Great educators know one thing. The purpose in life is not to win.
The purpose in life is to grow and to share. "When you come to look
back on all that you have done in life, you will get more
satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's
lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated
them." – Harold Kuschner.

As an educator, you have many responsibilities. Those include making
sure everybody gets through their competencies, and orientation, and
developing new continuing education programs. But the greatest
responsibility we have as educators is to serve. John Maxwell says
that "servanthood is the missing link in most chain of commands."
Serving your nurses means more than just putting on another
educational program. It means being a part of their daily lives so
that you can learn the basis of their understanding in order to
develop programs that meet their needs.

You may develop a program that you think would be valuable to nurses
without truly understanding their point of view and the needs that
your nurses have. For example, a program on managing an emergency
situation may be helpful if your nurses have a good foundation and
understanding of principles such as hemodynamics. If not, the
program will be just more useless information that they have no way
of applying.

As educators, we need to get out into the trenches to find out what
our nurses really need. How solid is the foundation of their
practice and how can this program be best developed so that they can
increase their understanding of what can be used at a patient's
bedside? By envisioning yourself as a servant of those whom you are
charged to educate, you will get a different perspective on what kind
of education is most important to them and how best to deliver it.

As was said by Martin Luther King, Jr., "Anyone can be great because
anybody can serve. You do not have to have a college degree to
serve. You do not have to make your subject and your verb agree to
serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by
love."

Best wishes,
David W. Woodruff, MSN, RN-BC, CNS, CEN
President, Ed4Nurses, Inc.
www.Ed4Nurses.com