focus

Whether your goal is to launch a legal nurse consulting business or to grow your CLNC^® business, now more than ever you must have a consciousness about whether you are on or off focus.

I am blessed to be passionate about my business, and because I grew up in New Orleans, I am equally passionate about playing. I just spent four days hiking in a remote part of Utah and am already planning the next trip. Most people can’t believe I take 12 weeks off every year, but the big reasons I am able to do so are not only that I have 23 awesome employees and great subcontractors and vendors who do just fine (and often better) without me, but also because when I work, I work with focus.

Today it is so easy to get caught up in all the superficial, time-sucking distractions of the Internet, email following you everywhere, YouTube, Facebook, texting and Twitter. But to succeed big, you will want to get on focus and stay on focus.

To find time to launch or grow your business and still have quality time for yourself, try these four strategies for working with focus.

1. Focus on one Big Thing at all times. When you always have something big on your agenda and touch it most days, you have the constant reminder of what it feels like (and how good it feels) to be productive. There is nothing like the momentum of momentum to keep your momentum going. This is one of the reasons successful people achieve big over and over again.
2. Stop being the fastest email responder. There is no greater blow to productivity than email. No matter how good it feels to empty your email inbox, you don’t have to keep it open 24/7. You can check email every two hours and still be perceived as responsive by your attorney-clients. If you’re too quick to click they may even wonder whether you’re really working on that important case. I am not saying email isn’t important. I am just saying that email is not important every second of the day and that success isn’t defined by how quick you click.
3. Stop being social. It feels good to hang out on Facebook, but don’t let social media become an obsessive compulsive disorder. I know a woman who spends her entire working day on Facebook and Twitter and has lost a client or two because of it. Social media has changed the way we communicate and connect and can even be used to market your CLNC^® business. But if you find your first and last calls of the day are Facebook, and not your significant other – the last time I checked, there’s professional help and prescription drugs for that
4. Interrupt the interrupter. I personally think there’s a secret alarm or flashing green light that goes off the moment I shut my office door to focus. But there’s one person who is responsible for more interruptions than anyone else. Who’s that? That’s right – you. All of the things I talked about above – email, Facebook, Twitter – are interruptions you invite into your mental space. It’s also easy to interrupt yourself with the whining, complaining and negativity that derail your productivity. Pay attention to your most intimate companions and how they influence your productivity.

In today’s busy world, it’s more important than ever to work with focus. Guard your time carefully. It’s a precious gift, not to be wasted. When you begin to work with total focus, you’ll miraculously find time to grow your business and also get to go outside and play.

Success Is Inside!

One of our CLNC^® pros, Suzanne Arragg, shares how losing sight of her business plan almost cost her a valuable attorney-client and what she did to come back even stronger.

“A couple of years ago a law firm I had worked with for three years noticeably stopped sending new cases to me and emails I sent on existing cases went unanswered. My relationship with the paralegal paid off. She called me to let me know that the partners were shopping for another nurse consultant. She told me she was advocating for me and had expressed her concern to the attorneys that she felt it was unfair they hadn’t let me know. I thanked her for her phone call and as I hung up, my head started to spin.

This was a reality check. Too often, we become comfortable with the daily routine of business and forget the importance of spending time each day on our business plan and marketing. Even if it is only 10-15 minutes, we should never lose sight of its importance.

Once my head stopped whirling and my thoughts became more organized, I began to refocus on my CLNC^® business practices and market more. Within a couple of months, new cases began to arrive and I picked up new attorney-clients. But more importantly, I did not lose sight of the value of my existing attorney-clients. I continued to call the partners and express my commitment to servicing their law firm. Guess what? They called to set up a meeting to discuss moving forward. Since that time, our relationship is stronger than ever. In fact, at their request I have expanded my CLNC ^® services to meet their litigation needs.

In hindsight, I think their shopping experience was healthy not only for them, but for me as well. They quickly realized the communication and work product of others did not compare to mine. I learned that taking the time to build strong relationships with attorney-clients and their staff has value beyond the dollar and that losing sight of my business plan was a prescription for potential failure.”

Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

Success Is Inside!

