CNA. My smartphone and MacBook have no idea what this acronym means. Their best guess is always ‘CAN’. For those of you scratching your heads, a CNA is a Certified Nurse Assistant and is the health and nursing teams’ equivalent of starting out in the Operations department at a rising .com or Fortune 500 company.
This semester I decided to knock out a CNA training course, a requirement for a nursing school I am targeting. If you’d asked me back in November, I would have told you I was a little worried about how exactly I was going to navigate working full-time, and completing this part of my journey. CNA courses are compacted over half a semester and demand 16 hours a week in lab/lecture, and 21 hours a week once you get to clinicals. However, due to a generous and timely gift of free-time and greenbacks from my former employer, the tracks ahead are clear and this train has left the station!! I will complete the CNA course March 21st, after which I will be prepared to sit for the state CNA licensing exam and be able to secure an entry-level health team position in a hospital. For those of you keeping score, yes I am starting back at the bottom not only with my education, but also with my professional pursuits. So far it’s cost me a few thousand dollars, 5 semesters, and getting laid off; but I will have secured an Associates of Science degree, CNA licensure, and entry into the field I want to be in. It turns out one man’s severance is another man’s sabbatical. CNAs are not a glorious position. We are constantly told in our training, we are not to make decisions about a patient’s care. We are not to assess a patient’s condition. We are there to perform delegated tasks from the nurse. We are there to observe and report to the nurse. The irony in all this is that CNAs spend the most time with the patients out of any member of the health team. We are the front lines in an unsexy position that demands a lot of work and knowledge for limited pay. If that sounds a lot like any entry level-position you are currently in or have held in the past, that’s because it is basically the same game in a different industry. I’ve spent a decent amount of time since getting laid off in December reflecting on my experiences with my former company and pondering what lessons I could take forward. As I thought about what to write in this post, I realized that maybe my smartphone is actually on to something when it autocorrects CNA to ‘CAN’. No one likes to be at the bottom. We have many experiences with this throughout our lives when we move on to middle school, high school or college. We get fired or laid off. We become newlyweds, or newly divorced. We start a new job or a family. While some of these events are positive, they all involve discomfort, anxiety, and maybe a little self-doubt. It’s so easy to get down on ourselves and discouraged with events in our lives or stations we find ourselves at. Negativity and stress are all around us constantly. From time to time I hit the panic button with my future plans when I am stressed with school or life. It’s easy to start spinning wheels that I haven’t even gotten to the most challenging part of my adventure, actual nursing school, or dwell on the limitations and constraints this path puts on me. The next thoughts are usually “Can you do this?”, “How will you do this?”, “Do you want to do this?”; down the rabbit hole it goes. When people are faced with obstacles or challenges in their life there are only two responses. ‘I CAN’ or ‘I can’t.’ I think there’s a lot to the idea of attitude and how it carries us through things. When I first started in the corporate world, there was a brief moment in my entry-level job training where I felt legitimately conned. The job posting had a lot of fluff to it and I remember verbally saying half way through to my trainer, “This is it?”, “This is all we do, punch data into different windows, click here, click there?” I had been waiting for the big reveal, the aha moment about why I was really hired. It never came. In that moment I decided that ‘I CAN’. ‘I CAN’ be the best data entry specialist on this team. ‘I CAN’ be the best in this moment with the cards I was dealt. I chose not to cut corners with work, follow processes, and look for opportunities to go above and beyond what was required. It was that attitude that padded my reputation and brand with others and opened up more doors for me within the company. Thankfully this time around as I restart my career, I feel like I have a better idea of what exactly I am getting myself into and have clearer vision with my path, but that attitude is something I want to continue bringing to the table. I don’t have a lot of doubts about my intellectual ability to learn and understand the procedures and policies of healthcare in the CNA or nursing role. However I do know that a personal challenge for me will be listening and empathizing with individuals dealing with very difficult situations. This is going to be something I learn to say ‘I CAN’ to. If I had to pick an area I struggled with at my last job, it would be verbal communication. It wasn’t something I readily practiced and I don’t always present my thoughts in a clear and concise manner. Many times I know what I am trying to say in my head, and bank on the idea that people will think the same way I do, which I have learned in many instances isn’t the case. Other times I didn’t have the confidence in myself, and ultimately my message, which is a rocky place to start communication from. As a CNA in training, my clinical hours will be completed at a long-term care facility, or what most people would call a nursing home. I’m grateful for the foundational knowledge I am learning through this program, but I am more grateful for the hands on practice in lab and the upcoming real-life practice in clinicals. I look forward to seeing and learning first hand from those with more experience while developing my own flavor of compassion and care along the way. There’s value in starting out from the bottom in any pursuit. It’s a place where you can learn the culture and best practices while having ample room to learn and make mistakes. It’s an environment where you can hedge weaknesses on your strengths and say ‘I CAN’ to facing new challenges and learning new skills. When it comes down to it, anything we want in life takes work. It also takes vision and sacrifice and many times some risk. These are the costs of things that are good. They are the costs of learning and growth and are things that we should all learn to say ‘I CAN’ to no matter how young or old we are.
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Alexander McNaChronicles of my journey into the nursing profession. Archives
September 2018
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