personal nursing essay writing

personal nursing essay writing

The Art of Personal Reflection in Nursing: Enhancing Self-Awareness and Professional Growth Through Writing

1. Introduction to Personal Reflective Writing in Nursing

The nursing profession often struggles with defining its unique knowledge. As has been established in the knowledge utilization literature, the daily activities of nurses involve solving unpredictable problems, coping with all aspects of a human’s life course and death, dealing with one or many troubled interrelations, taking responsibility, practicing with autonomy, and using several theories, from the most unassailable to the most humble sources and characteristics. Lately, much emphasis has been placed on the caring, art, and ethics aspects of nursing. Perhaps due to the complexity of nursing, and overemphasis on evidence and a hard-science approach to healthcare, the aesthetic and poetic aspects of nursing have come under threat. Creative arts, especially music, creative writing, fine arts, and aesthetic activities, can serve to enhance personal growth and development and provide a spiritual dimension to health and nursing care. Creative arts can bring beauty, intuition, and revelation into nursing, and should still be an essential part of a caring profession.

2. Benefits of Personal Reflective Writing for Nurses

This form of writing can offer a nurse many cognitive, affective and professional benefits. As Greenberg expresses, nurses are often involved in the business of healing others but feel a “hunger to be healed too” (1996, p.15). Some potential benefits which derive from regular reflective writing are: 1. Gains in empathy: nurses report an increase in the capacity to understand others. 2. Self-appraisal: through reflective writing, nurses can internalize past behaviors and choices and objectively consider a different approach the next time. 3. Professional insight and gains in clinical judgment. 4. Integration of “thinking, feeling, and doing.” 5. Creativity arises. 6. Changes in attitudes and values occur. 7. Greater understanding and communication: reflective writing creates personal insight which can result in improved interpersonal relationships and stimulates creative problem-solving skills. 8. Eased transition into a new environment.

3. Practical Tips and Techniques for Effective Personal Reflective Writing

The process of enhancing readers’ perspectives is a difficult consideration. We can all identify with Abraham Pais, a physicist, who reported that his writing was always private and had always felt ‘like sinking in quicksand. If other physics students would observe how much my output reflected my input, they would rightly conclude that I had not been participating at all,’ he confessed later. At the same time, his reliance on reading others’ works as a mentor was often critical to his progress as a scholar. The reader remains an active party in the process. In using writing for self-awareness and professional growth within a learning environment, I attempt to respect the kinds of progressions experienced by Pais – the loose, the public, the humble, and the confident.

The art of using one’s personal writing to reflect upon their professional nursing practice or nursing education is challenging. Writers’ cognitive and emotional processes need to be in place for personal reflection to be effective. Furthermore, two goals guide our use of the personal writing technique. Mainly, effective writing, i.e., writing as a tool of reflection aimed at enhancing self-awareness and professional growth, and injecting our work with readers’ perspectives. Effective writers are those who understand how words on paper provide the very means by which they can learn more about themselves, their work, and indeed their world. Like other professionals, nurses can use writing as an intentional habit, either informally or formally as a basis for teaching and learning.

4. Case Studies: Real-Life Examples of the Impact of Personal Reflective Writing in Nursing Practice

Now, we turn to examples of how all three of the bedside and personal reflective writing resources can be used in practice. In at least one case, the authors state that writing during the workshop led to an article in a printed journal.

Throughout this book, we have presented strategies that can enhance personal reflective writing approaches for individual writers. We began by outlining the transformative potential inherent in personal reflective writing. We offered a taxonomy (though certainly not the final word) on the types and foci of personal writing. We noted how personal reflective writing can play a role during different stages of a nurse’s career. We next moved to application, describing a specific time-honed approach to the facilitation of personal reflective writing workshops for nurses in practice. We concluded by describing a little-used resource for nurses to develop professionally and personally – bedside reflective writing resources are exercises that nurses can use to learn more about themselves, their colleagues, and their relationships with their patients within the context of a busy clinical environment.

5. Conclusion: Empowering Nurses Through Self-Reflection and Writing

Guidance nurses develop advanced therapeutic relationships with patients—relationships that promote good psychological and physical health—by providing therapeutic encounters with patients, using therapeutic communication, and developing the discipline, communication skills, and connectedness that foster the patient’s search for meaning and purpose. Self-reflection makes this development possible. According to insufficient self-awareness development amply limits the personal and professional growth of nurses leading is a challenge for all nurses, especially for Academic Nurse Leaders. Nursing leaders and educators can model and teach reflective experiences and narrative writing to promote self-awareness, self-growth, and the ability to choose the ethical and dignified path for nurses and other practice, using self-care strategies, coaching and mentoring others. Empowering ADN nurses to foster reflective relationships in their practice contributes to the profession’s essence. Recognizing that the self-awareness literary genre is useful is a first step. Empowering nurses with these reflective and adaptive learning strategies is timeless and priceless.

Nurses are deeply aware of the contradictions, challenges, and enriching possibilities facing their life in nursing. Their daily acts of healing and nurturing are profound. These wonderful acts are, in part, expressions of wisdom, compassion, and commitment that are greatly valued within the human community. Providing skilled professional care to human beings is a central aspect of all health professional work, but especially so in a profession that is characterized by its healing outlook and consistent focus on the needs and well-being of those persons in its care. Both caring for others and self-awareness are thought of as being two central values in this profession. This, therefore, calls for a way of increasing reflective insights of nurses and teaching nurses a way of establishing a reflective way of thinking as part of their caring behavior.