July 2018 President's Message
APNA News: The Psychiatric Nursing Voice | July 2018 Members' Corner Edition
“Be open to the visions of the very young and the memories of the very old”
Linda S. Beeber, PhD, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN
As a relatively new psychiatric-mental health nurse, I had the privilege of learning from a psychiatric-mental health nursing icon: Grayce Sills. I cannot overstate the amount of influence she had on my career and how I think about our profession. One particular piece of wisdom I want to pass down to you from Grayce is the importance of mentorship and leadership development to the success of psychiatric-mental health nursing. In a message Grayce crafted for friend Peggy Chinn’s 1987 calendar, she said that in order to create a viable future we must...”be open to the visions of the very young and the memories of the very old.”
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Grayce Sills |
As for the memories of the experienced, I’m going to return to Grayce Sills. At the APNA Annual Conference, I, along with Pat D’Antonio and Madeline Naegle, will share Grayce’s legacy of leadership and mentorship. We’ll have plenty of “Grayce-isms” and video vignettes to demonstrate how leadership is passed from one generation to the next through key professional mentoring relationships. Isn’t mentorship after all, a mutually beneficial relationship where new vision meets wisdom and experience? This special presentation will provide an important look back at one person who played a key role in shaping the path that brought our profession to where it is today. Columbus, Ohio was her home, so the location of our annual conference in Columbus makes this presentation ever so special! Her pearls of wisdom must not be forgotten. I hope to see you there!
Ultimately to succeed, we need to all heed Grayce’s advice. We need to listen to the young and the old. We need to value both lessons learned and new ways of thinking. It is only through fusing the two that we will create a viable future for psychiatric-mental health nursing.