July 2010

After I became a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, I worked for a corporation doing internal auditing. After two years, a CLNC^® friend told me about an opportunity to have an exclusive Certified Legal Nurse Consultant contract with an attorney. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted an exclusive contract with any attorney because I did not know if he would have enough work for me. I was wrong. I ended up signing a contract with this attorney-client for $150,000 annually for 40 hours a week. This year I will make about $175,000.

Technology has been a big plus for my CLNC^® business. My husband retired and we moved to Tennessee. My attorney-client lives in California. Technology allows me to work full time at home out of an office that used to be part of our barn as I watch over llamas grazing outside. My attorney-client, who has a protected server that allows her to download documents, copies everything to a disk. One of the best things I’ve adopted from one of Tom’s Tech Tips was dual monitors. I review the files from my attorney-client on one screen while I write my report using the second screen. I also take my work on the road when I travel. My husband races cars so I can just pack up my bag with my laptop and go with him. It’s great because my legal nurse consulting business is completely portable.

The benefits of being a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant are endless. I work out every morning, have coffee with friends, then I go to work. The more I work, the more money I make. I can work 50 hours one week and take a day off the next whenever I choose. In my prior job, I only slept in my own bed about eight nights a month because I had to travel so much. Now as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, I enjoy staying at home.

When I worked at a full-time job, I could count my friends on one hand. Now, I am more involved in my community and I’m active in the charities that are important to me.

I was going to semi-retire, do a little CLNC^® work but not really do much. However, I have stayed busy and have had numerous offers for additional legal nurse consulting work. When this happens, I contact my network of CLNC^® peers. The NACLNC^® Directory has a wealth of CLNC^® consultants who I can refer business to or recommend as experts.

My advice to nurses is to stop waiting – do it now. Become a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant today. Stop procrastinating!

Guest Blogger Profile

Sheila Silvus Chesanow, RN, MS, CLNC is owner of Chesanow & Associates in Tennessee. She has been a nurse for 30+ years and has been clinically active as a nurse practitioner. Sheila’s CLNC^® practice specializes in acute care, long term care and geriatric medicine.

The term “sexual assault” refers to forced sexual intercourse. The term used in your state, region or area may be called “sexual abuse” or “rape.” It is important for each person to check the law’s legal definition in their state.

How many of these statements have you heard as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant reviewing a sexual assault case?

• There was a delay in seeking treatment and/or reporting the assault.
• They know each other and they were on a date.
• There were no injuries.
• They were calm when they arrived.

CLNC^® consultants should focus on the facts in a case, not the assumptions while at the same time being alert to how others might interpret the case.

Many times the survivor may delay seeking treatment or reporting the incident. The delay in seeking care may have been because the victim was in shock. They could have been threatened, unconscious or waiting for a friend or family member to arrive to assist them. The survivor of a sexual assault is a trauma patient; and they will have the same psychological reactions as any other trauma patient. The reactions you may see documented are that they were calm one minute, crying or angry the next and withdrawn or even confused at another time. A Certified Legal Nurse Consultant should not focus on whether or not the victim delayed seeking care or delayed reporting the assault to determine if the case has merit.

Saying the victim knew the attacker so they can’t claim assault is not necessarily a strong defense. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 73% of sexual assaults are committed by a nonstranger and 38% by a friend or acquaintance. 93% of juvenile survivors know their attacker. Of the 93%, 34.2% are family members, 58.7% are acquaintances and only 7% are strangers.

Knowing the attacker, being on a date with them or even being married to them does not give the “okay” to be sexually assaulted. “No” means “no” when said to a spouse, dating partner, relative, friend, any kind of acquaintance or a stranger.

A physical examination, even in a child victim, may not reveal any injuries. Factors that can affect the injuries are anatomy, physiology, how much force was used, how much the victim resisted, the time lapsed between the assault and the exam and the grooming of the victims. Everyone’s anatomy is not the same and this is true of the genital area and the hymen also. If there was an injury or difference documented, it is important to know if it is an anomaly or an acute injury. Also, realize there are other types of injuries beside sexual assault that can cause an injury in the genital area or even cause a ruptured hymen. The vagina and cervix are vascular areas and heal quickly. If time has elapsed before the examination, any injury might be healing or healed. If injuries were documented, then you may be able to determine if the injury was acute by checking the records to see if the victim was examined a few days to a week later. If another examination was completed, compare the documentation of injuries. If documentation confirms that the anatomy is the same and no further sexual assault was found to have occurred, then it was probably not an acute injury.

