Expanding Your Creativity with Rachel Dick
Meet Rachel
After a discriminatory incident at work showed Rachel how the system thought of her and her fellow nurses, registered nurse Rachel Dick decided she needed to be in a place where she didn’t have to answer to anyone but herself. That led her on a journey to become a certified holistic nurse coach, working with nurses to unlock their own potential. Rachel coaches nurses and runs workshops, helping them to unlock their own creativity and find their own voices. She also works to help them process trauma through writing.
In this conversation, Rachel and Beth talk about her journey, her coaching, the political discrimination that led her to make the change in her life, and more. Tune in!
About Rachel
Rachel is a registered nurse and certified holistic nurse coach. Her passion lies in helping individuals unlock their creative potential. Along with Tilda Shalof, nurse and bestselling author, she has founded The Nurse’s Way, an interactive workshop geared to helping nurses find their voice and master the art of storytelling.
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Intro/Outro:
Welcome to Don't Eat Your Young, a nursing podcast with your host, Beth Quass. Before we get started, we have a few quick notes. Don't Eat Your Young Is a listener supported podcast. To learn more about becoming a member and the perks available to you for becoming a patron yourself, visit patreon.com/donteatyouryoung. You can learn more about the show, share your story to join Beth as a guest, or connect with our wonderful community in our Facebook group. You can find all those links and more at donteatyouryoung.com. And now on with the show.
Beth Quaas:
Hello everyone and welcome to Don't Eat Your Young. I'm your host Beth Quass. Today we have Rachel Dick on the show. She's a nurse that grew up in Canada, she's now based in California, and she's going to talk to us today about her coaching that she does for storytelling for nurses, which I think is an amazing opportunity for those that want to write a little bit to learn from her. So, hi Rachel. Thanks for being on the show.
Rachel Dick:
Thank you so much for having me, Beth. I'm so excited to be here.
Beth Quaas:
Great. Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Rachel Dick:
I've been a registered nurse for about 10 years, I'd say about a couple years ago, I changed the direction of my career. So I've been an orthopedic nurse for most of my career, working bedside day shift, night shift. And a couple years ago I changed the direction of my career and I decided to go in a more holistic direction. I became certified as a holistic nurse coach and I started my own business, my own coaching practice. And my focus in my coaching practice is on nurses who want to expand their creativity. So I have launched this workshop together with Tilda Scheloff, who I'll probably talk a little bit more about her in this interview. She's from Toronto, she's also a nurse, she's an author. She's written several books and we've collaborated and created this workshop to help nurses become more creative.
It's the super dynamic, interactive workshop. We have writing prompts, we have journaling, we have all sorts of interactive activities to help nurses really expand and become more creative. And also we help nurses process trauma through writing. So that's another piece of the workshop. So this has been the endeavor that I've been on for the last eight months or so. Really exciting, I've had to face a lot of my fears. I've had to really push myself, learn about communication, leadership, all sorts of things. But overall, it's been an adventure and I'm really, really excited to be on this path.
Beth Quaas:
Oh, I'm excited to hear more about it. So can you tell me, was there something that pushed you away from the nursing that you were doing and made you want to start this and did you know this is what you wanted to do?
Rachel Dick:
So there are a lot of stories that led to the development of this workshop. I'm going to start with this story that woke me up and made me realize I needed to step away from bedside and step away from being an employee. So I'm going to start there. This story starts in January, of 2021. In January I lived in the Bay Area at the time in California, and on January 6th there was a rally in Sacramento and there were rallies all across the country at several different capital buildings. This was an election integrity, it was related to the election, the rally. But I really wanted to go to the rally because my intention was to speak with a reporter. I was very passionate about the COVID-19 shutdowns at the time. As a nurse, I really felt like these shutdowns were impacting children, impacting the elderly, affecting all sorts of different populations. And I felt very strongly that the shutdowns were harming people and also just ideologically I felt opposed to them, I felt like they were wrong.
So I knew that this rally would be a really good place to speak to a reporter. So I put on my scrubs, jumped in my car. Sacramento was about a two hour drive from where I lived, and I brought a big American flag. I went to Capitol Hill in Sacramento and I found a reporter basically right away. He was a reporter from NPR. He had a local radio station up in Sacramento and he saw me in my scrubs and asked me what I was doing there. And I had a really nice conversation with this reporter. I told him my opinion about the shutdowns. I told him how passionate I am about freedom and how people should have the freedom to choose how they want to approach COVID and how the shutdown was impacting our hospital, our population, the patients that we were seeing.
