Hello, welcome back. It's Adam shore the heart guy in the last. In the last lesson, we looked at how to solve problems. And in this lesson, we're going to look at how to learn from your mistakes. Now, I'm going to tell you I'm going to start this by telling you a story. We all make mistakes in our life.

And when I was training as a student nurse, we always had more senior nurse there with us, so we never had any accountability. So whatever happened, whatever decisions we were making, we always had somebody there that we could run it by. It was never just me that was there to make a decision on my part. I had a mentor, I had a safety net, so to speak. And then one day I qualified as a nurse and they said right there you go in. And the good thing is they always put me on with two fairly experienced nurses.

So I always had somebody to run things by, except one day I went into a medical ward. And the two most experienced nurses there, there were only three of us qualified. The other two were good friends. They'd been working there for years, and they decided that they wanted their break together. So they left the board and they left me in charge. I only been qualified for about two or three weeks, and I had 24 bedded medical wards that I was then responsible for.

Now, for any nurses out there or people in the medical profession. You'll know, if you're in the ward, the phones are ringing. The porters are coming to pick patients up and take them away for various scans. The relatives want to know what's happening. A lot of the patients aren't yours and you're having to read up on notes. medications have to be given out people want toilets, people need help with their washing and dressing.

There is so much stuff to do that you're caught in the middle running around. And in the middle of all this as I'm doing my best to manage all of these expectations upon me. Suddenly the carer system wanders over to me without a care in the world nice and slowly and says there seems to be a patient in the toilet and he doesn't look particularly well. I went really. So I went into the toilet. Now what I have to point out is I was working a bank shift, which means that that's the hospital's own agency and to save money, they used to bring it in at eight o'clock instead of seven.

And they used to send us home at one o'clock instead of three to save money on the ship. So I hadn't even had a proper handover. And I went in to this toilet and there was a guy sat there, white as a ghost, completely dead. This guy was so dead, that he had rigor mortis. Now it takes rigor mortis at least for six hours to set in, which means this guy had died during the night shift. And the night staff hadn't even noticed.

The early staff during handover hadn't noticed they hadn't noticed that during handover. No one had noticed this guy had died on the toilet. Now in this day and age, that probably wouldn't happen. But back when I first qualified as a nurse in the early 90s it did happen. And there it was, and suddenly I'm in a situation and I panicked. I panicked.

I didn't know what to do. I thought right quick, send out the crash course. So I said to one of the care assistants, called the crash team called the CPR team. So she had gone off to do that with the other care assistant. I thought, well, we can't resuscitate this guy in the toilet. Everyone else is going to be using it.

So we better take him back to his bed. So I grabbed the top half of his body, the carrier system Practice legs, and we ran across this Ward with the dead body. I often wonder what people must have been thinking when they saw that. Because this was back in the day when it was an open plan, what we call Nightingale award. You could see every bed from every other bed in the ward and we just run across the middle of the ward with a dead patient. I put him on onto the bed, which stripped out the pillows to get him flat.

I put the chest monitor on, of course, he was completely flatlined. I put an intubation into his throat and I put the oxygen mask on his face and I started doing CPR. But this guy was so dead with rigor mortis and because he died on a toilet. Every time I was pushing down on his chest, his knees were coming up and nearly hitting me on the head. So there I am having this comedy panic stricken resuscitation with knees coming up each time I went down. And even though I knew it was ridiculous, I knew this guy was dead.

But I didn't know what to do. I was in this panic stricken state, terrified of what people were going to think that I was. And suddenly, the curtains open and in walk the resuscitation team. I had the looks on their face said everything at this ridiculous nurse who was trying to resuscitate the patient, who already had rigor mortis. Where do you begin to start explaining that and how stupid does that look? And that was one of those moments.

I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me and how I knew I'd made a mistake. But I also knew that the previous shift had made a mistake that was to more senior nurses on that shift had made a mistake but It was me that the team saw in this ridiculous position. And I quite honestly, I never wanted to be a nurse again. At that moment. If I could have found another career, I'd have done it. I'd made this massive mistake.

And as I after I'd calmed down and I got myself back together when I went back to the ward. It was after then that I realized that after that experience, everything was easy. Because I had that as a benchmark, everything else that happened from that point, my job easier because I now my context of what a bad day was a really bad day boss could be used to compare all of my other experiences. So things that may have otherwise be quite traumatic to me when we did have a real resuscitation that we caught the person and we actually managed to bring them back to life and I started feeling good, because I know at least we got to this patient, we were able to help them, it could have been so much worse. There were days where I would end up covered in all sorts of bodily fluids.

And trust me, there were some bad ones there. But putting it in the context of other stuff that had happened of this incident, it was then able to help me because I had a different experience of what could go wrong. So in this incident, I was able to use this mistake, as a benchmark to help me with everything else. That would be challenging for me as a nurse. And this is the same thing some people get caught in this mode where bad things happen. And we never even think to ask for the positives.

I even had incidents where people I worked with, they take quick and quick we need your help. And I I'd run down the ward and they bring me into a room where the patient was clearly dead. And they said We thought you might want to do some, some resuscitation before we called the morgue. So, people started joking with me, they became the butt of jokes, we were able to laugh about this stuff. So I was able to put smiles on people's faces, I was able to take myself a little bit more likely, we were able to see the funny side of this particular instance. So I want you to write down what is one or two, the most difficult things you're facing at the moment.

And we've already covered what better question Could you ask, but what is the benefit? What is the potential future benefit of this happening to me? How will it improve my life? What will I do differently? How will I learn from this? These are questions that you can ask.

I want you to do this until you get the positive out of it. Let's see how you get on with that exercise. If you've done the exercise, you've already got some positives to come out of it. And it's like everything in life and the first time that you would have burnt yourself in the fire. Now, it's not pleasant, you burnt yourself, but you now know to stay away from fire, you know, to treat fire with more respect. And just having this awareness having this ability to learn and grow, learn and grow.

Back in the times of caveman, there would have been certain poisonous animals that may have killed some people. But you've lost one of your loved ones. But the positive thing is that person dying is save so many other lives because you now know not to go anywhere near that snake, a deadly creature or eat that deadly herb that could kill you. Now, although some people sometimes have to lose their life for the rest of us to get these positive outcomes for this awareness This ability to learn and grow is always something that we can take out of every situation in our life, regardless how negative that is down the line. So, I'm going to ask you to take time to think about this. Chapter challenges in your life.

Resilience comes from the ability to learn from those incidents, and to evolve yourself as a person. It's a bit like I watched a documentary once on honey badgers. Now if you haven't ever come across honey badgers look them up. They are down as the most fearless species in the animal kingdom. What honey badgers do adult honey badgers take baby honey badgers to build up their resilience by first getting them to tackle things like scorpions, and they know the little badger will get a few bites and that builds up their immunity And once their immune sees increased to a degree, then they'll bring them into snakes. They'll get a few bites there again, it builds up their immunity.

And they keep working towards bigger goals until the point comes where they they're scared of nothing. These things will stand up to elephants. They'll walk in a line through through lions and tigers, just to show them that they're not scared of them. Every critical creatures and again, if you can build resilience like a honey badger, then you're definitely in a good place. So we've discussed how to learn from your mistakes in this module, and in the next module, we'll look at how to face your fears