July 2009

When I decided to start my own business as a legal nurse consultant in 1982 I had a full time nursing job at the hospital, plus I was having to work a part-time job to pay my mortgage. How could I possibly realize my dream of starting a business? Through Promise 3. No matter how tired I was at the end of the day I would take at least one action step a day toward my legal nurse consulting business.

Let’s face it, dreams and visions are great, but without action they are nothing more than hallucinations. Without action, visions scud away and dissolve like clouds. While my belief in pioneering this new profession never wavered my belief alone wasn’t enough. I needed to take action every day.

When a national news anchor from CNN asked me how I got to where I am today in light of my humble beginnings, I was hoping to say something profound. But the truth was I did it one step at a time.

Like anyone trying to accomplish any whopping big goal, I had to tackle it in small workable chunks – talk to that first attorney, get my first medical-related case and build my first attorney-client relationship.

I lacked business savvy, but with each small step I gained both knowledge and momentum. Sometimes I barreled through with enthusiasm, other times I barely had the energy to inch forward, but the accumulated effect of all those steps brought me to where I am today. What I learned in the process and what still applies today is that it is less important what I do and more important that I do something.

Successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants love the action as much as the dream. By taking action every day you develop the habit and discipline to make your vision a reality. When you focus not just on the idea but on making it happen, you stay in motion, not just dreaming your passions but living them.

Make this third promise now, that you will take at least one action step every day for the next 30 days on the big thing that will bring you closer to launching or growing your CLNC^® business. Once you are hooked on the natural high of action, taking giant leaps comes easy.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share the action step you will make today to launch or grow your CLNC^® business.

Legal nurse consulting may not be for you, but if you decide it is, then you owe it to yourself to go for it or reject it outright. Don’t leave the dream dangling with that one day someday I’ll get around to it attitude.

If you want to become a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, don’t wait for conditions to be perfect – won’t happen. When I was working in the hospital, I knew many nurses who had dreams, but they didn’t go for their dreams. I went to a lot of retirement parties for those nurses. And you know what they got: a glass of watery punch and a piece of white cake. And the punch wasn’t even spiked with anything interesting.

Dreams can make a person miserable. Going for your dreams is what makes us authentically happy. To paraphrase Yoda, “There is no try. There is either do or not do.” Own up to your passions, then step out and grab hold of them with both hands.

Despite a fear of cliff-hanging heights, I stepped out of an airplane at 14,000 feet to skydive. I was terrified. Once out of the plane’s cabin I couldn’t step back in. I was truly committed, even if not by choice, and the exhilaration I felt later at overcoming that lifelong fear proved to be a catalyst for future accomplishments.

Most of us stay in the safe cabin of everyday life. We never step out into the audacious dreams that smolder and spark inside us. What would your life look like if you didn’t have the choice of that safe cabin? If your only option was to grab that dream and jump into it? To go all the way once you made the jump?

It’s perfectly okay to admit that a commitment is not right for you and to reject it outright.

What’s not okay is to hold back and put less than everything into a commitment that is your passion. If you want something, like a new career in legal nurse consulting, go for it all the way and go for it now. When you do, you’ll wake up every day to a life and career you love.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share what you will do to go all the way in your legal nurse consulting business.

We all know when we discover something we feel passionate about. We feel amazingly energetic. Desire is energy. Have you ever experienced a time when desire overcame all physical, emotional and intellectual barriers? Like a child waking up on Christmas morning, you spring alert full speed ahead. Why can’t we experience that passion – that vitality and energy – not only on Christmas but every day? Believe me, you can. When you wake up every day to a life and career that are your heart and soul, a life and career you’re passionate about, you experience maximum joy.

One of my passions was ignited in me when I was eight years old. For hours each day I taught an imaginary class. I was so absorbed with my class that my dad would come in and break it up to encourage me to play outside with my real friends. To this day I have no idea what I was teaching, but I was darned passionate about it.

