Legal Nurse Consulting

April 15th is just around the corner and for many nurses tax season serves as a rude awakening. This time every year we’re forced to run the numbers and take a long, hard look at our true financial picture. Unfortunately for many of us, the end result is always the same: we pony up to Uncle Sam and then push everything our tax forms revealed to us to the back of our minds… until next year. Maybe it’s time to ask these four questions instead:

Do you have the W-2 Blues?

Your W-2 can be a painful reminder that once again your income hasn’t measured up to your dreams. I’ve been there. My W-2 was a painful reminder that I was in a dead-end job and was going to have to work overtime at the hospital for the rest of my life just to pay my mortgage. If you feel stuck, you don’t have to be. My W-2 motivated me to step out and start my own legal nurse consulting business in 1982. Buck-up and take responsibility for changing your W-2. That’s the first step. I promise you’re more in control of your W-2 than you realize.

Where did your money go?

Tax season is a great reminder that unless you’re the government, you have to stop spending more than you earn. I encourage stretching way out to achieve a goal, but I never encourage living beyond your income. Living beneath my income is what helped me to be able to step out and start my legal nurse consulting business. It has also helped me to grow the business and survive the recession.

If you’re not quite ready to give up your Starbucks addiction, maybe you can pack your lunch or do without that new pair of jeans (or that cool purse). Living beneath your income cuts your stress levels dramatically and frees you to move toward your dreams as you gain more control over your finances.

Have you been underpricing yourself?

Here’s the tough part. You can love your job and the people you work with. You can even love your boss (I know I do – but wait, that’s me!). But if your W-2 says you’re getting the short end of the stick, do something about it! Don’t just accept what’s handed to you. When I got my masters degree, I didn’t get a nickel raise. So I went to work for a hospital that recognized the value of what I had accomplished. But more importantly, that situation sparked my drive to be more in control my earnings and helped to accelerate my plan to start my own business.

Do you deserve a refund?

We all love a tax refund. It’s like getting an unexpected bonus – even if it is your own money. But if you’re not getting one this year, there are many ways to refund yourself all year long. Wake up 30 minutes early just for you, not your spouse, not your kids, not your computer. Take plenty of walks. They are free and clear the mental clutter. Read a book to improve your mind.

Don’t tell me you don’t have time to take care of yourself. Disconnect from those time-sucking distractions that follow you everywhere like Facebook, Twitter, texting and Angry Birds. Make yourself the priority – not everybody else. A woman I mentored told me she waited 50 years to start taking care of herself. If you’re like her, it’s never too late to make a change. Refunding myself every day, both mentally and physically, is a big reason I love my legal nurse consulting business as much today as I did 30 years ago.

If you just can’t stand the thought of another year or more of the same – living paycheck to paycheck, stuck in a job you don’t like, stressed to the max – let this tax season be the impetus for bucking up and making the changes in your life that will bring you closer to your dreams. You can shake the W-2 blues. Get up and get started today.

Success Is Inside!

I’m deep into the Spring/Summer CLNC^® Certification Seminar season and working with students in person is always one of my favorite things to do as owner of Vickie Milazzo Institute. It’s so much fun to observe how students come in excited but nervous, especially about the CLNC^® Examination, then walk out on Day 6 proud of their accomplishments.

The CLNC^® Certification Program is intense, especially for the students who attend live. We cover an extraordinary amount of content, but successful CLNC^® consultants know the time they spend with me is just the beginning. You must commit to being a success student for life. That’s one of the primary reasons the Institute provides mentoring to all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and offers a variety of advanced-practice building products.

It’s also why we at the Institute work tirelessly to bring you the NACLNC^® Conferences. I hope to see you March 2-9, 2013. In my New Orleans style I’m turning education into a 7-Day Weekend on the “Oasis of the Seas.” Who said education has to be boring?

Success Is Inside (and at Sea)!

P.S. Click here to learn more about the 2013 NACLNC^® Conference Cruise.

The Internet can be a tricky place and not all websites are designed equally. With the coming of HTML5 it will only become, shall we say, more challenging. Even in today’s simple world, not every website displays the same in every web browser and not every feature of every website will display; Flash^®, video, animations, etc. may work in one browser and not work in another.

Internet Explorer^® is the most widely used browser in the good ole USofA but it’s not perfect. No browser is. I don’t care if you’re on IE6, 7, 8 or 9 – some websites just won’t work. You can bring your Flash player, plug-ins and add-ons fully up-to-date and guess what? Some websites still just won’t work.

So what’s a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant to do when her prized podcast, video or PDF file won’t open? Keep multiple web browsers installed on your computer! On my PC I’ve installed Apple Safari^®, Google^® Chrome^®, Firefox^® and Microsoft IE8 browsers. When I run into trouble on a website in one, I can open up an alternate browser and view the site and its videos, graphics, etc. the way the designer intended.