Legal nurse consultants should also be aware that estrogen can play a role in whether there might have been injuries noted with the exam. Estrogen in females makes the cervix thicker and more redundant. Injuries might be less likely to occur during the child bearing years when there is usually more estrogen in the body. The victim’s resistance to the attack and the force and object(s) used have an effect on any injuries sustained. If the victim did not resist the attack, the examiner may not discover any injuries. The victim’s cooperation should not be confused with their willingness to have intercourse. They may have feared for their life, been too traumatized to resist, been drugged, intoxicated or the attacker could have threatened them, a loved one or even a pet.

Child victims may have been “groomed” by the predator. Grooming is the process of desensitizing the child. The predator usually has some type of relationship with the child. This relationship provides the predator with the opportunity and access to the child to engage, entrap, prepare and trick the child into accepting the sexual abuse. The grooming can start with subtle behaviors or statements and once the victim responds favorably, some form of sexual activity begins, and often progresses. When there is less resistance, there may be little to no injury sustained or noted.

Remember that a calm victim does not indicate whether assault did or did not happen. A Certified Legal Nurse Consultant needs to review and consider all information and documentation – the subjective and objective data obtained during the physical exam and the history of what occurred. Gather all records from other disciplines that might have spoken with or examined the victim after the assault. Review the records to be sure the examination was conducted thoroughly, to learn what type of practitioner performed the exam, that all evidence was collected and stored properly and that the chain of evidence was followed.

Most areas have at least one hospital and sometimes several that have a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) or sexual assault response team (SART). A SANE is a registered nurse who has had specialized education to provide comprehensive care to sexual assault patients and demonstrates competency in conducting a forensic exam and who has the expertise to give effective courtroom testimony. SARTs are set up in a similar style with a multidisciplinary and community-based approach to caring for and assisting the victim. The teams usually consist of local law enforcement, prosecutors, judicial members, a victim advocacy group, the hospital, SANE members and any other professionals with a vested interest in assisting victims of sexual assault.

With a thorough review of all the information, a definite response to the question of whether the victim was really sexually assaulted still cannot always be given. The response that can be given is the results of the examination, the injuries sustained and any behaviors noted that were or were not consistent with the history obtained.

Guest Blogger Profile

Cheryl Garrison RN, CEN, SANE, CLNC has 18 years of emergency nursing experience and has been a SANE nurse for 8 years. She is cofounder of Class Act Consulting Services, LLC in Kansas specializing in emergency and abuse cases. Her company has assisted the local district attorney in the victims unit on various abuse cases. Her company partners with an elite group of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who specialize in various nursing specialties including labor and delivery to hospice, home health and Medicare fraud cases.

Every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant has changed mobile phones at least once in the course of their CLNC^® business. If you’re still carrying a brick-phone worthy of Gordon Gecko – it’s time. I’ve gone through a couple of BlackBerry^® models myself and I am getting ready to move to the new 4G iPhone^® this summer. I decided this is one time when it is indeed better to wait.

During my BlackBerry time, I’ve accumulated a plethora of wall chargers, car chargers, headsets, charging bases, etc. Not all of which work with each other, even within the same family of products. My new BlackBerry won’t fit in the old BlackBerry stand which frustrates me to no end. So, to keep some order on my desk, my sanity and in expectation of that new iPhone, I purchased a pair of Seskimo’s Crabble iPhone stands, one for each of my desks.

These inexpensive, folding plastic stands slip into your wallet, purse or computer case for transport and can be set up in seconds. Its legs allow me to use it with different devices and its silicon rubber feet keep it firmly in place on my desk allowing me to charge my BlackBerry upright. If you watch movies, video or Facebook on your iPhone, you’ll love this same feature which allows you to turn your iPhone horizontally.

This is one of the best, cheap stands I’ve ever seen and it fits a variety of mobile devices. Certified Legal Nurse Consultants looking for a Tom-tested phone stand couldn’t do much better than a Crabble. Consider one today.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Everyone knows that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant knows at least one CLNC^® consultant, if not more. If you’ve attended one of our CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminars, you’ve made lifelong CLNC^® friends. When you attend the NACLNC^® Annual Conference, you reconnect with CLNC^® consultants from all over the country. But all too often you only do it for those short periods of time. Not everyone capitalizes on their connections to make a strong chain or develop a mini-network.

