Ownership is a funny thing. We all like to own things: a house, a car, an iPad2^®, a legal nurse consulting business or simply a garden. Then we learn that there’s some responsibility that comes with that ownership. Stand up and look out the window. You probably don’t have to look far down your street to notice that some people are better homeowners than others.

There are some things we’ll probably never own (like that private jet I want) but one thing we all own equally is time. That’s right, we all get the same 24 hours every day and the only difference between us is how we regard our time and what we do with it. Time is one of our greatest possessions.

And just as I care about my home, I care about my time and, more importantly, care for my time. How about you? Maybe it’s time to step back and objectively observe yourself for a day or even a week. Are you a good steward of your time or do you squander it away?

For the record, I love to play as much as I love to work. I started a business to have a life, not to give up my life, and fortunately my New Orleans upbringing helps me to remember to do just that – to play on a regular basis.

Whether it’s work or play, it’s your time and what you do with it is your choice. I’m just sayin’…

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share the good and bad things you do with your time.

I’ll be the first to admit it feels good to be right. There’s a comfort, if not outright confidence, in that moral certitude that comes from knowing you are correct in a situation. Recently a vendor and I disagreed over a matter that was objectively verifiable and I knew I was right. It took some effort on my part, but he finally agreed with me.

But when you’re in a relationship, whether it’s business or personal, being right rarely ends with being right. That’s because no one likes to feel that they’re wrong. When you’re right, there’s a right way and a wrong way to be right and a right way to respond when another person has to admit you’re the one who’s right. For example, while it may feel satisfying, annihilating the person or crushing him with the correctness of your position (as I admit I wanted to do in the above situation) is just not an option. And while it can be tough, a certain grace goes a long way if you want to get along with that person in the future.

The next time you’re right in your legal nurse consulting business, take a moment to consider the impact of how you communicate that fact to your attorney-client, subcontractor or MD expert. I’m not suggesting you back down, just that you tone it down and maintain a composed, confident demeanor. Your relationships are much more important than feeling good about being right – though you can still be right at the same time.

Success Is Inside!

As we move into the holiday season, our role as CEO becomes even more pronounced. Sure we’re CEOs of our Certified Legal Nurse Consulting businesses, but you might be the “Chief Everything Officer” of your family as well, in charge of your business and housekeeping, childcare, homework, shopping, meal-planning, cooking, carpool and finance, to name just a few departments.

So how do you juggle your career and family without going insane, and still enjoy the holiday season? That’s the million-dollar question and here’s my million-dollar answer: stop being the Chief Everything Officer and learn to say no. That might mean saying no to the people you love the most and no to doing all the laundry, all the housework and all the errands. Learning to say this one word, the most powerful word in the dictionary, can have a revolutionary effect not only on enjoying the holidays but also on your CLNC^® business.

For example when Edie, who was very career driven, got married, her husband said “I don’t do laundry.” She smiled and said, “That’s okay, neither do I.” In her 14 years of marriage, she has raised their son, gone back to college and risen to an executive position.

It’s okay for your spouse and kids to do some of the housework. It’s not going to kill them, but it is going to kill you if you keep doing it all. Get your family behind you and your career goals in the same way that you’re behind each of them. That’s the best way to handle your legal nurse consulting business, the holidays and the day-to-day we call life.

And while you’re at it, stop saying yes by default. Too many nurses fall into the traps of “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done” or “it’s faster to do it than explain it.” When you agree to say yes to an additional chore or project, think about what you’re saying no to as a result.

You’ll have a much happier life, holiday season and productive CLNC^® business when you learn to say no, delegate some of those myriad responsibilities and initiate on-the-job training programs for your spouse and children. As long as you’re the CEO, you may as well put those skills to use!

Success Is Inside!

Successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants know that being nice always pays off with your attorney-clients, subcontractors, vendors and employees. Being nice in no way implies that you are weak or have to kowtow to someone else’s whims, nor does it mean you’re always agreeable or a pushover. Being nice can mean that you have the ability to deliver an unpleasant message or opposing viewpoint while coming from a place of professionalism rather than emotion or antagonism.

