For me, when I began thinking about this project and different leaders that have inspired me throughout my life, I came to the conclusion that I have been raised by a leader. My mother is a nurse who started a little bit later than what is considered normal. She worked as a hairdresser for 11 years after I was born when she was 18 years old and worked tirelessly to make ends meet to give me the best childhood that she could have. She was a leader in the salon as well, as she was offered several positions to go on tour with models for Bed Head hair products and others as well, but stayed home for me as I was only a toddler. It was later in her life, when she was about 29 or 30, that she decided that she was not fulfilling her life and wanted to do more to help people. She then went back to school and received her RN and has recently been working at a spinal surgery office as a personal assistant to the surgeon, where she scrubs in and assists as much as she can. This person, in my eyes, is a leader. She advocates for her patient’s daily and is the voice as there are very few other RN’s in the facility in which she works, which gives her a lot of autonomy. She has worked very hard to get where she is now, and that is shown through the idea that the surgeon asked her specifically to be his assistant in the OR and in the office daily. She made a 4.0 all through college and that is very inspirational to me as she never gave up, even when she had two other babies before and during school.
My mother has many qualities that I value; she is determined, hardworking, compassionate, strong, smart, and so many other things. This is an informal leadership position in that she is not a nurse manager or charge nurse, but rather is the main RN at her facility and offers her amazing compassion and skills on a daily basis. I am very interested to learn a lot of things, as I feel that I am often too busy to notice the work she is doing and her dedication to it as well. I am interested to know what she does on a daily basis, the things she sees, her routine, the struggles, the good days, and everything in between. It will be very interesting to interview her now in my senior year of nursing school to see how I can relate and how much we have in common.
