Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Allow me to reintroduce myself. I have been on this beautiful nurse entrepreneur journey for the past 10 years. It started with me being a wellness coach. All I could talk about was wellness for nurses and how we ignore our own mental, spiritual and emotional wellness. Ignoring our needs makes it harder for us to see the needs of our patients from an empathetic lens. One day, I was sitting in the breakroom at the nurses station and I stumbled across the National Wellness Conference in a magazine.

They talked about certified wellness practitioners, coaches and human-centered approaches and I was immediately drawn to it. You would think that nursing would satisfy that desire for wholeness, but unfortunately it did not. I have suffered from discrimination, feeling like an outsider, being gossiped about, watching my colleagues of color also suffering from passive aggressive discrimination. It was a lot to take in.

So I decided that this wellness conference would definitely give me some solace, connection and a source to draw from when I felt challenged. And it did. I went to the conference for over a decade because it was rich and yummy. The one piece that was missing though were people of color, nurses who shared my experiences and desire for bringing wellness to nurses. But I made it a part of my entrepreneurial journey and in the early days I did laughter yoga sessions for nurses and others. During COVID, I even did them virtually for an organization out of Seattle. Talk about commitment.

What I found then was that nurses weren’t pressed about their personal wellness. Like most women, nurses have been taught that self-care is selfish. The industry didn’t respond to my calls for taking a breath, pausing, and discovering what needed tending to within.

So I Pivoted. I became a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coach around 2016. Most of my expertise was drawn from personal and professional experiences. I used this lens to preach about microaggressions, toxicity in the workplace, implicit bias and so on. Towards the end of 2019 I was burned out. Even though I was training community-based organizations from all over the U.S., I wasn’t hearing what I wanted from the nursing profession. I decided I would take a year off to retool. Well, in May of 2020, George Floyd’s murder became the outcry for the injustice we were seeing in all systems. And finally, nurses seemed to care about DEI in practice. So I came back prematurely from my sabbatical, to teach, to strategize with nurse leaders about having these conversations. And it was gratifying…for a while.

Then, I started to realize again that something was missing. While I was “ok” with teaching organizational best practices to address discrimination in nursing, I was harping about what we were doing wrong. And I know that we have to hear what we’re doing wrong, but it was almost all about what was wrong. Most of my research and points shared were about what was being missed, overlooked, minimized. And I know that there is a place for this kind of work. It just was not for me. I’m a wellness practitioner. I’m a wellness coach expert trained to help individuals to build self-reflection, discovery, a sense of positive regard and here I was focusing almost exclusively on things that brought me so much pain.

So I shifted. Since teaching comes naturally to me, it wasn’t hard to discover that academic nursing and academic clinical partnerships are my lane. Last year, I rebranded myself as a Health Equity Education Coach and I would like to begin this next portion of the journey explaining what that means for me and for you.

As a Health Equity Education Coach, I use coach leadership to create belonging which allows nurses to be connected, to welcome others, and to be intrinsically motivated towards creating health equity. Time for some definitions so that we are all on the same page .??

What is Coach Leadership?

Coach Leadership is where leaders adopt coaching techniques to help team members reach their full potential, enhance their skills, and achieve their goals. The coach leader focuses on facilitating learning, fostering a positive work environment, and promoting the personal and professional growth of team members. For more great information on how to become a coach or what coaches can offer, I recommend you check out the Center for Creative Leadership.

What is Health Equity?

Health equity exists when all people, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, socio-economic status, geographic location, or other societal constructs have fair and just access, opportunity, and resources to achieve their highest potential for health. Unfortunately, social and political determinants of health negatively affect many communities, their people, and their ability to lead healthy lives.

What is Belonging?

Belonging and well-being are partners. Belonging in the workplace is the sense that your uniqueness is accepted and even treasured by your organization and colleagues. Belonging is an accumulation of day-to-day experiences that enables a person to feel safe and bring their full, unique self to work. Well-being is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. It includes having good mental health, high life satisfaction, a sense of meaning or purpose, and the ability to manage stress.