In this information/communication-driven world of Facebook^®, Twitter^®, Skype^® and the Internet, the only thing holding you back is the lack of a plan. Given the myriad ways we can communicate these days there is nothing, and I mean nothing, stopping any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant from setting up their own CLNC^® Connection Chain (or “CCC” for short).

Set up your CCC in 5 easy steps:

1. Use Darwinian Selection. From your certified, but not certifiable, colleagues pick 5-8 other CLNC^® consultants you respect, who have different specialties than your own and who are in different parts of the country. This is Link 1 in your CCC.
2. Facebook’em Danno. Next, set up your own private group on Facebook and send an invite to each of the Certified Legal Nurse Consultants you’ve identified and ask them to join your group. You now have the second link in your CCC, a place where you and the CLNC^® members of your group can communicate freely and network with each other that doesn’t require any special skill. Remember to set your privacy settings to keep others from seeing your group’s discussions. CCC Link 2 is complete.
3. Get Yourself a Glam-Cam. Your next step is to go out and spend less than $60 and buy a USB web cam with embedded microphone for your computer (unless you’re lucky enough to have an Apple^® laptop or iMac with one built in). Install the camera. (Tom installed mine and claims it’s so simple even a caveman can do it.) Then sign up for the free version of Skype. This will allow you to have weekly video conferences in pairs or in groups with your CCC members. It’s much more fun than telephone conferences and much more rewarding in terms of retying the connections with the other CCCers. You can also use this to check in with your hi-tech attorney-clients. Link 3 checked off.
4. Tweet Like a Tweety-Bird. Join Twitter but be sure to protect your “tweets.” Protecting your tweets allows only those Twitter members you specifically approve to see your tweets. You can still follow Ashton Kutcher, but your tweets will only be seen by those you approve to view them. Use the initiation function of Twitter to send email invitations to your list of CLNC^® colleagues. If you have a texting plan for your smart phone, turn on the mobile tweets function of Twitter and select only those people in your group to update you via cell phone. You can read the rest of the twitterers using Tweetdeck or on Twitter. This way you’ll get texts of important updates from your CCC. Use Twitter to schedule your Skype calls, update your CCC on new attorney-clients or just to tell them what you’re doing. Link 4 in place.
5. Meet Up to Keep Up. When you attend the NACLNC^® Annual Conference, plan on flying in at least two days early to brainstorm with your CCC members. You’ll want to meet before the conference to get your face-to-face time in with your CCC members. Focus on learning from your group and grab new ideas for your legal nurse consulting business so you can rock back and enjoy the conference. Link 5 done and your CLNC^® Connection Chain is ready to pay off big!

Now put your CLNC^® Connection Chain to use. Set accountable and measurable objectives, and share them with your CLNC^® chain members. When you complete an objective, send out a tweet. Schedule at least two Skype calls a month so that everyone can update each other on the steps they’ve taken towards their accountable objectives. Research shows that being accountable to others for the action steps in your strategic plan help you implement them. Celebrate each others’ successes and brainstorm over what went well and what didn’t. This is your private brain trust, exclusive board of directors and personal planning committee – make use of them!

A CLNC^® Connection Chain is a great way to make sure your legal nurse consulting business succeeds. Here’s my challenge to Certified Legal Nurse Consultants – set up your own CCC and put it to the test for 60 days. I’ll be waiting to hear from you when you share with all of us how your CCC has helped your legal nurse consulting business.

Success Is Inside!

We all love social media. For example, I use Facebook to communicate to all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and aspiring CLNC^® consultants. I love reading details of your lives and seeing the fun photos you post. One Certified Legal Nurse Consultant told me that what she loves most about Facebook is that she never has to worry about keeping up with her friends’ email addresses – because their Facebook address never changes. If she’s on Facebook, she’s always in touch with them. This is really a radical form of communication and allows connection with more and more people, including attorneys, who are joining Facebook every day.

Something I’ve noticed though – social media can quickly move from a means of communication to an obsession. One can get caught up in all of the things to do there – the games and other ancillary applications. That’s my issue with social media. Clicking your mouse to get points to build a hen house for your farm or sending someone virtual hugs, flowers or groceries seems like a crazy waste of time.