We were seeing a lot of patients, elderly patients, neglect hip fractures. We were seeing delayed cancer diagnoses. People were struggling with alcohol, drug abuse, all sorts of things that were side effects of the shutdown that were not really, I felt being addressed in the news. We had this great conversation. I really felt like he listened to me, he gave me a voice. And then about three, four days later, I was at home. I remember I was cooking in my kitchen and I get a phone call from work and I was confused because I knew I wasn't planning to go into work for a few days. I had not posted any pictures from the rally. I had barely told anyone that I went other than my close friends and family. And I pick up the phone and it's employee health from a hospital.
And the woman on the other side of the line said, Hi, Rachel, I'm calling from employee health and I just wanted to let you know that you were cited on social media without a mask and therefore you are suspended from work without pay. You cannot come to work until you receive a COVID swab. So as you can imagine, my heart sank, I had an immediate physical response in my body. I felt totally violated. I didn't even know what picture she was referring to. I hadn't even seen what this reporter had published. I was really, really shocked. And I said as much, I told the woman on the other end of the line that I felt that this was a violation of my rights. It was inappropriate for them to be calling me on my day off.
I knew the rules of the hospital. I've been the unit rep at that hospital for years, and I said, COVID swabs are actually against hospital policy, forced COVID swabs. That policy eventually changed, but at that moment in time, the hospital had an explicit policy that there were no forced vaccines, no forced COVID swabs. And I said this to the woman on the phone. And then I immediately hung up the phone. I called my union president, I told her what was going on, and I feel very fortunate because she, a hundred percent supported me. The first thing she said to me was, Rachel, I want you to know that you did not do anything wrong. You spoke up, you shared your voice. You have every right to do that. This is America, we have freedom of speech. And she said, I'm a Catholic. I know what it's like to come to work and have to hide my beliefs from other people.
So I felt validated, I felt supported, I felt really fortunate that the president of my union had my back in that way. And she said she was going to support me. She was going to find out what the picture that they were talking about. Anyway, she tracked it down. It was a picture that the reporter had posted of me on Twitter in my scrubs holding an American flag, basically not near another human being. And the quote that he put was something along the lines of Rachel's a Bay Area nurse, and she believes that the shutdowns are wrong and freedom wins. Something along those lines. And then there were comments under his post, strangers who crawled out of the woodwork, tagged my hospital on Twitter, called their HR department, called me a sorry excuse for a nurse, said all these horrible things about me. And seeing that picture just really, really rattled me.
I knew in my heart that I had not done anything wrong, but sometimes when you see these nasty comments, we call this being doxed. I had essentially been doxed. I had been exposed. I felt just so vulnerable and violated, and it really, really shook me to my core. I ended up taking the COVID swab. I ended up sitting in HR meetings, fighting for my job. One of the things that I said in the HR meeting was, it's interesting because my coworkers went to rallies all summer, there was a lot of BLM rallies that summer, which... And I said, I totally support my coworkers expressing themselves and saying what they need to say, but they all posted pictures on social media. I saw those pictures and they were not wearing masks, and not one of them was asked to take a COVID swab. And here you're telling me that I need to take a COVID swab and this is just blatant political discrimination.
You're picking on me because of my beliefs. You're picking on me because of what I said. This has nothing to do with the safety of the patients and this has nothing to do with COVID. And the room felt silent. And the meeting quickly fizzled out, wrapped up. They told me, oh yeah, you're still in trouble. But then it fizzled out. I never really heard about the incident again. And I was able to hold onto my job. I actually continued to work at that hospital for another year and a half, almost two years after that incident. I loved my job. I was very dedicated to my job. I've always been very active in my hospital, taken on all sorts of responsibilities, and I really, really enjoyed my job. It was a wonderful job. But that incident, being treated like that by my managers, by the director, by the HR department, it just shook me awake. And it made me realize, I think I need to find a job where I only have to answer to myself, where I don't need to run my opinions by anyone before expressing myself.
And this was really the beginning of my journey towards self-employment and independence and freedom. So that's one of the stories that led to the creation of this workshop.
