Many of you know I share my birthday with my twin brother Vince. (No, we’re not identical, he’s my brother.) When we were teenagers, our parents took us to the local roller-skating rink for our birthday party. All of our friends came and we were soon skating clockwise around the rink, all at different speeds and at different levels of skill.

As you can imagine, Vince and his friends were flying around the rink like the teenage boys they were, trailing testosterone and intentionally zooming in and out among my teenage girlfriends, trying to frighten us, impress us or both.

That is, all the boys but one. Changing the names to protect the relatively innocent, the star athlete, Danny, couldn’t skate. He’d apparently never been on skates before, but to his credit, was gamely shuffling around the outside of the rink with one hand hovering near the safety of the handrail. The girls were all laughing as we zoomed past him!

Then about a half hour into the party, Danny took a fall and to his horror, split his pants from front to back. Now, you’d think that a macho football player would call it quits right there and then. Instead, he stood up, took off his sweater, tied it around his waist to cover the split and got right back to shuffling around the rink. He stayed for the rest of the party and you’d never have guessed from the fun he was having that anything had happened.

To this day I recall with fond memories how much heart Danny showed, not just by taking on something he wasn’t very good at, roller-skating, in front of all his friends who celebrated his athletic prowess, but especially the heart he showed in staying in the game after splitting his pants.

What about you? How much heart do you put into your CLNC^® business even when you split your pants right in front of your attorney-clients? Do you get back up on your CLNC^® skates and get back on the rink or do you sit on the sidelines?

Like a roller rink, legal nurse consulting isn’t always smooth skating. Some days you’ll fly around the rink with your attorney-client’s praise, others you’ll be shuffling along with that difficult case you’re working on and you may even take a fall. But if it starts to get rough, think of Danny shuffling around that rink with his split pants; show some heart and get back on the legal nurse consulting rink. Before you know it you’ll be at the party with your CLNC^® peers.

Here’s the funniest part of this story – Danny went on to become a professional football player with our hometown Saints. But as far as I know he never went skating again.

Success Is Inside!

I just spent the Fourth of July weekend with one of my best high school friends, Missy from New Orleans. We especially bonded when we attended an all boys high school together to take a physics class and made the Times-Picayune newspaper for being the first and only girls in the city of New Orleans to ever attend an all boys school. Over the years we have shared laughs and tears and an incredible friendship that has stood the test of time.

One of my cousins sent me a funny email about the difference between friends and Louisiana friends and since I’m not yet into work mode today after such a festive weekend I thought I’d share it. Of course, I’ve added my own humor to it. Enjoy a good laugh and hope you had a fun Fourth of July .

I love all my friends, best friends, blog friends and Facebook friends. Even better than having a friend is being a friend.

Have a great week and if you’re not going to spend at least one day this weekend with a good friend, call one and tell him or her how much they mean to you.

Success Is Inside!

Vickie and I travel a lot, so I’m always on the lookout for travel apps. I’ve come across some great apps that legal nurse consultants can use everywhere from Paris to Poughkeepsie and, with the exception of XE, I use all of these right in my hometown. Most of these are free and I’ve indicated where they’re available for iPhone^®, Windows^® Phone 7, Blackberry^® and Android^® users.

Here’s six of my favorite travel apps.