In your CLNC^® business, whether you’re working with attorney-clients or subcontractors, it helps to have a consciousness about the way you express your dissatisfaction, dissenting opinion or tough message. Your behavior becomes part of that message and to be in control of your message, you have to be in control of yourself. When you’re not, people don’t hear the message and will often discount it because of the way they’ve perceived the delivery or even worse the messenger, no matter how you intended it.

Effective communicators know how to balance the message and the delivery. They don’t deliver bad news with a smile but with equanimity. They don’t disregard the feelings of others or put too much into how others feel about them. Instead they care more about the message itself and don’t load it with unnecessary baggage. Sometimes this means being nice, but more often it means being effective. You know when you’ve achieved the perfect balance when you “nicely” tell someone off and they thank you for it.

Take a moment to reflect on how you deliver your messages. Do you prefer to be “nice” and always relatable, rendering yourself and the people around you ineffective by failing to deliver dissenting viewpoints or tough messages when needed? If yes, you might need to redefine nice.

Do your messages get dismissed by others because they are laden with inappropriate emotions? If yes, learn how to detach from your own junk and the emotional responses of others.

Do you balance the art of nice and effective? If yes, congratulate yourself on achieving that balance but don’t strain your shoulder patting yourself on the back quite yet. Each new day will offer you a plethora of opportunities to choose between “nice” or “effective.” Be sure you choose wisely and consistently.

Success Is Inside!

I always start my day with a plan and usually before 9:00am I am busting that plan. Over the years I know I’ve wrecked more than a few of my executives’ days because my management style is dynamic and priorities change unexpectedly. I believe my job is similar to an emergency nurse – to triage company priorities every second of the day.

Finally Harvard Business Review (October 2011) has validated that I’m onto something. It turns out that the greater a person’s tendency and ability to multitask, the greater their ability to absorb and disseminate information. They also are less likely to bog themselves down in one task while neglecting other important tasks. And here’s what I like about the study – it states that “people with those enhanced tendencies make strategic decisions faster, thus boosting their company’s performance. They become superior information brokers, absorbing and disseminating more insightful information than their average counterparts.”

By multitasking, I’m not talking about doing two things at once such as reading email while you’re on the phone with an attorney-client. What I do mean is the ability to shift back and forth between projects and priorities at a second’s notice.

In today’s world, CLNC^® consultants are faced not only with important cases and deadlines, but also with an onslaught of potential distractions such as email, texting, voicemail and social media. These distractions are just as much a part of your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting business as sitting down and writing that report for your attorney-client. Successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants are able to go from one task to another and have the ability to fully concentrate on each task they are doing. We rarely get the luxury of long uninterrupted periods of work and accordingly, have to bring our full concentration to those periods we get – no matter how brief they may be. That’s where our agility in multitasking comes to the forefront.

Today, what will you be multitasking on? Or is the list too long to write down here?

Success Is Inside!

I’m writing this at the CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminar in Atlanta after I just came off one of the most hectic weeks of my life. First I had the official launch of my new book Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman. If you haven’t been following me on Facebook or Twitter, Wicked Success was #10 on the New York Times Monthly Business Bestseller list Sunday, October 2nd and my publisher just told me Wicked Success will be #6 on the New York Times Hardcover Advice & Misc. bestseller list on Sunday, October 9th! Wicked Success hit #1 on Amazon.com, #3 on the USA Today business bestseller list and it was not only #3 on the Wall Street Journal’s bestselling business book list but also #8 on the WSJ’s bestselling nonfiction book list in the same week! Thank you all for supporting the book and sharing it with all the women you love. Being a New York Times bestselling author is every writer’s dream and you helped to make that dream come true.