Beth Quaas:
And you have to wonder if, because someone brought it to them, and people react when they think that they might get a poor satisfaction score. And so whoever was sending these things in and saying that you were a terrible person and nurse, probably has no idea what you were even asking for. And you were probably advocating for them or someone they know or love. So that's unfortunate. Then you talked to someone that had a similar thing, but a different role in your hospital and they had a different outcome as well.
Rachel Dick:
Shortly after this happened, I approached a doctor that I work with that I really trusted, and I knew his beliefs. I knew he wouldn't judge me. I knew he wouldn't ostracize me for this. So he's a urologist and he does a lot of penile prosthesis. And when I told him this story, he laughed and he pulled out a picture of him on Instagram wearing a scrub cap that it looked like it said, make America great again. But if you actually looked at the scrub cap closely, it said, make America hard again, which was just funny because he helps men with erectile dysfunction. So he showed me this picture and I laughed. I thought it was hilarious. And then he told me, the hospital told me that I need to take this picture off of Instagram. And then he said, no, I don't work for you. I'm a contractor. I'm leaving the picture up.
And that also struck me as, wow, doctors have a different level of confidence and independence. And it didn't even cross his mind to listen. I think he understood how valuable he was, he understood how powerful he was, and he basically said no to the hospital and they dropped it. And that gave me a boost of confidence. But it also highlighted for me the difference between physicians and nurses and our roles and the way we see ourselves. And nurses, I think traditionally, I know this is the masculine feminine archetype. Nurses see ourselves as employees. We see ourselves as rule followers. We like to follow protocols, we like to do what we're told, whereas physicians don't feel that way. And this same topic has come up in my writing workshop because Tilda has said this to me several times, the one that I run the workshop with, she said, many, many doctors write books. There's no shortage of books out there by physicians. Nurses rarely write books.
Nurses feel like they need to protect their patient's privacy. Nurses feel like scared to share their voice. They feel scared to stand up and tell their story. But what does that say about us? What does that say about us that we're sitting on this gold mine of beautiful stories? We're with people in the most vulnerable moments of their lives, birth, death, transition, illness, and we're witness to these things and we're scared to share those stories because we're so scared of HIPAA violations or getting in trouble with HR at our job. And at the end of the day, nurses are practitioners, we're independent thinkers, we are skilled workers, we're very educated, we're thoughtful, we have amazing communication skills. But I do think we need a shift in our culture where we step up and see ourselves as leaders. We see ourselves as owners of our own story.
Those stories belong to us, those things that we see with our patients, of course, and we talk a lot about this in the workshop. We do need to protect people's privacy. And that's very important, but it's not that hard to do, you change a few details and it's hard to identify who you're talking about. But those stories are ours to share. And it's really just my passion and my dream to inspire nurses to step up, to share their stories, to show the world what we do inside our jobs, those nitty gritty details. What are we doing in our job? And to really shift the culture. Nurses have been maybe too passive, and maybe we need to take more of an active role in order to change healthcare and to change the world.
Beth Quaas:
I am so glad you used the term shift because I think people like you are shifting the way nurses are thinking and the confidence level that they have because you are showing them you can leave a job you don't like, and you can figure out a way to make it work, and you can speak your mind. So I applaud you for what you've done and that you're continuing to help other nurses have their voice and tell their story. I do mine over the podcast, and you're doing yours in writing, which I think is amazing. So when you offer a workshop, how does that look?
Rachel Dick:
So first of all, thank you. I appreciate those comments. I'm really, I'm hoping to see a shift in healthcare and shift in the mindset of nurses. So the workshop, the way the workshop works is, so I like that you mentioned that you're sharing your story through a podcast because the workshop is not explicitly for nurses who want to write. A lot of the nurses who join our workshop do want to write a book, but not all. It's a general workshop to help people with creativity. So some of the nurses in our workshop do want to launch podcasts. Some of them are starting businesses, so they're trying to get better at marketing themselves, and they just generally want to be more creative, or they're just curious, how can journaling change my life? How can I be more creative, expressive, articulate, in my job, in my life, in my relationships?