What is Nikki’s Approach?

My specific approach as a Health Equity Education Coach is to combine coach leadership, health equity, belonging and well-being in nursing education to transform our relationship with equity practices. I hope to bend the arc in nursing towards nurses who act locally, but think globally. I imagine nurses who are activists, rebels, advocates, and helpers demanding that we use our healing abilities to restore relationships between minoritized and divested persons so that we can see their beauty through the scars that our society has inflicted upon them.

And with this knowledge, this change in attitudes, our practice will change, and so will the health of our society. That’s what it's all about. That’s what I’m all about. I’m about moving from a fixed mindset to a possibility mindset. As a coach I seek to ask what more we want instead of what it is we don’t want. I’m set on what can be and not the mountain in front of me. So, what this means for me and you is that I want to invite you to be present. And if you don’t know what that means, it's ok. We can find out together.

This year, I’d like to share more about well-being, health equity and ultimately how we can heal our fractured relationships with one another. Sometimes, I’ll speak to ways to practice this in nursing education through curricular changes and sometimes it will be clinically based practices that increase healthy respect. At other times, I’ll be speaking to nurse leaders and sometimes it will be students, or nurses on the front lines.

Why all of these different roles?

Because I’ve been a student, a clinical nurse, and a nurse leader ??. I’ll keep you posted on what I’m up to and what I’m offering. I’ll share resources with you and shout out other amazing servant leaders. I hope that these communications will be a welcome treat to you and give you an excuse to love on yourself, to not blame yourself or inflict any more harm.

What Nikki’s Up To?

I am in full on creation mode!

I’ve created a beyond the book study co-learning space called the THE CLINICIAN’S GUIDE TO MICROAGGRESSIONS AND UNCONSCIOUS BIAS BEYOND THE BOOK STUDY: Building Your Skill and Toolbox to Help Clinicians, Instructors, Faculty to Move Student Learning(*no-pre-reading required)

Description of the Masterclass

Many nurses have leaned into diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to promote more equitable workplaces, but without aligning it to a transformational leadership process, it doesn’t convert to better learning environments or improved representation of diverse thinkers. It’s time for nurses to move beyond a focus on what we are doing wrong and focus on what we can change. This masterclass will explore coaching leadership as a model that invests time and energy into developing people over processes. Coach leaders focus on mentorship, feedback, and integration of efforts into a culture that promotes trust, diversity, respect, and belonging. Nursing organizations with a coaching culture are more inclined to appreciate and incorporate health equity throughout the organization. The nurse of tomorrow, will use coach leadership to develop inherent health equity practices that are imbued with competence, a growth mindset and a focus on the long game.

We will use strategies from The Clinician's Guide to Microaggressions and Unconscious Bias with case studies, role play, and inquiry to help you make your own improvements as a coach who can use health equity practices more effectively over the course of four weeks. You will get 90-days in our private Circle community to watch replays and get follow-up coaching from Nikki if so desired.

Who is this Masterclass For?

• Nurse Educators, Clinical Instructors/Coordinators, Faculty that want to bring health equity to the surface in their workplaces
• DEI Officers, facilitators who are leading DEI initiatives in schools and/or workplaces
• Faculty-leaders in charge of curriculum development in nursing schools
• Nurse educators, clinical leaders who desire to cultivate a practice of health equity If you’re looking for new health equity content to turn around and teach next week this IS for you.

If you’re looking for an approach that calls in instead of calls out, this IS for you.

If you’re looking for a one-off, so-called health equity “engagement” strategy to pass on to others this IS NOT for you.

You are not required to have read the book already, we can do it together. ??

Cost: $249

Where: Virtual Over Zoom

When: May 22nd, June 5th, June 19th (Wednesday)

Time: 1:30-3:00pm Central | 2:30-4:00 pm Eastern |11:30am-1pm Pacific

Look for the registration link to hit your inbox on March 1st, 2024.