After interviewing a nurse that I see as a leader, I have learned that leadership in nursing is accomplished mainly through experience and confidence. During my interview, I asked the nurse what barriers or challenges to being a leader she has faced. She replied that her biggest barricade to becoming a leader was feeling as though she did not have the authority to speak up to individuals who she considered superior to her at that time, even when she felt that the patient’s health was in jeopardy. I was surprised to hear that when she became a newly graduated registered nurse, she did not have the confidence in herself to be able to identify a problem in a patient and suggest a solution. I then asked what she did next in this situation. She stated that she pushed past this barricade and asked another nurse to verify her suspicions, then called the provider to let him know of the patient’s status change, and provide further treatment based on her findings.

When I asked her how she was able to overcome this barrier, the nurse responded that she silenced the fearful part of her and did what she knew was best for the patient. This is when I realized that her self-awareness was just as substantial as her social awareness. Socially, she was a new nurse who still had a lot to learn, but her self-awareness allowed her to trust in herself that she had made the correct interpretation during her patient’s assessment. The nurse I interviewed also said that she thinks a large part of her decision to speak up also ascribes to the notion that it is “better to be safe than sorry”, which I agreed was probably used often in the nursing world. A lot of this nurse’s responses to my questions and experiences she shared with me shined light on who she really is as a nurse. After knowing her for almost a decade, I realized how great of a caretaker and advocate she is both in nursing and in life in general. I plan to take all of her nursing wisdom with me into my career.