All Certified Legal Nurse Consultants love their electronic gadgets and rarely go anywhere without them. I’ll bet few of you can remember life before smart phones, email everywhere and the connectivity we all take for granted. I’m not sure if it’s good for us. I do know I love having my iPhone^® in the car, especially since the CD player (not my 8-track) in the old “global warmer” crapped out. I have a Monster iCarPlay Cassette Adapter that lets me play my iPhone/iPod^® music through my cassette deck. This of course runs down the iPhone’s battery and gets to the weakness of all electronic devices – battery life.

Any CLNC^® consultant who has ever charged an iPhone, Blackberry^®, Droid^® or iPod using the USB port on a personal computer knows that charging times can be incredibly slow, especially compared to the short charging times of a “wall wart” charger.

Why is that? Well, sparing my CLNC^® amigos the geeky details, the USB ports on your computer put out a lower power level than does a wall charger. If you’ve been in your car and your iPod died during your favorite Justin Beiber song or your phone died in the middle of a legal nurse consulting case discussion with your favorite attorney-client, you’re now probably smart enough to carry a car charger that plugs into your cigarette lighter socket.

It’s one of those immutable rules of life that the longer the drive the quicker your battery will give out. If you use your phone’s GPS, you know how quickly that drains the battery and many car chargers will simply maintain battery level, not charge the battery if the device is on while charging. Likewise if you’ve ever simply tried to charge your phone in the car, you know it’s not a perfect science. Car-charger power levels can be just as low as a USB port.

So what is a savvy Certified Legal Nurse Consultant to do? Easy, buy a Scosche reVIVE II Dual USB Car Charger. It’s advertised for an iPad but here’s the beauty of this particular charger – it has both a 5 watt (1 amp) and a 10 watt (2.1 amp) output which will kick-start just about any device that can be charged through a USB port! You simply plug in your cable and device and baby, you’ve got the power! You can even charge two devices, like your headset and phone at the same time. SMALL PRINT WARNING: Check your device’s documentation to be sure it can handle a 2.1 amp charge BEFORE charging your device. You’ll also need to buy your own USB cables but that’s not an issue.

Consider one of these for your CLNC^® Batmobile and you won’t regret it.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I once described a wine to Vickie as being “not entirely intolerable.” After about a month supporting Windows^® 7 on Vickie’s spiffy new laptop, I’d describe Windows 7 as “not the best, but not entirely intolerable” and I think that any Certified Legal Nurse Consultants running Windows 7 would agree.

Vickie always jokes that she’s the early adopter in our family. She went from paper Daytimer^® to Palm^® PDA, she had the first cell phone, the first Blackberry^® and now is the first to dip her toes into the wild world of Windows 7. In point of fact, her new laptop is so fast and glorious that I’m having a hard time not liking it. It runs circles around my XP machine and has caused me no small amount of hardware envy. That being said, I’m not in a hurry to leave my old, comfortable shoebox of an XP machine for Windows 7 and neither should you.

If you’re a CLNC^® consultant who’ll be buying a new computer for your legal nurse consulting business (or family), you’ll be saddled with Win7. Once you get done tweaking it, you’ll be happy with it. Win7 combines the best of Vista (if there was any) and the stability of XP to good effect. I’m having a little difficulty navigating the options for filing documents (but we work with networked storage so it’s not a real issue for us) and will muddle through it with the help of a Windows 7 for Dummies book. You’ll probably get Office 2010 at the same time so that book will help.

Vickie works in two worlds: with her XP desktop at the office and her Win7 laptop she uses at home and on the road. To her credit, she goes back and forth between the two without a problem and once you’re on Win7 you’ll like it too.

Back to the question of the day from one of my CLNC^® amigos: should you upgrade today, tomorrow or next week? I’d say only if you’re upgrading because you’re buying a new computer for your legal nurse consulting business. The average life of a computer, laptop or otherwise, is about three years. If you are a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant with a fairly new computer running Windows XP, there’s no need to put yourself through the upgrade and data transfer process.

