CLNC Success Strengths

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!

Nurses have the strength of renewal. You’re a healer. You renew and re-energize the patients you care for, physically and emotionally, turning them out healthier than they were before. You give and you give and you give all your energy to renew everyone else. But do you turn that strength around and apply it to you?

Consider this, if you stepped back and looked at your daily routine objectively, as if it were happening to a good friend, what would be your advice? Slow down? Take a few breaths? Spend a few moments mindfully enjoying one day before another day crashes in with new demands?

You can’t keep giving what you don’t have. If you’re feeling like an overworked, underpaid nurse it’s time to reclaim your life energy through frequent renewal. Remember, our thoughts become our reality and renewal helps us change both our thoughts and our reality.

To have a healthy, exciting and fulfilling relationship with others, you must first have a healthy, exciting and fulfilling relationship with yourself. When you’re your own best friend this is easy, but too often our practices sabotage what we need and instead we act as our own worst enemy – repeating behaviors that we know are bad for us and not taking the renewal steps we need to restore ourselves. If we don’t renew on a regular basis, we’ll slip further and further into the state we’re seeking to escape. When you renew, you recharge your batteries to gain the energy for your big goals while still juggling the daily challenges of your career and life.

I recently mentored a CLNC^® student who shared that she had lost the connection to herself, to her vision and to what really mattered in life. After our visit she vowed to go home and get reacquainted with herself.

I’m just as challenged as you are. When I left my hospital job to start my own business, I fantasized about 4-hour work days and lying by the pool sipping margaritas. Boy was that a hallucination!

Knowing all the issues and the 21 employees waiting for me at the office, I wake up 30 minutes earlier than I have to, and well before any sane person, to make time for a cup of quiet renewal in the form of healthy green tea. When I get into the office I’m ready: “Come on, bring on the madness!” Taking time to charge my own batteries prepares me that much more for the challenges and opportunities each day brings.

It’s okay to take care of yourself. If you don’t, the odds are nobody else will. Carve out your own 30-minute renewal break daily, before everyone gets up or after everyone has gone to bed, and you’ll find energy abundantly available when you need it to grow your nursing career, your legal nurse consulting business and your life.

Success Is Inside!

Nurses have the strength of enterprise. Think about all the creative, enterprising ways you’ve worked around administration, the doctors, the insurance companies – all on behalf of your patients. To satisfy everybody you have to be enterprising. But being enterprising isn’t just about satisfying patients, doctors and administration. It’s about being enterprising in the pursuit of your career and professional advancement. You must be as enterprising as the CEO of a successful business.

One way CEOs are more enterprising is they expect a payoff for every venture, large or small. After I got my masters degree, my hospital failed to acknowledge it. I didn’t even get a 25¢/hour pay raise. I thought this venture deserved a payoff, so I gave myself a pay raise by announcing my resignation and getting a job at a hospital that recognized my new level of knowledge.

A few years after I started my legal nurse consulting business I attended law school at night. At the time, I thought I would be interested in practicing law, but later decided I preferred the payoff of the freedom and flexibility that my legal nurse consulting business afforded me.

After I graduated, one of the law firms I consulted with offered me a position as an associate attorney. I didn’t have to think hard about the offer. Not only was I already doing what I loved, I was also earning more money as a legal nurse consultant than any of the associate attorneys just out of law school. Saying no was easy.

Then, a year after I politely turned down the associate position, they upped the ante and offered me a partnership at the law firm. Now, the stakes were much higher. These were some of the best medical-malpractice attorneys in Texas! Between working with these attorneys and thinking about the partner bonuses, that offer was more lucrative than I thought my legal nurse consulting and education businesses could ever be.

But then I remembered that payoff isn’t always about money. Practicing law wouldn’t provide the emotional payoff I was receiving from helping nurses start their own legal nurse consulting businesses. My passion was teaching, not lawyering. My enterprising spirit (and intuitive vision) told me something grander lay ahead. So I stayed with what I loved and passed on what certainly seemed to be a firm financial future. Eventually, as our intuitive decisions often do, my decision paid off, both financially and emotionally.

