Goals

This time of year many people make resolutions, or determine an action that the wish to take for the New Year in effort to improve themselves. I've never been real good at making or keeping any resolutions. Today my 9yo sat at the computer and came up with list of 9-10 "resolutions" of how she wanted to improve her behavior. They were all nice ideas a couple of therm were, "be nicer to my little sister" and "work harder at school". I told her these were great ideas but that for her to be successful she needed to focus on a couple and use measurable goals to improve the behavior....then it hit me. I sounded just like my instructors in nursing school

Every week on Wednesday we, the nursing school students, would go to the hospitals where we were doing our rotation that quarter, and pickup our patient assignment. Each assignment was generally 2 patients we would have to study their medical history, current history , disease, medications, etc. We would then have to write out a care plan for each patient identifying the potential or actual problems the physiology for the problem, include actions or nursing care that would help improve the patients situation or prevent a problem from actually occurring. Goals would actually have to be measurable; we couldn't just write "patient will be pain free" but "Patients pain level will be less than 5 on a scale 1-10".

So here I am trying to explain to my sweet 9yo that while I appreciate her wanting to be nicer to her little sister, she needs to think about, how, what actions she is going to take that will help her be nicer to her sister. She looked at me like I was a little nutty, I have that reputation with my kids. This interaction with my daughter has helped me think about what I want my goals for the year to be. When I decide on what they are going to be,I don't know if I'll post them all here it depends on how brave I'm feeling at the time.

Until then Happy 2010