There are many things that nurses have to be. They have to be compassionate, empathetic, skillful, kind, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, fit, and more. Ideally, they should also be confident. If a nurse is confident, it means they will be more comfortable helping patients, and they will make suggestions that will help even more without fearing they are wrong. They’ll be able to do everything possible to assist the person in their care.
Not everyone is confident, however. If you are a nurse and you want to build your confidence so you can help people – patients, their families, and your colleagues, for example – as much as possible, read on to find out what you can do.
Find An Experienced Mentor
No one knows everything right away, but a good nurse will want to know everything, and they will continually strive to learn more and do better. This is not always an easy thing to do, and sometimes, when you look around at the other, more experienced nurses working with you, it can feel as though you will never reach those impressive levels.
Rather than being envious of those other, more experienced nurses, why not utilize their skills in a different way? Why not ask for one or more of them to be your mentor? A nurse mentor can look out for you and help you in your career, giving you much more confidence in your abilities and teaching you a lot at the same time. With a mentor, you might still make mistakes, but they are much less likely to occur, and if they do, they probably won’t be as serious as they would have been if you were going it alone.
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Get Organized
A good nurse must be organized, and the more organized you can be with the best time management, the more confident you will be. This is because when you are organized, you’ll always know what you’re doing and where you’re meant to be. You’ll meet deadlines and meetings, and you’ll become much more efficient and productive in your work. The better you are, the more your confidence will grow.
Being organized is helpful for a wide range of different reasons, including feeling more in control of your career (and perhaps life in general), having a better self-image, and being less stressed. When you put all this together and look at what you can achieve simply through better time management, your confidence in what you can do will soar.
Build Your Knowledge
Nurses have to know a lot, and this is why they need to gain a degree to become a nurse in the first place. In the past, a lot of a nurse’s training would have been done first-hand with patients in a hospital or clinic setting, but today, learning things theoretically before putting them into practice has been shown to have better outcomes. Gaining your nursing qualification and becoming an RN will certainly boost your confidence; you’ve done what you set out to do.
However, think more long-term when it comes to your education. The more you know, the more confident you will be, so it makes sense that, as well as the experience you are gaining in your work as a nurse, you also continue to learn in a more formal setting, and by doing this, you will not only enhance your knowledge but your career too. This is because you can choose to take qualifications, such as a DNP. What is a DNP degree? It stands for ‘doctor of nursing practice,’ and it will help you get ahead in your career, enabling you to move forward and apply for higher ranking jobs. If anything is going to boost your confidence, this is it.
Ask Questions
Learning doesn’t just have to happen in the classroom; you can learn while you work as well, and the best nurses will do that. Those nurses will ask questions as they go along, ensuring they are completely aware of everything they need to do and why they need to do it. They’ll ask questions of the doctors, other nurses, other healthcare professionals, patients, and their families to get a full overview of what is happening and what needs to be done.
Some people won’t ask questions even if they need to know the answer to something. They think it shows their lack of knowledge or even common sense. However, how will you learn to do something you’re not sure of if you don’t ask questions? Rather than being a weakness, the ability to ask questions is certainly a strength that will help you become a wonderful nurse. It will improve your confidence because you’ll feel you are learning more and becoming much better able to take care of your patients.
Be Comfortable In Your Role
The more comfortable a nurse feels doing their job, the more confidence they will have in what they are doing and how much they can help someone. Nurse training takes several years, and during that time, you will develop not just nursing knowledge and skills but a number of ‘soft’ or transferable skills too. These include:
- Organization and time-keeping
- Communication
- Empathy
- Research
- Problem-solving
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Professionalism
The more of these things you can bring to your role as a nurse, the more comfortable you will be. The things you are doing will become second nature, but because every day as a nurse is different, that won’t mean they become boring. You’ll grow more confident and more comfortable in your role every day, and you’ll constantly be able to put your skills to the test.
Ask For Feedback
Maybe you aren’t confident in your role because you aren’t aware of how good a nurse you are. It’s hard to understand when you’re involved in the situation, and it takes an outside person to comment to let you know what is happening.
This is why asking for feedback is so important. It might also be a scary thing to contemplate – getting feedback on performance is always a little concerning, as you might discover something you don’t like – however, if you want to build your confidence, this is a good way to do it. Firstly, positive comments will immediately boost your confidence levels. However, even negative comments can help; they will show you where you need to learn more and do more, and when you put the feedback into practice, you’ll build your confidence in this way.