When you take on a new venture, make a career decision or simply choose how to spend your time, you should ask, what’s the payoff? Is it monetary, is it good for your spirit, is it good for your career, is it good for your life? If you say no to this opportunity, is there a bigger payoff available to you? You may have to look hard and be imaginative. The profit may not always be in cash but there needs to be a payoff. Passion for your life and work is the best profit of all. But you still don’t want to underprice yourself. So reach for the stars – you deserve them, whether it’s in business or simply personal.

Success Is Inside!

Nurses have the strength of endurance. How else would you get through those 12-hour shifts? You work on your feet, you eat on your feet, you think on your feet. Sure – you get to sit down at least once a shift – when you go to the bathroom. Wait a minute – nurses don’t sit, right? We squat – we ain’t touching nothing. But how do you fuel your endurance when the doctor wants it yesterday, your kids want it today and…your spouse wants it tonight?

Endurance is about having the stamina to do what it takes to succeed. When you are launching and growing your business as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you need endurance. I love working and I don’t mind working long, hard hours full of the challenges inevitable in my legal nurse consulting business. Those hours are easier to endure because I love what I do and also because I reward myself by taking off 12 weeks throughout the year to pursue my passion for hiking and traveling. That’s my payoff and the further I get away from the business to places like Bhutan, the Galapagos, Patagonia and the Arctic Circle, the bigger the payoff.

When I’m off, I’m off. I stay disconnected. My office knows they can reach me if the office is on fire, but they also know I’m not calling in unless I need a ride from the airport. When I return home, the fire for my CLNC^® business blazes just like it did 28 years ago. Fuel your endurance with incremental payoffs as you focus on your big dreams for your legal nurse consulting business. Don’t wait for the big win. Celebrate the small steps and reward yourself all along the way.

It’s not just the final payoff but also the amazing small payoffs you receive along the way that will help you endure the journey to success. Reward yourself, and your family, for the small accomplishments; don’t wait for the big win.

At my company we celebrate more than birthdays and work anniversaries. We’ll stop and celebrate a milestone on a project – such as the completion of a website design or the promotional materials for a new product. We don’t wait until the product hits the market or until we see whether it’s successful. We celebrated the proposal for my book, Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now when we submitted it to the publisher. We didn’t know if it would be accepted, but we knew we had put a lot of hard work into that proposal and we were proud of our final work product and a job well done. Sometimes the success is in the middle. I like to celebrate stepping out and going for it. When we define success as going for what we want (regardless of the outcome), we can succeed and celebrate every day. Celebrate the hard work that you’ve done and then celebrate again whether or not things work out the way you wanted.

If your endurance is tested and you’re tempted to give up, remember this: whether you’re building a legal nurse consulting business or working toward a promotion, the ultimate reward goes to those who endure even when the big reward is far in the distance.

Success Is Inside!

Did you know that the most trusted profession is nursing? No surprises there. Nurses are the patients’ advocates. Patients know who’s watching their backs. Watching out for the patient, standing up for the patient, protecting the patient – this is our primary role. And that requires integrity above all else. You have the strength of integrity.

The whole world trusts nurses. But the question is, “Do you trust yourself to succeed beyond where you are today?” Do you have the integrity to act on what you really want to do with your nursing career? When I decided to start my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, nurses did not own businesses. I had to have the integrity to trust myself and that yes, I could succeed as a legal nurse consultant.

And, do you trust the people who you spend your life and time with? If you want to become a legal nurse consultant or grow your CLNC^® business, surround yourself with family, friends and attorney-clients whom you trust and who treat you with integrity. When you do, you will easily achieve your CLNC^® dreams and desires. I had to ignore the naysayers. Their fears did not have to become my fears.

