Travel Nurses Go For The Gold Every Day!

The 2014 Olympics in Sochi are coming to a close this weekend. Maybe if you’re lucky enough to have worked the evening or night shift you got to catch some of my personal favorite winter sport, Curling — which was on at exclusively odd hours this time around!

Seems so many of us have the Olympics on the brain, and I just came across a great blog this week on allnurses.com called Nurses Train Like Olympians. The posts’ intro reads:

“Before an athlete can enter into the Olympic ring, they must do years of extensive training. The same is true for nurses. They take rigorous prerequisites, nursing courses and clinicals, before they can enter the nursing field. Nurses train to go into many environments. Just like [sic] Olympians take their talents to the slopes, nurses train to take their skills and knowledge into many different arenas. For both there are tears, laughter, joy and few hours of sleep. But they know in the end it will all be worth it because they are following their dream!”

I thought this blog made some really fantastic comparisons. The post goes on to compare nurses and Olympians in terms of:

• Physical Strength
• Mental Toughness
• Uniforms
• Nursing Also Having Fans
• Ability to Keep an Eye on a Goal

Agreed, on all counts! But, it got me thinking about how travel nurses specifically are like Olympians. Here are a couple more I’d add that are specific to travel nurses and how travel nurses are like Olympians:

Performing Like a Champ on an Unfamiliar “Course”

There was some talk this year about difficulty of certain courses in Sochi. Shaun White may have lost some fans over his inability to deal with a tricky course. On the other hand, American Kelly Clark called the halfpipe course “challenging” but told USA Today, “I know I can’t control what the pipe conditions are. It has the potential to be variable, and I’m going to make the most of this opportunity.”

Clark’s sentiments are pretty much what every good travel nurse must believe when jumping into things at a new facility. Travel nurses can’t control or know what the dynamic will be like, but they jump right in and make the most of it.

Sense of Adventure

Watching terrifically talented athletes conquer adventurous courses and dominate the landscape in all the way across the globe totally reminded me Olympians travel for adventure and to succeed in their fields — just like travel nurses.

I hope you enjoy the conclusion of the Sochi Olympics, and that all you travel nurse Olympians keep going for the gold every day on the job!