When you started your nursing career, your vision of why you chose the profession was clear. You knew exactly how you wanted to care for your patients, and you probably never thought any obstacles could thwart that love. Somewhere along the way, however, your love was besieged by stress, added working pressures, or the exhausting effort to balance your personal and professional life. Now you’ve fallen out of love. Before you take a drastic leap into a new direction, you should consider some more questions. Questions like: Is it possible to rekindle your love for nursing? Can you recapture the passion for your practice — a passion that once seemed as if it would never fade?

Start with Healing

“To fall back in love, you must start with healing,” says Kathleen Heinrich, RN, PhD, professor of nursing at the University of Hartford, CT. “Nurses who are disenchanted or feel burned out can feel better with self-nurturing.” Heinrich believes that nurses can regain their love and enthusiasm in their work by first caring for themselves, then their fellow nurses, and finally, their work environment. “Turn to activities that energize you,” she says. “These activities don’t necessarily need to be related to nursing.” Activities like walking, sewing, and eating properly all contribute to an increased energy.

In addition to conducting healing workshops for nurses, Heinrich has joined with other colleagues in developing a website devoted to Nurses Healing Nurses. In its formative stage, the website is dedicated to enhancing the spiritual and caring needs of nurses. They are planning programs and activities for nurses to share support and encourage renewal. Their mission statement is “to promote nurses to care for themselves by identifying, valuing, and actualizing individual self nurturance.”¹

“We have to start with ourselves so that we have the energy to help others,” says Heinrich. “Without energy, we lack the stamina to change our nursing practice — we don’t even have enough energy to consider other nursing options.”

In her healing space workshops, Heinrich suggests that nurses set aside time with a trusted colleague one hour a month. “One talks while the other listens compassionately, without offering advice,” she says. “Whatever is bothering that nurse about the job can be said. Just the ability to vent and feel supported can make a huge difference.”

Create a Nurturing Environment

You may like your area of nursing practice but feel something is missing in your workplace. Heinrich believes that work environment changes must come from within nursing itself. “You can create a nurturing environment on your own unit by asking each other what you can do together to feel better. “Connect with those who energize you.”

One of the groups that attended a Nurses Healing Nurses workshop do scrapbooking in the staff room during lunch. “Self-care is all about creative ideas and ways to create healing spaces,” says Heinrich. Sharing activities unrelated to nursing can help build a camaraderie that continues throughout the shift.

Face Today’s Reality

“You may not need a big change,” says Marilyn Westerfield, RN, JD, personal and professional coach, RightLife Coaching. “Go back to the reasons why you chose nursing, then ask how far that is from today’s reality.” She suggests that you look at ways to emphasize what drew you to nursing. “You may want to give even more of yourself to the patients,” she says. “Do more patient education or learn new skills.”

Analyze where you are in life so that you can better determine what direction to take. Perhaps when you fell in love with ICU nursing, that option worked well with your lifestyle. Now it’s time to reexamine your priorities. “It may be that you no longer like the high speed of the ICU,” says Westerfield. “Even if you’re a great ICU nurse, if you find that you’re always exhausted, you need to rethink where you should be.”

Westerfield says it may be that your reasons for choosing nursing have changed. “You may have originally chosen nursing to help people, but later, your primary reason is that nursing allows flexibility.” If that’s the case, look for the nursing position that allows that flexibility.

Identify Your Energy Vampires

Sometimes the pressures of life intensify the pressures of work. “Early on, you need to identify energy vampires — things that are sucking your energy,” says Karen Laing, RN, MS, CHES, life coach in Richmond, VA. “You may think it’s your job, but it may be other things,” she says. “Even little things like a drawer handle that’s broken, or the button on your jeans that’s missing — little things that you don’t take time to fix.”

She suggests identifying five things this week that are “energy vampires” for you. Once you do that, take the time to fix them. “As nurses, we share a commonality in that we care for others and are not as good about caring for ourselves,” says Laing.

Get a New Attitude

“We are shaped by our attitudes, and what we think becomes our reality,” says Westerfield. “See if there’s a way to look at the situation with different eyes; you’re wiser than you were when you started.” Sometimes, she says, telling yourself that you’re going to enjoy what you’re doing can help it happen. Consider how you can be a more valuable employee, not only for the job, but also for yourself.

Being part of a committee may help you feel that you have a voice to make change. “Review your priorities and ask whether you’re working simply to help your family, or is this a career,” says Westerfield. If it’s a career, keep learning so that you keep it fresh, and remember you’re doing it for yourself. All of this can increase the sense that you’re in charge of your career, that you can make changes, if you want. “You can empower yourself,” says Westerfield, “and this feeling makes it easier to tolerate where you are.”

Put the Passion Back in Practice

To recapture your passion, Laing suggests that you look at your values, along with your strengths, and passions. “Take the time to identify your values, strengths, and passions, and in the center, you’ll find your gifts.”

Consider incorporating some change into your present practice. Perhaps mentoring will allow you do some of the things you have loved. “When we share knowledge with others, it reinforces our own knowledge,” says Laing. “Nothing is ever learned as well as when teaching others.”

Pat Yourself on the Back

Feeling good about your work helps keep your love alive. Most of us leave work thinking more about what we didn’t accomplish rather than what we did. “Consider a ‘way-to-go file,’” says Laing. “In this file, put in notes from patients, committee involvement, information on that breast cancer walk, or write yourself a note about an especially good day in which you helped a patient or family member.” Then when you have a stressful day, take something out to remind yourself of the value and satisfaction of your work. “There is a tendency to forget your positive environment.”

So, take a strong look at your work and your life. There are positive steps you can take to recapture the love and passion you first felt when you became a nurse. Nursing can be an energizing and joyful presence in your life again. Ask yourself: Why did I become a nurse, and how can I feel that way again? Armed with that answer, you can begin to take the needed steps to make your love of nursing a reality again.