Success

Vickie, I just have to tell you about my recent exhibiting success. I started my Certified Legal Nurse Consultant business 5½ months ago after a long hiatus from nursing. I was fortunate to be able to work on my legal nurse consulting business full time and I made a concerted effort to use the marketing strategies I learned from the CLNC^® Certification Program. I got my first two cases on the same day within a week of my launch date just networking with friends. This networking brought me two attorneys and seven cases in the first three months.

To create immediate success for my legal nurse consulting business, I decided to exhibit at a statewide plaintiff attorney convention. I put to use the event marketing information in the Core Curriculum for Legal Nurse Consulting^® textbook, NACLNC^® Apprenticeship and Advanced CLNC^® Practice-Building Programs. I decided to spend the money to hire a graphic designer to create a professional tri-fold exhibit I could use repeatedly. I was thrilled with the final product and thanks to the information I received from Vickie Milazzo Institute, my exhibit booth looked attractive and professional.

I stood in front of my exhibit throughout the convention and introduced myself to most everyone who walked by. I passed out numerous business cards and brochures. I focused my conversations on how the attorneys were currently screening and developing their medical-related cases and how I could save them time and money. On the first day, I stayed until all attorneys and all but two exhibitors had left the exhibit hall. Ten minutes after returning to my hotel room, I got a call from an attorney-prospect who was waiting by my booth with medical records for me to review! Needless to say, I ran downstairs to meet with him. Believe it or not, I walked away from that convention with not one but two sets of medical records and retainers for both cases from that one attorney!

I received permission to follow up from every attorney with whom I spoke. I also gave free screenings to three attorneys who were particularly interested in my CLNC^® services. Two other attorneys asked me to call them after the convention to discuss a case on which they needed help. The day after I notified one attorney of his free screening, he called me to discuss a case he wanted me to handle. He needed help with several cases and wanted to get started. His firm handles a large number of malpractice and negligence cases so this opportunity really opened doors for my CLNC^® business.

I was surprised on the second day of the convention when one of the other two legal nurse consultant exhibitors shut down their booth (three RNs were exhibiting together). It was “tax-free shopping” that weekend so they closed their booth at 11:00am and went shopping! Needless to say, they had not attended the Vickie Milazzo Institute’s CLNC^® Certification Program. Since the convention was only 2½ days, they lost a huge opportunity to meet attorneys.

All in all, as a result of exhibiting at this one event I came home with the following:

• Two sets of medical records and retainer fees for each case from the same attorney.
• Requests from two attorneys to call regarding cases on which they need help.
• Request to screen a case for merit from a new attorney-client.
• Request to locate two testifying experts.
• Plus I received the attorney mailing list database from the association sponsoring the convention.

While exhibiting is not cheap nor easy, it definitely paid off for me. It gave my CLNC^® business statewide exposure and I will be hiring my first CLNC^® subcontractor to help with my rapidly increasing case load. I love my new career as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant and look forward to many years of exhibiting success.

Laura H. Beard, RN, BSN, CLNC is president of LHB Medical-Legal Consulting located in South Carolina and specializes in medical malpractice, personal injury, workers’ compensation cases and Medicare Set-Aside Allocations.

As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, I focus on helping hospitals reduce Medicare denials and win more Medicare Part A appeals. My photo and short bio on my websites generate four to five calls from hospital attorneys each month.

Hospitals want to be paid and I’ve learned that the first level of preventing Medicare denials is the assessment of the patient and the physician’s documentation of medical necessity. It’s usually the lack of this information that triggers a Medicare denial of payment.

The first rule to get the physicians to buy into what you are trying to teach them is to feed them. So, I contact the hospital administrators in question and explain that I have a plan that will help them reduce Medicare denials and change their doctors’ bad documentation habits. If lunch is not within the facility’s budget, then I work with ancillary vendors who might want to participate and provide lunch.

I use exhibit posters and flip charts to present during lunch (provided by the hospital). I also use a dry-marker board and include actual excerpts from Medicare’s denial documents. The exhibits show what was missing and how to correct it. My program includes hand-outs with the information from the posters, dry board and flip charts.

This educational approach usually works and I receive calls from physicians with questions for some time after each event. The marketing benefit is that people from different hospitals talk to one another, which often generates calls from other facilities wanting presentations and I get more clients.

