If Your Brain Doesn’t Remember Failure, Why Should You as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant?
When I first started my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, I was nervous about contacting attorneys and marketing to them. The single most important thing that helped me overcome my fear, was remembering who I was – an RN. You know my mantra, “We Are Nurses and We Can Do Anything!®” If we can make split second decisions that are the difference between life and death, we can do something as easy as talk to an attorney. We learned early on as nurses that doctors are not to be feared and we learned to talk (back) to them. Well, attorneys are the same. They put their super-suits on just like everyone else, one leg at a time. Talk with them; they’re fun. They have great senses of humor and they love life. Some of the most fun people I’ve met in my life are attorneys.
As I grew my legal nurse consulting business I focused on my strengths and successes, not my weaknesses and mistakes. I could write the book on just the mistakes I’ve personally made. Maybe you can too. Now though, there’s hard evidence that it’s our successes that have the most impact on the brain. If you do something the right way, the brain remembers how you did it.
Studies suggest that failure has no impact on helping us to succeed. That’s because if you do something wrong, the brain doesn’t know how to process and store it. Since we absorb more from success than failure, this might explain why successful people learn more from their experiences and continue to succeed often while people who fail learn less from experience and continue to fail often. Think about the people around you. We all know someone who keeps making the same mistakes, in love, at work or in business – it’s because they’re not learning from their failures (unless there is a strong negative association with it such as pain, embarrassment or electrical shock). They fail to learn like they would from a success.
Keep succeeding and stay focused on your past successes. I’ve always said that reliving your past successes will fuel your future success and now research has proven me right.
If your brain doesn’t know how to process your failures, why should you bother? I say you shouldn’t.
LegalNurse.com is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.
The National Alliance of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants (NACLNC®) is the largest and oldest association of legal nurse consultants.
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*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.
