I have been fortunate to have been supported and influenced by many of nurses’ contemporary leaders: I studied with Dr. Jean Watson prior to completing my dissertation by taking 6 units of doctoral level electives with her at UCHS. I had contacted Dr. Watson during my Masters studies, and I was amazed at how approachable she was via email. Watson’s Theory of Human Caring has influenced and directed my work in a way that is immeasurable on many levels; being with her and spending a week in sacred center, studying emerging sacred-caring science concepts brought me to a new vision of how nursing education can and should be practiced.

I also stumbled upon the work of Dr. Peggy Chinn and the nurse manifest project during my early doctoral studies, and soon found myself embraced by the NurseManifest community. I was blessed to have been part of the first Nurse Manifest research project team, and the experience of presenting our findings together was monumental in my life as an emerging nursing scholar.

While Dr. Watson and Dr. Chinn epitomize the amazing academic and scholarly accomplishments of Nurses’ Living Legends, they both also remain approachable, kind, caring, and generous. They reflect back to us a deep love for nursing, coupled with calls toward caring and a level of social justice activism that is highly needed in our process of supporting both local and global healing. There are many other nurses whom I might call “global nursing leaders” who share in this attitude, commitment, and consciousness toward change.

I am also frequently touched by the leadership capacity of my nursing students; the willingness to change their lives, spread their wings, and find ways to bring caring, holism, and healing to the “local” bedside in environments where these concepts often remain fringe in the face of allopathic approaches. The many global nursing leaders inspire nursing students, and the continuum to me is clear; students and nurses need these leaders to raise our consciousness, build our confidence, and lead us into our own leadership capacity at the local level. We need global leaders to shine a light on our professional paths and support our deepening understanding of both self as nurse and our profession’s capacity to create nursing qua nursing as the norm.

I am honored to be working with my RN-BSN students this fall in their leadership coursework. We will look at Chinn’s Peace and power work and also explore leadership through holistic concepts. We will examine burnout and how we can recover or support others in their recovery through self-care. In analyzing our workplaces, we will explore Sharon Salzberg’s (a registered nurse and globally known meditation teacher) Real happiness at work: Meditations for accomplishment, achievement, and peace as a supportive tool for self-exploration around workplace issues.

Many nursing students struggle to perceive themselves as “local nurse leaders”, and I strive to support them to tap into their own leadership capacities, to create the types of healthcare workplaces where they can thrive and support the healing of their patients through integrative modalities and caring consciousness. I do believe one way to provide this platform for students’ emerging leadership is to create a caring environment for students, to support their own healing processes, and to role model shared leadership processes and self-care-healing for, and with, students. In this way, I humbly express my deepest gratitude for those global nursing leaders who have shone their light on my own professional and healing path when it was often far from clear where I was headed.