Lyn McCright is a registered nurse, an adult and gerontological nurse practitioner and a nursing consultant. Occupational stress and burnout among health care workers inspired her to form Advancing Holistic Health, an online school that offers courses in the Resilience Paradigm to registered nurses and licensed health care professionals.

The Resilience Paradigm is a psychological approach that supports the mental wellness of health care workers by showing them how to live in the present and develop a better understanding of how they create their own experiences of life. Through the resilience principles, McCright says that nurses and licensed health care professionals, especially since the onset of the pandemic, can recognize stress and use common sense to get in touch with their inner wisdom.

Medical journals, including Harvard Medical School Harvard Health Journal and Nature Reviews Neuroscience, document how long-term stress can adversely affect the brain, leading to interference with cognition, attention and memory. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report, “Exposure to Stress: Occupational Hazards in Hospitals,” affirms that work stress has been a long-standing concern in the health care industry.

“When you’re in the middle of a stressful situation in the emergency room or in the intensive care unit, that inner wisdom is always available to all of us,” explains McCright. The Resilience Paradigm consists of an 80-hour continuing education program for nurses to become nationally board certified as a nurse coach. Other licensed health professionals can receive a health coach certificate. The program allows nurses to coach other nurses and the general public. McCright says they are particularly focusing on health care professionals now because the need is so great.

Despite the tumultuous year of 2020, McCright believes gifts to the health care community will be revealed through the contacts and connections made, along with a better understanding of their work practices. “Our most recent presentation to nurses was titled Understanding Our True Nature. In that lies a way for us to understand that life is really very simple, but we made it very complex. We do better by simply going directly into our own wisdom, and for each of us that will be slightly different, but individuals will find that is our next step in every situation.”

McCright equates finding tools for lifelong learning through insight to learning how to walk—one step at a time. “It’s about balancing while at the same time moving forward. It takes a while, but once we master it, it will be lifelong learning for us.” She notes that the National Institutes of Health surveys found that certified nurse coaching improves job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships and improved personal health.

During the last year-plus, McCright notes there’s been a lot of hostility against healthcare workers by the public, but it’s also shown that health care worker-to-patient relationships are all about human-to-human connection. “Health care workers know not to take it personally, because we’ve encountered sick people all of our lives, and sick people are often not happy people,” she says. “But what we see are peoples’ frustration with the larger picture, politically and economically, being taken out on us. But through resilience, we learn how to reduce stress.”

Gallup polls over the past decade have ranked nurses to be the most trusted, ethical and honest among all professionals. “Nursing is finally being recognized for what it is—a very valuable part of infrastructure in regard to services,” she says. “It’s never been a better time to be a nurse or a licensed health professional. It’s our time. The public is waking up to the value of our services. We’re honoring ourselves in that, as well.”

For more information about Advancing Holistic Health, call 254-751-7111 or visit AdvancingHolisticHealth.com.