Daring to be a leader in nursing –Experience from the Upsilon Nu Chapter

Por Jaime Ramírez, Cindy Valbuena, Paola Blanco

This year our chapter promoted a project in response to Sigma's presidential call: "Be BOLD" With hard and constant work, the "Seed of Leadership" program was planned and materialized, focused on promoting leadership in nurses of the Upsilon Nu Chapter Aware of the need to prepare leaders who can face different, current and future, challenges of our discipline, we dared to create a dynamic, flexible and open space that would put our members' potential leadership abilities to the test.

In this occasion, 15 members took on the challenge of being the next leaders in nursing in Colombia and the world From the diversity of gender, age, culture and nursing role, exchanges of experiences were carried out, managing to build and strengthen the necessary skills and attitudes to dare to promote changes that highlight our profession and discipline From the analysis of real and current nursing problems, the innovation and creativity of our participants were stimulated, focusing on the development of inherent competencies such as problem solving and the assertive orientation of work teams

Discussion spaces were opened where the theoretical-conceptual bases of nursing were resumed to solve problems associated with the recognition, dignity and exaltation of our discipline. All the above was possible thanks to the support of the Board of Directors and the Members of the Upsilon Nu Chapter, as well as the Colombian Nursing Student Association, who have been strategic allies in many of our projects.

It is important to highlight that to start with this program we wanted to sensitize each of our participants about the love for nursing, thus awakening a sense of belonging that would give new meaning to the sense of being a nurse, and thereby lay solid foundations of leadership and disciplinary and social projection. Once this phase was completed, conceptual constructions and reflections were made about what leadership is and what it is not, contextualizing it to each participant's own experiences.

Little by little, our leadership seeds were taking shape, assuming more and more challenges, knowing each one himself, recognizing his strengths and weaknesses, thus allowing the