What You Need To Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Nursing Career

For the majority of people, there will come a time when they finally need to decide what it is they want to do. This may sound daunting, but remember, you can always change your mind – you don’t have to stick with something you don’t like. However, changing to a new career, although entirely possible (and important if you don’t like what you’re doing), is time-consuming, and it can be costly. It can also be difficult, especially if you have responsibilities within the home or financially. Therefore, it’s far better to make the right choice at the start, and this involves asking yourself a lot of deep questions about whether or not the career you are thinking of going into is really the right one for you.

Many people are keen to be nurses. This makes a lot of sense; nursing is an excellent career with a lot of progression opportunities flexible working hours (although potentially not at first), and it is also highly rewarding. However, to become a nurse, you will need to do a lot of hard work, and the intricacies of the job itself won’t be something everyone enjoys. So before you start studying to become a nurse, here are some of the best questions to ask yourself to determine whether this is the right direction for you to go in.

Why Do You Want To Be A Nurse? 

The first question to ask yourself when it comes to your career as a nurse is why you want to become a nurse at all. In fact, this is a great question to ask yourself, no matter what career you are thinking of studying for, just what is it that makes this particular sector interesting to you. Why do you think you will enjoy the work?

There are many answers to this question, and some are better than others. For some people, nursing is a calling – in other words, it’s just the only thing they can see themselves doing, and they instinctively know they will be great at it. For others, it’s a question of where they can put their personal character traits to best use. Others still want to have a career in which they can help people or where every day is different. Some, however, only want to become nurses because that’s what their family expects of them (perhaps it’s a career that many family members have undertaken in the past) or because they can’t think of anything else to do. These are not such good reasons, and in the end, going ahead because of this could mean you become miserable, and you might have to change careers.

What Do Nurses Do?

This probably seems like a very strange question. After all, everyone knows what nurses do, don’t they? The truth is that although people might all have an idea of what it is a nurse does on a day to day basis unless they do research and look into exactly what this career entails, they’ll never know. The public only ever see what the media shows them, or what they see when they go into a hospital or clinic.

Before you can decide whether nursing is the right choice for you in terms of your career, you are going to have to know exactly what it is a nurse does. This means conducting more thorough research. You might read blogs written by nurses. You might read industry reports and journals. Perhaps you could interview a nurse or perform some job shadowing. Just make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into before you start to help you make the right choice.

Are You A People Person? 

Not everyone is the same, and that’s what makes the world such a special place. It means there is a career path for everyone, no matter who you are or what you are good at. If you want to be a nurse, you’ll need to like being around people; it’s a big part of the job. You’ll be helping patients, talking to their families, dealing with colleagues, and generally being with other people a lot of the time. There won’t be much time to be alone. If this is something you would enjoy, then nursing will tick the boxes. If it’s something you don’t think would suit you because you are much more introverted and prefer to work alone, then it’s time to think of something else to do.

Don’t worry, though; just being a shy or introverted person doesn’t mean you can’t still be a great nurse. It simply means you’ll need to do some extra work to ensure you learn how to be with people in a more productive way. This might entail learning how to communicate better or how to listen more. Only you will know if this is something you are able to do. If you know that you’ll be much more effective working alone, you can still help people – there are many careers that offer this option – but you might not make the best nurse.

Are You Committed To Learning? 

There is a lot of learning involved in becoming a nurse, and that’s something that is going to please some people greatly; they love to learn, and they want to know as much as possible. It’s crucial that you know this in advance; you wouldn’t want the amount of knowledge a nurse needs to have to become a surprise at the last moment. However, there is more to understanding how to study to become a nurse than the initial stages; if you want to be a good nurse, you’ll need to continue learning throughout your career. Will you want to do this? Will you be able to?

The medical sector has changed a lot, and it’s constant change. Just because you have graduated and are now an RN, that doesn’t mean you know everything, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ll always be on top of all the information you need to be because more and more will be discovered and more and more changes will be made. This is why you need to be completely committed to learning; you must ensure you know what all the latest information is regarding nursing and medicine.

There are many ways to do this, but a lot of nurses like to go back to school. In this way, not only are they learning, but they will receive a qualification such as a post masters FNP which will help them progress their careers as well. The more you are willing to learn, the more you will enjoy your job and the more you can help people.

Are You Resilient? 

Nursing is the ideal career path to choose if you are looking for something that is challenging and in which you can make a difference in people’s lives. Yet it is this challenging aspect that you might need to ask yourself about before you actually go ahead and apply to study for a nursing qualification. What exactly does that mean? There are actually many things that make nursing challenging, and no matter which ones you are dealing with at any particular time, you need to be resilient in order to cope with them.

Remember that in nursing, as in life, what you are aiming for might not be what you achieve. Obstacles will come up, and you will have to be resilient to keep pushing past them. You might have to change your plans or come up with an entirely new treatment option for someone. You might have to concede that there is no treatment and simply make someone as comfortable as possible. The only thing you can’t do when you’re a nurse is to walk away from a difficult situation. You will need to see it through, no matter what; can you do that?

Can You Keep Calm During Emergencies?

Although you can have a lot of fun as a nurse, the fact is that nurses deal with negative things. They are there to help when someone is sick or injured. They are there to help when it comes to life or death. This is why it’s vital you are able to keep calm when there is an emergency situation happening in front of you. You can’t just freeze, and you must stay cool and collected – not only will this help the patient, but it will help everyone else around you as well.

It’s not easy to do this. Human nature is to allow panic to set in when there is an emergency happening; it’s a natural instinct and relates to the fight or flight mode that the body goes into when certain hormones are produced. When you are a nurse, you need to override these feelings and remain completely in control.

Of course, it could be that you have no idea whether you can do this or not. If you have never been in a difficult, urgent situation, you might just not know. Yet you can have an idea of how you would react; are you naturally a calm person, or do you tend to panic about things? The truth is that you can learn to be calm over time, and therefore, although it’s crucial for nurses to be calm, you don’t have to know exactly what to do right away. The more experienced and knowledge you have, the easier it will be to stay calm and do your job.