Take This Challenge

The challenge is to start moving towards realizing your goal to share your expertise and knowledge.  Not just think about it.  Settling on your primary focus area may take time but if you are an expert in a clinical, research, or educational area you can start to outline more than one ways to share your knowledge.  Through written articles, chapters, blogs?  Through conference presentations? Worst case, move forward in outlining what you would address in one talk and/or one paper.   This process even helps to refine areas are of most interest to others and to refine your niche.

Do a deep search for “call for abstracts” for upcoming meetings and review each call carefully to find at least one that fits your area. Don’t focus exclusively on national conferences.  They often rely primarily on known presenters who cover multiple topics.  Remember to target multiple options including state or specialty meetings.  Many state NP organizations sponsor excellent conferences, drawing speakers and attendees for broad geographic areas.  Examples include LA, TX, NY, UT, CA, PA, FL, and others; they occur throughout the year with large attendance.  Study the call for abstracts and polish your abstracts on one or more topic, developing them according to the specific directions of each program.  You start out with objectives and a presentation outline, establish your credentials, and once submitted you can flesh out your outline while waiting for the selection process.

If interested in written article manuscripts, outline your topic and “who cares” to refine your focus.  Well written article manuscripts take more time to develop than conference abstracts.  You can always contact the editor of a journal to determine whether your topic would be of interest to its readers. BTW there is a separate set of monographs on writing for publication on this site.  It discusses strategies for various stages in writing.  I plan to revise and post content on submitting abstracts.

But if you want to spread your knowledge, you must start somewhere.  That is the challenge.