If you're not question it. Get curious.
Be compassionate with yourself and move through it, and we'll help you through the podcast and how to tackle these things moving forward. But really interesting. Do you rely on drugs? Do you rely on. Drugs. I'm not even going into, I have too many judgements. But, you know, think about it for you.
The other thing is seek validation from others.
This is a big one in our industry. We sit here and we wait for other people's validation to move forward. Just think about the whole, I've gotta wait. Who said, why are we waiting? No one gets to define your path, ? We do not need other people's validation for us to be able to move forward. In order to be happy.
You do not need to pass that osky to be happy. You do not need to get a new pay point to be happy. You do not need to be promoted in order to allow yourself to be happy. If you say something like, I'll be happy when dot dot dot you're outsourcing your happiness and. That might work for a period of time, but you will eventually learn the life lesson that that's not gonna work in the long term.
Okay? So when we, do externalize our validation, it looks like people pleasing, ? Lots of other things come up, but it looks like people pleasing and we literally go to work and we people please our patients. We're looking for validation from them for feedback from them. We're looking for positive feedback from the family and from the relatives.
We're looking for it from the M D T and when we don't get it, we make up stories about whether or not we're good enough. That's completely unnecessary. That is us outsourcing our happiness instead of having our own back and being like, you know what? I totally have this. I did an amazing job today.
Remember, anything we're looking for external to us, we give to ourselves with compassion and abundance. And freedom. Give it all to yourself and it will feel very uncomfortable cause you just haven't done it. You just probably haven't ever done it. Think about that.
The last thing that we're gonna talk about when we're outsourcing our happiness is social media.
Like really going to, who's the scroller? I'm a scroller. Like indulging hours and that. And then being like, oh my God, I didn't go to the gym. I'm beating myself up. You know, when I spent an hour on TikTok. So really thinking about. Are we using these platforms as a means to outsource our happiness to get a dopamine head?
Because that's what all of these platforms are. They give you a head of dopamine. You connect to something, you feel something, you create an emotion. You watch Happy dog videos, you watch cat videos, they give you a head of dopamine, and you feel better. You are happy. Okay, so have a think about where in your life are you outsourcing your happiness?
Are you. Without sourcing your happiness, or are there some things that I've talked about today that you're like, Hmm, interesting. Maybe I am actually outsourcing it? Those of you that want to acknowledge this and want to genuinely be happy will think about this and we'll do the work. Those that are like, he doesn't know what he's talking about, you should probably leave the podcast now.
Okay. This is from Lived Experience Peeps and coaching. This is coaching one.
So I want to talk about five ways in which you can. Internalize your happiness, and give it all to yourself. We've already talked about one, anything that you're looking for actively from other people, whether that's at work with your partner, with your children, with your mom and dad, with your grandparents, whatever that is, with your peers, your friends.
I want you to think about what would it look like if I gave myself acceptance. What would it look like if I gave myself permission? This is a big one for me. I always used to ask people, what do you think? Do you think I should do this? No, that's not a bad thing. But if it's coming from a place of like, I'm outsourcing my happiness and needing the answers from you, that's not a great thing.
Okay. Trust your own wisdom. You know all the answers to all the questions you have. We have a rule in our coaching programs. If your brain offers you a question, you have a duty and a responsibility to answer it first, before I do, you answer it first, cause nine tens outta 10. If you implement this rule to your life, you do have the answers and you don't need other people.
You can consult other people, but you can generate and drop on your own wisdom. So that was number one.
Number two, I've got some notes here and I can't read my own writing cause I should have been a doctor with this terrible hard writing. So number one, we've already acknowledged that anything that we outsource, we give to ourselves.
Okay. So that's understanding and accepting yourself and being like, oh. Curious about it. Okay. Question your outsourcing. Just ask yourself the simple question, does it serve me to outsource this? Do I need that other person's validation in order to apply for a job? You guys send me messages all the time.
What do you think I should do, Liam? And I'm like, I don't know you. I don't know you. I love you, but I don't know who you are. Like, I don't know what you should be doing. I can't give you advice based on three sentences. And unlike Hey Liam, how are you? What should I do in this situation? So question. You're outsourcing.
Tap into your own wisdom. Now I just want to add a caveat here or like add a point. The reason why we do outsource so much, especially when we're looking for validation is clinicians, is because we've been trained to do. So you've gotta unlearn this practice at work. It has its time and place. You must go and ask the doctor.
You must escalate something to the consultant. Amazing. But in your personal life, you don't need to do that shit. Give it to yourself. Question curiously, question your outsourcing.
Number three is developing emotional flexibility, emotional intelligence, emotional fitness. I don't know about you, but I never thought about emotional fitness until this week.
I've been talking about emotions, but that term was like, wow, I haven't practiced feeling all my feelings. I haven't practiced allowing. Every emotion on the spectrum and just recognizing for what it is. cause that feeling is just a vibration in your body. Something happens, you think, something you have a feeling in your body and it's a vibration.
And mostly when you check into that vibration and you actually just explore and be like, what am I actually feeling when I feel fear? It might be like I have a tight throat. I need to swallow a lot. I have a a frog in my throat. Maybe I've got like palpitations. Maybe I've got like a pressure on my chest.