With Vickie, we built her Win7 machine from scratch and all I had to do was move her iTunes^® library, photos, documents and other settings, etc., from her old computer to her new one. Trying to upgrade to Win7 on a box running XP or Vista will be more problematic and much more laborious. In fact, I have a Win7 laptop that I’m going to do a “Tom” build on (in my spare time) and then one day just transfer over to it, sort of like we did with Vickie.

So, stay with XP until you’re forced to Win7. Once you’re there, you’ll enjoy it.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Over the years I’ve run into students at my CLNC^® Certification Programs who can’t easily answer a simple question. When you ask them what time it is, they proceed to tell you how to build a watch before they can say “It’s 11:15.” When this happens I want to shout, “Objection, non-responsive!” in the middle of a long, obviously rambling answer that has nothing to do with what I’ve asked them. I’m sure you all know someone like this. Hopefully that person’s not you.

The ability to “answer the question asked” is a quality successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants must possess. Attorneys are crazy-busy people and don’t have the time to listen to unnecessary details or rambling communications. Attorneys are like the police on the old Dragnet TV series: they want “The facts ma’am, just the facts.” The next time you’re in an interview with an attorney-prospect and he says “Tell me about yourself” he’s not asking you to regurgitate your autobiography; he really wants to know what you’re going to do to help him win his cases.

If you veer off, even just occasionally, start today to retrain the way you think. Consciously observe if you are making a simple question or issue more complex than it really is. Pay attention to not only how you communicate but how you think. Assess for yourself how you analyze your day, a problem or a case. Do you quickly get to the essence or are you cluttering unnecessarily? Do you come up for air while answering a question? Do you occasionally pause to receive feedback or clarifying questions or do you go on until the person you’re talking to starts looking for a way out of the room?

The bottom line is that in your legal nurse consulting business and in your life, simplicity sells. When someone asks you a question answer it succinctly. Attorneys want information and they want it fast. Make sure what you tell them is what they need.

Success Is Inside!

At Vickie Milazzo Institute we have lots of policies and procedures. Not as many as we had at the hospital, but still enough to fill an electronic employee manual to overflowing. One of my favorite policies is the Institute’s “Interruptions” policy. This simple policy sets up a hierarchy of reasons and times when a person working “on drive-by,” as we call a closed door, can be interrupted. The intention behind this policy is to give us all the space and time we need to do that work which calls for uninterrupted concentration. Of course, this policy is routinely and regularly ignored.

Like any other Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, whether you’re working at home with family around you, in an office with other CLNC^® consultants and attorneys around or camped out in a Starbucks with your laptop, I can guarantee you’ll be interrupted. I personally think there is a secret alarm or flashing blue light that goes off the moment I shut my office door to focus. It seems to be a shout-out for people to start lining up to interrupt and ask me questions that range from the important (How many pieces do you want to print of the WomenEmbracingLeadership.com postcards?), to the mundane (Can I go to lunch at 12:15 instead of 12:30 today?) and to the ones that are so goofy that I won’t even mention them.

I handle interruptions pretty easily – I’m sure it’s a result of my nursing training and experience. Haven’t we all had that shift where everything happens at once and once it settles down, it all happens again? Nursing teaches us to handle interruptions with grace and aplomb and still keep our cool. That’s why I know that by letting someone interrupt me, they can get the answer they need and get on with their work, which keeps them productive.

But other than all those outsiders, there’s one person who is responsible for interrupting the work you’re doing in your legal nurse consulting business and keeping you from getting to the really big things you need to do – like that report for your favorite attorney-client or reading that boring deposition of the doctor who’s accused of implanting unneeded cardiac stents. That one person is probably responsible for more interruptions than anyone else in your home or office. I’ll give you one clue – it’s not your significant other.

Who is the responsible party? That’s correct, it’s you. Today we live in a world where we are surrounded by a plethora of interruptions – there are email pop-up notifications, Facebook postings, Twitter streams to read, voicemail on cell and office phones, not to mention the latest news of interest to Certified Legal Nurse Consultants that pops up on my Google^® homepage. While writing this blog, my email notification flashed at least 15 times alerting me to what may (or may not be) a new emergency. I won’t know until I switch myself to email mode and start responding. Right now I’m in blog mode, which means that all those other distractions like Twitter and Facebook will need to wait until this job is complete. Could I allow these communications to interrupt me if I wanted to? Yes, but I won’t, and you can train yourself not to allow them to either.

