New Year’s Resolutions for Travel Nurses

We have come to expect the new year to bring us changes in our life. Sometimes they’re exciting and sometimes they can be downright scary. For travel nurses, the start of the new year is a good place to review what went right in 2012 and find out what needs improvement in our lives.

Examining the year that was is ritual that everyone goes through around this time. Some of us are just conscious of the process while many shrug it off as being nostalgic.

If you’re a travel nurse, you might be better equipped to handle the challenges in front of you if you take a conscientious look-back at 2012 to review the highs and lows of your professional and personal life. Assessing how your year went will help you avoid the mistakes you’ve made and will help you grow as a better nurse.

One way of effectively assessing 2012 is to write down your favorite and least favorite moments in your career that happened last year. Did you, for instance, travel to all the places you wanted to visit in 2012? Have you practiced in the settings that you want?

If the goals you had set for 2012 weren’t all met, try to find the reasons why. Perhaps your goals weren’t realistic enough or were there unexpected obstacles that you had to deal with along the way?

You might find that your 2012 didn’t pan out like you wanted. Perhaps you’ve experienced some hiccups in your career. Were these the result of picking the wrong destination or setting? Did your home life suffer from being away for so much of the year?

These questions might be uncomfortable to ask but they have to be asked if you want your 2013 to have a different and better outcome.

Once you have a clear overview picture of what happened in 2012, the wrong turns you took and the valuable lessons you learned, you’ll be able to map out—in realistic terms—what you need to get done in 2013.

When choosing your travel nursing destinations for 2013, take into consideration what worked and what didn’t work in 2012. We’re not just talking about settings and facility sizes too. Although you should put these things into consideration as well. Mainly, you should ask yourself this question: how has the destinations that you traveled to in 2012 helped you become a better nurse and/or person? And how do you improve yourself with the destinations you have in mind in 2013?

These are not easy questions to answer but they’re well worth the time to ask.

New year’s resolutions need not be all about losing weight or quitting bad habits. Sometimes it’s better to try to work out how to improve one’s life based past performance. It’s more achievable too.