Season 2 Unleashed - Bring Your Boots, I’ll Bring the Shovels, Cuz it’s Gonna Get Mucky | ETS00-S2

Welcome to the end, the silence podcast. I'm your host, Sandra Payne, and I am the owner of Sandra pain, wellness, and the founder of an incredible coaching program for nurses called nurse RX. So, I'm so excited to be back again to relaunch Season Two of the in the silence podcast, and share with you some powerful, brave, vulnerable and inspiring stories of real nurses. In our society. There are colleagues, there are mothers, there are daughters, there are friends, and it is such an honor to share space, and to hold space for them and for their stories. So who am I? As I said, my name is Sandra, I am a nurse and I became a nurse in 2006. I can you cut that part? My name is Sandra, I am a certified holistic master coach with the International Association of wellness professionals. I nursed as a registered nurse for 15 years. And I experienced the long list of psychological, emotional, traumatic and moral distress and injury that so many of us are experiencing still today. I started my career in the neonatal ICU in Winnipeg, and I moved from there into the community quite quickly. I only nursed in the NICU for just under four years full time, before I really hit the wall. And when I say hit the wall, it was because I didn't really know what was happening. I didn't even really know that it was related to nursing. And I, I became burnt out, I was unmotivated to be at work, I was distressed by a lot of the things that we were doing. I was questioning the ethics of many things that we were doing, I was becoming defiant to orders. I was crying all the time. And avoiding certain situations at work, I felt dread. Every time I was coming in, I at home was drinking a lot and sleeping a lot. And my life was just work and come home and crumble and try to find some sense of normal at home that I could never really find. And in the early stages of my career, I thought that I was supposed to, you know, pick up all the overtime and give everything that I could I wanted to prove myself, I wanted to prove that I was good enough for this, that I could do this and I was strong enough. But when I reflect back on that time, that kind of pressure and myself forcing, edit that and forcing myself to push to try to strive to meet this expectation. It it just destroyed a lot of what made me me. And so it wasn't too long into my career that I started to experience a lot of these really heavy, mostly mental and emotional challenges and suffering. And when I moved into the community, of course it was it was better. I was working, you know, nine to five type of job working in more of a preventative way and you know, helping people to create changes in their lifestyle and to really promote health and I became a lactation consultant. So I was working with families. I was also working with clients with diabetes and I was developing programs and I found a really sweet spot for myself. And then we moved and when I moved I went back to the NICU and slowly started to climb my way back out of there into community roles, which I really do I did find that I thrived in. But what was becoming super obvious to me in those community roles was that the moral distress was piling up. Now, I didn't have a word for it back then. But the frustration was piling up, the anger was piling up, because it seemed that no matter what we did, we were constantly having things pulled from us, we were constantly being told we can't, when we knew in our hearts and in our guts, that we should, that we should be doing more for people, and that we had the capacity to do more for people. But they kept stripping it, they kept pulling it away. And this kind of distress really starts to eat at you, because it challenges your core values, the core values that make you you. And when those things are challenged, it can really press people up against a wall, and it can create a lot of suffering for us. And I was in that place. And at the end of my last maternity leave, which was in 2018, I took an extra six months off on an unpaid leave to try to decide what the heck I was going to do. Because everything inside of me was saying, this is not the right choice. This is not the right path for you. But I didn't know how to pivot because it was scary. I had invested so much time, so much money, I really thought that this was something that was going to be you know, my career for the rest of my life and to think about leaving and choosing another path, particularly a path of, you know, building my own business because I was already considering coaching at that time. And it was scary. It was really scary. I'll just pause here my dog is barking I apologize, I forgot to set the timer in my phone. Maybe she'll stop. Coaching had kind of been appearing for me, and showing up as the kind of this idea of potentially a new way of showing up and serving people. And I dismissed it for a long time because of that fear that I was talking about that I know you can all resonate with. And but when I took that time off after my last maternity leave, and I really thought about what was going to be right for me, I made the really difficult decision and I left my position. And just to give you some context, because I know you'll appreciate this is that this position was a Monday to Thursday, nine to to position. So it was a pretty, pretty gravy boat job. I was the team lead of the cardiac clinic. And I you know, I had I had some autonomy, I had flexibility, I had the ability to make decisions and to create. But what happened when I went on that last maternity leave is that everything that I had worked so hard to create, and to really, you know, pour my heart and everything that I had learned in all of my experience in the community creating programs and really showing up for people in a holistic way. They they took it and they cut it and they they left us with nothing and I was just I was so distraught over that. And I felt so let down and so unvalued and just under, you know, like they just didn't care about the patients or us and and that was a pretty, you know, that was kind of the final straw. And I and I decided to leave I left that position. And I stayed on casual of course because you know, that's what we do as nurses and actually i i I went back for a couple shifts. And I had panic attack. I had a panic attack in a room with a client and a physician