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

Outline

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!