I just mentored a very successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. Her issue: she loves being a CLNC^® consultant and the freedom that comes with it, but the operational part of her business sometimes takes the wind right out of her sails. The parts she enjoys include the marketing, working with her attorney-clients and locating experts, but the processes necessary to keep her CLNC^® subcontractors and employees on track can suck her spirit dry.

Every business is made up of thousands of details and if I or my staff try to manage those details without processes and systems, the wind goes right out of our sails. I want as many things to be automatic as possible. I don’t want to be thinking about something small when I can be thinking about something big. I don’t want to be searching for a lost file because someone misfiled it – I want to focus on important projects.

In the early years of my legal nurse consulting business I woke up one morning and had a reality check: my lack of systems and processes were kicking my ass. My office looked like a shipwreck with the debris and detritus strewn about everywhere by the tide of day-to-day business. I was so busy working cases I had completely ignored my business and the systems necessary to manage it properly. I could no longer afford to take 10 minutes to locate this file, that file or the standards I’d carefully researched and just as carefully misplaced.

I needed to act fast to avoid drifting out to sea and I tackled the problem with a vengeance and determination equal to that of Captain Ahab’s in his pursuit of the great white whale. My goal: to be as fast and sleek as a sailboat. Today if you walked into my office you would think I have no work to do, but that is just an illusion, one that has accelerated not only my productivity but my team’s as well.

Your CLNC^® business should run like a state-of-the-art sailboat. Sleek and built to run with the wind. Look at the way a sailboat is constructed. Each part is there for a reason and each part is necessary. Not only does each part (the mast, boom, boom vang, fairlead, hiking straps, thwart, main sheet and even the centerboard) need to be in working order, all the parts need to work together. The failure of one part of the boat, for example a mainstay tearing loose, could lead to the failure or even sink the entire boat.

The same is true for your legal nurse consulting business. Just like the success of the sailboat depends on thousands of details, so too does the success of your CLNC^® business. This includes all the details that some people might find tedious (filing or organizing medical records), not just the details that we enjoy (high-fiving your favorite attorney-client after a favorable settlement or depositing retainer checks).

Like a sailboat, if you neglect one part of your CLNC^® business you run the risk that the part might fail. Your enterprise might not sink right away and might float along with the wind or current for some time. It may not even be obvious that your ship is sinking until you wake up one day with water lapping at your ankles. If something major happens, say you lose a big client, that could be the equivalent of a main sail tearing loose. But something less obvious, like failing to retie the connection with prior clients while you’re busy marketing to new attorney-prospects, might be like not doing the regular maintenance of cleaning and oiling the pulleys or cranks you need to raise your sails. While your main sail is up you’re able to make headway, but if you need to hoist the jibs later or fly your spinnaker you may not be able to and may end up floundering in the wind.

Successful people create systems to make taking care of those details as simple and easy as possible. Successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants know that creating checklists, policies, intake forms and shared calendars for staff and subcontractors goes a long way toward easing their workload. The more systems you have in place the less time you spend reinventing the wheel or recreating each detail when a new case comes along, you get a new attorney-client or hire a new CLNC^® subcontractor.

My advice to the Certified Legal Nurse Consultant was to hire a “first mate” to engage in those pesky details for her. To paraphrase Yoda, “Details, engage them you must.”

Business isn’t always smooth sailing, but with the right systems for taking care of the details in place, your journey will be more like crossing the “Drake Lake” than rough, category 7 sea swells of the Drake Passage that Tom and I experienced on the way home from Antarctica.

Success Is Inside (and in the details)!

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!

Okay, that’s a question that a lot of new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants might not know how to answer. In the world of digital media and MP3s, we no longer have to deal with skips in the middle of a song like we did when we listened to CDs or LPs. I’m so glad the days are gone that I have to worry about washing the lotion off my hands before handling my Prince CDs, or having to carefully slide an album like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” vinyl album into its sleeve and then into the album cover at just the right angle to keep it from catching and scratching one of the tracks.

Digital media and the iPod^® have not only changed how I listen to music, but also the way that I think of music. Since music has become ultra-portable, it’s changed air travel, working on the road and vacationing by giving me the ability to add a soundtrack to my life at any time that I want without disturbing other people. If this wasn’t the best invention in the world, I’m still waiting to see what it is going to be.

