nursing career

I talk to thousands of RNs every year who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the healthcare system. Many of these conversations remind me of a dinner I had with my father at an Italian restaurant. After an animated discussion with the waiter, my dad ordered a pasta dish that wasn’t on the menu, telling the waiter exactly what he wanted in it.

When the food came, it was presented beautifully and prepared exactly as he had requested. Bits of scallion, garlic and peppered chicken glistened over a serving of fettuccine, all mixed with basil and olive oil, topped with chunks of ripe, red tomato lightly dusted with Parmesan cheese. The dish looked so good, I wanted it instead of my own.

I expected my father to be delighted with his meal. Instead, he started comparing it to a completely different pasta dish from a different Italian restaurant. Rather than enjoying his dinner, he found fault with the waiter, the restaurant and the chef for not serving this other recipe. According to dad, the dish was prepared wrong and even had the wrong ingredients! He specifically complained that there shouldn’t have been any tomatoes and there wasn’t enough garlic.

I sat there both stunned and amused. Even though my dad’s pasta was prepared exactly as he had requested, it wasn’t what he really wanted because it wasn’t the dish he was used to ordering at the other restaurant. Finally, I gently interrupted his litany of complaints, reminding him that he had received exactly what he ordered. In fact, after tasting it, I liked it even better than the dish he was comparing it to.

Dad replied, “I may have gotten what I ordered, but it isn’t what I want.” My father had expected the waiter to read his mind and bring him something other than what he ordered. Eventually, my dad’s hunger got the best of him and he enjoyed his meal to the last bite. After all, when you’re hungry, even the wrong dish fills your stomach.

What Career Menu Are You Ordering From?

As an RN, are you hungry for job satisfaction but ordering the wrong dish off the wrong menu?

• Do you feel exhausted by your working conditions and environment?
• Do you dislike the hours, the weekends, the administration, the HMOs?
• Are you cranky about too many patients and not enough time to provide the quality of care you know you’re capable of?

If your nursing career isn’t where you want it to be, are you confusing your expectations and desires with what a traditional nursing job menu offers? Are you trying to order a dish that isn’t on the menu?

Like my dad, you may have expectations about what you are being served. You may have tried your best to order exactly what you wanted. Yet what’s on your plate has turned out very differently from what you were expecting.

If you stay at your same RN job and order off the same old RN job menu, don’t be surprised when you get what you’ve always gotten even though it’s not what you want. Much like the Salisbury steak in a hospital cafeteria, what healthcare facilities serve up for your nursing career has been on the menu for years. Sometimes the description changes, sometimes the preparation changes, but it’s still the same old Salisbury steak, and it is still not very satisfying for many RNs I’ve come to know.

Feast at a Brand New Restaurant

If you’re salivating for a nursing dish with different ingredients, if you want more autonomy, freedom, control or money, it’s time to feast at a new restaurant with a new and modern menu.

Certified Legal Nurse Consultants don’t order off the traditional menu offered by healthcare facilities. They’ve found a new menu that features more of what they want for themselves and they’re willing to leave their hospital restaurant to enjoy that innovative menu. For these nurses, the legal nurse consulting restaurant has the right menu – dishes that satisfy their palate in every way, and choices so plentiful they don’t have to look anywhere else because any dish they can imagine is already on the CLNC^® menu.

Life is meant to be an adventurous banquet filled with tasty and satisfying dining experiences. It’s your meal – you get to choose the restaurant and write your own menu. Shouldn’t you get what you want, what you deserve, like so many other nurses who have chosen to stop ordering off the wrong menu?

Your right menu is just an action step away. Go to the right nursing restaurant today and you’ll find that one dish you’ve been craving. I invite you to join me and my CLNC^® colleagues at the legal nurse consulting banquet – the taste sensation of a lifetime. Don’t miss another minute of this exciting feast – reserve your place at the CLNC^® banquet table today.

Success Is Inside!

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.

Did you know that the most trusted profession is nursing? No surprises there. Nurses are the patients’ advocates. Patients know who’s watching their backs. Watching out for the patient, standing up for the patient, protecting the patient – this is our primary role. And that requires integrity above all else. You have the strength of integrity.

The whole world trusts nurses. But the question is, “Do you trust yourself to succeed beyond where you are today?” Do you have the integrity to act on what you really want to do with your nursing career? When I decided to start my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, nurses did not own businesses. I had to have the integrity to trust myself and that yes, I could succeed as a legal nurse consultant.

