Success Strengths for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants: Enterprise

Nurses have the strength of enterprise. Think about all the creative, enterprising ways you’ve worked around administration, the doctors, the insurance companies – all on behalf of your patients. To satisfy everybody you have to be enterprising. But being enterprising isn’t just about satisfying patients, doctors and administration. It’s about being enterprising in the pursuit of your career and professional advancement. You must be as enterprising as the CEO of a successful business.

One way CEOs are more enterprising is they expect a payoff for every venture, large or small. After I got my masters degree, my hospital failed to acknowledge it. I didn’t even get a 25¢/hour pay raise. I thought this venture deserved a payoff, so I gave myself a pay raise by announcing my resignation and getting a job at a hospital that recognized my new level of knowledge.

A few years after I started my legal nurse consulting business I attended law school at night. At the time, I thought I would be interested in practicing law, but later decided I preferred the payoff of the freedom and flexibility that my legal nurse consulting business afforded me.

After I graduated, one of the law firms I consulted with offered me a position as an associate attorney. I didn’t have to think hard about the offer. Not only was I already doing what I loved, I was also earning more money as a legal nurse consultant than any of the associate attorneys just out of law school. Saying no was easy.

Then, a year after I politely turned down the associate position, they upped the ante and offered me a partnership at the law firm. Now, the stakes were much higher. These were some of the best medical-malpractice attorneys in Texas! Between working with these attorneys and thinking about the partner bonuses, that offer was more lucrative than I thought my legal nurse consulting and education businesses could ever be.

But then I remembered that payoff isn’t always about money. Practicing law wouldn’t provide the emotional payoff I was receiving from helping nurses start their own legal nurse consulting businesses. My passion was teaching, not lawyering. My enterprising spirit told me something grander lay ahead. So I stayed with what I loved and passed on what certainly seemed to be a firm financial future. My decision paid off, both financially and emotionally.

When you take on a new venture, make a career decision or simply choose how to spend your time, you should ask, what’s the payoff? Is it monetary, is it good for your spirit, is it good for your career, is it good for your life? If you say no to this opportunity, is there a bigger payoff available to you? You may have to look hard and be imaginative. The profit may not always be in cash but there needs to be a payoff. Passion for your life and work is the best profit of all. But you still don’t want to underprice yourself. So reach for the stars – you deserve them, whether it’s in business or simply personal.

Success Is Yours,

P.S. Comment and share your next payoff.