Maybe, you know, I've got a bit of a funny tummy. Maybe my hands and feet go cold or I get sweaty palms. That is fear when I just acknowledge it and see it for what it is, like an experience in my body. I'm like, oh, hold on. Like I've had that feeling. And I survived. I didn't die, you know, and I invited in and I allow it and I process it and I just sit with it.
So the more that we can develop our emotional flexibility as nurses and we can develop our emotional management skills and tools, we are going to absolutely be able to enjoy our life and our career. cause when you can walk into work and you can be faced with stress, fear your anxiety, worry, excitement, shame.
Elation frustration, disappointment, anger, all of those things within 12 hours. cause you all know that's what we experience anyway. And you can experience them and you can keep your coat and you can manage it and you can allow yourself to go through those peaks and troughs and you can allow yourself the human experience of being 100% human.
You're gonna nail it and you're gonna leave at the end of the gym. You're gonna be like, today was the day, but I got my own back and I'm able to manage all of this. Cause you have the tools. . I think that there's a huge missing piece there, and we're gonna be doing more about this on the podcast. If you're something that resonates with.
Drop me a message. Let's have a chat about where you are at, because that, especially as you build your career, is so integral. It's a non-negotiable. Okay. Building emotional intelligence and emotional flexibility and fitness as we move through our careers. So, so important. Monitor your thoughts. Okay.
We've talked about this before, but one of the reasons why you might not be happy is because your thoughts are. Serving you. Your thoughts are things like, I will be happy when I get the job. So it's dependent on the panel. It's depending on their mood, it's depending on their biases. It's dependent on all these things external to you that you have no control over.
Instead of, I can choose to be happy today. Look around at your life. Look around at what you have. Stop focusing on what you don't have. Focus on all the incredible things that you have and see how differently you feel. See the truth in your situation, in your thoughts, instead of indulging in those thoughts.
I don't have enough. I need another certificate. Cause when you think like that, you're not gonna feel happy. But When I think about, I haven't achieved my goals yet. I haven't done this. I haven't lost a weight. I had a glass of wine yesterday. I said I wasn't gonna do it. I don't feel happy. I only had wine, glass of wine yesterday and last week I had six.
I'm proud. That's amazing. See what thoughts are coming up for you. Okay, number four, I think maybe five. Can't count. Embrace the human experience. Let's stop shitting on ourselves for being. Nursing is one of the toughest professions. What we face is unlike no other,
Let's not compound the human experience by indulging in all of the bullshit that our brain offers us about happiness. Let's just invite the happiness in. Let's see it for what it is that we're outsourcing it, and let's just internalize it and make it a conscious, intentional practice.
Let's in the moment when you do outsource it and you buy that cake and you go, Liam said something about outsourcing. Let's not shed on ourselves. Let's just be like, oh yeah, I'm outsourcing here. I'm choosing to do that and enjoy the bloody donut. Okay. Or stop yourself and go, you know what? I am outsourcing in this moment.
Do I really need that? What am I looking for there that I could give myself? And in that moment, give yourself the thing, and I tell you, your dopamine and your happiness hit will be tenfold compared to what you would've got from that donut Trust me, I practiced that a lot. The last thing that I want you to think about is, Goals and how to be happy in the context of making sure that you actively measure and manage the things that you're working towards in your life.
Up until recently in my business, I have been very I plan, I strategize, I do all the things, but I haven't actively been stopping and taking time to look at my data and look. Our reach and look at our numbers and look at, you know, the people coming into our programs. And for you, this could be looking at your goals for the court out looking at your professional development, your personal development, your weight loss, your stop and drinking, stop and smoking, whatever that might be for you.
Measure your progress as you move along. Because when you measure your progress and you each month intentionally stop and reflect back and go, am I 1%? You can create thoughts around the fact that you are or you aren't, and you can practice being intentionally happy because to wrap up this whole discussion today, happiness, as we've talked about, is not accessed when we outsource it.
It isn't a micro moment, but it's not long standing. We have to get really good at being able to generate happiness in any situation. How can it be that people that have much less than us in the world are the most or some of the happiest people? I spent four weeks, five weeks in Fiji. I saw extreme poverty.
People were begging me for Panadol when I was running the clinics. And they were the happiest, most beautiful, centered, grounded people that I've ever met in my life. And it was a real moment for me. Cause I indulge in thinking that I don't have enough and I don't have all the things, but really we have more than enough.
There's actually no excuse for us not to be happy in this moment.
So as we wrap up today, I want to offer to you that
Happiness, my friend, is an intentional act. It is a conscious process that we need to generate and actively participate in through our thoughts when we think happy thoughts, and we allow ourselves to have the full human experience. And we remind ourself that happiness is an internalized process and not an sourced process.
Happiness is available to you. I would love to hear your feedback from this episode. I'd love to know what you are doing to reduce your outsourcing or to increase how to be happy for you in this moment. Happiness is always there for you. I pass and wanna pass out my happiness vibes to you today, and I will see you in the next episode.
