The Psychic Compost of Your Healthcare Career

By Keith Carlson via Multibriefs

Does your healthcare, medical, or nursing career result in psychic, mental, emotional, or spiritual compost that can be used to feed your career and help it come to complete fruition?

When a gardener looks at compost, she doesn’t just see dirt, worms, and slimy rotting veggies. Rather, the gardener sees the potential of that compost to become new soil that can nourish her garden and continue the cycle of growth and blossoming.

The same can be said of your healthcare career: you can consciously choose for your gains, losses, and stories to feed your career, provide inspiration, and continue to clarify your personal and professional mission.

Adding to your psychic compost pile for the betterment of your career is a smart career growth strategy and a good way to continue to understand yourself — and your motivations and ambitions — more keenly.

The Garden of Your Career

You were tilling the soil and planting the seeds of your career long before you sat down in the first class of your chosen healthcare-related specialty. Perhaps your uncle was a nurse and put the nursing bug in your ear at an impressionable age.

Maybe taking care of your dying grandmother was the impetus to become a palliative care doctor. Or perhaps accompanying your disabled brother to physical therapy piqued your curiosity.

No matter; seeds are planted for many reasons, even when we don’t at first recognize that the sowing process is underway.

You may have been a massage therapist or yoga teacher in a previous iteration of your professional life, but that garden didn’t really take off as planned. The seeds of hands-on care were sown earlier, and you felt that a career in physical therapy would be a prudent way to combine your interest in patient-centered care with your knowledge of complementary medicine and functional anatomy.

Or perhaps you became an Adult Nurse Practitioner (ANP) and then came to the realization that a post-graduate certificate in leadership would be a boost to your credibility, marketability, and professional identity.

The garden of your healthcare career can be populated with seeds or starter plants; no matter what, it will need tender loving care to produce the results you’re seeking.

The Compost of Your Career

As some plants from your professional garden die, you’ll grab a shovel, turn them over with the soil, and allow them to decompose and become fodder for the next crop. Every interview, conversation, conference, webinar, patient encounter, failure, success, and position feeds the compost of your career.

What you’ve done in the past seeds the present and the future; in fact, your entire life provides vital compost for the current state of both your life and work.

Compost is about dark, healthy soil; in terms of your career in healthcare, it’s the nutrition-packed experiences, knowledge, and skills that make up the bulk of who you are as a professional.

Tend to your career garden with care. Utilize the rich compost of your years as a healthcare provider in order to embolden and empower yourself to reach for greater heights and deeper awareness of what and who you wish to be and accomplish in the worlds of healthcare and medicine.

Keith Carlson, RN, BSN, NC-BC, has been a nurse since 1996. He is the blogger behind the award-winning blog, Digital Doorway, a widely read freelance nurse writer, and motivational/keynote speaker. Keith is the host of The Nurse Keith Show, a popular nursing career podcast. Under the auspices of Nurse Keith Coaching, Keith's passion is helping nurses and healthcare professionals create ultimate satisfaction in both their personal and professional lives.