At eight years old teaching was play. At 28, I turned that passion for teaching into a business, and I’ve been playing ever since. When I left my hospital job as an RN to start my legal nurse consulting business, I promised myself I would work only my passions. That decision proved more important than I realized. Along the way I’ve been tempted by many flattering and interesting offers, the most tempting of which was joining a powerful law firm as a partner my first year out of law school. But I always stop and listen to my heart. When we live and work our passions, we take an uncompromising approach. It means being honest with yourself and others about what you value.

As The New York Times reported, I “crossed nursing with the law and created a new profession” when I started teaching other nurses how to become legal nurse consultants. That’s the kind of BIG Thing that can happen when you commit to Promise 1, to living and working a passionate life.

Commit to Promise 1 right now and you’ll discover the passions that will propel you to a totally fulfilled future.

Success Is Inside!

A common question I get from Certified Legal Nurse Consultants is whether or not you should supply your legal nurse consulting work product to attorney-clients as a Microsoft^® Word document or as a paper printout.

I’ve never been a fan of letting an editable document out of my control. Not only do you run into issues where different users/recipients have different versions of Word software and suffer formatting issues, but you also have the very real concern that your words may be edited and end up not being your own. That is especially unsettling to me if my name is on the document or the document is on my letterhead. Attorneys, like everyone else, prefer to have paper printouts to work from so that we can highlight, make notes, etc. We also like to be able to reproduce a clean copy after we ruin the first one by writing all over it or dripping Russian dressing from our Reuben sandwiches on it while we eat lunch at our desks.

There is a way to solve everyone’s needs (beside offering extra napkins). Send the document to the attorney in portable document format (PDF), a file format created by Adobe Systems back in the early 1990s. Any document created as a PDF will maintain its formatting no matter what printer is used to print it or what computer is used to view it and you can also restrict whether or not someone can cut and paste or edit the document. Most people use the free Adobe^® Reader to view PDF files (which restricts cutting/pasting) but to create PDFs, you once needed to buy a full or professional version of Adobe Acrobat which will integrate into Microsoft Word 2007.

A free alternative is Bullzip PDF Printer, a program that allows you to create PDF documents from just about any Microsoft Windows program, including earlier versions of Word. Bullzip PDF Printer installs and operates as if it is a printer. You simply print to Bullzip PDF, supply the output file name and it will create the PDF file for you. Anyone with the Adobe Reader can open, view and print the file and it will look exactly as you intended.

Simply set your PDF document properties (protection level) and email it to your attorney-client. Now you can sleep without worrying about what’s happening to your legal nurse consulting work product after it has left your control.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

What would your life look like if every moment of it was absolutely enriched, fulfilled and swelling with joy? Think about it – your health, relationships, career, spirituality and finances are the best they can be and you greet each day with energy and enthusiasm for whatever comes your way. What would accomplish that?

I discovered the 5 Promises in 1982 when I faced the reality that I was unhappy with the direction my life was taking. It wasn’t easy after putting hard work into becoming an RN, earning my bachelor’s degree, my master’s degree and working six years in the hospital, to find I was extremely disappointed by the career choice I had made. I’d gone in wide-eyed, thinking I could make a difference, even improve the state of healthcare, only to bump up against the reality that no matter how hard I worked, my efforts would never make a dent, much less an impact. I was also moving far too slowly toward financial success, and I was forgetting what it was like to have fun with my nursing job at the hospital.

A quick look at my nursing colleagues who had been in nursing for 20 years or more showed me that my future held more of the same. Not that they weren’t trying really hard, but their passion for nursing had died. I could see that my passion was starting to die too and wondered if I might not be wasting my potential. I decided to start my own business as a legal nurse consultant.

Einstein said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. I knew whatever mindset got me into nursing school was not the mindset I would need to start my legal nurse consulting business. So I committed to 5 Promises. These promises became the 5 Promises I have continued to renew daily for almost three decades, and which changed not only my nursing career but my entire life.

Look for each of my 5 Promises in my next 5 blogs.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share what you believe it will take for you to unleash your legal nurse consulting dreams.

