feel-good addiction

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success Is Inside!

Did you know that the word “niggle” is an intransitive verb which according to Merriam-Webster, dates from about 1616 and means to trifle or to spend too much effort on minor details? Do you find yourself niggling away your time or do you use it meaningfully for your legal nurse consulting business? Most people claim to cherish their “quiet” time, but be honest. Do you spend the first part of your day on your email? Or, do you use that peak productivity time to knock out those hard projects for attorneys and big things for your CLNC^® business.

The first part of my day is my quiet, productive time. These are the hours before my office is officially open and all the employees have shown up. By 8:30am there’s a line of penitents forming outside my door; employees asking for my input on a project, directors telling me why they won’t meet a deadline and the janitor asking me to diagnose a toenail fungus. If I’m lucky enough to be working from the sanctuary of my home office when my phone starts ringing off my desk, I know the office is open. Knowing this madness is coming, on my best days, I use my quiet time to hunker down and work on those projects that need the most concentration.

Less successful people gravitate towards what’s easy instead of what’s productive; I call this the “feel-good addiction.” Feel-good addicts start their days differently. Since they like to feel-good they focus on minor, easy to complete tasks – email, desktop organizing, sorting mail, more email and other nonproductive (but necessary) activities. The feel-good addiction is insidious for people who like to check things off, because you feel good after completing each small task (and you get to check it off your “to-do” list). This addiction bites you on the butt because that cheap check-mark high guarantees to frustrate, overwhelm and stress you out in the long term. You feel busier than ever but are accomplishing less of real value. When we get caught up in feeling good, we never get to our big commitments.

Even worse, about the time you’ve completed your feel-good tasks and are ready to start in on your real work, the other folks in the office have completed their feel-good tasks and they’re ready to start interrupting you from the big things you are ready to do or an attorney-client calls with the latest crisis (that’s when the line forms and the phone starts ringing).

When you break the “feel-good” addiction, you actually open the doors to achievement and to your passionate vision for your CLNC^® business. Start by asking yourself; is this feel-good start to my day the best use of my time? Or, are these feel-good tasks best reserved for mental breaks throughout the day? That’s the way I use them. I, too am a happy checker-offer and I like knocking out tasks. Working for two hours on a report or project that I won’t finish doesn’t release the same amount of endorphins as cleaning out my email box (and forwarding those tasks on to others). After two hours I need to “get something checked off.” That’s when I indulge my own feel-good addiction and attack the stack of bills, plow into the financials or grab my mouse to viciously click through my email.

What you engage and focus on in your legal nurse consulting business is where you will yield results. Trivia saps the creative energy you need for accomplishing your audacious goals and will douse the fire that you need to fully engage your passionate vision. You may feel good for a while but at the end of the day, which will be here before you know it, all you’ve accomplished is of little value.

Break your addiction and work on those important projects, like that report for your attorney-client. We already have precious little free time, and it’s been mathematically proven that work expands to fill the time available, so we need to make the most of the time we have and not niggle it away. I’m not trying to say that some email isn’t important or that there might be something pressing in your in-box. If you can’t bring yourself to close your email box, at least turn off the sound alert so you won’t have the annoying little “ping” sound off every time a potential time-waster drops out of cyberspace and into your consciousness.

Remember you’re a nurse. Use your triage skills; just don’t start the surgery unless the patient is critical. Email doesn’t bleed out, doesn’t need defibrillation and, unlike an ICU patient, won’t expire if not tended to immediately.

I’ll look for you in line.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your best tip for breaking your feel-good addiction.