My Own Human Flourishing Unit 9 Project

 

My name is Donna Phelps and I am a nurse for a major hospital in South Carolina.  In my profession I do more than slap a dressing on a wound, I educate, medicate, give advice, offer comfort to patient and families, and give medical care to my patients.  One of the main components between a patient and a nurse is trust.   My patients need to trust that I am competent in what I am telling them and that the advice/teaching that I give them is something that I am willing to do myself.  Those are just a couple of reasons why it is important for me to develop psychologically, spiritually and physically.  Why should they do what I’m asking of them if I am not willing to practice what I am preaching?  As with anyone I am a work in progress and more development in each of these areas is needed.  This is a life-long journey that can’t be completed in 10 minutes, 10 weeks or even 10 years.  These are things that develop and grow as we do.

Back in Unit 3 of this course we did a reflection score based on a self-assessment of what we needed to work on for our blog and this is what I wrote then.  Based on your reflections, and on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being optimal wellbeing), where do you rate your A-physical wellbeing, B-spiritual well-being, C-psychological well-being? Physically I would give myself a 5 because I am overweight and tend to ignore what that does to my health and I have high blood pressure because of being overweight. Spiritually I would give myself an 8 I have a lot of faith in the higher power and practice daily prayers and spiritual reading.  Psychological well I will give myself a 5 there as well, there are things in the past that I have buried deep but probably need lots of work to overcome.  I still feel that these scores are an accurate assessment of my development thus far.

Develop a goal for yourself in each area (physical, spiritual, psychological). Physical goal would be to lose 50lbs and get off the blood pressure medicine by the end of the year.  Spiritually I am changing shifts at work in April (I have already made the job switch and I feel so much better and less stressful) and will no longer be working every weekend and It would be so nice to return to going to church on a weekly base instead of whenever I happen to get called off.  Psychologically I have no idea what to do about that because I am of the mind that the past is best left alone (at this point in my life but that is subject to change).

What activities or exercise can you implement in your life to assist in moving toward each goal? Physical-have already started walking daily to help with this goal. I have also started taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator and parking my care in the furthest spot away from the entrance (it’s a least a 10 minute walk to the hospital from my parking space).  Spirit- like I said going to back to church regularly since my schedule changed this past month has really helped strengthen my faith and I am also using meditation and the loving kindness exercise daily to help my spiritual growth.  It is nice to start the day with a positive outlook and end the day with a relaxing attitude.  Psychological- I’m still going to re-evaluate my stance at the end of the year.

How can I keep these commitments I have made to myself and how will I assess that what I am doing is really helping me make the changes?  I can evaluate my progress in the physical sense by just weighing myself each month it can be evaluated in weight loss but also in a loss of inches.  It can also be measure in the increased energy that I have and hopefully through a reduction of the blood pressure medications that I have to take.  Spiritually and Psychologically is a little harder to measure but I should be able to tell if I have grown and that I am heading in the right direction by the reduction of stress and tension in my life as well as with the healthy relationships in my life.  To keep those new commitments to myself I just have to do them daily, take the walk, do the meditation exercises, practice my faith in my higher power, and over time it’s a good habit I have developed.  It will be integrated into my lifestyle.