Do It Scared, Then Change Your Mind

For most of my career, I believed you had to be ready before you moved.

Ready meant prepared. It meant certain. It meant having every detail planned, every risk accounted for, and every question answered before taking a step. I'm a nurse, after all. We are trained to double-check, to anticipate, to leave nothing to chance. That instinct has saved lives at the bedside. Off the clock, it nearly kept me standing still.

The best career advice I ever received was three words long: “Do it scared.”

It took me years to understand that it only tells half the story. The other half I had to learn on my own: once you do it scared, give yourself permission to change your mind.

Climbing One Rung at a Time

I started in 2007 as an EMT, riding in the back of an ambulance and writing my first patient care reports. I didn't have a grand plan. I had a sense that I wanted to understand more, so I kept going. I became an LPN in 2009, an RN in 2011, and a nurse practitioner in 2016.

None of it happened in a straight line, and none of it happened in ideal conditions. I earned those credentials one at a time, often while working and raising a family. [Optional: one real moment from those years, such as studying after the kids were asleep or a shift you still remember.] Each step felt like the one I couldn't possibly take yet, and each time I took it anyway.

Over the years, I worked in critical care, hospital medicine, long-term care, and long-term acute care. Every setting taught me something different about how patients' stories get told and how easily they get lost.

The Leap I Waited Too Long to Take

In 2023, I earned my second board certification in psychiatric-mental health, and I opened my own integrative mental health virtual practice, Thoughtful Therapies.

I had wanted to build something of my own for a long time. But I waited. I told myself I needed one more piece in place, one more system perfected, one more reason to feel sure. When I finally did it, I was scared.

Here's what surprised me: almost everything I had spent so long perfecting, I changed within the first year. The plan I was so attached to turned out to be a starting point, not a blueprint. The waiting hadn't made me more ready. Only doing it did.

Around that time, I also wrote and published a book, Restoring Calm. That was another thing I could have waited forever to feel ready for.

When the Brave Choice Is to Stop

Then came the part of the story I didn't plan for.

I stepped back from my practice to focus on my own health. As nurses, we are very good at caring for everyone else and very bad at admitting when we need care ourselves. Stepping back felt like failure at first. I had built this practice with my own hands. Walking away from it, even temporarily, went against everything in me.

But time away gave me something I hadn't had in years: space to ask what I actually wanted my next chapter to be. And the honest answer surprised me. I didn't want to go back.

That was the hardest version of “do it scared” I've ever faced. Starting something takes courage. Closing something you built, on purpose, takes a different kind. There's a voice that says you're quitting, that you're wasting everything you put in. I had to learn that changing my mind wasn't undoing my work. It was using it.

Nothing Was Wasted

When I looked back at my path, I realized every rung had been teaching me the same skill: reading a patient's story. In the ambulance, I wrote it in a few lines. In the ICU, I tracked it hour by hour. In psychiatry, I listened for what patients couldn't say outright. I had spent nearly two decades writing the medical record from every angle.

So I built my next chapter around that. Today, I run TRACE Legal Nurse Consulting, where I review medical records for attorneys and help them understand what the chart shows and what it leaves out. It's the first work I've done that draws on every single step that came before it. None of it would exist if I had stayed in the plan I made in 2023.

What I'd Tell You

If you're waiting until you feel ready, here's what I learned the hard way: you probably won't. Ready usually shows up after you start, not before.

So do it scared. Take the step while your hands are still shaking.

And then, just as important, give yourself permission to change your mind. Pivoting isn't proof you chose wrong. Stepping back isn't failure. Taking care of yourself isn't quitting. Learning as you go is the process, not a detour from it.

My career has been one long series of brave starts and honest course corrections. I wouldn't trade any of them, including the ones that scared me most.