When I was working at the hospital as an ICU nurse, “Dilbert” would have been my best friend. I was young, in my 20s and too smart for my own good. With the exception of one supervisor who would stand with us at the bedside when we were understaffed, I thought all hospital supervisors and administrators were stupid or misinformed (or both). What did they know about the real world and the frontlines of patient care? I’m not sure where I thought they worked for their first nursing job, but I was convinced none of them had ever started an IV or coded any patients other than a rubber training dummy. Maybe they dropped out of the sky into their desk chairs – or came prepackaged like an action figure.

Today I’m the executive “pointy-haired boss” the twenty somethings could be ranting and raving about while they text their BFF from the depths of their windowless cubicles. And if they’re thinking the same as I did back then, they may be justifying why they are giving less than 110% to their job.

While I might prefer to just zap them with an Epi-Kit, defibrillate them back to life or just holler “Off with Their Heads!” from the throne in my office, instead I work at staying relevant and being the model for an honest and respectable work ethic. You can’t lead from the back, but you can lead by example. I’ve tried to create a collaborative office and it’s paid off. I seek their advice, brainstorm issues with them, occasionally confess when I’m wrong and even listen to Coldplay. By ensuring that all the voices are heard and appreciated, I’ve made sure that everyone feels safe to voice their opinions and ideas. Some of the best ideas I’ve implemented have come, not from management, but from the frontlines.

If you sometimes feel like you’re not relating to your staff, your CLNC^® subcontractors or to your attorney-client’s assistants, ask yourself when’s the last time you included one of them in a discussion about a case, acknowledged a job well done or shared the latest Coldplay CD? Take a minute to give a minute – it’ll be worth it later and if it’s not, you can always shout, “Off with her head!” from the safety of your car afterwards.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share creative ways to lead by example in your legal nurse consulting business or send a funny “Off with Their Heads” story.

This morning I looked into my closet and couldn’t figure out what to wear to work. (We have a pretty casual dress code in my office so I could have tossed on my flip-flops and a track suit but I’d worn that yesterday.) I confess, I like to have nice clothes and a decent closet.

You see, when I was young my mom always sewed my clothes while I coveted store-bought dresses. If it wasn’t hand-made, it was handed-down from my older sister. To add insult to injury, my twin brother got the store-bought clothes for obvious reasons – no son of an Italian father could wear his sister’s clothes (no matter how butch she was). I always envied him for that privilege. Wearing “vintage” clothing from my older sister drove the desire to create the abundant, but not ostentatious, closet I have today.

After all, I tell my legal nurse consulting students they need to dress professionally to make the right impression. So should I.

So standing there in front of my closet, why wasn’t I seeing one thing to wear? Easy! It’s because I was looking at it in the same way I’d looked at it every day leading up to this morning. I was looking at the same clothes from the same point of view.

Suddenly it hit me, instead of having nothing to wear, I was standing in front of a cornucopia of clothing (all neatly cleaned, pressed and hung). Instead of putting on one outfit, I simply needed to change the blouse, switch the skirt for pants, pull different earrings, shoes and purse and I had a whole new outfit! There were infinite possibilities with my imagination (and mis-matching plaids) as the only limitations.

Do you look at your legal nurse consulting business each day with new or the same eyes? Are you so used to looking at it one way that you can’t see the limitless possibilities and opportunities waiting for you?

I recently challenged my executive team to look at a situation in a new way. The results were surprising. Each came back with a new, surprising and different solution – much better than I had even hoped for. That’s because they applied new eyes to an old situation.

Are you still looking at the same old CLNC^® business closet and not seeing anything new? Are you still looking in that closet and not seeing the opportunities?

Is there a CLNC^® service you haven’t offered yet? One that’s in your scope of ability, but that might just require you to flex your agility (or get off the couch)? Have you contacted your attorney-clients to see if there’s something new you can do for them beyond what you offer today?

It’s time to throw open the door to your CLNC^® closet and start looking at your business with new eyes.  I can’t wait to hear what stunning new outfits you come up with.

I’ll be mixin’ and matchin’.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share how you look at your legal nurse consulting business with new eyes.