You Were Called to This - 11 Essential Lessons for Nursing Students and New Graduates
By Christine N. Malone, MSN, RN
Are you a nursing student wondering if you have what it takes? A new graduate who passed boards and is still waiting to feel like a real nurse? A nurse in your first two years who needs someone to tell you the honest truth about this calling?
This book was written for you.
Nursing school prepares students for clinical work. What it rarely prepares them for is everything else, the fear, the transition, the NCLEX anxiety, the colleagues who are not rooting for them, the seasons of depletion and self doubt that threaten the very passion that brought them to nursing in the first place.
Christine N. Malone, MSN, RN has been navigating those seasons for thirty six years.
As a single mother who walked through nursing school facing racial injustice and personal adversity, who sat for NCLEX twice, LPN and then RN school, who was placed on probation for a skill she had never performed before, who survived the loneliest professional seasons with her passion and her faith intact, and who went on to earn her Master of Science in Nursing and spend decades training, precepting and mentoring the next generation of nurses, Christine knows the road nursing students are on from the inside.
In these eleven chapters she shares what nursing school never taught her.
What you will find inside:
Chapter 1 - How communication at the bedside is a clinical skill, and how to develop the specific language for the hardest nursing conversations.
Chapter 2 - What the transition from student to nurse actually feels like, and how to discern who is genuinely in your corner.
Chapter 3 - The difference between memorizing and thinking clinically, and how to develop the nursing instinct that experienced nurses seem to possess effortlessly.
Chapter 4 - How fear nearly ended Christine's nursing career before it began, and the two words a nine year old boy handed his mother that changed everything.
Chapter 5 - What NCLEX actually tests, why anxiety is not a prediction of failure and what to do the night before your examination.
Chapter 6 - The power of having someone genuinely in your corner, including the story of the nurse manager who put up a banner on the unit the day Christine passed her RN boards.
Chapter 7 - What professionalism truly is, how it is built in the moments nobody is watching and what one nursing instructor taught Christine without ever saying a word about it.
Chapter 8 - The difference between being a nurse and owning your identity as one, and how competence and confidence build together across the first years of practice.
Chapter 9 - Why nurse self care is not selfish, it is clinical wisdom, and what restoration actually looks like when life is carrying more than one person should have to carry.
Chapter 10 - How to sustain your passion across a long career, why stagnation is the real threat to nursing resilience and what thirty six years of still standing actually looks like.
Chapter 11 - The most important commitment a nurse can make to herself, and the truth that will carry her through every season the calling requires.
This book is practical. It is personal. It is rooted in real clinical experience and real testimony. And it is written from the unwavering conviction that nursing is not simply a profession, it is a calling. And everyone who answers it genuinely deserves someone in their corner who has already walked the road.
You were called to this.
Christine N. Malone will help you believe it, and live it, one chapter at a time.
Christine N. Malone, MSN, RN is a retired registered nurse with thirty six years of clinical experience, a published author and the founder of CaringNurses101- a nursing education platform.