My marketing strategies include:

• Bulletin board teasers with movie ad-like messages: “For Doctors: Coming soon to your hospital…” posted a couple weeks before the presentation.
• Hand-outs placed in facility mail boxes at least two weeks ahead of time.
• Posters on stands just inside the entrance to the presentation room at least 30 minutes before start time.
• Enlargements focused only on the most important pieces of Medicare rules on the subject that affects physicians.

One of the most rewarding experiences occurred while I was auditing a telephone conference regarding Medicare appeals with corporate attorneys for two of my hospital-clients. One hospital administrator on the call wondered why two facilities seemed to be doing much better than the others in overturning denials. The attorney explained, “That’s because they have a Camy,” as though I were a product brand name.

Another time a different hospital-client armed with the education and hand-outs I provided, was able to make enough immediate and lasting changes that they, effectively, stopped their denials cold. Most hospitals make changes slowly and with a lot of kicking and screaming. This hospital’s collective, firm resolve made the changes using the education they paid me to give them – and won big!

Medicare is my specialty and marketing, as I learned from Vickie Milazzo, is what sells my CLNC^® services.

Guest Blogger Profile

Camy Joyner, RN, BSN, CCM, CLNC, CEO and co-owner of C. Joyner and Associates, LLC. Consults/manages Medicare Part A appeals for acute general rehabilitation hospitals. Consults for records review/audit for physician medical pertinence. Also consults in non-Medicare negligence cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest Blogger Profile

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

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

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

Set up your CCC in 5 easy steps:

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

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

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

Success Is Inside!

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!

Marketing your CLNC^® business successfully to attorney-prospects and attorney-clients requires that you provide a safety net and build trust. Here are some strategies for achieving both:

1. Make a professional first impression. In doing so, you have begun to construct a safety net for the attorney-prospect, ensuring the attorney that he is making the right decision in hiring you for his medical-related cases.

2. Communicate. Listen carefully to the attorney-client’s needs and demonstrate your understanding of those needs as you proceed through the meeting. Ask questions to clarify specific points. Confirm the attorney-client’s expectations regarding the CLNC^® services you will provide and the schedule for its completion.

Stay in touch. Provide an easy way for the attorney to reach you and notify you of any changes in needs or the case. When you deliver your work product, make it clear that you are available to collaborate on any necessary additions or amendments.

3. Guarantee. This step may seem risky, but think about how much more secure you feel about purchasing when you know you can return a product that fails to meet your expectations. For example, if your report failed to meet your attorney-client’s expectations, wouldn’t you be eager to correct any problems? Then why not offer that guarantee up front, thus satisfying your client’s psychological need for security?

Guaranteeing satisfaction does not mean you would compromise the integrity of your opinion or work product by adding something you know is incorrect or misleading or by making inappropriate changes. Nor does it mean you guarantee your work product will win their case. It means you will make any corrections or additions needed to the research, wording or format to guarantee the client gets value for the dollars invested. You aren’t offering to revise your work product endlessly either. State a specific time period, say two weeks from the date of delivery, during which the guarantee is in effect.

4. Start Small. Before you get to those bigger projects and cases, you may have to build trust step-by-step. Customers generally are more comfortable starting a new relationship on a small scale. When a woman buys a new line of makeup, in addition to being sure the color is right for her, she wants to know if the makeup suits her skin type, contains sun protection and holds up during the day. Likewise, a new attorney-client wants to make sure your product will perform as expected. The attorney wants to know:
• Will your work product meet expectations?
• Will your report be supported by appropriate standards and research?
• How conscientiously will you meet deadlines?

A woman at the makeup counter might start out with a smaller container or trial size of a new product. Similarly, an attorney might suggest beginning with a brief report and ask for a quick turnaround. Recognize this as an important step in building a long-term relationship.

5. Deliver. Actions sell and quality counts. Your attorney-clients often deal with people who talk a good game but who don’t deliver on promises. By turning in a quality product on time, or even ahead of deadline, you reinforce that the attorney has made a wise buying decision and can depend on you for bigger and bigger projects and more medical-related cases.

When you provide a safety net and build trust, hard-sell is never necessary.

• Every time you present yourself with professionalism, you sell.
• Every time you listen intently and affirm the attorney-client’s expectations, you sell.
• Every time you deliver a quality product, you sell.

Every step of the way, you build into your attorney-client relationship a sense of trust and dependability – a safety net.

Beginning with that initial interview and that first small project, you can create a mutually satisfying, long-term business relationship. And a few loyal, lifetime attorney-clients will make your legal nurse consulting business prosper. You won’t need dozens. Soon you will find attorney-clients relying on you, recognizing your CLNC^® and nursing expertise and your ability to make them look good. They will begin to trust that without your help and expertise they could miss significant issues and even lose cases.