It’s a matter of discipline. When we’re working on a difficult project we either get so immersed in it that we forget time, place and surroundings (once, just once, Tom had to remind me to come to dinner) or we find the project so boring that we practically look for interruptions (you click the refresh button on your Facebook wall and when nothing changes click it again just to be sure). In the first state our focus gives us the discipline to work without interruptions. The second state is where our discipline gives us the focus to keep from interrupting ourselves.

In this holiday season we need all of the time we can spare to enjoy the holidays. It’s more important than ever to work in as focused a manner as possible. If you can interrupt the interrupter you’ll get a whole lot more done and have time to truly enjoy that holiday eggnog with your special someone.

Success Is Inside!

Tom jokes with me that I have two speeds – fast and off. It’s true that I work fast and that I have an innate way of grasping a concept and moving forward with it. I can also switch back and forth between complex issues with a speed and mindfulness that baffles my staff (even Tom gets temporarily derailed by sudden changes in direction). At the end of the day though, that speed catches up with me and I switch to off, usually right after a glass of healthy red wine. During the day, I move like quicksilver and expect the same from my staff – the legal nurse consulting world moves rapidly and we need to stay ahead of it.

I never cared for those self-help books that claim you must act slowly to be mindful. After all, most of us can’t and don’t live a Buddhist monk’s life in this fast-paced world. During a trip to an ancient Buddhist Monastery in Kyoto, Japan it was the monks themselves who shattered the “mindfulness” myth perpetuated by many self-help authors. Buddhist monks are the epitome of mindfulness and on this trip I observed them mindfully walking the grounds, ringing the prayer bell, meditating, sweeping or gardening, all in the slow and deliberate manner we associate with mindfulness.

But to get to that mindful state, they must first wake and eat. That’s where the myth was shattered and where speed came in. Well before dawn when the waking bell rings, the otherwise peaceful monks become a beehive of frenzied activity. They rapidly roll off their pallets, “thump,” fold and store their bedding and stream down the hall to the meal room, rice bowls in hand. There they pass wordlessly through the line, receive their food and shovel it into their mouths with a speed and intensity that makes a nursing lunch look leisurely. The monks accomplish all of these tasks quickly, but at the same time, in a fully-present and mindful state – despite the speed.

That day I learned that doing something quickly doesn’t mean that you have to abandon mindfulness when you do so. You can be fully present in every state and at every speed – so long as you have the intention to do or be so. In your legal nurse consulting business you’ll need to be fully present in all your tasks and you’ll expect the same from your CLNC^® subcontractors. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be expected to work slowly – you can be fast and mindful. To be a successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultant you must practice mindfulness at whatever speed you’re working and sometimes your attorney-clients will need you to work at the speed of light. Start practicing speedy mindfulness today.

Success Is Inside!

For a busy CLNC^® consultant staying up with pertinent information on the web can be pretty time consuming. There’s an awful lot of information that changes on a daily, hourly, even as-you-read-this basis. One way for you to stay on top of the news or the latest changes in a subject of interest for your legal nurse consulting business is to use RSS feeds on a customized Google^® or Yahoo!^® homepage.

Another way is to set up “Google Alerts.” These harness the unmatchable power of Google^® to search the web, at whatever time-basis you choose, for subjects of your choice. You simply need to go to Google.com/alerts where you’ll see this page:

In the search terms box, use words or a phrase directly related to your legal nurse consulting business (don’t be too specific) and set the other conditions, such as how often you want Google to check for your terms and your email address (so that it knows where to send it). Click on Create Alert and it will send you a verification email. Once you click on the link in the verification email, you’ll start getting alerts. You can set up as many alerts as you want on as many topics as you want – you’re only limited by your curiosity and the amount of email you want to receive.

This is a terrific way for busy Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to keep up with the most current news and events without having to spend their precious non-billable hours surfing the web to do so.

