confidence problem.........

Scrubby · Feb 4, 2008

Lorabel I can relate to what your saying because i'm not the worlds most confident person (i am unable to do any form of public speaking) and i too sometimes worry about making mistakes. I have only nursed for three years and i have found that my confidence has gradually increased over time, as i feel comfortable in what i do. It's a huge step going from a student to an RN and theres a lot of nursing environments that do not support or encourage new nurses to gain confidence.

From reading your post it seems that you honestly care for you patients and understand the responsibilities of nursing which to me makes you a good nurse. My advice here is to try and let go of what happened in your former job and to focus on your new position.

Best of luck to you.

Imafloat, BSN, RN · Feb 4, 2008

Lorabel, confidence comes with time, as you feel more comfortable in your job. I don't think outgoing people are always more confident, they just seem to be. I am outgoing and people think I am confident, but I'm really not that confident, I just appear to be. When I have a crisis, I am crumping on the inside, but all business on the outside. Unfortunately true confidence comes over time as you are experience situations more frequently.

What will completely crush your confidence is dwelling on the past and your old job. I know what I speak because I am a dweller. I torture myself over what I could have done differently. Just get strict with yourself, tell yourself that you are moving on to a different job and take what you learned and use it to better yourself. If you find yourself slipping down into that cycle of negative thinking nip it in the bud, sometimes when I find myself drifting off in that direction I tell myself to stop and think about something else. Dwelling on the negative only sucks your confidence.

I hope I am making sense.

lorabel · Feb 4, 2008

Thank you. What you say does make sense. I guess I am obessing because I truly love nursing. I even find myself thinking about patients I cared for and wondering how they are. I worked in onco and many patients stayed in the hospital for weeks at a time and sometimes came back. We established relationships with them. I will try to put it all behind me. I think part of me is afraid it will follow me to my next job. As you say I need to take what I learned and I did learn alot, to my next job. I have said before that i am at my strongest when others are at their weakest. Thats a good and bad thing. If I was in a situation with no one else around, I would take charge. If there were others there I would probably tend to stand back a bit.......I'm not at all aggressive. I need to work on that! I have not been in a code situation and it scares me to death! I wont know what to do! I still have so much to learn. I'm praying confidence does come with time for me as well. I'm not sure if I should jump back on the horse as they say and go back to a hospital or try something slower like LTC. I am waiting for the LTC place to call me to schedule my physical.....I also applied to another floor at the hospital where I worked.I'm not sure if thats a good thing or not? The manager on the floor I applied knew of my situation and was angry that I was treated as I was....my daughter worked as an aide on that floor and spoke to the manager about it.......I guess time will tell.......

nursemike, ASN, RN · Feb 4, 2008

I was having a pretty good night, once--busy, but pretty much on top of things--and at one point I was doing some charting and sort of mentally reviewing my shift thus far, talking to myself about it: "So, I started an IV here, got some sort of order there, whatever, whatever... and feeling pretty satisfied with my several small victories, when a co-worker overheard me and remarked, jokingly, "Gee, you aren't afraid to pat yourself on the back, are you?"

For once in my life, I had just the right answer: "Well, I would never leave anything that important to someone else."

And, by golly, I was right, even though it wasn't anything I had consciously reasoned out. Self-congratulation isn't pretty, but it can be effective. More than that, it seems to me that confidence is not so much a personality trait as a skill, and while it's largely true that it will come with time, it isn't anything you have to passively wait to arrive.

You can help yourself build confidence. Recognizing and enjoying your successes (not necessarily out loud) is one tool. Another thing I told myself at times when I thought maybe I needed to find an easier environment was that if I could just hang in there and face the challenges before me, if I ever wanted to go somewhere else, it would be a piece of cake by comparison. (I've had to revise that, a bit. A lot, if not all, jobs that appear less demanding turn out to have their own challenges. Still, it is true that meeting one set of challenges makes facing another set easier.)

During our first year as working nurses, a classmate of mine used to say, "Gee, remember when we thought nursing school was hard?" As much as I agreed with him, the fact is, nursing school was hard--very hard. The transition from Graduate Nurse to working nurse may well be as hard as or even harder than getting from Student Nurse to Graduate Nurse. Be that as it may, losers and dimwits do not graduate from nursing school, and they certainly don't pass NCLEX. Really smart people work really hard to get through nursing school, and those who succeed have already proven their ability to become good nurses. They merely have to work as hard at it as they did at nursing school.

Some people are just naturally good at starting IVs. Most of us have to practice. Some people can remember huge gulps of their Pharm texts and spit them out effortlessly. Most of us work hard to learn the couple dozen meds we pass most often, and look up any of the thousands we might run into with one patient and never see again.

Some people just seem to exude confidence and grace under pressure, some can fake it until they develop the real thing, and some of us just have to put up with feeling like a deer caught in headlights from time to time--but even if all you can manage is standing frozen in fear while the real nurses get the job done, you learn more by watching than you do by hiding in the med room and crying. And, hey--bonus points if you were with it enough to realize you needed to call in the real nurses!

It's important to learn how to critique yourself. Sometimes that means looking hard at what you did wrong and thinking how you might try to do better, next time. But any idiot can find fault. Part of realistic self-criticism is recognizing the things you did right (and sometimes still looking at how you might do even better.)

It ain't easy, for sure, but putting yourself through this wringer and coming back for more entitles you to call yourself a nurse. Do it enough times, and you'll call yourself a good nurse, and while it's always nice when others call you a good nurse, by the time you get there, your own opinion will be the one that matters most. And that, my esteemed colleagues, is what you call confidence.