Travel nursing can be a rewarding experience. It offers opportunities for you to make a real difference in a range of communities — not to mention that you can face diverse challenges that enrich your medical knowledge.
Nevertheless, while travel nursing offers some incredible opportunities, it’s not always clear how to achieve professional growth. Certainly, you can benefit from developing advanced skill sets. However, one of the frequently overlooked traits is the importance of building confidence. By committing time and energy to this part of your personality, you gain another way to boost your career trajectory.
Understanding the Importance of Confidence
If you find that your travel nursing career growth has slowed, this can be a frustrating experience. However, simply being told that having greater confidence could help can also be challenging. After all, it seems like a nebulous and — in some ways — dubious claim. Therefore, it’s worth starting by getting to know how and why confidence is relevant to your travel nursing career.
Firstly, a positive self-image can impact your career as a result of its significant mental and physical health benefits. It isn’t just that self-esteem helps your general well-being. Research suggests that your ability to think highly of yourself can make you more resilient to challenges and stress. In turn, this confidence can also give you the push to adopt behaviors that are conducive to career progression in travel nursing. For instance, you may feel more able to apply for unusual opportunities, engage in learning experiences, or even adopt innovative working routines.
Confidence can also boost your travel nursing career because it can help you gain comfort in navigating new or unfamiliar surroundings. This means that you may engage more meaningfully with the communities you spend time in, bolstering your impact and gaining a reputation in the process. It may even give you the boldness to head to different countries, which can offer you multicultural experiences.
Adopting Practical Ways to Boost Self-Esteem
Confidence is essential to your career growth. However, identifying effective and healthy ways to improve your self-esteem can be challenging. It requires long-term work, with a focus on developing positive relationships, challenging negative self-thought, and learning how to be more assertive. One approach is to start incorporating practical confidence-building steps into your daily travel nursing routine.
Some of these can include:
Recognizing your skills
You are an essential part of any community you provide your services to. It’s important to take a little time every day to recognize and acknowledge the significant skills you apply. Indeed, one of the reasons mid-career nurses tend to be more confident than students is due to the development of their skills. Think about how the technical skill sets you continue to develop tangibly improve the quality of life of patients. Reflect on how your soft skills — communication, empathy, and unique personality traits, among others — factor into boosting the experiences of colleagues and service users.
Celebrating small victories
There’s often a lot of focus on the big metrics of success, such as promotions and pay rises. However, these aren’t always practical ways to boost your daily confidence. Instead, remember to celebrate the smaller victories in your day. A patient feeling more empowered by the guidance you’ve provided or taking care of all your administrative work are triumphs that you should take the time to recognize. You, your skills, and your commitment made these things happen.
Utilizing Your Travel Experiences for Confidence
Travel nursing is a relatively unique career experience. You’re likely to have a more diverse range of interactions than professionals rooted in a single space. There can be a wider range of challenges you face, too. It’s vital to consider how the experience of travel nursing in itself can offer opportunities to boost your confidence in ways that can translate to career growth.
Some areas to consider include:
Cultural and linguistic competence
Wherever you’re stationed in the world, take the opportunity to learn about local cultures, customs, and languages. This isn’t just a practical imperative. It can also help you to better understand patients’ needs and the help they require. The more you engage here, the more confident you’re likely to be interacting with a wider range of patients. This directly impacts your career growth, particularly for roles where diverse cultural competence is valuable.
Learning different healthcare systems
Whether you operate close to home or internationally, each place you visit is likely to have different healthcare systems and practices. By getting to know the nuances of each system, you can gain confidence in your ability to effectively treat patients and handle administrative elements wherever you are. Remember, too, that an eagerness to learn is one of the most valuable traits of a travel nurse. Your confidence in your ability, combined with a commitment to learning, can demonstrate to potential employers that you can handle a range of needs.
Gaining professional growth as a travel nurse can benefit from your commitment to strengthening your self-confidence. After all, having belief in your abilities and a positive self-image can lead you to new opportunities and to explore fresh ideas. You can build these traits in practical ways, by taking time to recognize your skills every day and celebrate the little victories. You can also find elements of your travel nurse experience — such as cultural competence and systems knowledge — can bolster your self-worth.
In addition, try not to focus your confidence-building entirely on your career. Remember that you have significant worth and talent outside of your job. By also taking time to regularly explore what is fantastic about your human elements, your overall confidence may have a greater holistic impact.
