What Happens When Something We Hear Starts to Mean Something to Us?
By Teresa Walding, BSN, RN, NC-BC
As nurses, we know how to learn. We study, ask questions, practice, and become more proficient.
But have you ever understood something intellectually, and then, sometime later, seen what it meant in your own life?
Think about replaying a difficult conversation. The conversation is over, yet each time you revisit it in your mind, you feel upset again. Then you notice: “I’m responding to the conversation happening in my thinking right now.”
The original conversation still matters. But seeing what is happening in that moment may change your relationship to it.
That is the kind of discovery we explore at Advancing Nurse Coaching through the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought, first articulated by Sydney Banks.
In this understanding:
- Mind points to the source of life and the capacity for fresh understanding.
- Consciousness is what allows us to be aware and experience life.
- Thought is the capacity through which our moment-to-moment experience takes form.
You do not need to memorize these definitions to begin exploring. They point toward something you can notice in your own experience: how real and convincing your thinking can feel, and how differently life can look when something fresh occurs to you.
Years ago, I began writing down the conversation that might be going on within someone hearing about this understanding. Much of it came from my own experience: becoming interested, trying to figure it out, having an insight, and then wondering why familiar thinking still returned.
You may recognize some of that conversation here.
These reflections describe possibilities rather than a fixed sequence. You may recognize several at once, revisit something familiar, or describe your experience differently.
Before we know there is something to explore
- No desire to learn something new, we don’t know what we don’t know.
- We do not know there is another understanding that could help us.
- We take a class, hear a podcast, or encounter something that sparks an interest.
- We decide to see if there is anything we might like to “check out.”
- We start listening but still question whether we need it or can make sense of what we are hearing.
- We keep hearing something that piques our interest. We want to know more.
That willingness to take another look can be small. We do not have to be convinced before we become curious.
Trying to figure it out
- We try to “figure it out” from our current knowledge base.
- We try to make it fit what we already know.
- We understand some of the words but wonder what they mean in our own lives.
- We sense there is something here for us but can’t quite grasp it.
- We continue listening.
- We hear something helpful.
For nurses, intellectual understanding matters. We need sound knowledge and clinical judgment in our work.
Yet we can learn the language of the Principles without having a personal insight into what that language points toward.
Intellectual Knowledge ≠ Transformation
Being able to explain an idea is different from seeing something that changes how you experience a moment.
Something becomes meaningful
- An insight happens that has meaning for us.
- What we have heard has a personal impact.
- It makes sense, it is helpful, and we wonder how we didn’t see it before.
- Our interest grows, and we want to understand more.
- We begin noticing what this understanding means in our everyday lives.
- We begin to listen differently.
- Things we have read or heard before look different because the lens we are looking through has changed.
Perhaps we notice how differently we experience the same situation at different moments. Perhaps something we were certain about no longer looks so certain.
The significance is personal. It may be difficult to explain to someone else, even when it is clear to us.
“If I understand this, why am I struggling?”
- We still assume that other people or circumstances directly determine how we feel.
- We lose sight of what we have seen and find ourselves suffering.
- We wonder why we can’t “do it.”
- Our minds get busy trying to figure out what happened and how we lost that feeling of ease and knowing.
- We may think, “I know I’m caught up in my thinking, and I don’t care.”
- Our old ways of thinking are familiar, even as we continue to suffer.
This part deserves a place in the conversation.
A nurse may have a meaningful insight and still feel overwhelmed during a shift, upset by a conversation, or worried at home. Then comes the added thought: “I should know better.”
Recognizing the Principles does not require us to maintain a particular feeling. A difficult moment does not erase what we have seen.
Seeing something fresh again
- We recognize that we do not need to judge ourselves for this.
- Our ability to meet life can feel out of reach at times, then become apparent again.
- Our thought habits do not always disappear easily.
- As insights appear, thinking that once felt unquestionable may begin to lose its hold.
- New thoughts and new solutions to our problems become visible.
- We may experience more compassion, joy, and ease.
- We may become less judgmental of ourselves and others.
We do not have to turn these possibilities into another set of expectations.
At Advancing Nurse Coaching, we emphasize implications, not applications. By that, we mean exploring what changes as we understand, rather than giving you a technique to practice.
You might notice that you no longer take a familiar worry quite so seriously. Or you may hear someone more clearly because you are less occupied with what you plan to say next.
These changes can emerge naturally as we see something differently.
An understanding that becomes part of everyday life
- We recognize how much our thinking has changed.
- We no longer feel new to the understanding.
- It becomes a way of life as we recognize something that has always been a natural part of being human.
- The understanding naturally informs how we listen, relate, and respond.
- We are changing from the inside out. It is personal and powerful.
- This is lifelong “learning.” We never come to the end of discovering the Principles.
- We continue to have questions and insights as we live our lives.
By “inside out,” I mean that change unfolds through a fresh understanding of how our experience is created.
Integration may be ordinary. We may notice that we listened to someone with more openness, that a familiar worry passed without drawing us into a long argument with ourselves, or that a response occurred to us that we had not considered before.
Our nursing knowledge continues to matter. So do the realities of our work. What we see about our own experience may bring a different perspective to how we meet them.
What do you recognize?
You do not need to locate yourself at a particular point in this reflection.
Perhaps you are curious. Perhaps you are trying to figure it out. Perhaps you have seen something for yourself and are wondering why familiar thinking still returns.
There is room for all of that.
What sounds familiar in your own experience? What are you beginning to see? What would you describe differently?
If you would like to explore this understanding with us, begin with our free CE The Revolution in Nursing and Coaching Begins.
We welcome your curiosity and your questions.
— Teresa Walding