Some travel nursing professionals lose their resilience once they are settled in their careers. Working with patients on a daily basis, you have surely seen how much this quality can affect someone's well-being. Work on maintaining your abilities to cope with difficult situations and remain a goal-oriented individual with these tips:
Connect professionally
Maintaining positive relationships with other travel nurses outside of work can help you to build your resilience. This can mean participating in networking events, using social media outlets or just grabbing dinner with a colleague. From there, you can create a support system for yourself.
Prepare for change
During your life, you're bound to experience changes over time, but this is especially true for your career life as a travel nurse. Having the ability to accept and foresee changes in your future will make coping with the transitional periods and personal adjustments much easier.
Keep a list of goals
It's a lot harder to achieve career milestones if you never set any goals for yourself. Both professionally and personally you should create a list of things you'd like to get done while on your assignment. This can be as simple as exploring something new or finding another health care professional to mentor. If you're up for the challenge, why not throw some deadlines for yourself into the mix?
Stay positive
If at first you don't succeed, try and try again is a great motto for maintaining a resilient personality. Although life is full of struggles, having confidence in your ability to move past negative experiences is always the best option. Understand that momentary emotions don't need to define you and remain hopeful in all aspects of your life that one bad day isn't the end of your happiness. Your attitude is likely to rub off on your patients and co-workers, so be sure to set a positive example.
Ditch the all-or-nothing attitude
Things aren't always yes or no, or black or white. Sometimes there may be a shade of grey in there. A resilient individual is one who understands this and allows it to affect the way in which he or she goes about dealing with situations.
Being a travel nurse, you are used to taking on new experiences and making the most out of them. Try your best to maintain that resilience throughout your career and you will be able to make a difference in the lives of the patients in which you come in contact.