D235 Task 2 Hero's Journey Reflection Example

A Hero's Journey Reflection: Returning to School, Learning to Pause, and Leading a Small Change in an Outpatient Infusion Center

Student Name

Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University

D235: Interprofessional Communication and Leadership in Healthcare, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

A Hero's Journey Reflection: Returning to School, Learning to Pause, and Leading a Small Change in an Outpatient Infusion Center

Introduction

Joseph Campbell described a pattern found in stories across cultures: a person is called away from ordinary life, resists, finds help, crosses into unfamiliar territory, faces trials and a central ordeal, and returns changed with something to offer others (Campbell, 2008). This course asked me to look at my own recent experience through that pattern. My journey over the past year involved three overlapping challenges: returning to school after twelve years, learning to pause instead of pushing through, and leading a small change on my unit for the first time. This reflection follows those challenges stage by stage and closes with my plans for the future.

The Call and the Refusal

The call came in a performance review. My manager told me I was the nurse others trusted with the hardest patients and asked whether I had thought about a charge or educator role, both of which require a bachelor's degree. I said I would think about it and then did nothing for almost a year. My reasons sounded practical: I worked full time, I had a teenager at home, and I had not written a paper since my associate degree. The honest reason was fear that I would not be good at school anymore, and a quieter worry that leading people would require the energy I had just learned, from my working style results, is my weakest.

The Mentor and the Threshold

Help arrived in two forms. A colleague who had finished the same program the year before walked me through enrollment and told me which courses would feel hardest. And in this course, the live sessions on leadership mindset gave me a different way to think about my hesitation: leadership is made of habits a person can rehearse and improve, not a personality that someone either has or lacks. Crossing the threshold meant enrolling, telling my team I was in school and asking my manager for one thing I had never asked for before, a predictable schedule so I could plan study time.

The Trials

The trials were ordinary but real. I fell behind in my first term when two colleagues left and I picked up extra shifts. My first submitted task came back for revision on two aspects, which felt like failure until I read the comments and saw they were specific and fixable. At work, my habit of rushing to solutions caused friction when our team began discussing why patients were waiting so long for their first infusion appointment after referral.

The course material on mindfulness changed how I handled these trials. I began a five-minute breathing practice before each shift and before each study session, one of the simplest techniques from the course. A review of 32 studies found that mindfulness-based interventions may significantly reduce anxiety and depression in nurses, and that qualitative studies described better communication with colleagues and patients and calmer handling of stressful situations (Guillaumie et al., 2017). I cannot claim that level of change, but I noticed that I interrupted less in meetings and that I could read an evaluator's comments without reacting first and thinking second.

The Ordeal

The ordeal came when my manager asked me to lead a small project to shorten the wait between referral and first infusion appointment. It was the first time I had to lead colleagues from other professions, including a scheduler, a pharmacist and an oncology nurse practitioner, without formal authority over any of them. At our second meeting the scheduler said, in front of everyone, that nurses always blame scheduling for problems the clinic creates. My instinct was to defend the nurses with data. Instead I paused, which I would not have done a year earlier, and asked her to walk us through what happens on her side when a referral arrives. Her answer showed that incomplete insurance information from referring offices caused most of the delay. That conversation changed the project, and it changed my relationship with her. It was also a practical lesson in a core expectation of interprofessional practice: understanding the roles of other professions and using that understanding to address the needs of the people we serve (Interprofessional Education Collaborative, 2023).

The Return

What I brought back from this journey is not a new personality but a set of habits. I pause before responding when I feel defensive. I ask about the other person's process before proposing my own. I accept that leading a group means making room for energies I do not have, especially the enthusiasm and relationship-building that come naturally to others. The referral project reduced the average wait from 11 business days to 7 over three months, mostly because the scheduler and I built a checklist for referring offices together. The result mattered, but the way we reached it mattered more to me.

Plans for the Future

I have three plans. First, I will keep the five-minute mindfulness practice before every shift and add a short pause at the end of each shift to note one conversation that went well and one I would handle differently. Second, I will apply for the educator role when it opens next spring, after completing my degree, and before then I will precept two new nurses so I can practice teaching and giving feedback. Third, I will ask our scheduler and social worker to co-lead the next improvement project with me, so that the work starts with more than one profession's view of the problem from the first meeting.

Conclusion

Framing the past year as a hero's journey showed me that it was one change with a shape, not a series of unrelated struggles. I resisted a call, accepted help, faced trials that forced me to use new skills, and returned with habits that make me a better colleague and a more capable leader. The journey is not finished, and I expect the next stage to bring a new call and, probably, a new refusal to work through.

References

Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library.

Guillaumie, L., Boiral, O., & Champagne, J. (2017). A mixed-methods systematic review of the effects of mindfulness on nurses. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 73(5), 1017-1034. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13176

Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2023). IPEC core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: Version 3. https://www.ipecollaborative.org/ipec-core-competencies