Where we focus is where we yield results, and let’s face it, building a better farm, sending pictures of flowers and answering meaningless quiz questions becomes a feel-good addiction that reaps little more than distraction from vision and purpose. Does “I got a new llama for my herd today” or “I answered a quiz about Pop-Tarts^®” really sound better to you than “I got three cases from a new attorney-client today”? The way you unwind is certainly your personal choice, but I prefer to find my relaxation in nature, taking a walk or listening to the clacking of my bamboo while enjoying a glass of wine in my backyard. Relaxation has a beginning and an end but the demands of a “virtual farm” never will.

For successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants living in the real world, those meaningless feel-good addictions are something we avoid. We spend our time growing our legal nurse consulting businesses, not fertilizing our virtual farms. I’ve gone though and blocked just about every “application” I can on Facebook to keep those “requests to bale hay” from cluttering up my wall. I appreciate that someone loves me enough to want to send me a virtual pet – but I’m busy with my legal nurse consulting business and connecting with my family and friends – and I hope you are too.

Social media is a great thing. It’s changing the way we connect and communicate. Just make sure that you’re using it to advance your legal nurse consulting business or to truly connect and communicate with your “friends.”

Success Is Inside!

As all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants know, I’ve written myriad tech tips that will save you valuable time for your legal nurse consulting business. Now I’m letting you in on more timesavers I regularly put to good use. For instance, if you want a little more screen depth when you’re researching medical literature for your legal nurse consulting business, you can get an extra 1/4” or so of visible screen (or just as much screen as you can get) with only a few clicks. Just right click the Windows^® XP Start button, then left click Properties. You’ll see a variety of options for the taskbar. Click in the box beside “Auto-hide the taskbar” to make the taskbar disappear until you mouse over it. Now you have the maximum amount of visible screen.

While you’re there uncheck the “Lock the Taskbar” button and click Apply. Then add a check in the “Show Quick Launch” box. It will give you a place to put shortcuts for the programs you use the most. Using Quick Launch, you don’t have to minimize your desktop or navigate through your Start menu to find a program you use on a regular basis. Instead, you simply right click the shortcut you want to place onto the Quick Launch bar and drag and drop it there (select “Create shortcut here”). This only works if your taskbar is unlocked, so once you load the taskbar with shortcuts, you should then re-lock it.

Once you’ve loaded your taskbar with shortcuts for the programs you use the most in your legal nurse consulting business, all you have to do is mouse over the taskbar and left click on the appropriate shortcut to start a program. This sure beats minimizing all your programs or sorting through your Start menu. Remember, seconds wasted build up into minutes and then into hours lost, so the more time you save, the more billable hours you’ll have as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

When you communicate to attorneys, whether by speaking or writing, you can choose the response you want. That’s not a typo – I don’t mean your response, I mean the response from the attorney with whom you’re communicating. You can guide the response you’ll get by the words you choose.

For example, if you want to instantly get the attorney’s full attention, use signal words such as, “here’s how to,” “the opposing attorney will probably argue” or “this will almost certainly be an issue in the case.” Phrases like these alert the attorney that important information is about to follow.

Because your goal is to maintain an associative relationship with your attorney-clients, you will also want to use collegial phrases. For example saying, “let me share something I learned” is more collegial than “let me tell you about this.” Hearing these words, the attorney expects to benefit from, and possibly be enriched by what you are about to say, versus feeling they’re about to receive a lecture.

When explaining a medically complex situation, preface with, “this is how I would explain it to a jury” or “if I were explaining this to a jury, I would tell them….” This allows you to get down to the attorney’s level without insulting the attorney’s intelligence.

In addition to “sharing,” you can also use words that stimulate thought, inspire creativity and transform passivity into action. Think about famous persuaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. How did these orators persuade us to their way of thinking?

First of all, great persuaders sprinkle their speech liberally with “fat” words – freedom, love, success, judgment, loyalty, privilege, honor, generosity and together. Try putting any of those words in your CLNC^® tote bag. You can’t see them or touch them, but they sure feel good when you hear them. “Fat” words are empty of content but full of meaning. Take the word pride. You can’t hold pride in your hands. You can’t see it, hear it or taste it, yet it has exquisite meaning. Tell someone “I’m proud of you” and notice their immediate response. Think about these phrases:

“I value your judgment.”

“It’s a privilege to be here.”