Nurses at our CLNC^® Certification Seminars always comment on what a great staff I have at Vickie Milazzo Institute. They say, “I’ve never seen a company that has so many positive people.” When I left hospital nursing, I intentionally set out to create a culture that did not include gossiping, whining and complaining. I created our mission to be about the customer. That’s the culture of integrity here at the Institute.

As you build your CLNC^® business, do so with intention and create a culture that supports your highest integrity by choosing to surround yourself with people who share and support your vision.

Never tolerate people or groups who are intentionally gossipy, mean or hurtful to you or anyone else. If you find yourself in an environment that’s putting you down, don’t put up with it. Don’t let rotten apples sour your fire and vision.

Likewise, it’s important to know that if you participate in gossiping, whining or complaining, it kills not only your fire, but also your opportunities for career advancement and growing your legal nurse consulting business. I promise you, the people who matter do notice unprofessional behavior.

The more successful we are in our careers, the more we participate in life, the more we face decisions that challenge our integrity. That’s why I love the Buddhist proverb that says, “Even the smallest act should not be underestimated, for even tiny flakes of snow falling one atop another can blanket the tallest mountain in pure whiteness.”

Success Is Inside!

You have the strength of genius. You save lives every day. Is there anything more intelligent than that? Saving lives requires a special kind of genius. Move over, Einstein. Let a nurse handle it.

So, what’s the most ingenious thing you’ve done for your CLNC^® business? Here’s how to get to your next ingenious idea. Change one small action or behavior. Instead of watching TV after dinner, spend that time contemplating and visualizing how you will grow your legal nurse consulting business. I turned the TV off in college and never turned it back on. Turning off the TV cleared out the noise and clutter and freed me to think big about my future as an RN. Already in nursing school, I knew I wanted to one day own my own business at a time when nurses didn’t own businesses. Such a huge goal – owning my own legal nurse consulting business – could not have happened without that small change of turning off the TV.

Change one small thing and you change your entire future. That’s the essence of genius. Respect your genius – you’re an Einstein in your own world and you can be an Einstein in any world you choose.

Success Is Inside!

Nurses naturally have the strength of agility. After all, you can’t be a nurse and not be agile. When you have five people talking to you at once, and you’re handling five different emergencies at once, that takes agility. When you go from this to that, without time to think and seconds are making a difference – that’s agility. When you’re floated to a unit you know nothing about – and you don’t kill anyone – that’s agility. As nurses, we’re all over that strength, aren’t we?

But agility is more than bending over backwards to satisfy a patient or even a unit of patients. Instead of simply using your agility to cope with your nursing practice or your day-to-day life, do you use your agility to stretch and grow to new levels professionally and personally? Agility is also flexing a curiosity about what else is out there for you professionally.

Agility is also about challenging fixed viewpoints that people (like the doctors, your supervisor, your spouse) have about you and fixed viewpoints you have about yourself. When I started my legal nurse consulting business, I had to challenge the fixed viewpoint that nurses don’t go into business. I also had to challenge the fixed viewpoint that if the business idea hasn’t already been invented, there’s probably no market for it. But more importantly, I had to challenge my own fixed viewpoints.

These include the belief that nursing didn’t prepare me for owning a legal nurse consulting business and the belief that I didn’t have time to start a business as a legal nurse consultant with my full-time nursing job at the hospital.

Open your mind and energy to people who can introduce you to new ways of thinking about nursing or your CLNC^® business and the unlimited possibilities that are available when you stretch your agility. You’ll need to be willing to change directions, just like you do in your hospital job. And be ready to shake things up.

Risking even minor change strengthens your agility to go where you need to go next and prepares you for future challenges that will undoubtedly require even more change. When you stretch yourself to a new level, the next challenge isn’t nearly as scary; the ground is more familiar. Agility is your path to a deeper, richer experience in nursing and in your CLNC^® business, as well as the strength you’ll need to side-step any challenges you’ll meet along the way.

Success Is Inside!

