When Leaving Feels Like Disloyalty
The work is hard, and that is okay. Impossible is not.
What does success look like when you have already done everything you were supposed to do? Everything you were taught.
You planned. You got the education. You built the experience.
You have the skills, and you know what you want. And still, somewhere in the still moments, you are asking yourself if this is really what success feels like.
Success was never the checklist. It was never the paycheck, the calendar, the certifications, or the years put in.
Success is a definition, and most of us never wrote our own. We took what we were told or learned and adopted this idea of success without ever being told it was a choice at all.
I did not learn what success looked like from a lecture. I learned it from watching my father, a welder, leave early in the morning and come home at night. Each week he received a paycheck, a reward of sorts for the work he did. At the time, this is what I thought success looked like. For many of us, it was.
He was a strong man, but his success was measured every week by how he provided for the family. Food. Housing. Clothing. There was never any talk of being independent. There was no teaching on what it meant to be successful on your own. Success came through someone else. An employer, someone who held the control, and the reward was simply transactional. Time for money.
You may have learned this too. Not by a welder, maybe, but by a profession that taught you what a good nurse sacrifices, by a family that measured success the way most families do, and by whatever you absorbed early about what counts as achievement.
No one sat you down and explained it. You simply learned it, the way I learned it, by watching, listening, and absorbing.
There is a cost of never questioning what you learned. Being rewarded each week by a paycheck, despite the exhaustion. The feeling of powerlessness of not being in control of your life, your time, your ability to do something important for yourself.
Staying exactly where you are today, for the foreseeable future, because the old definition of success is the only one you have ever known.
I sit here today, having built a coaching business from nothing. I have everything I once thought would be enough to settle the question. The education, the experience, the certifications. The infrastructure. What I know now is that none of it answers the question by itself. What does success look like?
The answer came when I stopped asking whether I was successful by the old measure and started asking what success meant on my own terms. What it looks like today under my own independent control.
That old measure is exactly what keeps nurses in impossible situations. If success has always meant staying, enduring, and being rewarded, leaving an impossible job can feel like disloyalty.
Maybe you are sitting at exactly these crossroads. You are an excellent nurse. You perform every day, giving yourself to people in the moments they need you the most. You love nursing. You love what you do. This was never a question. What you can no longer tolerate is the conditions in which you are forced to work.
Short-staffed. An increasingly complex patient load. A schedule that requires a debrief on your day off just so you can get up to speed on what is happening with your family. Calls to work on your day off.
You most likely never signed up for this. I remember learning in nursing school that nursing is a tough job. It has always been a tough job. It will always be a tough job. Maybe so. But what we never learned in nursing school was that it would be an impossible job. Hard work was never the concern. Impossible is.
Strength is not the absence of the old narrative running in the background. Strength is naming what you learned, questioning whether it was ever true for you, and defining success on your own terms anyway.
Success is not a job that disregards your health, your time off, or your contribution. It is making decisions for your career that let you use your education in a way that pays the bills and still gives you peace, knowing you are making a difference. It is being able to manage your time so you can attend your daughter’s recital, and maybe even her softball game.
What it looks like to me:
The freedom to define your day. The freedom to enjoy the work you are doing. The flexibility to pivot when needed. The freedom to control your future, your destiny. Most importantly, knowing that your life is not in the control of someone else.
What does success look like to you?
If you are a nurse who is ready to reclaim a career that has started to consume you, one where you are not in control of your professional future, it is time to talk. I help nurses who carry impossible responsibility recover and rebuild a healthier relationship with their work and themselves. So you can keep caring for others without sacrificing your own health, identity, and ability to enjoy your life outside the hospital.
So you stop operating in survival mode and recognize your own needs, rebuild emotional capacity, and learn how to respond instead of constantly absorbing the weight of every crisis around you.
I help nurses rediscover their passion for nursing and their life again. The shift is moving from “I can handle anything” to “I can care deeply without destroying myself.” You avoid reaching the breaking point after years of pushing through. Gain the ability to stay in a meaningful profession with more energy, boundaries, and longevity instead of having to choose between your calling and your well-being.
If this is a place where you live right now, let’s talk nurse to nurse and discover a way to move you forward to a decision that recognizes your value not only as a nurse, but as a person.
Until next time - stay strong and know you are seen.
Patrick
Resources + links
🎁 Free guide, Transition Out of the Bedside: translating your skills, refining your job search, AI prompts to sharpen your resume for the role you actually want. www.lifenursecoach.com/free-guide
☕ Schedule a Conversation, Nurse to Nurse: thirty minutes, real, honest, no fancy frameworks. Book here
💬 Join the conversation: leave a comment on this post. What is your definition of success?
💬 Visit my website for more information. Lifenursecoach.com
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About The Second Shift
The Second Shift is a newsletter plus podcast for nurses who carry the weight of caring for 12 to 14 hours, then come home to begin a second shift. This is the shift no one sees, one that is equally important. I have lived this story. As a coach, I create space for nurses built on real, honest conversations: a plan that moves you from chaos to a life you feel alive inside of again.
Patrick LaRose, DNP, MSN/Ed., RN, NC-BC Board-Certified Coach | Life Coach lifenursecoach.com
Great read, Patrick. I’ve spent more than 37 years in the workforce, and for most of that time success meant being someone people could count on. You stayed, figured things out, and carried what needed carrying. After a while, endurance starts to feel like part of your character, which may be why questioning the work can feel like questioning who you are.
Your distinction between hard and impossible matters. I don’t think most people are afraid of hard work. They’re afraid that admitting the conditions have become impossible means they’ve somehow become less capable or less loyal.
Leaving doesn’t erase the years you gave or the care you brought to them.
This really speaks to the heart of so many nurses’ experiences…my own included.
Redefining success on our own terms takes courage, especially when we’ve spent years measuring ourselves by someone else’s standards. Loving the profession doesn’t mean we have to accept every working condition. Honoring our own well-being is not a betrayal of our calling.
Thank you for giving nurses permission to imagine a different future.🩷