Emotional Intelligence, Reflective Practice and Therapeutic Relationship in Nursing

Emotional Intelligence, Reflective Practice and Therapeutic relationship In Nursing

“To develop a therapeutic relationship with health consumer requires the nurse to be self-reflective. The reflective process concludes with embracing insights from a variety of sources that serve to change practitioners’ awareness” (Taylor, 2006).

To begin with, self-awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts and emotions. Self- awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment. For nurses to be able to empathize with their patients and treat them with compassion, they have to be self-aware. When nurses are self-aware, they are able to positively change their attitude and actions in order to best understand how different people treat them, hence improving nurse- patient relationship.

Relationships are easy until there is emotional turmoil. Thus, being self-aware is important to any health care professional that needs to manage their cognitive, affective and behavioural self in order to engage effectively in therapeutic relationship (Taylor, 2006).

Self-awareness is important because it helps us to build a better understanding of ourselves. This helps nurses to get empowered to make changes and build on their areas of strength. Self-awareness is important to an individual health consumer. It helps us to control our emotions. It’s not bad to express our emotions but it has its own time and way to be done. Emotions also lead to many incidents such as suicide and unintended pregnancies. Secondly, self-awareness helps a person to control anger and live a happy life, as living a stressful life invites many sicknesses ...

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