Emotional Intelligence : The Impact Vulnerability Has On Leadership Within Nursing Care

Be the Nurse Who Dares Greatly In this paper I will discuss how Brene Brown’s book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live Love Parent and Lead, can be applied to nursing practice. In nursing, vulnerability, empathy, leadership and emotional intelligence can be used while providing care to patients, teaching patients, and communicating with patients, families, and other medical team members.

Empathy gives us as clinicians the ability to understand and connect with the client’s emotions. By building a relationship with a client it gives the clinician a better perspective of the client’s thoughts and feelings. Emotions are not something you can leave at the door and pick up later, it reflects on the individual’s performance. By simply asking how their day is going can create a conversation, this way the client can express themselves and not keep their emotions bottled up. Empathy can be cognitive or emotionally based. Cognitive empathy is being able to know what another person feels and what he/she might be thinking.

In “A Rounded Version: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences”, Howard Gardner illustrates how there are a variety of intelligences. Gardner starts off with an example how IQ tests may predict achievement in school but may not predict achievement in life. After finding out certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions, such as “Broca’s Area” which is responsible for sentence production, Gardner proposes the existence of multiple intelligences. Multiple studies later led him to propose seven distinct intelligences; Musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Each intelligence has certain classifications. According to Gardner’s classifications, I realized my intelligences are bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, and intrapersonal.

Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and its therapeutic relationships, and to reasons for problem-solving in nursing. This is involved in the capacity to recognize emotions, adapt emotion-related to feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage it. Reflective practice is a process by which one stops and think about their practice, knowingly analyse ones decision making and clarifying ones thoughts and doubts. As a result, one may modify ones actions, behaviour, treatments and learning needs. Therapeutic relationship, also known as the helping team,

The importance of empathy in any helping profession, medical or social, cannot be overstated. The workers that exemplified it in their practice did the best that they could with their limited resources.

In Daring Greatly (2012), Brown discusses the importance of vulnerability. She defines vulnerability as a person’s exposure to feelings, risks, and uncertainty (Brown, 2012). Being vulnerable is an essential part of our emotional lives as it impacts the way we choose to work, live, love, and lead (Brown, 2012). Nursing is a profession where interpersonal relationships are created on a daily basis. Nurses must be able to adapt to the emotional needs of patients as well as understand their own feelings and bias. In order for vulnerability to be effective, it requires the initial establishment of some mutuality, trust, and boundaries (Brown, 2012).

Empathy should play an active role in the daily lives of everyone, but in particular in the day-to-day lives of a healthcare professional. Healthcare professionals have the unique and challenging job of counseling patients in times of need, whether that is in the setting of a newly diagnosed disease or in the death of a family member. This unique challenge requires all healthcare professionals to be skilled at using empathy in the appropriate circumstances.

In recent years there has been a movement in nursing to further understand the many terms (concepts) that are used. Concepts in nursing often seem vague or appear to have ambiguous meanings. For the purpose of this paper, we will take a deeper look at one specific concept, emotional intelligence, and examine a peer reviewed article that utilizes the Walker and Avant method to deconstruct the meaning. Emotional intelligence is asks the nurse to look at their own feelings and the feelings of others to achieve a successful nurse-patient interaction. Lastly, this paper will show how emotional intelligence can be applied in practice.

Empathy is the tool to understanding patient needs, concerns and emotions, and is base to nursing practice. Empathy gives ability to understand another person. Empathy is most important to establish any kind of relationship, like nurse patient relationship or therapeutic relationship.

Problem solver’s empathy decreases with patients eventually. Empathy demonstrates core professional values which are essential but, because of working hard, stress and level of burnout among caregivers or problem solvers. Lack of empathy becomes obvious in comparison with expected percentage of side effects of this position before recruiting. So, caregivers or problem solvers should start care more about their own physical health, social life, and emotional well-being, so they start taking care of their essential

The use of empathy within nursing practice requires the use of three major skills, which

In relational situations involving clients, it is essential that emotional intelligence is established. The ability to read clients helps advisors connect with their clients. Most jobs rely on client relationships as the platform for their business. Jobs like social work, nurses, doctors, financial advisors, construction workers, and education all rely on their emotional intelligence to build strong relationships with their clients to succeed in their workplace. Take financial advisors for example, A financial advisor Lewis Schiff explained, “A key differentiator between financial advisors who help their client achieve positive returns and those who help their clients achieve superior returns is moral and emotional competency” (Schiff, 2009). This explains for an advisor to succeed in advising clients, they must build a trustworthy relationship for positive outcomes. Without a relationship built from emotions, there will be a failed relationship leading to a failed professional outcome. To build the relationship an employee must learn about the client and connect in a way to gain their trust. Once a client’s trust is gained, there is more of a chance that they will open up, and create a base for professional success. In an article from the University of Plymouth, it is explained that emotional intelligence is one of the main qualities looked for in hiring new nurses. In the Institute of Health Studies article, Cadman quotes Daniel Goldman, one of the founders of emotional

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 brings about the idea that the more someone is aware of their own emotions and other peoples emotions they will have a significant increase in personal and professional success by applying strategies from the four core emotional intelligence skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. The idea of emotional intelligence was first proposed in 1964 and since then other physiologists have added their insights and broken it down into four to five different categories. Emotional intelligence (EQ) was recently defined as one’s ability to recognize own emotions and other people’s emotions and applying this understanding to manage your behavior and relationships (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). With application to the nursing world, having high EQ knowledge will improve roles and functions of nursing, teach fellow coworkers techniques to lead, and help individuals grow in identifying emotions and further understanding one’s self.

When a person utters the word “intelligence,” people tend to think of a genius like Albert Einstein developing some obscure equation that the great majority of the population will never understand. The problem with the definition of intelligence is that people relate intelligence to words like “genius” which require intelligence but do not have the same definition as intelligence. Often, people try to use related words to define intelligence, but these words are unable to define intelligence since many are only different levels of intelligence. While many definitions try to encompass the meaning of intelligence and various definitions describe a small part of intelligence, no definition completely explains intelligence, because

I’ve always considered empathy and inherent trait that everyone just has. Sharing peoples’ feelings and emotions was how I connected with people even in my early life. I internalize the feelings of those around me and often find myself experiencing the hurt of the whole world. I sort of assumed that is the way everyone else experienced the world until I had a real conversation with my mom and learned that wasn’t the case. I was what my parents called, extra “sensitive” to all my surroundings including the emotions of those around, loud noises and bright lights. I was always concerned about growing up and being out in the world because I was told I’m so “different.” I feel just too much apparently. A “different, sensitive” personality like my own isn’t really a personality for success in emergency medical situations, I’ve spent years thriving in Emergency Departments, and out in the field as an EMT. Though I should be overwhelmed, I am not. My strength has been my ability to connect with my patients and share their feelings, but I had no idea how much I didn’t really understand until several weeks ago when I found myself unintentionally caring for my grandfather. My experience with empathy has deepened through my visits with my grandfather through the years, and my perspective has changed as I’ve watched and shared in my grandfather’s experiencing of losses. This narrative will discuss empathy through a nursing