With an eye to creative evolution in nursing education, research and clinical settings, Veda L. Andrus and Marie M. Shanahan discuss how emerging nurse leaders can be agents of change beyond the confines of traditional practice and curricula through innovation and collaboration. Andrus’s focus in nursing care revolves around the importance of making connections and building relationships. She have never lost her passion or commitment to her work in nursing and see it as an avenue to influence the healing and transformation of the nursing profession, the health care system, and our world. Shanahan’s move to hemodialysis, with its life-extending focus, seemed like a way to build the types of relationships she was missing in the fast-paced, often tragic environment of critical care. One of her ongoing professional passions is promoting self-care and renewal in nursing practice.

The author, Barbara Montgomery Dossey, explores a series of events that have shaped her professional and personal life endeavors. Dossey became interested in the emerging field of holistic health and became aware of setting new personal health goals, meditating, learning self-regulations strategies, and eating healthier. To Dossey, a holistic ethic is the moral fiber of nursing. From the beginning of her career, she has been aware of a professional nursing code of ethics, which she has integrated with her personal ethical code. During her doctoral studies, she began the development of her Theory of Integral Nursing (TIN). TIN is a grand theory that guides the art and science of integral nursing practice, education, research, and health care policy. This theory recognizes the philosophical foundation and legacy of Florence Nightingale, healing and healing research, the metaparadigm of nursing, the six patterns of knowing, integral theory, and nonnursing theories.

The author, Jean Watson, began to recognize that people could never know the subjective inner life world of others, but can be open to connecting human-to-human with others, realizing that one person’s level of humanity reflects on us all. Her journey as an ‘identified leader’ in nursing has taken her, and continues to take her, into the heart of nursing the soul of nursing, the sacred dimensions of nursing to be more specific. In summary, her so-called leadership has evolved from within, leading by following her inner passion, heart-centered vision, and ethical ideals of acknowledging and honoring that nurses hold a moral covenant with humanity to sustain human caring, health, and wholeness with dignity and informed moral compassion. The human sacred dimension of nursing is the bedrock and the moral motivation, which sets the value’s frame and serves as the moral map, vision, guide, and prophetic mentor into our future.

The author, Marlaine C. Smith, shares her experiences as a nurse. Her first positions were in a large 40-bed medical surgical unit at a teaching hospital, a long-term care facility, and floating to a variety of units in a rural community hospital. Smith realized that our health care systems are focused on treating disease rather than promoting health. She believes that nurses, as the healing environment for persons served, must attend to their own spiritual development. There are four future dimensions that she commented on: advancing caring knowledge within the discipline of nursing; creating structures that nurture nursing praxis; preparing the next generation of nurse scholars and leaders; and transforming environments toward peace and social justice. Nursing is the study of human health and healing through caring. Interprofessional teams honor the expertise of the nurse in human caring, holistic health, and promoting well-being.

The author’s, W. Richard Cowling III, current work is focused on developing a conceptual model of unitary appreciative nursing (UAN). He’s also proud of the work he have done using unitary appreciative inquiry (UAI) in his own research related to despair and adult survivorship of childhood abuse. As a clinical specialist in psychiatric mental health nursing, Cowling was intrigued by the predominance of depression in the vast majority of clients. Nurses have made incredible contributions to the health and well-being of humankind. The bold future of nursing he subscribes to requires many paths that support nourishing and inspiring the human spirit, appreciating the wholeness of human life, promoting healing through freedom and self-determination, and seeking novel ways of caring that expand the infinite potentials of human beings.

The author, Daniel J. Pesut, became a nurse because of his commitment to service and caring. During the course of his professional career, he have been interested in how the creative process supports personal and professional development, enhances reasoning, and provides a foundation for future thinking. Pesut believes he is best known for his work in clinical reasoning and nursing education, graduate education in psychiatric mental health nursing, futures thinking, and leadership development in nursing. He began to study the works of Dr. Frederick Hudson, who devoted his life to the study of self-renewal in human growth and development. In order to create the future through reflection, transformation, and renewal, each nurse must take responsibility for doing the inner work required to evolve his or her own consciousness, activate character strengths and virtues, confront personal shadows, heal old wounds, and become self-authoring and self-transforming.

In guiding the development of this chapter, the author, Marcia Hills, has continually focused on the concepts of collaboration and emancipation. Her caring science journey during which she would learn about collaboration, emancipation, and leading from beside began in the spring of 1989. Hills suggest that caring is not only the philosophical and theoretical foundation of nursing but also its moral and ethical foundation. Her intention with the first textbook, The Caritas Practitioner as a Health and Healing Coach, is to integrate her experiences in caring science, counseling psychology, relationship and family counselling, health promotion, group facilitation, and pedagogy to culminate in a framework for coaching clients from a caring science health promotion perspective. Her hope is that this will extend the caring science agenda, develop capacity in dealing with power issues, and integrate a health promotion perspective into caring science.

The author, Deva-Marie Beck, has been in clinical practice for nearly 20 years and could have been satisfied with the work she had achieved, as well as the new studies she had advanced and taught. She independently studied numerous biomedical journals about endorphin research. Through this and her growing confidence to share what she had learned, she began to teach other nurses through workshops focused on holistic health. Beck also pondered the possibility that Florence Nightingale’s legacy could well inspire the nurses of our new century to become global citizens themselves, collaborating together to advocate for global issues related to health beyond the limits of their hospital culture. Across her nursing career, her own artistic lens provided her with that ’something more’, even before she realized it. The science of nursing that she learned to safely apply to her patients is, indeed, both important and vital.

This chapter reflects the experience of nurses and the dilemmas they go through in developing countries. These countries are vital to the global health care scenario, and nurses are the key health care personnel, the largest sector of direct caregivers, who can move the agenda of health and health promotion to the doorstep of the community. Ethical considerations are the core of any patient care activity and should always be given preference in clinical decision making. The chapter emphasizes factors affecting nurses and their various roles and possibilities in decision making, budgeting, planning and conceptualizing, and improvising, to name a few, thus enabling the nurse to call herself or himself a leader to promote these priorities in the absence of systemic support to reach the masses. It also emphasizes nursing education and its influence on the implementation of idealistic practice, research, and professional development.

The author, Carla Mariano, studied nursing and minored in philosophy to take the edge off the hard sciences. The University of Connecticut (UConn) program provided a formidable foundation in nursing, especially the psychosocial aspects. Mariano journey then took her to New York City to pursue her master’s degree in psychiatric/mental health nursing and nursing education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her love and passion for holism culminated in the development of the Advanced Practice Holistic Nurse Practitioner Program at New York University (NYU). The relevance and validity of holistic nursing as a science, a practice, and a way of being have been confirmed in recent years. Holism is also needed as a foundation to broaden and deepen knowledge generation. We need approaches to interventions studies that are more holistic and that are sensitive to the interactive nature of the body-mind-emotion-spirit-environment.