Keep on techin’,
Tom

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!

I don’t know about your husband (or wife), but mine is a creature of habits. Some good, some bad and some just…

For all his tech-tippyness, he even has a bad tech habit and I have his personal permission to share this one with Certified Legal Nurse Consultants (Tom, I owe you one!). Here goes: any time Tom starts searching, no matter where he is on the information superhighway at the time, he’ll go straight to either Google^® or Yahoo!^® to start his search. To get there he’ll open a new tab on whichever browser he’s got open and click “Home.” On Firefox^® it’s his customized Yahoo! homepage, on Internet Explorer^® 8 it’s his customized Google homepage and I have no idea what’s on his Safari^® page. Once the customized page has loaded, he starts getting ready to search.

Now, I’ve watched him do this. He doesn’t go straight to the search box and start typing, first he’ll scan that customized page of RSS news feeds, etc. for current updates, weather alerts, checks on how the Dow is doing and then when he’s satisfied that all is well with the world, he begins searching. By this time he’s lost at least two minutes and those minutes build up over a day, a week and a year. Every minute he’s assuring all is right with the world is one he could be spending on the ironing (Just kidding – it’s actually washing the dishes!). In all fairness, he does keep me updated on what’s going on in the world – but at a cost to his efficiency.

One of the things working in the ICU as an RN taught me is economy of movement. When you’re coding or resuscitating a patient you don’t want to be taking three steps to do something you can do in one or two. Seconds count when lives are in the balance. I try to apply economy of movement to my workday to keep me focused on the big things. I could end up needing to work all day every day if I’m inefficient, and that would interfere with my vacation plans!

That’s why when I search the Internet, no matter what webpage I’m on, I go straight to the search box built into the top of my web browser. Tom converted me to Firefox and I love to search right from the browser. If I’m ready to leave the page I’m on, I’ll just type my search term in the built-in search box and “Google” away. If I want to stay on the page I’m on and am just doing some fact checking, I’ll simply click open a new blank tab (Ctrl + t) and search away still using that built-in box. Firefox allows me to select the search engine I want to use:

IE8 picks Bing^®/Live search as its default and I’d have to ask Tom how to change that so I’ve left it on Bing:

I do recommend that you customize your iGoogle^® homepage and Yahoo! homepage to add RSS feeds relevant to your legal nurse consulting business. I also recommend that you search from “inside the box” to stay efficient and free of distractions.

Keep on searching – efficiently.

Success Is Inside!

I’ve told you about the bamboo that highlights my morning tea time. Lately there’s been a pair of northern cardinals living in the bougainvillea growing outside my living room windows. They’re a matched set, a male and female, and whenever they appear, they bring a joyful mindfulness to my day, reminding me that life is good. I used to think they mate for life (like me) but found out that it’s more likely just for one season. I also learned that during the wooing process the male will not only sing to the female, but he’ll bring her seeds and feed them to her beak-to-beak. I’m still waiting to see that action (and I don’t mean from Tom).

Blogging about the bamboo and the cardinals reminds me of another practice I’d like to share with my Certified Legal Nurse Consulting colleagues. That’s the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness, in its simplest form, is simply being fully in the present and taking in things as they are. It is also being fully aware of our body’s sensations, such as our breathing. It can be fully embracing the joy I feel watching the cardinals hop from branch to branch. When you’re walking, it can be feeling the satisfaction of using your muscles, noticing and appreciating the beauty of the budding trees or smelling the hamburgers from the local cafe.

I’ve found that it is easier to be mindful when I’m doing nonwork-related activities such as hiking in the woods. When I’m working, I need to be intentional about mindfulness and not let my mind start flying in a thousand different directions about what has to get done by whom. I need to be mindful about eliminating the clutter that distracts me from my big vision. I have a friend who defines multitasking as worrying about many things at the same time. Worry is a completely useless emotion and that’s why mindfulness is so relevant to everything we do. Mindfulness gives us the focus we need to complete even the most challenging projects.