And, do you trust the people who you spend your life and time with? If you want to become a legal nurse consultant or grow your CLNC^® business, surround yourself with family, friends and attorney-clients whom you trust and who treat you with integrity. When you do, you will easily achieve your CLNC^® dreams and desires. I had to ignore the naysayers. Their fears did not have to become my fears.

Nurses at our CLNC^® Certification Seminars always comment on what a great staff I have at Vickie Milazzo Institute. They say, “I’ve never seen a company that has so many positive people.” When I left hospital nursing, I intentionally set out to create a culture that did not include gossiping, whining and complaining. I created our mission to be about the customer. That’s the culture of integrity here at the Institute.

As you build your CLNC^® business, do so with intention and create a culture that supports your highest integrity by choosing to surround yourself with people who share and support your vision.

Never tolerate people or groups who are intentionally gossipy, mean or hurtful to you or anyone else. If you find yourself in an environment that’s putting you down, don’t put up with it. Don’t let rotten apples sour your fire and vision.

Likewise, it’s important to know that if you participate in gossiping, whining or complaining, it kills not only your fire, but also your opportunities for career advancement and growing your legal nurse consulting business. I promise you, the people who matter do notice unprofessional behavior.

The more successful we are in our careers, the more we participate in life, the more we face decisions that challenge our integrity. That’s why I love the Buddhist proverb that says, “Even the smallest act should not be underestimated, for even tiny flakes of snow falling one atop another can blanket the tallest mountain in pure whiteness.”

Success Is Inside!

It’s a New Year, the time and opportunity to start new, think new and be new. Time to create new realities for ourselves.

Many of you have contemplated becoming a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, and may be wondering if, as a nurse, you’re cut out to be an entrepreneur and own your own business. After all, none of us were born entrepreneurs. It’s not like when we were born our moms asked, “Is it a boy or a girl? And the doctor said, “No… it’s a little entrepreneur.”

We often look to outside experts and when I started my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, I wished that nursing school had trained me better for managing a business. Nursing school didn’t offer classes such as marketing, accounting or business management. I wasn’t confident that my nursing education and nursing experience had in any way prepared me to own my own business. However, I soon recognized that nursing gave me most of the answers for successfully starting my own business. I also quickly discovered that I was better trained as an RN than most MBAs are for the world of entrepreneurship. Here are 10 things nursing taught me well about owning a business.

Success Lesson 1 – You Have the Power to Take Control of Your Nursing Career

We all know that patients heal faster when they take control of their health and practice healthy habits. Even the smallest positive action can give a patient a sense of control and empower the healing process. Placebos are proof that if a patient believes he can be healed, his body does the necessary work for him.

You too have the power to practice the healthy habits essential for taking control of your career destiny. Educate yourself about the necessary steps to achieve career health, including new career options like legal nurse consulting. Then take control of your career destiny by taking action on those steps.

Success Lesson 2 – Don’t Give in to Fear

As a nurse, you often treat different patients who have the same progressive disease, yet they experience dramatically different outcomes. We all have known patients who lived years after their predicted demise and other patients who should have lived but didn’t because they gave up. The fact that so many elderly patients die within months of losing a spouse is a sound example of the mind-body connection. In almost every case, the patients who died too soon had given in to their fear.

As Frank Herbert said in Dune “Fear is the mind-killer.” Fear can paralyze you and keep you from making decisions. There’s also a mind-business connection that will influence the health of your business. When I give in to fear, I become the biggest obstacle to my success. Practice mind control and exercise your mind daily for positive thinking. Shake off any lack of confidence and negative thinking. Don’t let fear be the reason you don’t live your career dreams. Always remember the mindset of the patients who live and the patients who die. The good news is that in business as opposed to nursing, bad results usually aren’t fatal.

Success Lesson 3 – Nurses Can Do Anything

If you can make life and death decisions in the middle of the night, heal sick patients and handle life-threatening emergencies as easily as you make your bed in the morning, you really can do anything – especially something as straightforward as starting a legal nurse consulting business. Whenever I face a business crisis, I remind myself, “I’m a nurse and nurses can do anything.” I’ve repeated this same message to myself for every obstacle I’ve had to overcome in my business.

Success Lesson 4 – The Nursing Process Is Your Friend

When I left hospital nursing to pursue my legal nurse consulting business full-time, I thought I could set aside the “nursing process” forever. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Business requires that same process of assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation. Every case you get involved in requires you to assess the possibilities and needs, diagnose the problems, plan how to achieve the goals, implement the plan and evaluate the results.

