LVN, You Have No One to Please but Yourself
Date: December 12, 2017
It’s true. Looking at professionals, such as LVN nurses or other medical professionals, one may realize: these people are so focused on helping others, but are they giving themselves enough attention? As the new nursing students enter an LVN program, they should be aware of this interesting phenomenon and, perhaps, make appropriate conclusions.
We often please others because society taught us when we were born: first, please our parents. A growing child must find the balance between exploring the world led by curiosity and surviving from the earliest years. Obviously, gaining the positive disposition of one’s parents or primary caregiver can often provide the environment suitable for survival. Hence, we learn the importance of pleasing our parents.
Later on, as a child enters the school system, it becomes vital to get favored by one’s teacher, and so we learn to please our school instructors and coaches, piano teachers, and of course, classmates and friends. Non-compliance with this seemingly widely accepted behavior often leads to solitude or even being exiled from the school community. We form friends and try to maintain these friendships by continuously attempting to please them.
As we grow older, we continue such behavior when teenagehood and adolescence peer pressure sets it. Here, often at the expense of self, we do things to please others, encouraging this behavior. The sense of acceptance by our peers seems to be the motivating factor in our actions. We crave that feeling of being liked, accepted, important, or even just heard.
We take this behavior with us into adulthood. Furthermore, we form more meaningful and lasting relationships with the significant others in our lives as we continue into college, graduate, and go on to our careers. We never stop to think about the importance of pleasing others: pleasing the spouse, pleasing the boss at work, and our friends and partners in business and leisure. By then, it comes naturally.
But what about ourselves? Do we ever stop to think about self-acceptance and pleasing ourselves? Of course, it is much easier to focus on loving and accepting another. It is much more challenging to learn to love and accept yourself, just the way you are. It is not easy for an LVN nurse who works all day to please her patients, doctors, and coworkers to think about self-gratification. Nurses often forget about themselves, making themselves the last priority. Perhaps, this needs to change?