So the workshop is based on the book The Artist's Way, and this is a beautiful book that's written by Julia Cameron called The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Hire Creativity. And there are basically spiritual principles in this book that teach individuals how to be more creative. The book has 12 chapters. Each chapter explores a different theme. And so the workshop is, it's essentially, it's 12 sessions. And each session we explore one of those themes. So we're exploring one of the themes. Another component of the workshop is what Julia Cameron talks about in the book, which is called the Morning Pages. So there's an expectation that everybody in the workshop is doing their morning pages. Morning pages is essentially just stream of consciousness journaling that's done every single day. When you set up this practice, when you incorporate stream of consciousness journaling into your daily life, you start to notice huge, huge shifts. You start to understand yourself better. You become more familiar with your internal dialogue. You have an instant boost in creativity and confidence, and all sorts of shifts start to happen when you're doing this kind of journaling.
So in the workshop, we discuss the theme, we discuss the morning pages, we discuss what's been coming up for people with their morning pages. And it's really, really cool because often people will come to the group and everyone's experiencing a similar thing. It's almost like we're on this shared journey. So somebody might come one week and be talking about, I'm really, I've been experiencing this self-sabotage and I noticed that I'm not able to sit and do my morning pages, or I'm getting distracted really easily, and then someone else will be experiencing something similar. And so it's really, really cool. We explore the theme, we talk about the morning pages, and then the final component of each session is we do a writing prompt. So everyone writes for about 15, 20 minutes, and then at the end of that, everyone has a chance, nobody scores, but everybody has a chance if they feel comfortable, and most people do, to share their writing.
And the act of writing and sharing what you've written to a group is extremely powerful. Just have people witness your innermost thoughts. It's an extremely, extremely powerful and valuable exercise. So that's the basic setup of the workshop.
Beth Quaas:
And so within that, for someone that does want to write a book or publish, do you help them with that as well?
Rachel Dick:
Yes. The way I think of it is anyone who wants to tackle a creative project, be it a book or a podcast, I like to break it down into phase one and phase two. So phase one is where you are muddling through those thoughts that live in your head. You're turning inwards, you're discovering what memoir do I want to write? You're organizing your thoughts. You're getting to know yourself better and often working through trauma or difficult things that you've come across in your life. So that's phase one. A lot of that happens on the morning pages. And then phase two is when you're ready to share. And obviously these two phases can overlap, but phase two is when you're ready to share, you're ready to edit, you're ready to publish, you're ready to make chapters of your book, you're ready to get it out there.
At the moment, our workshop focuses a lot more heavily on phase one, but because we have Tilda who's helping us, who runs this workshop with me, I think of myself more as the expert in phase one, and I think of Tilda as the expert in phase two. Again, obviously there's overlap, but Tilda has written six books. One of them was the bestseller. She's written about her nursing stories. She's had to move through those blocks. She's had to navigate the publishing industry. And she's just this incredible, phenomenal resource, and we're so lucky to have her as part of the workshop. So yeah, definitely a lot of the nurses will eventually move more into that phase two, but the workshop for the time being focuses a lot more heavily on that phase one.
And I do envision as we do more iterations of this workshop, so we're about to enter season three, next summer we'll enter season four. So I imagine as we do more iterations of this workshop, the nurses will be more and more prepared to be moving into phase two and start to share their stories and write those books and publish articles and do all those exciting things. So we don't want to rush the process essentially.
Beth Quaas:
That's fantastic. And you know what I find is amazing? Someone tried to stifle your story and you said, no, not today. And now you're helping others do the same, which I think is incredible. And nurses need that. They need to be able to share their stories. You've already said it, we have a lot to share.
Rachel Dick:
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Yeah, that incident that happened to me was the biggest blessing in disguise. When I was experiencing it, it was so harrowing, it was so terrifying. I felt so exposed. I had dreams for months after that incident of running down the halls at work naked, and just being exposed and vulnerable. And I would have this recurring dream. But in retrospect, it's what blew me open. It's what changed my life. It's what shifted my perspective, and it was a hundred percent a blessing in disguise. So yeah. Yeah, it's really, really cool.
Beth Quaas:
Do you think you were treated differently after that too, at work? Either positively or negatively?