Success Is Inside!

When I first started my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, I was nervous about contacting attorneys and marketing to them. The single most important thing that helped me overcome my fear, was remembering who I was – an RN. You know my mantra, “We Are Nurses and We Can Do Anything!^®” If we can make split second decisions that are the difference between life and death, we can do something as easy as talk to an attorney. We learned early on as nurses that doctors are not to be feared and we learned to talk (back) to them. Well, attorneys are the same. They put their super-suits on just like everyone else, one leg at a time. Talk with them; they’re fun. They have great senses of humor and they love life. Some of the most fun people I’ve met in my life are attorneys.

As I grew my legal nurse consulting business I focused on my strengths and successes, not my weaknesses and mistakes. I could write the book on just the mistakes I’ve personally made. Maybe you can too. Now though, there’s hard evidence that it’s our successes that have the most impact on the brain. If you do something the right way, the brain remembers how you did it.

In fact, the study suggests that failure has no impact on helping us to succeed. That’s because if you do something wrong, the brain doesn’t know how to process and store it. Since we absorb more from success than failure, this might explain why successful people learn more from their experiences and continue to succeed often while people who fail learn less from experience and continue to fail often. Think about the people around you. We all know someone who keeps making the same mistakes, in love, at work or in business – it’s because they’re not learning from their failures (unless there is a strong negative association with it such as pain, embarrassment or electrical shock). They fail to learn like they would from a success.

Keep succeeding and stay focused on your past successes. I’ve always said that reliving your past successes will fuel your future success and now research has proven me right.

If your brain doesn’t know how to process your failures, why should you bother? I say you shouldn’t.

Success Is Inside – and it’s repeatable!

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!

Certified Legal Nurse Consultant David Kuntz

During my career as an ICU nurse, I was always looking for ways to better myself. I took and passed the CCRN exam, but to my dismay I received no recognition from the hospital administrators for this accomplishment. I tried management and found that I was working more hours and getting paid less than the nurses on my unit. Then something happened that changed my career. I tore a ligament in my hand while restraining a patient. I could no longer lift anything over 25 pounds. I was devastated. My ICU nursing career was over. I spent one and half years on light duty and was told that I had to find a different job or the hospital would settle with me. After months of searching, I landed a job in IT as a clinical analyst.

At home after my surgery I had time on my hands, or in my case – hand, so I started to search for different ways to use my nursing knowledge. I came across legal nurse consulting on one of my searches. I spent hours researching legal nurse consulting. The spark was lit and grew with every bad day I had.

It took me five years until I finally decided to just go for it. I enrolled in the CLNC^® Certification Program in July 2009 and immediately started the home-study course. I finished it in a week and was certified the following weekend. I then worked on the NACLNC^® Apprenticeship Program. It took me a little over a week to finish and at that point, I started getting my promotional materials, sample work products and letters refined and ready to send to attorneys.

I started sending out material toward the end of August using all of the techniques I learned from Vickie. One goal that was foremost in my mind was to have a case before I attended the CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Program in October.

I was nervous before I made my first phone call to an attorney, but I kept remembering that they are people just like everyone else and that really calmed me down. In that first call, I introduced myself and gave a brief synopsis of the material I had already sent. I asked for an appointment and the attorney said, “Sure, come in at 4:00pm.”

Now I was really nervous. I looked over the sample interview questions in the online NACLNC^® Community and realized that I knew this information. I met with the attorney and the interview went so well, he is sending me a medical-malpractice case.

Two weeks later, I called another attorney to follow-up on my promotional material. He told me he didn’t receive it, so I presented a short version of how I could assist him. He asked me to set up a meeting with his secretary. The next day I went to his office and he walked into the conference room with a case in his hands and a check for $1,500.00. Inside I was doing cartwheels yet I remained composed until I got in my car and was heading home. The following day I talked with a different attorney and he wants to use me on two cases.

From the end of August to the first week in October, I was able to obtain three attorney-clients.

My first goal was met. I followed what Vickie taught and used her techniques. If everyone follows what they learn in the CLNC^® Certification Program, they will be successful in this business. Vickie and Vickie Milazzo Institute have already done the hard work; all a student has to do is apply what they learn from the CNLC^® Certification Program.

Guest Blogger Profile

David Kuntz, RN, BSN, CLNC has 17 years of nursing experience. He is the owner of David Kuntz and Associates in western New Mexico and specializes in medical malpractice.

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!