Nothing changed on January 1st. You didn’t magically become a different person at the stroke of midnight. You don’t have a fairy godmother and you’re not Cinderella. So, your life was exactly the same when you woke up on January 1st, as it was at 11:59 the night before. Sadly, no prince charming coming to see if the shoe you lost that night fits your foot, so he can carry you off into a life you’ve been dreaming about.

There is good news

While it’s true that your life didn’t change at midnight, the good news is that it can. You CAN be a different person with a different life on January 1, 2026, but it will require work. 

At some point in your life, you set a goal to become a nurse. The fact that you are a nurse today proves that you are willing to face difficult things, put in the work, and overcome them. So, how do we turn the person and life we had at the start of this year into the version we want for 2026?

Mindset

Mindset is a bit of a buzzword these days, but there really is something to it. I would define mindset as the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world around us that either propel us toward our goals or prevent us from reaching them. Here are some mindset examples that might be holding you back:

1. I’ve always been overweight, I probably always will be.
2. My parents weren’t good with money, so I’ll always struggle financially.
3. Living paycheck to paycheck is just normal.
4. Nobody can get ahead in this economy.
5. I’m too old to start something new.
6. I’m just not very good at relationships.

When you read them written out like this, it’s easy to see how these can hold you back. Unfortunately, many of us have these sorts of thoughts running around in our heads and we don’t even know it. Start with recognizing any negative mindsets you may have. Then turn them into positives. Let’s do that with the six examples from above.

1. Losing weight is hard, but I’m not afraid of hard things and I know I can do this.
2. My parents weren’t good with money, but I can learn and build financial freedom.
3. Living paycheck to paycheck is normal, but it doesn’t mean I have to live that way.
4. Even in a challenging economy, with hard work and a plan, I can get ahead.
5. I’m NEVER too old to start something new.
6. My past relationship struggles don’t define me.

In my recently released Companion Workbook to my book, The Restored Nurse, I have an entirely new chapter on mindset, as well as some exercises that will help you build the sort of mindset that will help you build a life you love.

Vision

Merriam-Webster defines vision as “the act or power of imagination”. While we often think of imagination as what our children use when designing new games, or works of art the truth is that it’s just the ability to create a picture in your mind of something that does not yet exist. That’s vision. 

For the sake of this article, vision is you looking ahead to a future life you want to live and imagining what it would look like. Have you lost weight, found a partner, paid off debts, increased savings, moved to a new area, or bought a home? What does the vision of the future life you want to build look like? 

We have to acknowledge that we may not be able to move from where you were on January 1st to the life you want to build in 2025. If you have large sums of debt to pay off, it may take more than this year. If you have a lot of weight to lose, you can get an amazing start, but you may need more than a year. 

Plan

Now that we’ve created a mindset that can help us, rather than hold us back, and we have a vision for where we are going, we need a plan. Dave Ramsey says that goals without a plan are wishes. Whatever the life you will love looks like for you, you have to have a plan that helps you get there from here.

Think of it like a road trip. With a road trip, you start with a destination in mind, that’s the vision. From there you make a plan. When will you leave? What route will you take? Will you stop overnight or drive straight though? If so, where? Will you visit any places along the way? What snacks will you pack? You get the idea. Building a life you love is a journey and, just like this road trip, you need a plan.

Action

Even with all the above items in place, if you don’t take action, nothing will change. You will wake up on January 1st, 2026 only to realize that your life is the same as it was on January 1st of this year. 

This does not mean that you have to make drastic changes to your life right away. I think that sort of action is the reason so many people give up on their resolutions before the month of January has even passed. Instead, consider what small changes you can make that move you toward the vision you built above.

If you’re unsure where to start when it comes to changing your mindset, building a vision or plan, or taking action, my book, The Restored Nurse, and the Companion Workbook are great tools to help you get started.

The post New Year, Same Old You appeared first on Restoring Nurses.