Your nursing jobs have prepared you well. You can apply the nursing process to any business situation and challenge. You will thank your nursing instructors for this one. Every time you review a medical-related case, interview with an attorney or face a challenge, you will rely on the process they taught you. Today, thanks to the analysis powers I gained from the nursing process, I handle things easily and successfully that would have seemed impossible 28 years ago. Aside from drawing blood, almost none of your nursing experience will be wasted in business.

Success Lesson 5 – Act Quickly and Decisively

As an RN you know that seconds make a difference in patient outcomes. You rarely have lots of time to ponder or brood over a clinical decision. Act as quickly and decisively in your CLNC^® business as you do as a hospital nurse and you will seize the opportunities that slower peers miss out on.

Will you always be correct? No. Will you make mistakes? Yes. But one thing for sure, you’ll never be paralyzed into inaction. Don’t miss your chance to succeed. Act quickly and decisively to grow your CLNC^® business.

Success Lesson 6 – What You Focus on Is Where You Yield Results

Nurses are often overwhelmed by short staffing, heavy caseloads and lack of support from hospital administration. Even the general public knows that working conditions for RNs are worse than ever. We quickly learn to triage and focus on what we need to do to heal patients in this less-than-ideal environment. Nursing taught me that where I focus my time is where I yield results.

That skill comes in handy for legal nurse consultants. It’s as important to triage and prioritize your actions in your CLNC^® business as it is when working with patients. Every day I’m confronted with dozens of challenges, five things that must be done at once, and 20 new creative ideas for my business, but I rarely panic. The organizational and multitasking skills I learned as a nurse have served me well. When you start your CLNC^® business, you will not receive any extra hours in the day. In fact, the days will feel shorter because you’ll be enjoying your newfound freedom. Your ability to focus on what’s really important is the perfect training for your successful CLNC^® business.

Success Lesson 7 – This Is Just Business, It’s Not Cancer

Ministering to patients and family members helps nurses put life, with all its problems and challenges, into perspective. Today when I overreact to a problem or feel I’m in crisis, I think of sick and dying patients. I think, “Now fighting for your life is a REAL problem.”

In business I’ve had lots of ups and downs. When the down moments come, I remind myself, “This is business – not cancer.” This helps me focus positively on solving the problem rather than embarking on a pity party. I’ve thrown plenty of those “parties,” and not only did they not make me feel any better, they never helped me solve a single business problem. As you grow your CLNC^® business, it helps to ask, “So what if that one attorney says no?” or “So what if my favorite attorney-client retires?” and to remember it’s just business, not cancer.

Success Lesson 8 – Illness Can Wake You Up

All nurses have treated some patients who only began to live after they almost died. We’ve all had patients who said they are glad they got sick, because while they were well, they weren’t living the life they wanted. The health crisis forced them to wake up, reassess their lives, decide what was truly important to them and go for it.

If your career is facing a health crisis, this is your opportunity to wake up and change things for the better. Today at work, ask yourself whether your nursing career is healthy and whether your nursing career is affecting your health and well-being. Wake up and remember that there’s always time to make a change for the better – but it’s better to do it now while you can still enjoy the change!

Success Lesson 9 – Business Is Personal

Even though technical skills are vital for nurses, the relationships with patients and their families are usually what matters most. Those relationships pay off. When I was a young nurse, I made a mistake on one of my patients and he knew it. To my surprise the patient requested that I continue to be his nurse despite my error. I attributed his continuing trust to the relationship we had established together.

Just like nursing, business is personal. I have all the technical skills to lead my seminars and run my business. In fact, at this stage I could hand off some of those responsibilities to others. But I still teach every CLNC^® 6-Day Live Certification Program we offer and speak to students daily because those relationships are what I thrive on. No one else could replicate my relationship with each and every nurse. As a result, most of our business comes from referrals by practicing CLNC^® consultants and graduates of Vickie Milazzo Institute.

Legal nurse consulting is a service business where you will apply the same relationship principles you learned in nursing to your attorney-clients and prospects. Provide quality service and excellent work product that no other legal nurse consultant can replicate, and soon you’ll feel like you’re in a short-staffing situation all over again.

Success Lesson 10 – Take a Deep Breath When Managing Your Employees

One more thing I learned, it’s easier to manage an ICU full of patients than a room full of employees! At least you can sedate your patients.