If the book launch and hoopla wasn’t enough, that same week also had site visits, rehearsals, event planning, preparation, and all the last-minute details leading up to the events with Stedman Graham – our Friday night Women Embracing Leadership (WEL) reception and event at Unity Church and the all-day Saturday WEL workshop. Forget rest! Thursday night was a late night taping our TV appearance on After the Headlines and a late dinner at a favorite restaurant of mine – Brasserie 19. Friday morning we started very early with a live TV appearance on Great Day Houston and continued with a live radio appearance that afternoon. You would not believe how much hurry up and wait time surrounds TV and radio shows!

So, my staff and I were hopping like toads every day and well into the night on Friday. In fact, when I say well into the night, I mean it. Friday night we had so much fun at the Unity Women Embracing Leadership event that Stedman and I were still signing books until 11:30pm! If you know me, you know I’m a morning person and have usually enjoyed a couple of REM cycles before midnight. But I was still wide awake when we got home and was so excited about Saturday’s WEL workshop that I had trouble going to sleep at 1:00am (really!).

Saturday’s 4:00am alarm came way too soon but I somehow managed to get out of bed and Tom (I love you man!) found some Starbucks before he went off to manage the AV setup for the WEL workshop. That Women Embracing Leadership workshop went flawlessly and everyone who attended walked away with a new direction, ready to achieve their next audacious goal. It was so interesting working with such a diverse group of professional women, all with different issues, goals and dreams. I’m already planning the next event! Afterwards, I took Stedman to a second favorite restaurant, Da Marco, then invited my best friends from New Orleans, who had come in for the weekend, to a private “after party.”

Sunday we all got to spend the day kicking back over a late breakfast and a later lunch. In between, we did a post-mortem on the weekend, bonded over those deep and personal conversations about sex and relationships that only women have and had lots of laughs and cutting up. Our ages range from 26 to 80 which made for a rich experience and even more laughter and cutting up when our 80-year-old friend shared that she’s just as enthusiastic about sex as ever. Tom conveniently discovered that he needed to run some errands, so we got some quality girl-talk time while he escaped the overwhelming surge of oxytocin.

I shared with my friends how inspired I was by a workshop attendee who had just retired from a successful career but was finding that retirement was bringing her no joy. She had been looking forward to retirement, and certainly had no money issues, but just wasn’t finding retirement to be “What I worked 30 years to do.” I advised her that it didn’t matter to me whether she went back to work, started a business or stayed retired. What did matter was that she find joy in her life because we all deserve to have that.

At the workshop, Stedman and I both worked with her to help her not only discover her passion but to create a plan to turn that passion into a business. She left Saturday not only with a plan, but with a new spark in her eye, a spring in her step and a fire burning inside.

As tired as I was after that week, on Monday I was still thinking about that woman and her search for passion. I’m lucky. I love the play side of my life, (I grew up in New Orleans after all) but I also love working and I love being busy. I also love that I can work my passions – teaching nurses to become Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, writing books and helping women to discover their own passions. My crazy busy week was just part of my crazy busy life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Without passion our lives are empty and we feel purposeless. We can discover and create a passion for any part of our lives if we take time to go inside and really listen. The woman at the workshop is about to get really busy and I am ecstatic for her. You can call me crazy, but we have just one life so why not live it with passion – even if it means being crazy busy living that passionate life.

Success Is Inside!

You know that thing you have always wanted to do? I confess I am often perplexed by a person who can never for the life of them achieve a goal they’ve set for themselves. They set the goal, they want the benefits of achieving that goal and then that’s the end of it.

For example, a nurse wants to start a legal nurse consulting business to earn more money and have more free time for family. Great goal, but then the reality check: reaching that goal is going to require work, like working before it’s time to report to that full-time job at the hospital, plus working again after getting home from that hospital job and, oh yeah, working on that coveted weekend off. And did I mention work?