Driving a wagon on a road with deep ruts means picking a rut and driving in it. Once in such a rut, you are pretty much stuck. You’re going where that rut goes. Sure, if you need to take a turn that the ruts don’t take, you can, but this change in direction will take effort as your horse works to put the weight of the wagon and all its contents and passengers up out of the rut.

Traveling through the ruts is easy. Changing direction to go to a place the ruts are going, takes work.

Ruts in Our Brain

The pathways in our brains are like roads that our thoughts travel along. For things that we think about often, our brain creates ruts, neuropathways, to get us to those thoughts more quickly. This is why something that you had never heard of as a nursing student becomes something you can bring up without even thinking about it later in your career. This is why going over ACLS algorithms repeatedly, or working through scenarios and mock codes helps us not have to think about what to do next when the time comes.

Ruts can be good

When our son was about 18 months old, he and I went to have lunch with his mother. She was breaking up pieces of a hamburger for him to eat. Things were going great, till they weren’t.

MY SON WAS CHOKING!!

My wife screamed my name, picked up our son, and handed him to me. Without even thinking, I flipped him over and did the sort of back blows they teach in life-saving classes. I had never done this on a child before, but I had practiced it so many times that my brain had created ruts that quickly took me to what I needed to do. After a few blows our son coughed up the meat. We quickly asked for our check and left. Lunch was over, but our son was ok. He now has a wife and a son of his own.

In another instance, we were having Christmas dinner at my in-laws’ house when my mother-in-law started choking. Again my wife screamed my name. I jumped up and, again, did what I had been trained to do. After a couple of abdominal thrusts, she coughed up the food she was choking on. I had never done this either, but the ruts that my training had built in my brain took me to the place I needed to go to save my mother-in-law’s life… not sure if that was a good or bad thing. (Totally kidding, my mother-in-law is great and I’m very glad that she’s still here.)

Ruts can be bad

In the above instances, the ruts in my brain were good. However, that is not always the case.

Some years ago I experienced what I was convinced at the time was a nervous breakdown. I talk about this in the Mental Health chapter of my book, The Restored Nurse. Or you can read it HERE. Through that experience, my brain developed some new ruts. When I woke up the next morning, I was afraid of things that I had never been afraid of before. I was afraid to fly. No biggy, lots of people are. But, I had flown on multiple occasions before this and loved it. I was afraid to ride in elevators. Again, this is something that lots of people are afraid of, but I had never been. I was afraid to start IVs. I had been a nurse for close to 15 years and had started hundreds of IVs. Not only had I started hundreds, I was good at it, but the things I had experienced that night made me afraid to do something that had become so familiar to me.

This experience created ruts in my brain that ran straight from flying, elevators, and IVs to FEAR! I mean I couldn’t even take the elevator down one level that next morning, even though I had ridden on that same elevator hundreds of times before this. Unlike the life-saving ruts I spoke of above, these ruts definitely were not helping me or anyone else.

The ruts in your brain

In addition to the ruts I’ve mentioned already, many of us have ruts in our brains that steer our lives in directions we don’t want to go. Perhaps you have a rut that leads you to overeat when you’re stressed, sad, or even happy. Maybe you have a rut that leads you to spend money you don’t have or at least money that you shouldn’t be spending. I don’t care what the internet says, “shopping therapy” can be a really bad thing.

These ruts in my fantasy novels, steer the wagons where the ruts want to go, with no care for where the wagon or its driver want to go. Sometimes the ruts in our brains are the same way. The good news for the characters in my books is that they are not stuck in the ruts. They can pull out of them and go in a direction other than where the ruts are going. We can do the same thing. We don’t have to be slaves to the ruts in our brains. But, just like in the books I read, getting out of these ruts requires two things: intentionality and work.

Where are the ruts in your brain taking you that you don’t to go?

You can join the conversation on my TikTok or leave a comment below. If you’d prefer to keep your ruts private, shoot me an email. I’d love to talk about it.

The post Trapped by the Ruts: How Brain Pathways Shape Our Lives—and How to Redirect Them appeared first on Restoring Nurses.