Can you believe we are already half-way through 2019?! Yesterday I had my annual evaluation at work, which is now done every year in the month of hire. I know I shouldn’t, but I dread formal evaluations. I just want to sit at my desk and send a quick email like, “Dear management, I’m working very hard, every day to be the best nurse practitioner I can be. I am abreast of the areas I want to improve in and will continue to make the appropriate strides to do so. If I have any questions or concerns or need your assistance with anything I will aptly reach out. Thanks so much and have a great day.” and then go on with my work. But you know that’s not how it goes. You have to send out peer evaluations to your colleagues (nurses, schedulers, the physician that you collaborate with, department managers) and you also have to evaluate yourself. That’s the part that I loathe. Sitting over a seven-page document answering questions about your knowledge, professionalism, practice, productivity, and self-development over the past year and then giving at least three goals for the upcoming year. How fun. And then you have to schedule a meeting to discuss it all. Like I said, my meeting was yesterday. It went very well but I was more than happy to be done with the evaluation process until next June.
I am always looking for ways to make my life… better and so when I went to bed last night, I sort of did a “personal” midyear evaluation of myself in my head. You know, just reflecting on the things that have worked well so far this year and the things that I haven’t been so successful in. I started thinking about the things that were at the very top of my list that I wanted to focus on improving by January next year… my weight, money habits, relationship with God, my blog, the organization of my house, and yes, what I talked with the nursing manager about yesterday, career self-development. This morning I wrote two to three specific, feasible goals to each of those things that I am telling myself to push through to, no matter what over the next 6 months.
The last bit of my “baby weight” has been a thorn in my side for quite some time now. So…yeah…
I actually hate sharing my fitness goals with people because sometimes I get this annoyed look of ‘what the heck are you talking about… you are already small.” The thing is, to me your weight goals are not exclusively about how big or small you are. It’s also about how you feel about yourself. I know when I feel the best about myself. I know the types of clothes I like to wear and what shape I need to be in to wear them. So my goals for my weight and health are centered on getting back to that place.
For the rest of the year you will find me somewhere between Beyoncé (always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper) and Cardi B (I got a baby, I need some money…) with managing my stacks.
One of my goals is something that Brian recently gave me a little stern lecturing about, increasing my retirement contributions.
Ya’ll know I love Jesus**insert multiple heart emojis**. I need my relationship with Him to be solid or else none of the rest of this even matters because it just won’t be right. So I wrote three goals for this. One of which is focused on intensifying my prayer life.
My blog is my special little baby that I have enjoyed watching grow. I want it to continue to grow beautifully and so plan: “feed the baby” is currently in full effect. I really want to push back the limits of my creativity.
My house has been an on-going project and I’m proud of how far I have come with it. I have a few more organizational things that I want to work on by the end of 2019.
As far as my career, you can just refer to my memo to management at the top of this post. Ok, I kid. As you can imagine in dealing with cancer patients, I order and receive quite a few scans, i.e. MRIs, CT, PET scans… So, one of my goals (as an NP) is to become more fluent with interpreting the images and maneuvering the software that our department uses. The one thing that they didn’t teach me in NP school! I’ve made a few baby steps with this since last year but I’m hoping to make some leaps because I no longer want to feel handicapped with it. My plan is to head over to our radiology department and spend some time with a couple of expert radiologists. Hopefully some kind of osmosis will occur while I am there and I will become the radiology reading queen!
So that’s it. That’s what I will be doing from now until the ball drops. What about you? How has 2019 been treating you? What are you hoping to accomplish before this chapter ends?
Photo credit: Timothy Blanks
