8 Strategies for Believing You Can Become a Successful Legal Nurse Consultant

In Friday’s blog I discussed the importance of believing in legal nurse consulting success before you can achieve it. Let’s face it, belief is not always easy. Believing in yourself is a lifelong process. Even for me, after 36 years in business it still takes daily effort.

I have discovered 8 strategies for bolstering my belief in anything I imagine for my life and career. These are your 8 strategies for believing you too can become a successful legal nurse consultant.

1. Look to your past successes. You’re a nurse. If you’re not sure that you’ll be successful in becoming a legal nurse consultant remember the things in nursing you didn’t believe you’d be able to do and you did them – like starting IVs, resuscitating patients, kicking a doctor off your unit.If you’re already a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant and not sure you can be more successful remember the success you’ve already achieved. If you’ve succeeded in getting just one case from one attorney you can get dozens of cases from dozens of attorneys. If you’ve made $30,000 consulting with one attorney you can make $300,000 consulting with ten.

   Any time your belief falters – in yourself, your CLNC^® business or in what you want to achieve – review your past successes to reaffirm what you already know. You’re a nurse and you can do anything!

2. Expand what you’re willing to believe. Belief that you can become a successful legal nurse consultant is a decision. You can challenge any limitations that are placed on your belief.My first attorney-client believed that all he needed was research. But I believed I could do so much more. So I just did it and I expanded his belief in what he thought he needed and what he thought I could do. You’ve got to expand your own belief before you can expand the attorney’s belief in you.
3. Surround yourself with supportive people who expand your imagination. At LegalNurse.com I have staff who see things from a totally different perspective than I do, and I often ask their opinions. Before I know it, I’m standing up, defending my ideas… but also refining those ideas. They get my imagination going and I get to where I need to be.When you’re around stimulating people, people who challenge you and who think differently, you may resist at first, but ultimately your mind will go in new directions and gather new ideas. The more you repeat this process, the more you’ll believe in you.
4. Write down your ideas. When was the last time you made a to-do list? Until you’ve done everything on that list, is it easy or hard to hit the delete button? That’s right. It’s hard. Once we write it down we’ve created a covenant with ourselves and increased our belief that we can achieve it.Sometimes the first thought you write is pure gold. Other times it’s only a sieve through which you mine the gold. And sometimes it’s nothing more than “fool’s gold” – but what have you lost besides a list. Write down what you’re willing to do to become a legal nurse consultant. Refer to it daily and continue to revise and expand the list.
5. Embellish your imagination with sensory details. This will solidify your belief. Let me give you an example. I had a vision of meeting Oprah. I could see it. Then in 2014 she attended the reception for the Consultant 2.0 event I do with Stedman Graham. People in my office and the Certified Legal Nurse Consultants couldn’t believe that Oprah came to a legal nurse consulting event. I wasn’t surprised because I had already met her in my imagination. Yes, she’s as cool and as engaging as I imagined – she took time to take photos and talk with every one of the CLNC consultants at the reception. Embellish your imagination with sensory details on becoming a legal nurse consultant. What do you have to lose?
   
6. See it to believe it! Don’t get me wrong, faith is a powerful thing. But seeing it is believing it. I personally know someone who’d been on Oprah’s TV show. Knowing that, plus knowing Stedman, I knew I could meet her too.When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, that record had previously stood for 10 years! Bannister believed he could break it, and he did, at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. But what’s really interesting is that a month-and-a-half later another runner broke Bannister’s record. And in the next 40 years over 700 more runners cracked that 4-minute barrier. They achieved it because knowing it had been done made it easier to believe it could be done.

   There’s a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, Suzanne Arragg, who cracked the million dollar barrier as a CLNC consultant. I wondered how long that record would stand? And then along came a second Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, who cracked the million-dollar barrier too and there are more on track to do the same.

   Now that you know it’s been done – not once, but at least twice, nothing is stopping any of you from doing it. Which one of you will be next?

7. Believe you’ll find a way despite any obstacles. If you believe in the outcome, you must believe in your ability to achieve that outcome, no matter what gets in your way. Fear took me along the safe, no-risk route through high school, nursing school and into a secure RN job – until I woke up to a different kind of fear – the fear of becoming like so many other nurses – tired, burned out and old before my time.I faced a decision: Step out and become the legal nurse consultant I imagined or spend the rest of my life in a dead end RN job at the hospital. So, with only $100 in my savings account, I called my first attorney and the rest is history.

   Everybody has obstacles. Obstacles can become crutches if you let them. For some nurses having children is the crutch for not succeeding. “I’ve got 2 children, I don’t have time to succeed.” One extremely successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultant had sole custody of her two children. She’s thinking “I don’t have time not to succeed.” For one the obstacle is a crutch. For the other the obstacle is the motivation and the opportunity.

8. Repeat your vision, over and over and over again. Athletes and performers are proof that this technique works. Winning athletes practice what they want to achieve in their minds over and over again. They believe and achieve because they’ve performed perfectly so often in their minds.At age 19 the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso was diagnosed with a detached retina and confined to bed for a year. Despite this incredible obstacle, during that time, Alicia danced over and over in her mind to keep her feet, memory and passion alive. Because she believed she could achieve what no ballerina had ever done before she didn’t just return to the stage, she danced perfectly – even with her limited vision. So perfectly she was eventually honored with the highest designation, Prima ballerina assoluta.

   Mentally walk through the steps for becoming a successful legal nurse consultant. This will imprint its reality onto your imagination, making it more believable and achievable.

Use these 8 strategies for bolstering your belief that you can become a successful legal nurse consultant and you will do just that. Imagine, believe and you will achieve.

Success Is Yours!

P.S. Comment and share which of the eight strategies you’ll employ first.