The Balancing Personal And Professional Life In Nursing Career. Balancing work and personal life requires specific strategies and self-care. Experts say that prioritizing well-being, setting boundaries, and utilizing time management techniques are crucial for a healthy work-life balance in the demanding caregiving field.
How Balancing Personal And Professional Life In Nursing Career
The emotional demands of caregiving can be exhausting and make it difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Nurses can address these demands by taking regular breaks, investing in self-care, and seeking support from colleagues and family members.
Work-life balance is an ongoing process that requires effort and commitment. By setting boundaries, prioritizing tasks, delegating responsibilities, and making time for self-care, a healthier balance can be achieved.
Supporting employees’ hobbies shows appreciation for their individuality and promotes work-life integration. For example, allowing runners flexible hours so they can train for marathons facilitates personal fulfillment, resulting in a happier, more balanced, and therefore more engaged workforce.
Balancing Personal And Professional Life
Nurses at all levels are responsible for delivering high-quality, safe, patient care in a complex health-care environment. To be able to meet this responsibility consistently, nurses “must have the capacity to fully engage and to be fully present in their practice and in their life” (Inter-professional Institute for Self-Care, n.d.,para. 1). Nurses are very focused on caring for others, often to their own detriment. Caring for others before oneself can result in an environment that saps energy and jeopardizes personal health.
What many nurses do not understand is that caring for oneself is foundational to being able to care for others (Cranick, Miller, Allen, Ewell, & Whittington, 2015). Self-care is “choosing behaviors that balance the effects of emotional and physical stressors. These behaviors can include exercising, eating nutritious foods, getting enough sleep, practicing self-centering activities, abstaining from substance abuse, and pursuing creative outlets” (Richards, Sheen, & Mazzer, 2014, p. 3).
Nurses have a duty to take care of their own health and safety just as they care for their patients (ANA, 2015c). Provision 5 of the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses With Interpretive Statements states “the nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to promote health and safety, preserve wholeness of character and integrity, maintain competence, and continue personal and professional growth” (ANA, 2015a, p. 19).
Sadly, many nurses easily become trapped in an unhealthy cycle of putting others before themselves and depleting their energy and time for self-care. The resulting fatigue from the lack of self-care is linked to an increased risk of errors, memory deficits, impaired mood, miscommunication, and overall poor performance that can jeopardize patient safety and quality of nursing care (ANA, 2014a). Personal wellness is important. Nursing students should begin self-care during their educational program.
Habits developed early in one’s career can have lasting effects. According to the ANA, a healthy nurse is “one who actively focuses on creating and maintaining a balance and synergy of physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, personal, and professional wellbeing. A healthy nurse lives life to the fullest capacity, across the wellness/illness continuum, as they become stronger role models, advocates, and educators, personally, for their families, their communities and work environments, and ultimately for their patients” (ANA, 2015b, para. 1).
Being healthy is not only important for nurses, it is also important for the quality of nursing care (Letvak, 2012). Nurses at all levels have a responsibility to engage in evidence-based self-care strategies to reduce the risk of fatigue. Richards and colleagues (2014) suggest that self-care should focus on six areas (Richards et al., 2014):
- Physical self-care: “Physical self-care includes proper nutrition, emphasizing dis ease prevention and management, regular cardiovascular and strength building exercise, adequate sleep and rest, and an understanding of personal self-care routines” (p. 9).
- Mental self-care: “Mental self-care focuses on flexibility, stress-reducing practices, open-mindedness, and constant learning: these are the pillars of a healthy mental environment” (p. 17).
- Emotional self-care: Emotional self-care involves identifying where unresolved emotional pain is eroding self-care and focuses on understanding inaccuracies, challenging negative beliefs, and changing how one thinks (p. 25).
- Spiritual self-care: Spiritual self-care is a reflection of the belief in a higher power that provides a connection to the universe. Beliefs may or may not be based in organized religion, but the spirit reflected is unique to the individual (p. 27).
- Relationship self-care: An individual’s life is affected, either positively or negatively, by the quality of the relationships in which they are involved. Self-care can be challenged by toxic relationships. Therefore, to be a healthy nurse may require eliminating toxic people from one’s life (p. 29).
- Choice self-care: When nurses make choices from self-compassion, the choices are in line with core values. Choosing to create a life of improved self-care may take some work, but nurses will have a renewed sense of freedom (p. 30).