1. XE Currency Converter: A FREE app that quickly converts one currency to another. You select the currencies you want to track. It can tell you what an individual Swedish Kroner is worth in U.S. dollars or, if you type in the amount of a meal in Kroners it’ll tell you how much that Swedish meatball costs in your home currency. I love this app! Available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. There’s no Win Phone 7 version, but it does have a mobile site you can access. Get your copy at XE.com.
2. iTranslate: A FREE app that will quickly translate short phrases from one language to another. I learned about this from a friend who uses it to insult his buddies in their native language (Men and their toys!) I find it keeps me from ordering the sea urchin off the sushi menu in Japan. It doesn’t translate Klingon yet so I can’t use it to connect with our techies. Available for iPhone, Android and even Blackberry. Get your copy from your phone’s app store.
3. Yelp! This is a crazy little FREE app that, once it locates you, will help you find just about anything nearby – gas stations, banks, restaurants, etc. My favorite part is it rates restaurants with user reviews and tips. It works overseas also. Thanks to one of the CLNC^® Mentors for tipping me off about this app. You can use Yelp! without registering for their community. Available for iPhone, Win Phone 7, Android and even Blackberry. Get your copy at Yelp.com and you’ll have the world at your fingertips.
4. Zagat: Zagat is a ratings community for restaurants, hotels, bars, etc. It’s a little more elitist and a little less populist than Yelp! It doesn’t help with gas, banks, etc., but I find that I generally agree more with Zagat when it comes to food and I’ve used their web-based service to make advance reservations nationally and internationally. There is a cost to use the website and app, but it is well worth it. Available for iPhone, Win Phone 7, Android and even Blackberry. Register or get your copy at Zagat.com. This will keep you from taking your favorite attorney-client out for a bad bowl of Tom Yum.
5. Google Maps: FREE in exchange for your soul. Google already knows everything about you so extending this to maps helps me find my way to obscure, hole in the wall places. Plug in your destination and it’ll take you there! Probably available for every mobile OS known to man and a few that haven’t been invented yet.
6. Flashlight: FREE from various sources for each of the different mobile platforms. This helps you find your way to the beach at night, your keys in the movie theatre and as an added plus, I can hold up a colored screen and lead Vickie right to me in a dark room (Heh, heh!). It has so many uses that you should drop what you’re doing and get one today. One incidental benefit is that this app can be used to quickly drain your phone’s battery when you need to drop below the threshold level for recharging.

FINE PRINT/CAVEAT: You’ll need to have your location services on to take advantage of most of these apps, data transfer and other hidden costs may apply, blah, blah, blah.

Those are a few of my “can’t live without” apps. How about yours? I’d like to hear from my CLNC^® amigos about their favorite app, travel or otherwise.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Today when I was working out with my trainer, it seemed I was doing everything wrong. It didn’t matter if I was doing a chest-press, a squat or even lying flat on my back in exhaustion – he was correcting me. This could have had something to do with my late night at the Houston Rodeo’s Keith Urban concert (or not).

Jerome is a perfect specimen of muscle who has control over every part of his anatomy. He’ll tell me to fully engage my lat muscles and I’m thinking I’m a nurse and I didn’t know the lats went that deep. Somehow he coaches me until, yes, I find them and yes, I actually engage them.

Today he was relentless. “Vickie, pin those shoulder blades to the bench. Vickie, contract your gluts. Vickie, engage your ADs. Vickie, hold that plank for a minute longer.” For 60 minutes he was instructing, critiquing and continuously driving home the message. I was getting so tired of hearing my name called out that I finally broke down and said “Jerome, call your wife and tell her Vickie said don’t come home tonight, it’s not going to be pretty.” Jerome laughed and replied, “Vickie you are so funny. Now pull those shoulder blades down and back like I told you.”

When we want to do something right, we find a coach or mentor to instruct, critique and drive us no matter how tired we get. The best athletes on the planet have coaches for a reason. The next time a CLNC^® Mentor critiques you and drives home a message, sit up, pay attention and get to work. Your CLNC^® business depends on it.

Success Is Inside!

Tom has a T-shirt he picked up in Fiji a couple of years ago while on his quest to dive with hammerhead sharks. It says, “You can run out of air and die. You can get bitten by a shark and die or you can fall off the couch and die. Get off the couch and into the water!”

