Star-struck!

As I sit in the airport preparing to leave Indianapolis and the 2012 Leadership Forum, hosted by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International, I am still in awe that I got a chance to meet her! She may not be a Hollywood star, a world-famous singer or another type of pop celebrity, but Loretta Sweet Jemmott, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a celebrity in my eyes.

You see, as a doctoral student, I have become very familiar with certain nurse researchers and their literary works. When you see the same names over and over again, the authors begin to become your nursing idols. They are the nurses you look up to, the researchers whose work you want to mimic, the change agents who have created the paths you want to follow.

In the same way that music fans admire Beyonce or Carrie Underwood or Michael Jackson, PhD students admire nurse researchers and, once inspired by their work, we want to know as much as we can about who they are. We Google their names, read their faculty Web pages and may even be bold enough to e-mail them with a question or comment concerning one of their publications. Once I discovered that Professor Jemmott had worked on research and published with my faculty adviser, I was over the moon! While I may not have known her personally, knowing that she worked with my adviser made me feel that much closer to the possibility of meeting her.

Imagine my surprise when I opened my Leadership Summit program booklet only to find that Jemmott was the keynote speaker at one of the Leadership Forum luncheons. Ahhhhh!!! I could have screamed, but I just smiled widely, instead. I've never been extremely impressed by celebrities, but I thought "This is how people must feel about Beyonce!" Throughout my first two days at the conference, I eagerly awaited the opportunity to meet Professor Jemmott.

Then it happened, President Prevost introduced Jemmott to the forum audience and my thumbs went into overdrive tweeting bits and pieces of her address:

• @tmontgomeryrn: "If it's gonna be ..., it's up to me!" ~ Loretta Sweet Jemmott #STTI
• @tmontgomeryrn: "When you feel like a failure, you don't quit. ... You go back to school." ~ Loretta Sweet Jemmott #STTI
• @tmontgomeryrn: "Do not take for granted that things will happen because you're here. ... Things happen because you make them happen." ~ Loretta Sweet Jemmott

Once Jemmott finished speaking, we were given the opportunity to meet her. Of course, I made a beeline straight to her table. I couldn't believe how nervous I was about meeting her. I stumbled over my words a little. "Good afternoon, Dr. Jemmott. My name is Tiffany Montgomery, and I'm a second-year student at UCLA. My advisor is Dr. Deborah Koniak-Griffin. I am really interested in your work. I e-mailed you once, but." She stopped me while I was speaking and told me to call her. I could have died and gone to heaven. ME call YOU? Really? I was so nervous in recording her number that my hand was shaking. My writing looked like complete chicken-scratch.

Yours Truly and Dr. Jemmott

I felt as if I'd just met the president of the United States. The woman who, in my mind, is equal in status to President Obama had just given me permission to call her to discuss her research. Were it possible, spontaneous combustion would have ignited my body and I would have burst into a million little pieces.

As I sit in this airport, shivering from the cold air conditioning, the world of nursing has become a little smaller. The likelihood of meeting world-renowned nurse researchers has become a little more real. I have no desire to meet bigwig movie stars or entertainment celebrities, but the thought of meeting more nursing research celebrities is very exciting. These nurse celebrities will someday be my colleagues. Wow!

To some, it may seem a little strange that I have become starstruck over a nurse. Honestly, I think it's a little strange, as well. Children are not taught to idolize their favorite authors or scientists or scholars, but I have a childlike fascination with the nurse researchers whose work I discuss in the papers I write. These are the people I want to be like. They are the role models whose careers I am trying to mirror. They are the names who take my breath away when I see they will be speaking at a conference I am attending. Maybe it's a little nerdy; maybe I'm a geek. Or maybe I'm just a young woman who is well on her way to being a great nurse scholar in her own right. My money is on the latter.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. 

Life happens!

When I first began writing this blog, I thought I could easily write an entry each week. This overzealous thinking was that of a young woman with too much time on her hands. Yes, I was working a full-time job. Yes, I was involved in leadership positions in various nursing organizations. Yes, I traveled whenever and wherever possible. But I still had lots of time to do other things, and I didn’t see how writing 500-1,000 words per week would weigh me down.

Enter my first year as a PhD student. If you haven’t noticed yet, this is my first blog entry since April. When I began writing this blog, I had no intentions of ever taking that much time off from writing, but life happened.

One of the biggest mistakes I have made on my leadership journey is packing my schedule too tightly. I used to think that if I was sitting around doing nothing, I was wasting my time. I felt as though I needed to be doing something “productive” every minute of every day. I never took into consideration the fact that unforeseen circumstances present themselves at the most inopportune times. I never thought about the possibility of having to cancel prescheduled activities because of a situation that had to be dealt with immediately, or worse, doing those prescheduled things halfheartedly because my mind needed and wanted to be elsewhere.

In the months between my last blog entry and this one, I have learned to lighten the schedule a bit and leave room for those surprise emergencies that inevitably pop up. Sick parents or children, relationship issues, personal illnesses, loss of loved ones, financial crunches—all these things happen, and there is no way to plan for them. It is now clear to me that a good leader will allow his or her schedule to be flexible enough to handle these things, in addition to commitments already made. While we can never predict life’s unfortunate circumstances, we can be better prepared to handle them without fear of dropping the ball in every other area of our lives.

“Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” Good advice! Whether our schedules are jampacked or wide open, it is always best to complete the tasks at hand as soon as possible. When the storms of life come raging at us, we may not have the time, energy or resources to complete the most simple of tasks. We may need to direct all of our attention to the storm and brace ourselves until it passes. Leaving time for unanticipated life events can make those trying times a little less stressful.

If my time away from this blog has taught me nothing else, it has taught me to leave room for the unexpected so that, when it arrives, I will not be in complete disarray. Maybe what I have learned from my misstep will prevent you from making the same mistake when planning your schedule.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published for the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.