Unknowing In Nursing Practice

Nursing is a career that requires exemplary critical thinking skills and adaptability, but also a skill set equipped with complex technical skills and an array of different ways of understanding clients by utilizing different ways of knowing. The different ways of knowing regarding nursing practice include empirical, aesthetic, ethical, personal, experiential, intuition, sociopolitical, and even unknowing (Zander, 2007).With such a complex abstract of ways of knowing, it can be difficult to decide which way to use in which aspect of the nurse-client relationship, and it is simply impossible know everything in a profession such as nursing, where the knowledge is constantly adapting and the subjectivity of the client can only be felt and understood to a limit. Every client and nurse experiences vital aspects of life such as pain, transitions, health, family, culture, and knowing

One of the most crucial factors to a nurse’s knowing, is being able to recognize the unknowing and how to find familiarity in caring for clients while embracing the capacity to not know. In this paper I intend to address the importance of unknowing, how professional nurses have recognized its place in client care, and how I plan to take advantage of the methods regarding unknowing in my future as a nurse.

Understanding and Embracing Unknowing For those who rely on hard evidence and empirical data in order to draw conclusions and solve problems, the ambiguous natures of unknowing can result in frustration in comprehension. However, unknowing in nursing is not rooted in empirical data, and is not intended to cure disease, but instead is intended to foster an openness to clients’ perceptions in order for nurses to act with more mindfulness and to become more present in the moment (Zander, 2007). Unknowing requires the nurse to set aside all biases and assumptions that may influence the