NURS 220 Week 5 Discussion Board Forum 2 Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: The Stories I Tell Myself Before I Speak

NURS 220 Advanced Nursing Communication, Discussion Board Forum 2

Thread by [Student Name]

The workplace scene and classmates are composites; the textbook and journal articles cited are real.

Here are the facts. I arrived for my 7 p.m. shift as a patient care technician. Three of my assigned patients had not been bathed, and one bed had not been changed. My coworker from the day shift was at the desk on her phone.

Here is the story I told myself within about five seconds: she was lazy, she had spent the afternoon on her phone and she had left her work for me because she knew I would do it. I felt angry, and I could feel my face getting hot. I walked toward the desk planning to say, loudly enough for others to hear, "Nice of you to leave me your baths."

Patterson et al. (2012) describe this sequence as the path to action: we see and hear, we tell a story, we feel and then we act. The trouble is that the story feels like a fact. My story was what the authors call a villain story, in which the other person is not just wrong but has bad motives, and it gave me permission to embarrass her. The chapter suggests retracing the path: separate what I actually saw from what I concluded, and ask why a reasonable, rational and decent person might have done what she did.

When I asked, instead of accusing, the facts changed. Two of her patients had been rapid responses that afternoon, and she had spent four hours helping with transfers. She was on her phone calling her son's school because she was late picking him up. She apologized for the baths before I said anything, and we finished two of them together before she left. I had been one sentence away from making an enemy of a coworker who had just had the hardest shift on the unit. The story I told myself took five seconds to write and would have taken weeks to repair.

Reply to Danielle

Danielle, you wrote that since becoming a charge nurse, you have avoided talking with a former peer who keeps taking long breaks, telling yourself, "If I say something, she'll think I've changed." That sounds like a helpless story, one in which the problem seems impossible to address. Mulcahy-Spence et al. (2026) describe avoidance of difficult conversations as a common pitfall when a colleague becomes a leader, alongside overcompensation and role conflict, and they recommend mentorship and deliberate attention to the relational shift. Perhaps the story could be rewritten as, "She may be waiting for me to set clear expectations." Would it help to talk with your own manager about how to open the conversation?

Reply to Isaiah

Isaiah, I related to your description of feeling your heart pound before you could think when a family member yelled at you. The chapter says we can master our stories only if we slow down long enough to notice them. Miller et al. (2026) taught new graduate nurses a one-hour, sensory-focused self-care approach called the Community Resiliency Model, designed to help regulate the nervous system under stress; resilience and burnout scores did not change significantly over three months, but 73% of the nurses reported using the skills. Even a few seconds of noticing your breathing might give you space to ask what story you are telling before you respond. Have you found anything that helps you pause before you answer an upset family member?

References

Miller, A. M., Tee, A., Giordano, N. A., Mcdermott, C., Hudson, J., & Duva, I. M. (2026). Effects of a resilience intervention within a nurse residency program. Journal of Advanced Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.70746

Mulcahy-Spence, A., Amidon, B., Clements, P. T., & Haddad, L. (2026). When the colleague becomes the boss: Navigating the shift from peer to nurse leader. Journal of Professional Nursing, 66, 241-246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2026.07.022

Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2012). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.