ten things i wish i'd known

October 2003 29:5 JOURNAL OF EMERGENCY NURSING 397

P R E S I D E N T ’ S M E S S A G E

In her book Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I WentOut into the Real World,1 award-winning journalist MariaShriver shares her perspective from years of reporting fromthe trenches: that learning is experiential. She observes thatthe pain each of us experiences gives us the strength and wis-dom to carve out our own destiny. Coming from a familythat has endured significant personal tragedies, the wife ofArnold Schwarzenegger may have some credibility where thismatter is concerned. Some days I am overwhelmed with sad-ness when I hear stories like that of a graduate nurse (or anexperienced nurse in a new department) who, in her firstmonth of orientation, experienced the wrath of a fierce pre-ceptor using her position to show the new nurse all that shedid not know. Feeling demoralized and absent a nurturingenvironment, the new nurse quit, never to return to nursingagain. Time and again, I hear colleagues irritably reflecting onthe phenomenon of “nurses eating their young.” In sometextbooks, this is referred to as “horizontal or lateral violence”and many of you already know that it is a human characteris-tic that is not exclusive to the nursing profession. What con-cerns me about this kind of personal violence is that simplyacknowledging it encourages complacency about the prob-lem and inhibits our ability to do anything meaningful tocorrect it. In my career experience it seems that most issuesescalate in the negative because it is much easier to form ajudgment and blame than it is to pursue the truth.

In Difficult Conversations,2 Stone et al of the HarvardNegotiation Project discuss blame as a “bad idea” but ac-knowledge that it is a prominent issue in many difficultconversations. They refer to blame as “irrelevant and un-fair” because “the urge to blame is based, quite literally, ona misunderstanding between you and the other person, andon the fear of being blamed.”

Ten Things I Wish I’d Known

Kathy Robinson is president of the Emergency Nurses Association anda member of the Susquehanna Chapter; E-mail: krobin@ptdprolog.net.

J Emerg Nurs 2003;29:397-8.

Copyright © 2003 by the Emergency Nurses Association.

0099-1767/2003 $30.00 + 0

doi:10.1067/men.2003.202

Kathy Robinson, RN, Bloomsburg, Pa

Each of us has a different memory ofwhere we were and what we were doing on September 11,2001, and yet it was a milestone in time that changed ourlives forever. During the aftermath, the nation’s President(albeit while trying to reestablish a sense of normalcy) urgedits citizens to “go shopping.” Hearing that within days of a24-hour train ride back from Orlando, the comment mademe rethink my own values. Were (are) we such an egocen-tric society that our solution to a devastating world tragedyis to empty our wallets at the local mall? All I wanted to dowhen I saw that plane crash into the second tower was talkto my family 1000 miles away, to reassure them that I wasokay, to make sure they were okay. I wanted to know thatdear friends and esteemed colleagues en route to the ENAannual meeting from locations all across America were safe,and that our EMS and ED contemporaries in New York,Washington, and my home state of Pennsylvania had whatthey needed to respond to the crisis. I grieved for humanityand the loss of innocence, and since that time I have tried toredefine normal as it pertains to my own situation.

398 JOURNAL OF EMERGENCY NURSING 29:5 October 2003

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE/Robinson

As my term as ENA President starts to wind down, I have learned a lot about interacting within the humanspecies over the last several years that I would like to sharethrough my own “10 Things” list. The first is advice frommy older (and wiser) brother, the rest is a compilation of ex-periences and lessons I learned the hard way:1. If you roll in the mud, you’ll get dirty. 2. We are influenced by past experiences. (Important

corollary: Forming assumptions about other people’sintentions is generally not good leadership practice.)

3. There are things we can change and things we can’t.4. Make the best decisions you can with the best informa-

tion you have at the time.5. Each of us has different information and different sto-

ries; it doesn’t mean one of us is wrong.6. Feelings are an integral part of conflict. Even pure

“thinkers” have them. 7. It is okay to say, “No, I don’t have enough time.”8. Being fair is always better than being right.9. Everyone loses when one of us wins at all costs.10. Attitude is a choice.

In closing, I think most of us have dulled personal painwith the swipe of a credit card, but my vision for carvingout my own destiny is best described by Joann Davis in TheBest Things in Life Aren’t Things3: “To affirm life or destroyit. In the final analysis, little else matters. Each one of us, inturn, must choose what we will do with our thoughts,words, and deeds. And for the rest of our lives, each of uswill have to live with our choices and their consequences.”

REFERENCES1. Schriver M. Ten things I wish I’d known before I went out into

the real world. New York: Warner Books; 2000.2. Stone D, Patton B, Heen S. Difficult conversations. New York:

Penguin Books; 1999.3. Davis J. The best things in life aren’t things. Boston: Beacon

Press; 2003.

Reviewers’ AcknowledgmentThe Journal of Emergency Nursing gratefully acknowledges the time,effort, expertise, and advice donated by the following reviewers of thisissue’s content:

Mary BaileySue BallatoSue BarnasonHoward BondellKaren Kernan BryantPat ClutterLaura CriddleFrank CunninghamLynn EastesKathy EmdeDennis EmersonFaye EversonPatricia Kunz HowardVicki KeoughDiane LapsleyLouise LeBlancLinda Ledray

Susan MacLeanPeter ManingasChristine MayCarrie McCoyBen MelnykovichPatricia MianLisa MolitorAllison MullerLorene NewberrySuzanne O’ConnorKathy OmanJim RichmannSusan Budassi SheehyDeb SmithSusan StraussDonna Ojanen ThomasShanda Zaharako