Every lesson I learned from nursing, I apply to my business today. You’ve already learned similar lessons yourself. Take a moment on this New Day of this New Year to revel in everything nursing has taught you. These lessons will help you manifest any dream you desire for 2010 including becoming a CLNC^® consultant.

Success Is Inside!

What would your life look like if every moment of it was absolutely enriched, fulfilled and swelling with joy? Think about it – your health, relationships, career, spirituality and finances are the best they can be and you greet each day with energy and enthusiasm for whatever comes your way. What would accomplish that?

I discovered the 5 Promises in 1982 when I faced the reality that I was unhappy with the direction my life was taking. It wasn’t easy after putting hard work into becoming an RN, earning my bachelor’s degree, my master’s degree and working six years in the hospital, to find I was extremely disappointed by the career choice I had made. I’d gone in wide-eyed, thinking I could make a difference, even improve the state of healthcare, only to bump up against the reality that no matter how hard I worked, my efforts would never make a dent, much less an impact. I was also moving far too slowly toward financial success, and I was forgetting what it was like to have fun with my nursing job at the hospital.

A quick look at my nursing colleagues who had been in nursing for 20 years or more showed me that my future held more of the same. Not that they weren’t trying really hard, but their passion for nursing had died. I could see that my passion was starting to die too and wondered if I might not be wasting my potential. I decided to start my own business as a legal nurse consultant.

Einstein said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. I knew whatever mindset got me into nursing school was not the mindset I would need to start my legal nurse consulting business. So I committed to 5 Promises. These promises became the 5 Promises I have continued to renew daily for almost three decades, and which changed not only my nursing career but my entire life.

Look for each of my 5 Promises in my next 5 blogs.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share what you believe it will take for you to unleash your legal nurse consulting dreams.

How would you rate your passion about your career? What kind of flowers would you send to your legal nurse consulting business? Or send to your nursing job at the hospital, if you’re not yet a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant? Would you send roses, lilies or a tumbleweed?

Do you love what you do? If you went to an amusement arcade and dropped a quarter into one of those machines where you squeeze a pair of grips or a mechanical hand, would your passion rating be “stone cold” or “hot tamale?” Did I hear you say “hot tamale?” Great! But what if you said “stone cold?”

The passionate path isn’t quick and easy. After I became an independent legal nurse consultant, I went to law school at night. I was also consulting with a group of attorneys who, after I graduated, offered me a position as an associate attorney. I graciously and easily declined, thinking, “Why would I want to do that? I’m doing what I love, having more freedom and making more money than any new associate attorney.” A year later a partner at the law firm approached me and said, “Okay, if you won’t come on as an associate, we’re inviting you to be a partner.”

This attractive offer raised the stakes considerably. Suddenly saying yes to my passion wasn’t so easy. I loved consulting with these attorneys, and a partnership would guarantee a bigger and brighter future every year, financially and in other respects.

But after my ego stopped dancing around the room pumping its arm and shouting “Yes!,” I declined the offer. Practicing law was not my passion, even with such ideal conditions. I remember saying to Tom, “There are lawyers who would die for this offer. Am I crazy to turn this down?” Choosing passion paid off big. My passion was so strong that my business soon soared despite my lack of business training or education. I surpassed the law firm’s offer in terms of money, vacation time and flexibility. To this day, I am able to maintain my freedom, continue creating my own financial security and, most of all, enjoy the legal nurse consulting industry I created.

That kind of decision isn’t easy. What’s easy is to compromise, say yes to a lukewarm interest because we, or someone else, think it’s a smarter decision. Live and work your passions and the reward will come.

When you get married, you go into it with the plan of being in the marriage for a long time. Business is a lot like a marriage. It’s a lot of work with ups and downs, fast times and slow times. If you haven’t yet started a business, know that once you do, you’ll spend more time in that career and business than you will in your marriage. We’re often at work more than we are at home with our family.

If you’ve chosen to do something you love, and can be passionate about, you won’t be working for a living, you’ll be living for working, and because you’ll be doing it with joy, you’ll be able to do it a lot longer.

Design your nursing career or legal nurse consulting business to be your passion – the one you love. Choose what you love.

Back in 1990, I was forced to make a choice between money and passion. I chose passion. I’ll be sending my business 12 dozen red roses tomorrow. What will you send your business or career this Valentine’s Day?

Success Is Inside!