Sara Lefkowitz – Nursing Stress and Exhaustion: Proven Strategies to Beat Burnout and Revive Your Professional Passion!

Nursing Stress and Exhaustion – Sara Lefkowitz

Your work can change the trajectory of lives. And providing healing, ending pain, and restoring the hope of your patients is meaningful beyond words.

But the intense pressures of being a nurse can threaten your career. Emotionally drained, physically exhausted and feeling unsure and unsupported; the negativity, frustration, and resentfulness can seep into your life inside and outside of work. As you dread your next shift, the downward spiral has begun and could end with you exiting the profession you once cherished.

This powerful recording will provide you with the skills, tools and techniques you need to manage the stress and emotional complexities unique to nursing. You will be empowered to overcome career-threatening burnout and regain your purpose and passion for the critical work you are entrusted to provide.

You’ll learn proven techniques to help you handle the most stressful and burnout-inducing situations you commonly face. Walk away with new insights to bring immediate physical and emotional calm when dealing with abusive patients, long-term strategies to maintain genuine compassion, skills to contribute to positive and rewarding relationships with colleagues and a plan to live a healthy, balanced, happy life.

Leave breathing a deep sigh of relief, knowing you have the tools you need to continue this incredibly rewarding work with renewed energy, joy and purpose!

1. Practice in-the-moment stress reduction techniques.
2. Evaluate the long-term benefits of a regular meditation practice.
3. Analyze compassion practices that help nurses regulate emotional distress.
4. Choose ways the nurse can professionally respond to workplace bullies.
5. Establish techniques to increase teamwork and cooperation in the workplace.
6. Discover strategies to bring closure to the workday.
7. Develop a plan to increase self-care and wellness in your life.

Unrelenting Stress Kills

• Self-evaluate: Identify your thorniest work stressors
• Discover ten in-the-moment stress busters
• Stress is a given, but what do you want your response to look like?

Managing the Demanding Patient

• De-escalate any situation with nonviolent communication strategies
• Consider… the impact of uncertainty, lack of information and loss of control
• The two parts of communication: Expressing honestly and listening empathically

Strategies for Stressful Work Overload

• Identify your triggers for emotional nursing distress: Maslach Burnout Inventory
• The Burnout Triad: Depersonalization, overwhelm and loss of personal efficacy
• De-stress in the middle of a busy shift
• Time management skills

Techniques to Bring Calm in High Acuity and Emergency Scenarios

• Processing intense emotions: It’s not for the faint of heart
• Create a ‘Calm Kit’ to get you back in the zone

Handle Unsupportive or Abusive Co-Workers

• How to say what you want, get what you need and not irritate everyone along the way
• Managing bullying and blaming
• Communication practice scenarios:
  • You want to tell a co-worker that she really needs to step it up at work
  • A co-worker is blaming you for a poor patient outcome
  • You need help with a patient today and no one working is very approachable
• Team-building strategies to increase support and cooperation

Increase Job Satisfaction with Caring, Compassion and Gratitude Exercises

• Discover compassion: The road between caring too much and being too burnt out to care
• Don’t let mind traps/habitual thinking get you stuck
• Are you experiencing empathic distress?
• Attributes of resiliency

Achieve a Healthy Balance Between Home and Work

• How personal, interpersonal and organizational factors contribute to overall burnout
• Give yourself kindness
• Name and process your emotions

Sleep Disturbances and Anxiety

• Current best practices for shift work/sleep cycles
• Quiet your mind so the work day does not replay

Red Flags: Self-Evaluation for Excessive Stress and Burnout

• Strategies to bring closure to the workday
• Distinguish between venting, complaining and processing the workday
• Meditation and the link to workplace outcomes
• Apply self-care – your most important survival strategy!