Engagement is about committing to achieve big. Talk about a group who is willing to engage or commit. Nurses are tycoons of engagement. Nurses commit themselves to situations that make normal people faint. Every nurse I know is fully committed – or maybe ready to be committed. We’ve all worked that shift. Nurses know how to engage and get things done. In the middle of horrendous situations, you instinctively triage on the fly – you resuscitate, defibrillate and medicate and then you go to work. Total engagement.

You have the strength of engagement. But are you willing to engage all the way in resuscitating yourself and your nursing career? There won’t be a code team coming to rescue you or your career. It’s entirely up to you. Resuscitating your career requires the same level of commitment you would give to a patient who just arrested, but is even more long term.

When I decided to start my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, I knew a lot of smart nurses who had dreams and ideas, but they didn’t do anything with them. They didn’t engage, they didn’t take action. They had their dreams, but they were disappointed. Some were bitter and angry. I’ve always said that dreams can make a person miserable, if you don’t ever act on them. It’s the action behind your dream that makes you happy.

When I launched my legal nurse consulting business, I had a full-time nursing job; so to succeed in my new business, I committed to take action every day. I learned that in the beginning it didn’t matter so much what I did, but that I did something. I was developing the habits and the discipline to make my legal nurse consulting business dream a reality. Whatever your dream is, you need to engage big. Start with the first 30 days. Turn that into 60 then 90. Success is in the motion and in getting the motion moving. You can’t start a business without starting something.

The more action you take, the easier it is to step out the next time. Anything you’re going for: career advancement, starting a CLNC^® business, improving a professional relationship – do something. Once you’ve committed to take action every day, then it’s time to focus on and engage in the impactful actions that give you the result you want.

What you engage and focus on is where you will yield results. You’ll need to break the feel-good addictions, and there are so many of them – checking email, surfing the Internet, watching TV and keeping up with your friends on Facebook – all of which take us away from big and important things. If you’re spending more than eight hours a day at work, you need to be extra vigilant about cutting out any feel-good addictions in order to have the maximum energy and focus for your CLNC^® business. The wrong focus might make you feel good about how many points you’ve scored in Mobster Wars or Farm-gate but, at the end of the day if all you’ve done is clicked your mouse, how’s that working for you and your dreams?

Where and how we focus also includes our families and friends. Society is complex, with family, friends, career, spiritual and social obligations. Nurses can handle a lot, and if we’re not careful, we find ourselves doggedly committing our energy to every person or situation that demands our time. My motto is nurses CAN do anything – not nurses SHOULD do everything. Set your own expectations for what you want to accomplish, stop being a commitment queen (for male nurses that’s commitment king) and shed the guilt for not doing everything for everybody.

It’s okay to say no. Say no to all the laundry, all the housework and all the carpools and preserve some time for your own dreams. Delegate. Your spouse and kids will benefit from participating in family life and learning new skills like washing dishes or sorting socks.

Engagement starts with choice. Choose the goal for your engagement with your passions and vision in mind. Resolve to engage in something big today.

Success Is Inside!

Intuitive vision is about connecting with your imagination, paying attention, trusting, perhaps experimenting a little, and seeing where that takes you. You have the strength of intuitive vision. How often do you make a diagnosis even before the doctor does? You don’t need lab reports or X rays. How often have you not followed your “gut” and regretted it? You intuitively know what needs to be done. And you do it every day, day after day.

You have intuitive vision. But are you using that strength for yourself as well as for your patients? Are you using it to move your nursing career to where you want to be? Are you making the diagnosis and doing what needs to be done to create the future you desire? As nurses, we’re our own worst patients. Go ahead and laugh, but you know it. We always know what everybody else needs but are often in denial about what we need. It’s time to trust what our intuition tells us we need for ourselves.

In 1982, I created the nursing specialty of legal nurse consulting by trusting my intuition. My intuition told me attorneys needed nurses, even if those same attorneys didn’t know it yet themselves. When one of the first attorneys said “no,” that could have discouraged me if I let it. Then where would I be now? My intuitive vision told me not to stop and has led me to where I am today.