I spend a lot of time with nurses all over the U.S. Some of them have a difficult time relating to my success until I remind them I started out just like they are going to have to – with a full-time job at the hospital. Plus, I had to work overtime just to pay my mortgage. To launch my legal nurse consulting business, I was going to have to work. That was okay. After all, nurses aren’t afraid to work. When this mouthy, opinionated, Italian girl faced the choice of working really hard for the rest of my life at a dead-end job, or to get to work on me, you know what I chose.

If you want to succeed as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, today I only have three words of advice: Get to work!!!

Success Is Inside!

It’s important to avoid a bulletproof mentality in the decisions you make for your legal nurse consulting business as well as in the cases you’re working on for your attorney-clients. I like to shoot holes in my own decisions. This doesn’t mean I don’t move forward with the decision, but it does mean I’ll be more prepared if things go south. Then, when things don’t go perfectly or as planned, we’re not a perfect target for perfect failure and destruction.

At the Institute, before we implement a business idea or decision, I’ll sometimes ask my executive team to brainstorm and discuss the upside and the downside. This forces even the most fervent supporter or opponent of an idea to challenge their own viewpoint. Sometimes it’s the person who introduced the idea who withdraws it. And sometimes it’s the opponent of an idea who ends up fervently embracing it. More often than not, we usually execute an improved version of the original idea.

Any business idea worth pursuing is worth shooting holes into it first. Smart Certified Legal Nurse Consultants know it’s better to shoot those holes themselves than to let someone else beat them to the trigger.

Success Is Inside!

Everyone has a favorite restaurant and I’m lucky enough to have several, depending upon which city I’m in when I get hungry. Here in Houston, it’s an Italian pizzeria enoteca called Dolce Vita in an old house near downtown. Sunday afternoons, if we’re in town, you can frequently find Tom and me on their shaded patio indulging in the outdoors with a glass of healthy red wine and scrumptious, real Italian food. This is a very casual, feel-good, comfy restaurant completely void of pretensions. But Dolce Vita’s standards are far from casual.

From the moment you pull into the parking lot, the valet welcomes you back and parks your car without giving you a ticket. (Side note: Visitors to Houston are always surprised that most restaurants have a valet to park your car 20 feet from the restaurant’s front door, but once you’ve experienced a Houston summer you instantly know why). Somehow when you go to leave, he clairvoyantly has your car waiting, air-conditioner running.

When you first walk in, the staff greats you effusively and escorts you to your table like you’re an old friend. The food is fresh and inventive. One of my favorites is the unique Truffle Egg Toast which is a thick piece of country bread with an egg inside, covered with parmigiano-reggiano cheese and toasted to perfection under a high-temperature broiler until it’s crispy and brown outside. Then it’s covered with sliced black truffles, drizzled with truffle oil and served on a plate so hot I’m surprised the servers can even carry it to the table. When you first cut into it, the egg yolk runs out onto the plate, mixes with more crispy cheese and begs to be mopped up with the bread. (I’m making myself hungry).

But the real magic of this restaurant is one of the servers, Isabel. There are a couple of servers that recognize us and always stop by to chat, but Isabel is different. She takes total ownership of us from the moment she sees us – whether it’s in the doorway, at our table or waiting at the bar for a table.

By total ownership, I mean exactly that. Even if we’re not seated in her section, she treats us like we’re old friends. Once we’re seated, she’ll stop by to chat and supplements the attentions of the assigned server so we receive double the service.  She anticipates every want and need and sometimes I believe she can read our minds. Isabel always has the inside track on what’s good or new on the menu. Best of all, she’s never pushy. If we drop in for a glass of wine and an appetizer, she’s just as happy and attentive as if we bring a bunch of friends and spend a long evening chowing down encouraging each other to “mangia, mangia.”

On our last visit, Tom noticed mussels were part of one of the specials and asked Isabel about his favorite appetizer, mussels in a marina sauce with oven-roasted bread, which wasn’t on the menu. Before we knew it, she’d arranged for the kitchen to prepare that dish for us and delivered it to the table.