“Working together we can…”

When Lincoln said, “Truth is generally the best vindication against slander,” he used three fat words in a total of eight. Look for opportunities to use fat words to inspire or persuade friends, family and associates, then turn your efforts to your attorney-prospects and clients. Notice the difference between “thanks for your time” and “I’m honored you took the time.” Even though both phrases work; they impact differently.

Great persuaders also use presuppositions such as fortunately, unfortunately and luckily. Such words, at the start of a statement, presuppose the next part of the statement to be factual. “Fortunately, you have the stronger position in this case” “Unfortunately, this fact hurts the case.” Another form of presupposition includes such words as odd, aware, know and realize. They presuppose a situation while at the same time embedding a suggestion.

“Are you aware that the medical expert missed an important issue?”

When talking with a prospective attorney-client always say “when” instead of “if,” “When I take a case for you I’ll be sure to…” or “When we’re working together….” Be positive and assume they’re already in a relationship with you and your legal nurse consulting business.

Another powerful use of words is the use of “linking words,” such as and, but, while and even. Linking words suggest cause and effect. Great persuaders use linking words to link verifiable experience with suggestion, making their ideas more believable, more readily accepted.

Most of us use linking words in a negative context. The two most commonly used linking words are and and but. By merely changing your unconscious use of those two words to a more conscious application, you’ll gain persuasion power. When you tell a subcontractor, “I love your work, but I don’t like how you go into too much detail,” the negative message is what is retained. “I don’t like how you go into too much detail” is what comes through loud and clear. “I love your work” goes unnoticed. It gets cancelled by the linking word but. When you change your language to use the linking word and instead of but, you send a different message – one more appropriate, “I love your work and I prefer that next time you avoid so much detail.” Your communication is less damaging and it still sends a constructive message.

Even more effective is linking two verifiable bits of information to a suggestion. This powerful technique takes more thought but is very effective. Here’s an example – “Fuji apples are red” – that’s verifiable, you can see it. “They crunch when you bite them” that’s verifiable too – you can hear them crunch. “And they taste wonderful.” In sales terms this is called a “yes set.” The first two yeses invite the third. Here’s another example – “It’s a beautiful sunny day outside” – verifiable, “that’s a great photo of your family” – verifiable “and as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant I can save you time and money on your medical-related cases.” Try this technique with an attorney-prospect and see how many more clients you get.

These word power techniques can help you communicate more effectively for your Certified Legal Nurse Consultant business. Now that you’re aware of how persuasive you can be by incorporating fat words, presuppositions and selective linking words into your vocabulary, you’ll want to put them into action for your CLNC^® business. These word power techniques do require practice, so you’ll need to think about what you want to say in advance so that you cannot only practice, but also think up the most persuasive way of saying what you want well before you sit down to talk with an attorney-prospect. It also helps to evaluate an interview afterward and think of ways you would handle it differently next time. Practice using these techniques in your introductions and elevator speeches. You can even incorporate them into your introductory letters and promotional copy.

Practice word power today to reap improved results for your CLNC^® business.

Success Is Inside!

A study published in Speech Management shows that when meeting someone for the first time, 62% of a person’s effectiveness can be attributed to voice and delivery and only 38% to content. In persuasive speeches, such as a sales pitch, delivery accounts for a remarkable 76% of the presentation’s effectiveness, while only 24% is due to content.

Delivery is the way you talk – your speech mannerisms, the sound of your voice and even how you change your posture as you speak. What you say is important, but the way you say it affects listeners as much as three times more. Your voice is a vital communication tool for your legal nurse consulting business. Effective communication is essential to interviewing successfully with attorney-prospects and for assuring your attorney-clients are fully present when you communicate your opinions on a medical-related case.

As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant preparing for interviews with attorney-prospects and presentations to attorney-clients, you should analyze your voice to discover where it needs improvement. Do you whisper or mumble? Do people constantly ask you to repeat yourself? Do you find yourself using your parent or cell-phone voice in normal conversation? Do you sound interested or bored? Do you race like a runaway train or buzz along in one endless sentence after another, providing no opportunity for the attorney to speak? Do you needlessly punctuate your speech with ahs, ems, hmms, sighs, “like,” “I mean,” “you know” or other fillers? Or worse, do you always sound like you’re lecturing instead of engaging?

