Practice
beginning every conversation by listening. Everyone wants their agenda
to be known and listening first will help to disarm defensiveness. You
have probably heard this a million times in a million different ways,
but it is so important. As Dr. Steven Covey says in his book The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand and then
to be understood”. This is a very difficult concept to try to
integrate into your practice and just into your life in general, but
it’s very, very helpful.
Take, for example, a situation where you have a patient that is
coming up from the Emergency Room and needs to be admitted to your
floor. The Emergency Room nurse calls up and says, “We’ve got this
patient down here. We gotta get him up to the floor. We need the
beds. We need the room. We’ve got a lot of extra patients coming.
The squad just called and said they’re bringing in a bunch of trauma
patients, and we have to bring this patient up to your floor right
now.” From your perspective, you’re saying, “Well, the bed isn’t
ready. We don’t have any place to put this patient.” And, what
usually happens in this kind of scenario is each person has an agenda.
The ER nurse is saying, “We have to get this patient out of here right
now”, and that is their agenda period. And then you are saying, “We
don’t have a bed for the patient. You can’t bring him up here because
we don’t have a bed.”
If you were the one who is receiving the call on the floor, if you
listen first to what the ER nurse is saying, and bottom line here is
they’re busy and they don’t know how they’re going to take care of this
patient. And then, restate that in terms that show your understanding:
“wow, you guys must be really busy down there today and it’s going to
be really tough to try and take care of this patient with all those
patients that you have coming in.” Then, you can state your point of
view and it will be more likely that you’ll be heard.
If you state your point of view first and say, “The bed isn’t ready
and you can’t send him up,” that immediately blocks the conversation
and there is no communication back and forth. Each person is trying to
win the argument rather than trying to resolve the problem. “Seek
first to understand, then to be understood.” Try this in your
practice. Try it when it’s not a crisis situation. Try it in every
conversation you have. Get some practice with it and then, when you
have a crisis situation; it will become a lot easier to do.
Best wishes,
David W. Woodruff, MSN, RN, CNS, CEN
President, Ed4Nurses, Inc.
www.Ed4Nurses.com
www.dwoodruff.com