Nurses at all levels should model health maintenance and health promotion measures for their patients, seek health care when needed, and avoid unnecessary health or safety risks in personal and professional activities (ANA, 2015c). Nurse leaders and managers have an ethical responsibility to foster balance within their units by promoting healthy lifestyles and encouraging nurses to make time for self-care (ANA, 2015c; Cranick et al., 2015). The ANA identifies five healthy constructs that are important to foster a work environment conducive to supporting healthy nurses (ANA, 2015a, p. 24):
- Calling to care: Caring is the interpersonal, compassionate offering of self by which the healthy nurse builds relationships with patients and their families.
- Priority to self-care: Self-care and supportive environments enable the healthy nurse to increase the ability to manage the physical and emotional stressors of the work and home environments effectively.
- Opportunity to role model: The healthy nurse confidently recognizes and identifies personal health challenges in himself or herself and in the patients, thereby enabling the nurse and the patients to overcome these challenges in a collaborative, non-accusatory manner.
- Responsibility to educate: Using nonjudgmental approaches, considering adult learning patterns and readiness to change, the healthy nurse empowers himself or herself and others by sharing health, safety, and wellness knowledge and skills, resources, and attitudes.
- Authority to advocate: The healthy nurse is empowered to advocate on numerous levels including personally, interpersonally, within the work environment and the community, and at the local, state, and national levels in policy development and advocacy.
Nurse leaders and managers should implement evidence-based policies, procedures, and strategies that promote healthy work schedules, improve alertness, and discourage nurses from working extra hours that may contribute to fatigue (ANA, 2014a, p. 5).
Future Directions
Conceptualizing the future can be difficult and demanding. In a classic article by Henchey (1978), four types of futures are presented, each with different characteristics and purposes. Interestingly, they are still relevant to consider today. The plausible future, or what could be, focuses on what may occur based on current and projected trends. The probable future is what will likely occur and actually reflects the present state with minimal changes.
Looking at the probable future is the catalyst that motivates people to want and explore possible futures (Henchey, 1978). The possible future, or what may be, considers all possible situations that could occur. The possibilities inspire people to explore the perfect future or what Henchey calls the preferable future. The preferable future is what should be and begins with a vision and a roadmap to get there. Nurses and nurse leaders and managers can shape the preferable future. The preferred future is one in which nurses provide safe, quality care in a healthy work and optimal healing environment. The Lucian Leape Institute (2013) described the future healthy and safe workplace:
Innovation, critical thinking, and technological and scientific advancement would be intrinsic to the work, without loss of compassion and relationship. Each day, all members of the workforce would learn something new and experience a sense of meaning and joy. All members of the workforce would be able to identify their contributions to the minute.
Management would hold workforce safety and experience as a non-negotiable requirement. . . . Patients and families would participate as partners in their care. They would enter the health care organization with a sense of relief and confidence that they would be respected, cared for, and safe in the hands of inspired care teams who clearly find their work meaningful (pp. 22–23).
Nurse leaders and managers can contribute significantly to this preferred future by honoring and respecting staff and protecting the physical, psychological, and emotional safety of these staff members. This culture of respect creates joy and meaning in the workplace, which results in safe and quality health care. Nurse leaders and managers must be aware of possible trends in the future so that the profession can be influenced positively. Ideally, nurse leaders and managers will be a leading force in creating the future of health care, not just reacting and adapting to future changes (Grossman & Valiga, 2016). For nurses to thrive in the anticipated increasingly complex health-care environment of the future will require the following (Johnson, 2015, pp. 90–91):
- Lifelong learning through formal and informal education
- Ability to implement practice changes rapidly and well
- Focus on outcomes and process improvements to influence the direction of health care
- Recognizing that the patient and their family must be at the center of care
- Partnership with other health-care professionals to improve patient care through teamwork and collaboration
Nurse at all levels should be involved in ongoing career planning and development that includes personal and professional self-assessment, envisioning the future, and establishing realistic goals to get there. Whatever goal a nurse pursues, the key is planning to obtain the necessary experience, the proper education, and specialty certification, if appropriate, to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will prepare the nurse for a long-term career in a dynamic, complex health-care environment.
Continued competence is critical to the nursing profession as well as ensuring safe, quality nursing care. Nurses must be committed to lifelong learning, which includes career planning and advanced education (AACN, 2008). All nurses should strive for balance between personal life and professional life. Further, all nurses should support each other’s needs for balance between personal and work life. No one can predict the future. However, visualizing or envisioning several possibilities and developing goals for a preferable future will allow nurses to shape their future.
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