Blog ✧───✧

🩺From Stress to Clarity: What If It’s Not the Situation?

Whether you’re managing the pressure of patient care, navigating difficult team dynamics, or simply trying to get through a long shift—stress can feel overwhelming.

But what if the power to navigate those moments with more calm, clarity, and confidence wasn’t in changing your circumstances—but in understanding something deeper about how we experience life?

🧠 It's Not Just the Situation—It's How We Experience It

In healthcare, it’s easy to feel like stress is coming from everything around us: the patient load, the shift changes, the emotional weight of the work.

But over time, I began to see something else.
I noticed that how I felt wasn’t always connected to what was happening.
It was connected to how I was thinking about what was happening.

The shift didn’t come from learning a new technique.
It came from realizing this:

💡 Thought Isn’t the Enemy. It’s Just Not the Truth.

Thought is always happening. It’s what creates our inner world.

But thoughts aren’t facts.
They’re more like weather patterns—passing through.
Some light and breezy. Some heavy and stormy.
But none of them define who we are or what’s truly possible.

So when your mind is spinning with worry, it’s not a sign that something is wrong—it’s a gentle nudge reminding you that you’ve drifted away from your deeper wisdom.

🌊 What Lies Beneath the Noise

Underneath the swirl of your thinking is a calm, stable presence—what I’ve come to understand as innate wisdom.

That part of you has been there since the beginning.
It shows up in quiet moments. In sudden insights. In the clarity you feel when you stop trying to force it.

This is the deeper intelligence that helps you care, connect, and respond—even when things are chaotic.
It’s not something you need to earn. It’s already built in.

🩺 Why This Changes the Way You Practice

When you begin to see your experience as coming from within—not from your charting system or the hallway chaos—you naturally feel less pressure to “fix” things on the outside.

You start to:

• Feel less reactive and more grounded

• Connect with patients from a place of calm presence, not urgency

• Support your team without taking on their stress

• And most importantly, access your own insight, even in the middle of a hard day

🪞A Gentle Practice for Noticing

Try this for the next 24 hours:

1. Pause and notice:
   In a moment of tension, gently ask yourself—Where do I think my experiences is com?

2. Feel the feeling:
   Notice the feeling in your body. Is it tightness, overwhelm, worry? That feeling is a direct reflection of the thought moving through.

3. Remember the source:
   You’re not broken. You’re not behind.
   You’re simply caught in a moment of thought—and that can shift.

🧭What Nurse Coaching Can Help You Remember

At Advancing Nurse Coaching, we don’t teach you how to suppress your thoughts or manage your stress.
We help you see something deeper.

• That you are not your thinking.

• That you have access to wisdom, no matter the situation.

• That peace of mind is not a destination—it’s a return to your natural state. A place of wisdom and calm.

And from that place? You become the nurse you always wanted to be.
Not because the world changed. But because you remembered where your clarity comes from.

💬 Reflection Question

What’s one stressful thought you’ve been believing lately?
What might shift if you saw it as temporary… not the truth?

With warmth,

❤️ Teresa Walding
Co-Founder, Advancing Nurse Coaching

🗓️ Ready to explore how insight—not effort—can change your experience of nursing?
Schedule a free discovery call and let's explore what's already working inside you.

Upcoming Events ✧───✧

✧ May 22-23: Advancing the Conversation on Consciousness in Health - We’re honored to be invited to the Health as Expanding Consciousness (HEC) Theory Dialogue at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, College of Nursing.

✧ May 27: "Before You Walk Away," with Lyn & Teresa at 4 PM CT! This free virtual event is a great chance to connect, click here to register and drop by to say hello!

✧ June 5-7: Advancing Our Profession Together - We’ll be presenting a poster this year at the TNA Annual Conference, The Power of Us: Advancing Our Profession Together, emphasizes the importance of collaboration, innovation, and shared knowledge in transforming the nursing profession.

Nurse News ✧───✧

✧ We had a great time at our last Mastermind call with Dr. Will Pettit on April 2, 2025 about Caring Without Burnout with our students. We look forward to the next one with Dr. Pettit joining us.

✧ In the news… Community Impact Stories: Nurses are making headlines for their community work. In rural areas, nurse practitioners are leading mobile health clinics, bringing care to remote populations. These stories, highlighted in recent nursing journals, are inspiring others to pursue community-focused nursing roles. ^{Source: AANP Community Impact}

✧ In the news… Mental Health Support for Nurses: New initiatives are prioritizing nurse well-being. Hospitals are launching peer-support programs and wellness hubs, like those at Johns Hopkins, to help nurses manage stress and prevent burnout. These programs are fostering a healthier, more resilient workforce. _{^{Source: Johns Hopkins R³ Initiative}}

Past Blogs ✧───✧

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