Rachel Dick:
Yeah. So interestingly enough, the incident I think was mostly kept under wraps. So I think there was really only a handful of people that really understood what had happened. I shared it with a select few coworkers, but most people didn't even know what happened, and I just quit my job about a month ago, and that's when I first shared this story publicly, and I had so many people reach out to me from work, Rachel, I had no idea that this happened to you, and very supportive. I'm sure there's people that weren't supportive, but none of them said anything. And I even had some people, which was cool from management, middle management, friends of mine up there in those roles who reached out to me and were, thank you, Rachel, for sticking to your guns and standing up, because they understand the politics of a big healthcare corporation, they understand the workplace politics and all of that. So I mostly have had overwhelming support once I went public with this story, which is really cool.
Beth Quaas:
That's fantastic. So where can people find you if they're interested in signing on to learn more about you?
Rachel Dick:
My website is still a work in progress. I do have a personal website, but it doesn't have anything about the workshop just yet. And that's racheldickcoaching.com. And then really the best place to get information about the workshop to reach out to me, to contact me is on Facebook. And I'm on Facebook as Rachel Dick Plonka, P-L-O-N-K-A. I also have a Facebook group called Nurses Who Write, and I have a lot of resources in there about writing and being more expressive and creative, and that's really the best, really my personal Facebook wall is the best place right now to get information about the workshop.
Beth Quaas:
Fantastic. And we'll have all of that in our show notes as well. So Rachel, what would you like to share with nurses? What tips or inspiration? And you're very inspiring anyway, but what else would you like to share?
Rachel Dick:
I think this is the age of nurses. I think we're coming onto the dawn of a new era, and my message to nurses is to own our power. There are, if I'm not mistaken, three million, four million of us in this country. We like to, and I know I do this all the time, we like to gripe about the system and how broken it is. And I do my fair share of that, very much warranted. But at the same time, if you really think about it, nurses we constitute the biggest segment of healthcare, and therefore we're the ones holding up this broken system on our backs. And the system is just going to keep chugging along the way it is, as long as we keep showing up in the same way. And until we walk away and until we shift things and until we take leadership roles and speak up and find our voice and say, wait a second, is this system, this beast that we've created, is it really serving our patients? Is this really what we went into healthcare to do?
I think a lot of us, if we really did the soul searching, I think the answer would be no. I feel really fortunate that I had a kick in the pants. I had an incident that woke me up and shifted things for me and caused me to walk away. And I have to say it was not easy. It was definitely not the easy path, but so worthwhile. I wake up every day now and I'm like, I can really say whatever I want. I'm not answerable to anyone. And so I guess my advice to nurses is to own our power, to do the scary things and to know our worth. We are worth so much. Nursing is the most trusted profession. People really respect nurses and nursing is the holistic profession at its core and becomes swallowed up into the medical model, this model of treating everything, a pill for every ill, charting everything, just really getting lost in the protocols and the details in... We've lost the flavor of nursing.
I like to turn all the way back to Florence Nightingale, the mother of modern nursing. What was so revolutionary about her, what was so incredible about her was her holistic approach. She said, it's not enough to just give our patients medicine. And, of course, that's part of healing, that's a piece of it. But she said, do patients have clean sheets, clean air, clean water? She was a pioneer in germ theory. She really looked at the whole person. She talked about spirituality and relationships and balance. And that is the heart of nursing. That's why most of us go into nursing. We really truly want to help people. But here we are in this system that unfortunately it's malfunctioned. There's too many bugs in the system. There's too many perverse incentives, there's too many things that are just causing us to be inside of a system that is not serving the patient.
And we need to shift things. It's not going to be easy. It's definitely scary, but it has to happen. And nurses need to be at the forefront of that shift. So do scary things. Challenge yourself. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Take on leadership before you feel like you're ready. And also know that we have an incredible, incredible network. Nurses really have each other's back, and that's super, super inspiring. And just tap into that. So yeah, wordy and lengthy, but that's my overarching message.
Beth Quaas:
No, I think that's fabulous. And I know that you will continue to get more and more nurses into telling their story and becoming more creative. And this podcast may help somebody say, I don't want that anymore either. And they come and seek you out and start to tell their own story. So I thank you so much. It was great to talk to you today. And for anyone listening, if you want more information, please reach out to Rachel.
Rachel Dick:
Thank you so much for having me, Beth. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
Intro/Outro:
Don't Eat Your Young was produced in partnership with TruStory FM. Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by the Light Hearts. Find the show, show notes and transcripts at donteatyouryoung.com. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show. But the best thing you could do to support the show is to share it with a friend or colleague. Thank you for listening.