Most of us are not aware of how we sound to others. If we were, we might talk a lot less. I’ve appeared on radio, television and DVDs enough to know all too well how I sound. This process has taught me that the best way to learn your own verbal “ticks” is to record a conversation and then listen to it. Use your digital camera, a video recorder like the “Flip” or, if you don’t have video available, use a simple voice recorder. Try and forget the camera/recorder is on, relax, be yourself and just speak. You can do this on the telephone, in a mock interview with a friend or spouse or simply in a casual conversation.

Now assess whether you sound like one of these:

• The Dying Swan fades out at the ends of sentences – losing all sense of command. Sometimes the dying swan doesn’t even close a sentence and just tapers off in mid-thought. Instead, punch those final words for closure. You’ve spent your nursing career learning how to draw conclusions – do it now in your conversation.
• The Flatliner speaks in a monotonous, boring rumble. Open your throat and your mouth. Imagine placing your voice forward, varying the pitch – from occasional high notes to more frequent low notes. Vary the volume too. When appropriate to what you’re saying, raise your volume. Occasionally, if you’re imparting information that can be done with a conspiratorial smile, use a brief stage whisper – your intended audience will lean forward to listen. That’s when you know you have them.
• The Valley Girl pitches up at the end of sentences, as if questioning. “After the meeting, we went to lunch?” “We ate the best Mexican food?” My legal nurse consulting fee is $150.00 per hour?” An upward inflection indicates hesitancy or a question. Most statements should be made with a downward inflection at the end to suggest certainty and confidence. At the end of a sentence, lower your pitch while still sounding confident.
• The Mumbler sounds like “We’re goan to see-um layer.” This usually results from lazy lips and running words together. Like stage actors, you must practice “biting” the words out. Form your vowels carefully. Own those consonants. Speak with the authority of a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant and slow down if you have to.
• The Whisperer sounds like the shyest person on the planet, but being shy is not an excuse. Having a “soft” voice is not an excuse. Open your mouth, inhale deep into your abdomen and speak up. Pretending you’re on your cell phone in a noisy room is a great way to overcome speaking too softly.
• The Artful Dodger leans back when she’s challenged on a point or unsure of her position. She leans forward when confident but fidgets when verbally cornered. Practice sitting still with a slight forward lean.
• The Conjurer waives her hands in the air while speaking like she’s stirring up the spirits. Keep your hands in your lap unless it’s really, really important to wave them around. Also, keep them away from your face and don’t hide behind them (the attorney can still see you).

Recording yourself makes all the difference in the world. Using a video recorder will let you hear what you really sound and look like when you speak. If you consider the time you’ve spent rehearsing your script for an attorney-prospect interview, you need to spend at least as much time, if not more, energizing the instrument that will deliver those important words – your voice. Chances are you concentrated more on content than delivery and it’s delivery that will prove determinative for your legal nurse consulting business.

Read those percentages at the top of this blog again. Now, focus your attention on your verbal delivery. Record your networking introductions and your answers to common attorney interview questions. Listen to the recordings and honestly assess what you can improve. Re-record it until you sound the way you want to sound – a highly confident, skilled and valuable Certified Legal Nurse Consultant with your nursing experience and education backing you up. You have the confidence – you just need to be confident about it.

Take care of your voice as much as you care for your laptop and iPhone^®. With only a little practice this important marketing tool will gain you instant credibility, visibility and profit while you achieve your CLNC^® goals. Ignore it and you might never realize how many attorneys you’ve lost through poor communication. Even one is too many, so start tuning up your voice today.

Success Is Inside!

I’ve got a confession to make. I love unique applications, so long as they aren’t malware (Remember the flying toasters screen saver?). I’ve updated my Windows^® XP machine to mimic Apple’s^® Dock and added emulations that give me some Windows 7 functionality. I’ve loaded add-ons to my Firefox^® web browser that tell me the weather, allow me to share websites on Delicious, trust a site or not with WOT, save a site with iCyte and use a cool program I’ve never shared with anyone else called FireShot to snag images of websites that even include Flash^® animations. In short, I could be a tech support nightmare, but I’m not because I only download my tools from well-known sites (like CNET.com) and only after I investigate their reputations on the web at large.

It’s with this love of quirky apps in mind that today’s Tech Tip is written. If you’re a hard-working Certified Legal Nurse Consultant you may not lift your head from your work for hours at a time. In fact, I’ve seen Vickie go an entire day without looking out a window because she’s fully engaged in a project. I’ll even confess that sometimes I get like that.