So, my CLNC^® amigos – pick one or more of the following and install them today.

Apple Safari Download

Google Chrome Download

Firefox Download

Internet Explorer 8 or 9 (Windows 7 only)

Opera Download

I love Firefox but for security and safety recommend Chrome – it’s the safest, as each open tab runs in a “sandbox” for security and it seems to be the most versatile. I haven’t tried Opera yet but have heard great things. I leave it up to you to decide which one works best for you and your legal nurse consulting business. Also remember to install the updates when prompted by the browser to ensure you’re always running the latest and greatest.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

“The impossible: what nobody can do until somebody does it.” Anonymous

Success Is Inside!

There are so many times that it would be handy for a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant to share his or her computer screen with another party who’s not in the room. It’s always easier to discuss a presentation, problem or tech support issue that you both can see, especially when one of you can point to it with your mouse.

One day you might want to share your screen with an attorney-client in order to point something out in an image that you included in one of your legal nurse consulting reports. Another time you might need to see the screen of the CLNC^® consultant who is doing your online research – you can walk through your searches together, preview your results and narrow down your keywords to get the best results. You might share your screen with a CLNC^® subcontractor to help them focus on a significant portion of a scanned medical chart.

The great folks at LogMeIn^® have come up with a solution called Join.Me. With this simple, safe program you simply visit the Join.Me website, download the Join.Me executable file and run it. It will install itself on your desktop. When you’re ready to start sharing or viewing you simply double-click your Join.Me shortcut, which starts the program. This image should appear:

Decide whether you want to share your screen or view someone else’s screen. If you want to share your screen, click the orange button and it will log you in and tell you when it’s ready to be shared and assign you a nine-digit number.

The person who needs to see your screen simply visits https://join.me/,

types in your nine-digit number into the “join” box, clicks the green button and they can see your screen! You can add additional parties and even swap control of the mouse back and forth between the participants.

If you need to share someone else’s screen you simply do the process in reverse. Join.Me works on Macs^®, PCs and some mobile devices so you can use it almost anywhere. This is a terrific free tool that every one of my CLNC^® amigos should be utilizing right now!

Keep on techin’,

Tom

30 years ago, one of my favorite attorney-clients labeled me a communication specialist. Little did I know when I started my legal nurse consulting business how much and how fast communications options and methods would change.

First, there’s the voicemail on our cells, landlines and work phones. Then there’s email and text messages on our phones, email on our computers, direct messages on Twitter and all sorts of posts and messages on Facebook and other social media sites. It’s enough to overwhelm you, if you take the time to be overwhelmed.

Depending on who’s communicating with me, I have my preferred hierarchy of communication. I like to receive texts from some people, email from others and there’s a few I just like to talk to. I’m sure you have your own personal preferences.

Just as attorneys come in all shapes and sizes regarding work product preferences, they also have preferred methods of communication and their preferences may not match yours.

Pay attention. Does your attorney-client email you or text you? Does the attorney respond faster to a voicemail, an email or a text message?

Better yet, rather than try to figure it out by trial and error, ask your attorney-clients what their preferred method of communication is and always default to that preference. This will ensure that you continue to be the communications specialist you are meant to be.

Success Is Inside!

The desire to succeed in anything – whether it’s losing 10 lbs or growing a CLNC^® business – is important to success. After all, every success story begins with a dream, desire or vision. But even more important than the dream is the will to prepare to succeed.

After 30 years of owning my own business, I sometimes think back to how easy visualizing legal nurse consulting was in contrast to executing on my idea, day after day.

The vision truly is the easy part for most of us. That’s often where the fun is – dreaming the dream and fleshing out the vision in your mind. Then come the late nights, early mornings and working weekends, getting your hands dirty with the details. That’s when the casually engaged fall slack while the tenaciously persistent grab the prize and run.

The will to prepare is what commits you to go for legal nurse consulting all the way and to engage the myriad actions necessary to succeed – especially on those days you’re just not that into it.

If you’re reading this blog, I already know that you have a strong desire to succeed in your CLNC^® business even more than you already have.

The question I have for you is what did you do today to prepare for your next level of CLNC^® success? I’m just asking…

Success Is Inside!

As we rely more on software programs doing our spelling for us, we can actually create spelling errors that we don’t notice, but your attorney-clients might. One of the issues with any word processing application is that once you accidentally mark a misspelled word as correct, that’s how the software spells the word until you do something about it. For example, you create your legal nurse consulting report for one of your attorney-clients and you misspell pleurisy as pleuricy. When you’re spell-checking the document you figure Word just doesn’t know any medical terms, and since you do, you click Add to Dictionary.