I love the pithiness of T-shirt philosophy – even when it seems that the same twisted mind writes them all. The slogans distill our thoughts, humor and fears into easy-to-laugh at sound-bites. “No matter where you go there you are” is an insightful reminder that external factors don’t control our happiness. I once saw a T-shirt with a seated Buddha, making a mudra with the same hand that was holding a hot dog, the caption – “Make me one with everything.” Cracked me up right on the spot. “Your mother was right about me” is one that always makes me nostalgic about the fact that Tom never got to meet my mom.

If I were to put my personal favorites on a T-shirt to wear for fun, they’d read, “Put down the phone and drive,” “Life is good all the time” and “Happiness is a choice.” The T-shirts I’d wear to work would say, “Today is the first day of the rest of the work-week” or “Just do it – NOW!”

What nurse, or legal nurse consultant, won’t crack up over a T-shirt that says, “Great veins,” “My catheter bag’s on the other leg,” “Rehab is for quitters,” “DNR (by popular request)” or “Nursing, it can make strong men weep.” Belly laughs all around.

I’m even thinking of creating my own line of CLNC^® wear for my future Camp Buck-Up. They’ll have all sorts of catchy phrases like, “Lead, follow or get out of the way!,” “We were all born crying – time to outgrow it” and “Whining and complaining are NOT competitive sports.” If I get contemplative about business, perhaps I’d offer the Zen-like shirt “After the marketing, the marketing.”

T-shirt philosophy captures not only pop culture but also our 140 character Twitter/texting culture too. At the same time, it reflects our fears, our prejudices and sometimes our beliefs, all on a pre-shrunk cotton billboard that we can change as quickly, and as often, as we change our minds.

Tomorrow when you start working on your legal nurse consulting business, what T-shirt will you put on? What will be the first thought in your day, the one you’d want or wouldn’t want others to see and judge you by? Will it be positive or negative? Will it be something irreverent? That thought on your T-shirt tells you everything you need to know about the success of your day and the success of your CLNC^® business.

Success Is Inside!

It’s Spring Break time again and peace has been restored to my neighborhood. I live in what could almost be described as a pastoral setting. Although I live in Houston, the fourth largest city in the U.S., I actually live in a city within the city of Houston. It’s a small neighborhood with its own fire and police departments. On Saturday mornings, you can watch the hunky firemen wash and wax the fire trucks. We’ve got a couple of little league and soccer fields and when the weather’s nice the morning air is filled with the sounds of sprinklers and the evenings are filled with the sounds of children having fun and engaging in organized chaos.

Except for one small thing, it’s like living in a Norman Rockwell painting. Right in the middle of these fields of fun is an elementary school. Each day on my morning commute I have the misfortune to pass through a school zone full of frenzied, caffeine-deprived soccer moms jockeying for position to drop their little ones off at the perfect spot.

This sounds like no big deal until you experience it first hand. Suddenly a quiet street turns into a heavy-metal combination of a demolition derby, death race, Indy 500 and bumper-car-ride full of median-strip-hopping SUVs the size of small airliners. Dropping off children is a competitive sport worthy of its own reality show.

I almost believe they can smell fear or hesitation from the inside of the Suburban. Be a second or two slow off the stop sign, and three cars have glided through the 4-way stop at the intersection (one from behind you). They’ll make kamikaze turns in front of you to drift-slide into a parallel parking spot like a Japanese racer. It’s like a pool of armored piranhas.

They come at you from all directions – U-turning, 3-point-turning (in about 16 points due to the overly large turning radius), stopping and waiting with the turn signal on for a parking spot that won’t be available until that driver gets off her cell phone, walks her son to the school, has a conference and cookie with the teacher, walks back, adjusts her makeup in the rearview mirror and checks every radio station in Houston for her favorite song before heading off to Starbucks^® for a Skinny Latte before yoga class.

The relentlessness of this race-for-the-door makes me a little crazy. At the center of this sturm und drang stand the gatekeepers who patiently wave the cars in, one after the other, to drop off the kiddos. These are the wizards of the walk and they have the power to banish an unruly mom for a second lap around the “fruit” loop before discharging the precious cargo. Even the person who two seconds ago was threatening to pull your intestines out through your teeth suddenly experiences extreme bursts of politeness and becomes as docile as a lamb when faced with the power of the gatekeepers.

