I have only worked for my new company for three months. They are so cool that they thought I was good enough to train a new nurse. (Totally a God’s favor deal) Every nurse in the company is an excellent professional so I was very flattered that they chose me to train the new nurse.

The first day I trained her was last Friday. I had had a fairly stressful week and knew that the weekend was not going to be much fun because I had to clean my garage so by Friday I wanted some fun.

That is exactly what I told her too. We were going to have fun. Having fun didn’t mean I didn’t train her. I was dogmatic about teaching her the computer system we worked with. I also introduced her to some of my fantastic patients. We kept each other laughing for all of Friday and Monday too. By the end of Monday we were trying to figure out how we could still meet up. Considering she lives on the south of town and I live on the north. It will be a challenge but challenges have never stopped me.

She is a brilliant lady so the training wasn’t hard but I could tell if I didn’t lighten it up a bit she may tense up. I know when I am tense that is when I start making mistakes and I sure can’t learn anything.

As I continued to train and pray about this new responsibility I realized that having fun was the main objective of my training. This girl was straight out of nursing college and had never done home health. If I didn’t make it fun for her she may have jumped ship and gone back into hospital nursing. I didn’t want that to happen because I could see so many good qualities in her that I knew she would far surpass me in excellence.

I remembered how boring the training was at corporate so when I was released from jury duty I swung by corporate and asked her if she wanted to go for lunch. She did. Training her was one of the funnest things I have done in my entire career.

The coolest aspect of using fun in your training is that even if the trainee doesn’t catch on as good as mine did you still have a chance to make a good friend.