and another nurse and I knew after that, that I couldn't go back there. I couldn't go back to nursing I was I was not in a place mentally, emotionally physically. to handle that. And just to also give you some more context is that at this point, you know, in 2008, teen, it was almost 2019 I actually it was 2019 I, I was already kind of like into holistic healing, like I had been really diving into my own journey with depression, I had been doing, you know, working with a lot of different people and different practitioners and healers and coaches to try to navigate the pain that I was in, and all these deep rooted, you know, negative beliefs about myself. And I was, I was really, I was doing the work. And so at this point in my life, I really realized that nursing in a traditional sense, it was not for me, and coaching had been showing up. And so I took the leap. And in 2019, the early part of 2019, I took the coach training with the International Association of wellness professionals, and became a coach. And I started just working with women trying to figure out, you know, how this was gonna work? And could it even work? Could I, could I make this run? Like, could I make a living doing this as some? Do people even want my help? Can I even help people who the heck am I like total, you know, experiences with imposter syndrome. And, you know, trying to navigate all of the self doubt, and the learning that was coming at me and I in this in the following summer, in 2020, you know, in the thick of this mess that our world is in. I was working with a coach Megan Joe Wilson, and she was really encouraging me to start speaking to nurses, to start coaching nurses. And I, I actually resisted big time in the beginning, because I have a lot of trauma when it comes to nurses. And I had I should say, and I was afraid. I was afraid of the mean nurses, I was afraid of the judgmental nurses, the critical nurses, I was afraid that I would be seen as unworthy, not good enough, you know, they would confirm all those things that I was still struggling to try to get past and to deal with. And so, but she kept pushing me kind of, you know, in her gentle but powerful way. And I so I decided to go for it. And in the summer of 2020, I did a workshop for nurses online. And there was over 1000 women mostly say women, but mostly women who responded, and, and I was blown away and terrified. And but I did the workshop, and it was really well received. And so was born, the program that I now run, called nurse RX. And it has been the most incredible journey, working with these incredible, brave and just powerful, inspiring women. And I particularly work with women nurses, it's nothing against men, it's just the way that things have evolved for me. And so but working in this, in this program has I mean, it has offered me so many opportunities to look at myself and to look at different areas of my life. But it has been such an honor to sit with these these brave women who are willing to look at themselves who are willing to say, I'm not going to be a victim in this. I'm going to step up and own my percent and take back control of my life. And these women have all experienced a lot of the same things that that you may have experienced, you know, trauma of all shapes and forms not just the big things. But those small things that we pass off is no big deal. I should just get over this, but for some reason we can't. They also are working in these high stress environments that are unsupported. They feel unvalued they feel like they're treated like they're just a number. They're not important they're experiencing burnout, they're experiencing depression, anxiety, some of them even suicidal thoughts. Nurses are struggling. That is not an understatement at all. Across the board across the world. Nurses are in a really, really difficult place. This, these past two years of this pandemic have not made any of it easier. But we can't blame it on the pandemic, because this stuff was happening before I was going through it years ago. So it's not new. What I think that the last two years has done, it has pushed everyone to the edge to the edge of their threshold of what they can tolerate. And it has pushed so so many people so far over that edge, that we have lost people, we have lost nurses to suicide, we have lost nurses who have walked away, because they can't do it anymore. Their body is telling them you can't do this anymore. And we've lost so many other people as well. We needed to take a look at what we were doing. And this pandemic has pushed us to take a look to be real, to be honest. And to take stock of what's happening in our own personal lives too. In the nurse RX program, it's a collective of nurses. And we gather for 12 weeks, we show up every single week, twice a week, some of them and we support each other, we learn. There's always a teaching component, I'm always talking. So that's never a shortage. I'm teaching I am sharing with these women, all of the different experiences that I've gone through all of the tools of the resources, all of the ways that I have been excavating my own mark, over the years that I have been digging through my own pain over the years, I'm sharing it. And I've packaged it up into this, you know, tightly knit little program that's tied neatly with a bow. But that's really not a healing journey. Let me just tell you that the work that these women are doing the work that I've been doing, it's not a neat little package. It's messy, and it's painful. It's painful to look at our pain. There's a reason that we're not because it's difficult, and it hurts, and it's scary, and it's vulnerable. And it can feel overwhelming. So there's a reason why we don't look at it. But when I'm in this program with these women, and they're saying, No, that's enough, I'm not living my life like this, I need to take it back. I need to find myself again. I need to find my fire, my passion, my joy, my peace, I want to be motivated and excited, and just full of life. They want freedom from the prison they've been trapped in for so many years. And this program, the nurse RX program is a piece of that journey. It's not the whole journey. But it's a big launching pad for these women who are ready, who are ready to take it back to take back their lives. After I started working with nurses in the program, in the end of 2020, I realized a common theme that I hadn't really considered before. And