New York City

Vickie and I were flying home from New York City after Vickie’s appearance on Fox & Friends. As usual, we were crunching away against a deadline. Our keyboards were blazing, fingers were flying and when we got to the point where we wanted to start highlighting some text in the document we were editing, I reached for my mouse, then remembered “Tom, you’re on an airplane and your mouse is packed in baggage.” My fingers drifted towards my touchpad, then remembered “Tom, you disabled your touchpad so that you wouldn’t drop your thumbs on it and move the cursor while you’re typing.” Finally, I thought about using the keyboard’s pointing stick but, it’s a terrible mouse alternative and tends to hop around when I use it so I dropped that idea.

As I was contemplating my next move, Vickie came to my rescue – she reached over, moved my cursor to the start of my text and told me to hold down the Shift key and then hit the right or down arrow and watch it select text. Amazing! It selected all the text I wanted and when I was done, I left-clicked the yellow highlighter and I was done ahead of the deadline.

My takeaway: if you want a quick, non-mouse way to select text for highlighting, cutting or copying, simply start with your cursor at the front or back of the text you want to select, hold down your Shift key and then arrow up, down or sideways until the text is selected. Then you can copy, cut, italicize or do whatever else you need.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I’m in New York City for Easter and just got back from strolling down Fifth Avenue (Tom held my credit card) in one of the most fashionable cities in the world.

New Yorkers have it all together. They are serious about their business and they’re not afraid to prove it in the way they dress. No matter what they are wearing, they know how to package it into one congruent statement. And nobody knows how to dress up “basic black” like a New Yorker. They dress for “Success in the City” more often than “Sex in the City;” which is exactly what you have to do when you walk into an attorney’s office for a legal nurse consulting interview. I recommend that new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants hire an image consultant. New or experienced, I mean it, you need one, you’ll have to trust me on this one. So did I when I started my legal nurse consulting business 27 years ago (even though I didn’t know it at the time).

A typical nurse, I knew how to wear scrubs, but little else. One year for Christmas I asked my mom for a $50 painting I coveted so I’d have something to hang on the wall of my new one-bedroom condo. Her response was, “You need a dress, not a $50 painting.” But being the loving person she was, I got the painting and mom got a big hug. When I had my first attorney interview, I wasn’t ready to “dress for success,” but that painting sure looked great hanging on my living room wall. Fortunately for me, the attorney wasn’t (and still isn’t) the best dresser either. The dressiest things I owned were my “church clothes,” a purple sweater and grey skirt my mom had gotten me for my birthday (two months after that Christmas). Lucky for me the attorney saw what I could do for him, not what I was wearing, and hired me to work on my first medical malpractice case. I got started both on the case and on learning how to dress the part to maneuver through the attorney’s world.

I did manage to avoid the Minnie Mouse look popular at the time, but some of my suits were a little stiff and serious. Through a “friend of a friend” I met an image consultant who quickly set me straight and pulled me together (but not without a struggle). She taught me a valuable lesson. No matter how competent we are, what we wear and how we wear it speaks loudly about what people will expect from us. We may be able to deliver a high quality work product (or save a life), but if the purse doesn’t blend, the shoes are a little scuffy and if the hair’s ten years out of style – you can count on the attorney focusing on the lowest common denominator, not your 15 years of nursing experience and terrific communication skills. We nurses are pretty lenient and tend to judge other nurses first by how we’ve secured all our tools to our scrubs, then by our competencies. Attorneys hire people they perceive to already be successful. You have seconds to influence that first impression and those scrubs or purple sweater just won’t do it. Nordstrom’s and other stores offer free image consults. Take advantage of them, you’ll appreciate it later. Your best thinking got you here – their best thinking can get you out of those scrubs.

If you’ve still no clue what I’m talking about, take a trip to New York City, stroll Fifth Avenue and take a good look at what people are wearing. Just leave your credit card at home.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your 5th-Avenue-style tips for your CLNC^® business.