What about you? When you’re working in your legal nurse consulting business on a report for an attorney-client, are you thinking about the time-crunch, how much you don’t like typing or are you wishing your children would quit interrupting your work? Are you wondering how you can find a CLNC^® subcontractor with a particular specialty or where you’ll locate an expert witness for a case. Is your mind flying everywhere but on your work? Be honest, it happens to all of us.

It’s been said that any activity that is done mindfully is a form of meditation. In other words, if you fully release yourself into the work, feeling the mouse in your hand, listening to the clacking of the keys on your keyboard, marveling at the science that brings the Internet into your home and the computer technology that allows you to share your knowledge with the attorney-client, you turn a chore into a mindful activity. Even pausing to appreciate the interplay of the sun in the branches of the trees outside your window or the sound of your house as it heats in the day can be an exercise in mindfulness.

Apply mindfulness to anything you consider a chore and turn it from a chore into a meditation – dialing the phone and being fully present in the conversation, enjoying the smell and warmth of the clothes as you fold them from the dryer or just feeling the texture of the crisp pages of the research study you’re reading. I’m trying to be mindful as I type this. I’ve closed my email program and am engaging my fingers on the keyboard, listening to my own mind and blocking out the ringing phones in the office.

But, don’t force mindfulness, it needs to become a natural act. Muho Noelke has pointed out “…we have to forget things like I should be mindful of this or that. If you are mindful, you are already creating a separation (I – am – mindful – of – ….). Don’t be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walk walk. Let the talk talk. Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the work work. Let sleep sleep.”

That’s the first step on the path to true mindfulness. Don’t “be” mindful, “become” mindful.

Success Is Inside!

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not hooked on Lost. I don’t know what “frack” means and I’ve never watched American Idol. I used to keep my television in my closet (it was a 12″ black and white) and it wasn’t out of shame – I just didn’t watch TV. Even though we now have one of those state-of-the-art flat screen, surround-sound systems (ask Tom for details), I still don’t watch TV. I will also confess there are a couple of exceptions. I set aside an evening for each of the Grammys^®, Golden Globes^®, Super Bowl^® (for Tom) and the Academy Awards^® as sacrosanct (don’t call me, I won’t answer). But the other 361 days of the year, my TV is off. My Google^® homepage tells me the news headlines and Tom keeps me in the loop. If the world was going to come to an end, my executive team would notify me and ask me to release the Institute employees early so they can go home and prepare (being on the Gulf Coast, I’ve even gotten tsunami warnings). In other words, TV doesn’t play a role in my life – it’s not an early warning system and it’s not a distraction.

Now, on the other extreme, I know legal nurse consultants who live and die by their TVs. Between reruns of Seinfeld, Friends and shows like The Bachelor and Dancing with the Stars, they eat, sleep, relax and work. That’s okay for them and possibly for you. I understand the need to let your mind coast and let your body relax. One of my best friends gets home from work each day in time to watch Oprah – that’s how he (correct, this is not a typo) relaxes. I relax through books, movies, Jacuzzi^®, meditation and a glass of a great red wine.

Let me ask you a question – if you turned your television off for just one night a week and put that time into your legal nurse consulting business, what dividends would it return?

TV is passive. As Zen master Takuan says, “This day will not come again.” Every hour you sit in front of a television you’re accomplishing nothing. Each of those hours is irretrievably lost to you. Sure, the next morning you and your friends can discuss Glee or which of the fifteen hundred versions of CSI had the most fun autopsy scene, but where will that get your legal nurse consulting career?

I challenge all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to take one day a week and turn off your TV. Put that evening into your legal nurse consulting business. Concentrate on a different aspect of your business each week, marketing, report writing or a new CLNC^® service. See what you’ll reap from that time. You’ll never be able to say “I’m too busy to…” again because you’ll have recovered 2-3 hours of time lost from Lost. If this whole topic is making you nervous, you can always TiVo^® your shows to watch them at a later date (after you’ve accomplished all you want).

If you dare to fully realize the power of this, try taking a week off from the TV. Put that time into your CLNC^® business and your family. You’ll make exponential leaps in both. I warn you though, this powerful practice is not for everyone – it’s only for those who choose to take back their time and make something powerful from it.

Success Is Inside!