In all of the years she’s owned us, Isabel has consistently delivered amazing service. I love the restaurant even when she’s not there, but when she’s working the restaurant feels more like home. In fact when we travel back to Houston, whether it’s from a CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminar, business trip, visit with family or vacation, we immediately dump our luggage and head straight to Dolce Vita.

Could you be more like Isabel in your legal nurse consulting business? Do you take total ownership of your attorney-clients as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant? Do you provide the type of service that they’ll rave about to other attorneys? When you’re reviewing a case, do you make recommendations for additional CLNC^® services based on the attorney’s expressed likes and needs or do you simply provide the same size bowl of spaghetti and meatballs or worse yet wait for the attorney to tell you what to do and when?

The next time you’re getting ready to talk with one of your attorney-clients, take a moment to think of Isabel and take total ownership. They’ll love it and you’ll most likely be creating a relationship for life.

Success Is Inside!

Everybody, including me, loves a bargain. While I don’t like to actually bargain, I do like to feel that I’ve received value for my money. If I get that value during a sale or find something I want at a heavily discounted price, I’m happy. But one thing I won’t do is buy cheap at the expense of quality. While cheap may feel like a bargain at the time, it often ends up costing more in replacement costs, repairs or in a state of dissatisfaction.

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, explores how much a discount culture really costs society. Extrapolating from her writing, you could determine that discounts and cheap goods are actually lowering our standard of living. Instead of buying higher quality, longer lasting goods such as clothing, home furnishing or even food, people are generally turning to lower-cost and much lower-quality replacements. You can find cheap just about anywhere you look, whether it’s cheap toys that break, cheap big-screen TVs that fail all too quickly or cheap farmed tilapia that has no taste and minimal Omega 3s.

What about your legal nurse consulting business? Are you letting cheap get in the way of your CLNC^® success? There are many ways it can. The first is being intimidated by legal nurse consultants who charge less than you do. Certified Legal Nurse Consultants frequently tell me that their attorney-clients have tried someone who charges less only to find that the low-end work product of the cheaper and inadequately trained legal nurse consultant was useless.

I can’t tell you how often a CLNC^® student will approach me and reluctantly confess that before coming to my program, they’d spent their money on a cheaper program only to find out that as a result they were ill-prepared to enter the field of legal nurse consulting. Depending upon their sense of humor about their loss, I sometimes respond that we’re the Harvard of legal nurse consulting and they picked Jonestown Community College the first time, but no worries – they are now on the path to CLNC^® success.

Other legal nurse consultants will tell me that exhibiting at legal conferences is too expensive. I’ll agree that exhibiting seems expensive, but what’s even more expensive is sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring without actively marketing your legal nurse consulting business. When you consider that a single attorney-client can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in your lifetime, I believe it’s expensive not to incorporate exhibiting into your marketing strategy.

We frequently review marketing materials for new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, and I and all of the CLNC^® Mentors instantly detect when someone has designed and printed their own materials in an attempt to cut costs. How many attorney-prospects passed up a consultant because the first impression was cheap?

Websites are another example of cheap that can ultimately be expensive to your legal nurse consulting practice. Tom likes to say that anyone with $3.99/month can create and have a website. I agree and when they do, the website often looks like it cost $3.99. If your website is your billboard on the information superhighway, you want it to be attractive and represent your brand in a professional way. If it doesn’t, you may not even know how many attorneys rejected you outright because you opted for cheap.

Finally, two tips on technology. First when you’re buying equipment for your CLNC^® business, don’t skimp. For example, it’s costly and time-consuming to set up a computer. If it crashes and takes all your legal nurse consulting work-product with it, you’ll quickly learn why people buy from Dell, Apple or other recognized brands. Second, saving money by not subscribing to an online back-up service will save you $60/year – but how much is your legal nurse consulting data stored on your computer worth to you?

Cheap is not always a bargain. Be smart about when and how you choose to be cheap.

Success Is Inside!