CARING FOR THE CAREGIVER: 8 TRUTHS TO PROLONG YOUR CAREER
Michael Sherbun's new book is a welcome addition to the very few new texts available to highlight the importance of caring for caregivers. The text is framed around 8 truths to prolong one's career. In addition, Michael incorporated information from Nina East, a Certified Coach and author of Rapid Relationship Recovery. The 8 truths are dedicated to healthcare professionals and are designed to reconnect the readers with their work and teach them how to improve their emotional health. While accomplishing this, the readers are also encouraged to reconnect with themselves. Through tools such as the Circle of Control, the Control Reaction, and others, as well as real-life story telling, healthcare professionals learn to recognize the differences in everyone's unique personality.
Truth 1, "Understanding Your Reality," presents real-life clinical situations where nurses are unhappy and disgruntled about their work or about the quality of the work they are able to provide. Sherbun presents startling statistics about the nursing shortage and provides nurses today with some genuine tactics to use to focus on the positive and remember why they are a nurse.
Truth 2, "Determining Who You Are," challenges nurses to a conscious discovery of themselves. Sherbun notes that true happiness and peace cannot occur until the individuals have found introspection. The Circle of Control and personality styles are introduced to assist healthcare providers with the task of determining who they are.
Truth 3, "Achieving Success With Every Conversation," helps the reader to successfully manage each interaction they have with others by introducing the Success Steps Model to Emotional Connection. Thought-provoking rules assist the reader to operationalize success.
Truth 4, "Successfully Caring for Difficult People," and truth 5, "Managing Difficult Coworkers and Supervisors," assist the healthcare provider with ways to deal with challenging and difficult patients, families, and team members. According to Sherbun, the key success strategies are to recognize that all good relationships start with trust and emphasize listening more so than speaking.
Truth 6, "Avoiding burnout in your job" suggests creative ways to establish boundaries and protect oneself from stress in the workplace. By applying principles from the first 4 truths, the reader's perception of what is a stressful situation will be changed. By emphasizing personality styles, acknowledging responses to stressful behaviors, and using holistic relaxation approaches such as yoga and meditation, Sherbun suggests ways to prevent and manage burnout.
Truth 7, "Creating Great Teams and Great Managers," is the most powerful section in this book. Recognizing that one cannot accomplish many initiatives without a team, Sherbun emphasizes 10 team developmental strategies. Examples from real clinical situations provide the reader with applicability to the real world.
Truth 8, "Creating Your Experience," is the final focus of the 8 truths and brings all of the truths together to create a wonderful career and life.
Sherbun writes in the Introduction that he hopes the book will provide the reader with a "sense of peace and enlightenment" (p viii). I feel readers will most certainly gain both and, after having read this book, will have concrete strategies to use in their day-to-day operations on the job (I know I did). Although this book is entitled Caring for the Caregiver, it most certainly has applicability to many other noncaregiving careers.
Submitted by
Lisa A. Ruth-Sahd, DEd, RN, CCRN, CEN
Associate Professor of Nursing
York College of Pennsylvania, York, Pa
Dr Ruth-Sahd is a consultant with DCCN
[email protected]