Most of us have our own soundtrack running in our heads and sometimes that soundtrack has a loop in it, causing us to hear the same information, right or wrong, over and over. Sometimes, that soundtrack has a skip in it and that skip causes us not to hear what the other person is saying over and over again. There’s a high potential for looping and skipping that can happen to legal nurse consultants too, and when it does, there’s a need to stop it.

As a CLNC^® consultant you’ve been trained to carefully listen to attorney-prospects when you’re in an interview, to relax and not to get so caught up in the soundtrack of your nervousness that the attorney becomes invisible to you.

If an attorney says “You’re hired,” you don’t respond “Thank you, but I have to finish explaining all 32 CLNC^® services I provide as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant” and then loop back into your script. You’ve got the job – stop, skip the script and start discussing the first case.

Likewise, have you ever fully and completely answered a question for a patient, friend, family member or other party but they didn’t listen to the answer and loop back to ask you the same question again? Or they make the same statement they just made and, no matter what response you make, they skip processing your response to loop and repeat the statement? They become so caught up with the looping in their heads that their soundtrack skips your answer.

In some situations, repetition can be entirely appropriate. I love listening to my twin brother Vince’s “True Hollywood stories” from our childhood in Louisiana. Each time he embellishes a little bit more and it’s fun calling him on those embellishments. One of my staff members has heard my “war stories” almost as many times as I have and to her credit she always laughs as if she’s hearing them for the first time.

But, there’s a big difference between repetition for its own sake and repetition due to lack of focus. I was mentoring a CLNC^® consultant over the telephone on some issues regarding her legal nurse consulting business. She kept trying to go back and rehash the issues we’d just discussed. I realized that if she was that unfocused with me, she would certainly be that way with any attorney-client or -prospect. I called her on it and challenged her to focus for our next telephone call by outlining her questions and checking them off after being answered and avoid the rehash. To her credit she did pretty well.

Recently at a live event I spent some time answering a woman’s questions. I went through all her concerns and questions and I thought she was satisified with my suggestions. To my surprise, the next day she asked me the same questions again. I politely told her that no matter how many times she asked me, my answers wouldn’t change. I later found out that after talking to me, she also approached Tom with the same questions. He politely told her to follow my advice. The internal loop of her soundtrack and story were causing skips in her listening and in her processing of the information she was receiving.

In your career as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you’ll run into plenty of situations where repetition is necessary in education or the case review process. But in other situations, before you start repeating yourself, ask yourself why and if it’s really necessary. It may not be. I repeat, ask yourself why you’re about to repeat and see if it’s really necessary. It may not be.

You will have many opportunities to loop and skip. I challenge you to be like an MP3 in your business and personal relationships for the next three days and let me know the results.

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.

I just hung up from mentoring a new Certified Legal Nurse Consultant regarding a med-surg case. After listening to her ramble aimlessly about the case for three minutes, I politely stopped her and said, “I would really like to help you solve your issue, but would you please describe the issue?” After a few more attempts at rambling and a lot more nudging by me to keep her focused, she finally got to the heart of the matter, and we dealt with it easily and swiftly.

As we were about to wrap up, she confessed that she still found it uncomfortable and often unsuccessful to talk to attorneys about her legal nurse consulting role. I immediately realized the source of her problem. I had just lived it! It was her rambling method of communication.

Those of you who know me, know that I tell it like it is. I firmly but nicely shared that I had a direct insight into her communication challenge just from our brief conversation. Attorneys are crazy busy. They’re working for a living. They’re not like patients who lay around in bed with lots of time to spare waiting for the next visit from their favorite nurse, happy for any company other than a bad reality show.

When you are talking to an attorney, you have to focus, focus and focus some more. You cannot go into an interview or meeting with an attorney being unprepared or misdirected. Once you lose the attorney, you lose the opportunity. There’s no place like an attorney’s office to prove the truth of the old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

The fastest way to lose the attorney is to appear unprepared. Practice your presentation before you give it. Try it on a spouse – if you can keep their attention, you’ll probably be able to keep an attorney’s.

Preparation and focus are the keys to successfully communicating and to feeling comfortable about any communication you are about to engage in.

And remember, if you can say it in five words/minutes, try doing it in three words/minutes instead.

Success Is Inside!