that was the shame and the stigma. And the way that the impact of those two pieces, we're creating silence. We're creating a huge proportion of nurses who are struggling in the same ways that I was saying ways that you might be depression, anxiety, PTSD, emotional overwhelm, burnout, moral distress, substance abuse, all of those things, a huge proportion of them struggling and suffering with that. But a small fraction seeking support. And it got me questioning why. Why don't we reach out? Why don't we ask for help. We know that there are resources. There are resources. I'm not gonna say that they're enough because they're not. But there is resources out there. So why aren't we asking for help? And the stigma and the shame is what came back to me as answers. And so I created this podcast. This podcast is about ending the silence It's about giving us a platform for our voice for our stories for our truth. It's about stepping up and owning it, talking about our pain, and sharing it with others. When we bring that dark, difficult, painful stuff that we're holding inside, when we bring it into the light, and it's held, and it's supported, and you have someone there listening, it loses its power. And that's a part of the podcast, there is incredible healing that happens for nurses or for anybody who shares their story. And that was the driving force behind me doing the podcasts and starting it that year. And now we roll into 2022. And I'm back with Season Two. And what I'm noticing is the powerful women who are messaging me and saying they want to be on the podcast, because they're doing work similar to me. They want to share their story, how they went through their own burnout through their own physical illness, through their PTSD through their psychological injury through their moral injury, they want to share that story. And then they want to give you hope. They want to share hope, that you don't have to suffer this way that there are people out there who are ready and open and willing to help just like I am. And that there is options, that we are not stuck in something that is not feeding us any more that we have choice. There are endless possibilities for us out there as as human beings, not just as nurses as human beings, endless possibilities, we are not stuck. We are here in this life to live in on a path of alignment on a path that makes us feel all those things that excitement, the joy, the passion, fulfillment, and freedom. I believe that that's intended for us all, it looks different for everyone, of course, but I believe we're all intended for that. And so these this season, it looks to me that it's going to unfold in this kind of way, stories of struggle, stories of success, because we cannot just say that nursing is struggle, because there is deep, deep, deep success and rewards in this profession. Also, when your heart is cracked, wide open by those patients that you're serving. When you have those really powerful moments of human connection, we can't dismiss that. Because that's what keeps us coming back. That's what keeps us walking through that door that is so toxic to us. So we talk about the success. And we talk about hope. I understand that there is a lot of fear in the nursing culture that we have been told quite explicitly not to speak out, not to share our stories. Nobody has that kind of power over you. We should never let anyone have that kind of power over us to tell us what we can and cannot say that we can own our pain in our truth that we can't talk about it. Nobody should have that kind of control over us. But I also understand that there is a lot of fear. And so if you're feeling ready, if you're feeling brave. If you're feeling like you're ready to step up to the microphone, and share your story, please know that this is not a place where we are shaming anyone. We're not shaming employers, unions, regulatory bodies. We're not shaming anyone. We're not blaming anyone. We're not even complaining about anything. We are just here to share our story, to share our truth and to offer ourselves an opportunity for that healing, but also to offer that opportunity to the people who are listening to all of the other nurses out there. Who don't feel safe to share their story, because when they hear the words that come out of my mouth when they hear the words that come out of other nurses mouths on the podcast, they realize that they're not alone, they realize that maybe they don't have to suffer in silence. And they also realize, and they also realize that there is hope that there's hope. And so that is my mission. That is why I am putting this out there for you. This is why I'm inviting you to be a guest. You can find me at Sandra pain, Coach calm, you can listen to episodes of the podcast on my website, you can contact me if you want to be a guest, you can contact me if you want to talk about the nurse RX program, you can contact me just to say, hey, and I would love that. So I hope you'll enjoy this season. It's already shaping up to be a power packed, emotion fueled journey that we're going to take together. Please do your part to share this, share it with your colleagues, your friends, share it on Facebook. Invite others to come and join the collective of women who are saying no, no, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not suffering anymore, doesn't mean we're leaving. Please note that it doesn't mean that we're leaving, I don't tell people to leave, unless it's what you want. But these, these nurses are saying no, I deserve better in my life. And I'm not willing to sacrifice my life anymore. And you can also come and join us on Facebook, I have a group it's called Surviving nursing, you can find us just by searching it in the search bar on facebook and join. And please don't ever hesitate to reach out I'm here. I can't wait to share this all with you. And I'm sending you so much love. So much courage. So much hope that we are not stuck. We do not have to suffer in this way anymore. But that it's up to us. It's up to you to decide that you want to take back your life, that you're not willing to stay stuck in this mock for the end of your days. It takes you to say no more. I can't do it for you. No one else can. You have to say it. And I invite you to say it and come on this journey with me. It's messy as I said. I talk about the mock a lot. And I say where are your boots? I'll bring the shovels. Thanks for listening