Don’t squelch your passion. For intuitive vision to work, you must not only trust it, but you must be tuned into it. How do you get in touch with your own intuitive vision? First, silence will arouse your vision. Clear some space, unclutter your mind. Purposefully eliminate one outside stimulus or one TV show. Then eliminate another and another until you can make time for silence. Silence is the only way you can connect with your intuitive vision to advance your nursing career.

You must also avoid negative naysayers. You might not think of a relationship as clutter, but it can be if it’s blocking your intuitive vision. Negative people, negative relationships and other energy vampires will stand between you and your vision. Cut them loose. This act is one of the most freeing acts you will experience.

Finally, to become more successful, begin to see yourself as more successful. Envision your new success over and over – planning, taking action, succeeding. If your goal is to put together a legal nurse consulting marketing proposal that wins a new attorney-client or to earn a promotion at your hospital job, vividly see the benefits you’ll receive and the people (you, your husband, your kids) who will enjoy the fruits of your efforts. You must see the change you wish to be – start creating it today.

Success Is Inside!

One thing I know about nurses is that you didn’t get into nursing for the big bucks, the big raises or the big perks (like the cafeteria food, going four hours without a restroom break or the five-minute lunch hour). To do everything that nurses do every day, you have to be wired by passion, by a fire that drives you to make a difference in the lives you hold in your hands. Nurses have the strength of fire and passion. But are you as fired up about nursing today as when you first started? If not, what are you fired up about?

I remember my own fear of fire, or at least my fear of losing my own fire and passion. In 1982, after six years in nursing, unsatisfied with the career choice I made, I woke up to the fear of becoming like so many other nurses at the hospital – burned out, exhausted, the spark gone. A voice in my head said “Vickie, forget Code Blue. It’s time to Code You.” I faced a decision: Step out into the unknown or spend the rest of my life working as a hospital nurse.

My dream was to start a legal nurse consulting business advising attorneys on medical-related cases. Afraid to step out, I settled for reading business books instead. Then, one day I thought about how easy it was for me to resuscitate a dying patient – I could practically do it in my sleep. You know what I’m talking about and may even have resuscitated a few patients that way yourself. So I asked myself, what could be so hard about resuscitating my own career and life by just stepping out and going for it?

With only $100 in my savings account, I stepped out and called my first attorney-prospect to offer my services as a legal nurse consultant. To my horror he answered the phone. About to hang up, I told myself: “If he was wearing a hospital gown with his backside showing, I would have no problem introducing myself and inserting a Foley catheter so Vickie, just talk to him.” I sputtered out something that I’m sure was unintelligible, and despite that clumsy start, he became my first client. Stepping out for what I wanted gave me the freedom to live and work my passions.

For me, success is not about the achievement. It’s not the pay raise, promotion or the prize at the end. The real achievement comes from just stepping out. Every time we step out into the unknown, win or lose, we succeed. I might break a leg or invest in a losing business idea. But I won’t end up at my 90th birthday party with nothing more than stale white cake and regrets about the paths not taken. I understand that bad things can happen when we step out, but I believe worse things happen to our souls when we don’t.

If you’re at a crossroads in your nursing career, stuck in your nursing job and feel you’re not living passionately, try stepping out and exploring new options. Find or create something you can be on fire about. If fear is holding you back, start with baby steps. I started my legal nurse consulting business part-time while still working extra shifts at the hospital to pay my mortgage. I really had nothing to lose and everything to gain. There’s a certain freedom to being a nurse and knowing that if you do step out and fail, you’ve got your hospital nursing experience as a terrific safety net to fall back on. That thought alone should give you the courage to step out.

Remember, life is too short to live it with regrets. Step out and try something new, something daring or just something different. It doesn’t have to be legal nurse consulting. I just want you to live a life of your choosing, not one of your surrender. Take a few minutes today and consider those dreams you’ve put aside. This might be the perfect time to act on them.

Success Is Inside!