Changemaker employs the practice of therapeutic self-exploration and storytelling to help frontline caregivers connect with patients on a personal and purposeful level.
Jeannine Acantilado’s career embodies the essence of integrating personal narrative with professional practice. Her diverse roles—from pediatric nurse and nurse executive to certified executive coach and award-winning film writer—reflect her commitment to understanding and reshaping personal and professional stories. This approach aligns with the idea that re-authoring one’s life involves a deep exploration and reinterpretation of personal narratives to foster authenticity and mindfulness.
In healthcare, Jeannine relies on the principles of narrative practices and storytelling, listening closely to the complex and unique stories of each person she is coaching, working \with them to understand and interpret the meaning of their stories and actions.
By applying these principles, Jeannine helps healthcare professionals, particularly nurse leaders and mid-level practitioners, enhance their emotional intelligence and resilience.
Building a Foundation of Compassionate Care
“It’s all about enhancing self-awareness and improving communication skills among healthcare professionals,” says Jeannine, who commutes between her home in Arizona and a condo in Seattle. She consults with an internal leadership team led by senior executive leader, June Altaras, EVP, Chief Nursing Officer for the MultiCare Health System, (the largest, community-based, locally governed health system in the state of Washington.) “When we discover and reflectively write about our own behaviors, especially those in stressful situations, we can learn to manage our responses better and be more thoughtful in our relationships with others.”
Helping nurse leaders raise the level of their emotional intelligence, Jeannine’s toolkit enables them to better manage the stress they may experience in workplace relationships. Enhancing EQ helps people adapt to change, be flexible and more resilient while working with others. This results in more cooperative teammates and enhances leadership capacity.
“Simply focusing on your own understanding of who you are enables you to see and understand others in contrast to yourself,” says Jeannine.
Ultimately her work filters through the organizational structure to inspire and empower frontline nurses to transform and improve the patient experience.
“This reflection not only helps leaders with personal growth but can transform how healthcare is practiced at all levels. By exploring our own stories, we can know ourselves better and in a way that we can be more thoughtful in our interactions with others.”
Jeannine also helps healthcare leaders deal with the challenges they face such as burnout and compassion fatigue, which have been challenges in healthcare for decades. Her coaching helps leaders ask: “So what can be done to keep our best nurses healthy, happy, and engaged with compassionate care?”
How it Works
Through Jeannine’s work at Elan Consulting Services, she employs an innovative and impactful tool, the WE-I Profile. It not only assesses emotional intelligence, but actively engages healthcare workers and leaders in scenarios that mirror real-world stressors. She’s leveraged this tool working with more than 1500 healthcare leaders.
Through the WE-I, video vignettes simulate stressful employment situations and interpersonal challenges to gauge responses to provide a dynamic and realistic approach to understanding emotional intelligence. This method allows for a nuanced assessment of how individuals navigate stress and interpersonal conflict and helps them learn how to deal with exhaustion, stress, and conflict in the high-pressure healthcare workplace.
Lights, camera, action…
Recently, Jeannine is also turning her focus to a new and profound endeavor. Her latest project, Breathe: Honoring Voices of Healthcare, in partnership with director Kaye Tuckerman, is a series of “film shorts” now under development. Each short film in this series was written by a healthcare worker who pulls back the curtain on the often unseen and unspoken experiences of caring for others in a deeply personal way. Through this documentary-like project, she aims to offer a raw and poignant glimpse into the lives of those on the front lines of healthcare, highlighting their struggles, triumphs, and the emotional depth of their work.
The project creates a cinematic space where art and science intersect, and where personal and emotional stories raise profound awareness.
These personal and emotional stories are designed to bring profound awareness and empathy and hold hearts. Consider:
- The pediatrician who realizes she has miscarried her baby moments before she returns to her shift.
- The nurse who is now the patient on the operating table.
- A labor and delivery nurse who cares for the sorrows of the expectant mothers who lose their babies before they hold them for the first time.
“There are so many untold stories needing to be shared,” says Jeannine. “Healthcare workers are not immune from the same life experiences as their patients. These films allow them to share their humanity. Sharing is healing for the storyteller and the listener. This project is an opportunity to share the inner world of caregivers on a global scale.”
Breathe is more than just a film; it's a tribute to the dedication and resilience of healthcare professionals. It seeks to honor their voices and provide audiences with a deeper understanding of the sacrifices and commitments inherent in this noble profession.
About Jeannine
Jeannine has a nursing degree from Ohio State University. She earned a graduate degree in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of New Mexico. She was a pediatric nurse for 20 years and now works as a leadership development consultant specializing in emotional intelligence and resilience.
The Mindworks Questionnaire
1. What’s next on your bucket list?
I have never traveled to Africa. It’s a big continent and it seems to be a place full of hidden gems and discovery. It’s on the list for June 2025! It is also about the achievable things in my everyday life that inspire me. I want to learn a tap dance routine to Fats Domino singing “I Found My Thrill on Blueberry Hill” and perform it on stage somewhere! Learning to tap has been on my bucket list since I was six years old and I’m just getting around to it now. I love the excitement of putting on tap shoes.
2. Who is the living person you admire most?
I’m not sure there is any one person. There is someone new to admire every day. I’m with Mr. Rogers on this one. “Look for the helpers.” Throughout my life, I have been blessed with “helpers” … family teachers, neighbors, friends, and strangers. I try to be a helper because kindness builds a community. Not only is being a helper important to connection, but also giving others an opportunity to help you. In healthcare, being a helper is a life purpose. Yet, human frailty also means we will have to lean into being “helped” one day if not today.
