To take a risk and to have the courage to branch out to something different is a brave act.
Welcome Savvy Scribes to another episode. This is another workshop we’re doing here at the Savvy nurse writer community, and this is for members, but we also use a little bit of repurposing, and we make this into an amazing podcast episode as well. My guest today is Catherine Burger. She and I have been back and forth over the years with many things we’ve done together. And today, she’s going to be talking to us about the daily decision of courage and having the courage to fail.
She has been a nurse for 34 years. She’s got the pleasure of working in specialties across a continuum of health care, including labor and delivery, ICU, home health, inventory care, education, and clinical practice consulting. She’s an experienced medical writer and has been published numerous times. She’s been published in Medscape, Minority nurse, and Trusted Health.
Catherine loves mentoring, coaching, and inspiring nurses and nurse leaders to grow into new roles and challenges in order to elevate their profession. She has a website called Nurseleadermastermind.org
She is going to give us a lot of value today. So I hope you enjoy this episode; get a piece of paper and a pen because it’s a good one.
What we’re going to talk about today is actually seven tips about the daily decision of courage and why we must equip ourselves with the courage to fail in order to succeed. We’re only going to talk about three of them here, and then members will join us over on Zoom for the rest of the four other tips you can download and will be able to ask Catherine some questions.
She describes her career path as like a jungle gym rather than a ladder until she met with a career coach that really helped her hone in on what she wanted to do, what are her values actually more than what does she want to do. And so she was able to learn from that experience, be a lot more purposeful in her career as a nurse, and really seek positions that would align with her values.
She spent 20 years of her career in California at Kaiser Permanente. She ran their largest ICU and practiced her leadership.
She retired from Kaiser and had a home-based business that was doing surprisingly well, and the writing part just kind of fell in her lap. When her girlfriend asked her if she wanted to try writing for registered nursing.org, she said yes because she knows that as a nurse, she wrote policies, and she finished her Master’s Degree, which was all about writing. So she started writing for them, and they liked it, and she got more and more gigs through them.
To take a risk and to have the courage to branch out to something different is a brave act because she really feels like a nurse, especially since we are conditioned not to fail at all, and so nurses are very sure.
To be looking at other career opportunities was terrifying and also very rewarding. We had the advantage as nurses of being immediately trusted, and so when you’re going into a new venture, and you are starting to build something, when those around you, find out that you’re a nurse, you automatically get another level of respect credibility, and it doesn’t matter how many alphabets you have behind your name, just being a nurse. Nursing is a street card. Use this advantage to think outside the box and try to venture into new things. Your opinion as a nurse, people do want to hear that as long as you’re backing it up with evidence.
You’re good. So, get over yourself and your imposter syndrome. You’re an expert. If you have an idea, you are the expert in that, and you need to use your courage and put on your big personality and push through to make it happen.
Different is better than better. Sometimes the solution is to keep pressing or to go around and that’s a whole other type of thing.
And then the last one, for now, is the courage to own it. We have to take responsibility for our actions and for what happens.
Like it shouldn’t be happening to you, you need to take control and then own it and be accountable for what is going on in your life, and if it’s not, how do you want it to be? Then you need to change it.
Learn more about Catherine by visiting her website: https://www.nurseleadermastermind.org/
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