What’s the takeaway for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants? Don’t run over the gatekeeper in your dash to the attorney’s office. Don’t be intimidated either. Gatekeepers control access but they have rules to do their job and as long as you obey the rules, or don’t bend them too far, you can get access. Be nice to them. Hard to believe as it may be, gatekeepers are people too. Pay them a compliment (“Gee, your hair is a nice shade of blue today – it complements your housecoat.”), bring them some of their favorite food (roasted wildebeest or brownies) and remember their birthdays (right before Lincoln’s). Be nice to the gatekeeper and they’ll be nice to you.

When all else fails, just call the attorney’s office and say “Hey Doris, this is your name here. Can you put me through to attorney’s first name here? She’s expecting my call.”

Good luck. Stay off the streets and up on the street lights where it’s safe.

Success Is Inside!

My family is pretty competitive. It started with dad beating us out of our lunch money at cards. And, having an athletic twin brother also raised the competition in the family sports department.

During this year’s Great Christmas Migration, we renewed one of our oldest family traditions. Instead of staying inside and watching a bowl game we grabbed a football and created our own bowl – one we call the “Red Beans and Rice Bowl.” We headed outside to play a mean game of “touch football.”

Don’t let the name fool you though – in my family, it’s touch in name only – we treat it pretty much like a full contact sport. Plus, we play football in the street, not on some wussy, grass-covered soft field. Traffic stops while the ball is in play. Gutters form the sidelines, parked cars and curbs become obstacles or advantages.

This was our first family game of football in almost six years – our last ended when my older sister, Karen, tried to throw a cross-body block on a community mailbox (you know – those big ones with about 20 boxes) resulting in no visible destruction of federal property but some very visible bruises and a squashed ball.

It was great to have the family together – my twin Vince, sister Karen, her husband and their sons, our two twenty-something nephews Josh and Matt, Tom and I, all tying on our sneakers and ready to go. Even my dad, Sal, came out to officiate (for a while anyway). We squared off – the three Milazzo siblings versus the guys – Tom, Rick, Josh and Matt. As I said, Vince is the real athlete in the family. I like to tease him that as children, while I read business books he played with his balls. We thought that having Vince on our team would make it fair – three of us versus the four of them.

Vickie and Vince

Karen, Vince and Vickie

The game started and we realized that the last six years hadn’t been exactly kind. Before long, one of us was limping from two torn tendons (he’s currently recovering from surgery), one was holding her hip and two were huffing and puffing from the running (the twenty-somethings). It seemed prudent to periodically stop to let some of the traffic go by, so we could all catch our breath. We weren’t dashing as far (or as fast) for the long passes and the passes weren’t even that long! The twenty-somethings did learn it can be pretty hard to catch someone twice their age any time they went after Vince. They also learned it can be quite easy each time they went after Karen or me. The ball changed hands and we were scoreless until finally Tom beat me in the backfield, making a shoestring catch (stoically thrown by Rick, playing through the pain of his torn tendons) and the only score of the day (he scored again later, too).

Sal immediately declared the game over and we all headed for the house for a cup of healthy green tea (who am I kidding? – cold beers). One of us crawled, one limped and one we had to drag. We were bruised, battered and broken but we were all glowing because we’d gotten out and done it. Even Sal was glowing. Of course, the pot of red beans and rice waiting for us inside added to that glow.

The survivors (sort of) – Rick, Karen, Joshua, Vickie and Vince

We had some great family fun and we did it at our speed. What did I learn that day (other than I still can’t outrun my brother)? An important lesson – you’re never too old to get out and play – even if you have to go a little slower. Sometimes you’ve got to limp to the attorney’s office. Sometimes you’re going to be making a shoestring catch, but no matter what you’ve got to go all the way in your legal nurse consulting business. Enjoy your own Super Bowl^®.