Then, one day your twelve-year-old daughter is looking over your shoulder, watching you work your CLNC^® magic and says Mom, everyone knows pleurisy is spelled with an “s” not a “c.” So you Google it and find out she’s right. Here’s how you get the incorrectly spelled word (and any others) out of your Microsoft^® Office^® product’s dictionary so that it is spelled correctly in the future.

First, click the Pearl or Office Button at the top left corner of your Word document. Then, go to the bottom of the dropdown box and click Word Options. Next, click Proofing and then Custom Dictionaries. Make sure the box next to CUSTOM.DIC is selected and click Edit Word List. You’ll see a list of all the words that have been added to your custom dictionary. It should look like this.

Simply scroll down through that dictionary selecting and deleting any misspelled words you find. When you’re done, simply OK your way out. It’s that simple and you’ll never have to hand-correct pleurisy again! Of course, once you fix your spell Czech yule still need to pay a tension to your graham air – it doesn’t help if a correctly spelled word is mis-used.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

While visiting temples on my biking trip in Japan, I learned about the Japanese concept of “ikigai.” A loose translation is “your reason for being.” I like to think of it as the reason you get out of bed in the morning, your passion and purpose in life.

The Japanese believe that everyone has an ikigai, although not everyone discovers hers. I’ve mentored some nurses who tell me they knew their ikigai when they were just children, while others tell me they still haven’t discovered it. For some, finding your ikigai can require a deep search of your inner self – a journey of sorts. For others, finding your ikigai comes naturally. For example, my idea of play as a little girl was teaching an imaginary class after coming in from playing football with my brother, Vince. Not only did I need to recover from the battering I received, teaching was my true passion. It’s no accident that my mission today “Revolutionizing nursing careers, one RN at a time” includes teaching.

Knowing your ikigai also has health benefits. Studies have shown that people who know their ikigai are less susceptible to cardiac disease and live longer than those who do not know their purpose.

When you ask yourself “What’s my ikigai?” – don’t give the easy answer “I’m an ICU nurse,” or “I’m Italian,” or “I’m a mother of two,” or “I’m the CEO of a legal nurse consulting company.” Instead think of what gets you out of bed and whether your reaction when you do is “Woo-Hoo!” or “Ho-hum.”

Consider the words of two of the greatest thinkers of their generation (at least as captured by A.A. Milne): “When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?” “What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?” “I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

Today, take the time to ask yourself why you get out of bed. The answer may surprise you and I hope that much as I love Pooh, it’s something you personally find more exciting and nurturing than breakfast.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your ikigai and how you discovered it.

Email is not perfect. Some days one person’s messages deliver and the next day they bounce and you never receive them. Sometimes an email leaves your outbox and never arrives but you don’t know it. Some days you get lots of spam and others you get lots more. Is there a reason for this? None that anyone will ever admit to, because there are just too many gears in the machine.

A representative of one of the largest commercial email marketing companies told me that many Internet service providers lock down their spam filters so tightly that sometimes legitimate email gets blocked, without the intended recipient (or sender, for that matter) ever knowing it. While this helps them control data flow and traffic – it can hurt us. Like many of you, I get my email through the mail server for our domain – LegalNurse.com in my case, but even I lose legitimate email to our spam filters.

Today many businesses are going to all-email communication and ditching paper communications entirely which means that you might not get an important notification because it didn’t pass some random spam test. It seems that a distressed widow in Nigeria with a spare 3.4 million dollars can get email through our filters but my managed network hosting provider cannot (duh!). The more important the communication is, the more likely you won’t receive it (it even happens to me).

Vickie Milazzo Institute has gone partially paperless (it’s our bid to partially save the planet). Expiration notices for your CLNC^® Certification, post test scores, routine communications and important deadlines are all sent via email. You may not be receiving all of our email without even knowing it. If you’re a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant and you’re not receiving email messages from us, one of three things has happened:

1. We don’t have a correct email address on file;
2. You opted out of a previous email communication from the Institute and our email servers unflinchingly continue to honor that request and refuse to send to you; or
3. Your ISP is blocking our email to you.

So what’s a CLNC^® consultant to do? There are four steps you can take:

1. The easiest is to send us an email telling us to add you back to our email lists. We’ll respond quickly.
2. If you have the available control in your email, “whitelist” the LegalNurse.com domain.
3. If you don’t have control, contact your Internet service provider and ask them to “whitelist” the LegalNurse.com domain. If you don’t know how to do this then go to step 4.
4. Get yourself a Gmail account and use that for communication from the Institute.

When used properly, email can be a powerful marketing tool – so long as it’s actually getting through and you’re actually receiving it.

Keep on Techin’,

Tom