As CLNC^® consultants, you know what I mean – you get so caught up in writing a report or doing research for your favorite attorney-client that you forget to eat lunch, go to the restroom and do anything except grab another cup of your favorite caffeine-containing beverage (hot or cold). Or maybe your office is a cubicle, or in a room that doesn’t have a window to the world or perhaps you’re just so caught up in Second Life, Farmland or Spacebook that you forget what’s going on in your real life or at least out there in the great wide open.

Well for those of you who need a reality check, reality reinforcement or just don’t have a window handy, check out a program called “YoWindow.” This is an easy-to-use screensaver that will show you the weather outside your own window (or at any other location in the world you choose) in real time. It sets the weather against a rather bucolic farm scene and realistically renders snow, rain, night and day, etc. and even reflects the season! Here’s the weather in Houston when I wrote this blog:

This is one fun little weather tool that is almost as cool as the “1-ClickWeather” Firefox add-on from Weather.com (which I really like).

YoWindow even allows you to scroll forward and see the forecast so you’ll know if you need to take an umbrella to an interview with your hot attorney-prospect when you go to show how your legal nurse consulting business can help him win his cases.

I’m an old-school tech-type and tend to use the Windows “Starfield” for my screensaver because it doesn’t put a strain on my processor or video card like some of the 3D screensavers used to (such as the floating, rotating, reflective “3D Text” saying “Tom Rocks!” that I put on Vick’s laptop this morning). YoWindow is different in that it seems to be fairly simple, if you’ve got a decent computer the clouds and weeds will blow in the wind and the effects will render nicely. The developers promise more backgrounds in the future but in the meantime you can substitute your own photo or background of your choice and the weather will lay over it.

If you want a quick weather app, YoWindow is fun and easy to install and use. Give it a try.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Nurses have the strength of fusion. When a patient arrests, your team comes together and fuses like a single entity to do whatever is needed to code the patient successfully. Why not use this strength of fusion to code yourself? The more audacious your goals, the more you will need other people to help you achieve those goals. This means surrounding yourself with strong, successful people of integrity to keep you, and your dream, alive.

More powerful than networking or brainstorming, fusion is the process of collaborating, mentoring, masterminding ideas together and encouraging individual passions and visions. Even though I have a successful business, I also had a personal goal of writing my book Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now – and that wasn’t happening. One business excuse after another. It was after I brought nine women together to discuss my book idea that I started on my book in earnest. Fusing with these women stirred my desire and passion and fueled me to move from the dream of the book to the reality of the book.

Even though I’m normally catatonic after 9:00pm, I found myself using my strength of endurance, writing and rewriting, writing and rewriting again and then rewriting the rewrites until 2:00 in the morning. I was energized and ready to move forward. Sure, I lost sleep but I gained a new fire for my life. Suddenly attaining an impossible goal didn’t seem so impossible at all. The collective force of fusing with those nine women is what made my bold venture possible.

The more successful we are, the less time one has to spend with friends and family. We spend less time doing the things we like and more time doing the things we need to do to make our businesses successful. Running your legal nurse consulting business, managing people or navigating your way through the hospital maze can be very stressful and sometimes lonely. That’s why fusing with other successful people is vital to encouraging and empowering you. Hang with winners if you want to be a winner. Only hang with losers if you want to be a loser.

You can fuse with successful CLNC^® consultants from other cities and states. The deepest, most effective fusion will happen when you connect with CLNC^® consultants from different locations and different specialties. CLNC^® consultants who are not your direct competitors and CLNC^® consultants who will wholeheartedly share the bold bursts of genius that have propelled their businesses to higher levels.

Fusing with CLNC^® consultants at a distance will take some planning, but it’s worth it. Don’t expect to have monthly meetings. Instead, plan for getting together in person quarterly or twice a year or even annually at the NACLNC^® Conference. To keep the fusion going in between, use Skype video-conference calls, telephone conference calls, Facebook, monthly chats and emails.

You can also fuse with entrepreneurs who are not CLNC^® consultants. In any group of entrepreneurs, someone has already solved the very challenge you’re about to face – getting your first client, hiring your first employee, working with a difficult client. The key is to remember that successful people hang with other successful people. There’s nothing wrong with fusing with people who, like you, are on the way up.

In fusion, we all have to pull our own weight, carry our own loads and be responsible for our own actions. Choose ruthlessly and honestly. Remember – it’s your career, your life and your goals. Choose carefully so that your fusion team is one that supports you.

Success Is Inside!