See you in the end zone!

Vickie

Thanks to all of you who joined Vickie and me at my surprise birthday party Saturday night. Today’s really my birthday but to get 80 adults and miscellaneous children to stay out until the wee hours on a work night is pretty hard, so she planned it for January 17, the Saturday before.

Did I mention it was a surprise party? I really mean SURPRISE party. I had no idea whatsoever that Vickie had schemed, plotted and planned (not to mention gone wine tasting during a workday) for so long with so many to pull off my surprise.

Special shout-outs to those who were kind enough to come in from out of town, the two who ran in the Houston Marathon the next morning and to someone who had to work Sunday (I hope that sermon came out well). Thanks too, for those who came from all over town, arranged sitters, etc. I was, and am, overwhelmed by your generosity (and don’t get me started on the gifts).

For those of you who know Vickie, the party didn’t just end Saturday (well, really Sunday) – she kept it going for the better part of Sunday and even Monday. I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world (now that the headache is gone and Vickie moved the recycle bin full of wine bottles into the neighbor’s yard).

I hope to see you all there again next year, in the same place, for even more fun.

Tom

We posted the 2009 NACLNC^® Conference opening video on YouTube…and it’s a RIOT!

My designers turned me into an animated cartoon character getting ready for, and going to the NACLNC^® Conference.

Now, I have traveled all over the world, trained thousands of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, wrote a bestselling book and even met some celebrities along the way…but I never thought I’d see a little “Cartoon Vickie” being streamed across the world on the Internet.

Just thought I’d share with you since everyone at our office got such a kick out of it.

Let me know what you think!

P.S. That cartoon put me in such a good mood, I’ll take $200.00 off the $800.00 2009 NACLNC^® Conference tuition.
Just give my office a call at 800-880-0944 and tell us you saw the “Cartoon Vickie” to get the $200.00 discount. I’ll keep this offer active until January 12, 2009.

Success Is Inside!

You’ve heard the news: bailouts for this industry, bailouts for that industry, bailouts for everyone except for the honest business woman or man. It seems like you have to be a pretty big crook or a terrible money manager to get a bailout from the government.

This morning, over some healthy green tea, my staff and I discussed what a government bailout might look like for the average entrepreneur:

• A pair of rose-colored glasses to help you to see the financial news in a better light.
• A lottery ticket to give you something for your retirement fund that has better odds than the stock market.
• A used TSA quart-size baggie containing leftover government office supplies (that you and I paid for anyway) such as bent paperclips, broken black binder clamps, stump-ends of staples and an empty bottle of white glue to help keep your business together.
• A roll of duct tape in case the above fails (BTW – here in Texas my friends call it “hunnert-mile-an-hour tape” and you can too – when your business gets rolling again).
• An open, and partially consumed, bottle of Jack Daniels (probably from the Treasury Secretary’s liquor cabinet) to help take your mind off your financial problems.
• A bottle of extra-strength Tylenol^® to help cure the effects of your late-nite discourse with “Gentleman Jack.”
• A bag of generic coffee to give you something to wash down the Tylenol^® that morning and give you the energy to go to work and focus on your business (and not the economy).
• And finally, a Travel Doodle Pro to help you stay in communication with your office after your Blackberry^® account is cancelled.

All of this would arrive postage due, in a damaged box, courtesy of the folks who brought you the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the Big Three bailout.

I’m hoping that it doesn’t come to this, but in a world that’s seeing its first big nursing layoffs, I’m glad I work in what my friend, Dale Barnes, (Check back for an upcoming interview with Dale) calls a recession-proof profession, legal nurse consulting. One thing’s for sure – the stock market may run short of money, but America will never run short of attorneys!

If the government is going to let the auto industry suffer and die, it won’t help entrepreneurs either. Don’t wait for the government to bail you out. Only you can bail yourself out.

Success Is Inside!