Background & aim: Nurses are the largest group of health care providers and play an important role in the quality of patient care. Career Thoughts is one of the most important factors that play a special role in nursing job performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy on dysfunctional career thoughts in nursing students.

Methods: The present studywas a quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design and follow-up with control group. One standard deviation above the mean of the group were selected by convenience sampling, then these 36 individuals were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. The experimental group received 8 sessions of 2 hours (one session per week) in the intervention group and the control group did not receive any training. After the sessions, both groups responded to the job dysfunction questionnaire (Sampson et al., 1996). Collected data were analyzed by covariance analysis using SPSS software.

Results: The results revealed that the experimental group indicated a significant decrease in dysfunctional job thinking, decision making confusion, commitment anxiety and external conflict after receiving the training compared to the control group. These results were also maintained at follow-up. The intervention in the post-test was 68% on the total score of ineffective job thoughts, 39% on decision making confusion, 55% on commitment anxiety and 59% on external conflict and in the follow-up phase, 56% on the total score of job ineffective thinking, and 35% on confusion. In decision making, 43% were effective on commitment anxiety and 46% on external conflict.

Conclusion: According to the results of the present study, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is recommended to reduce the ineffective nursing students' occupational thinking in order to enhance their job performance and provide their patients with better quality health services.

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