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Archive for January, 2012

Has honesty become a thing of the past? Many people are asking themselves this question as they scour the net for what they need.

As the low economy in the United States takes its toll on many, people are constantly looking for alternative ways to solve their dilemma, including the internet.

In a frantic search to find the ultimate solution, they spend their hard-earned money on “Get Rich Schemes” only to find out that the bargain they hoped for wasn’t a bargain at all.

With crushed hopes, dreams, and an empty wallet many people retaliate. Some may pass it off by learning negative things such as not trusting anyone else… possibly for the rest of their lives. Others quit buying altogether. While still others, run and tell there friends they got ripped-off and by whom causing a viral rift, giving marketers a bad reputation.

Either way we look at these facts, we still come to the same conclusion. We need to change the way we are doing things and become more ethically inclined when running our businesses.

Honesty has a great deal to do with any marketer, if not for any other reason but to be able to continue with one’s business. Secondly, it helps someone else get what they need.

I remember a time when people put great trust in their local merchant. You remember those days? The marketer was fair and usually gave the consumer more than they bargained for…They new the secret to long term success.

We too have that same power to claim long term success and to help change what is going on in the internet marketing circle! By claiming this power and making a few changes, we can help stimulate the economic growth that is needed to overcome hard times.

You may be saying to yourself, but I am honest in my work. You may be! There are still many marketers that use ethical marketing when selling their products. That’s great, but what about passing these ethical techniques to future merchants? Like our affiliates for example…Are we teaching them about honesty? How about the new marketer who seeks wisdom and a JV with some of the old timers?

I know some folks who have been making money for several years are going to say, “We’ve tried to teach the young about ethical marketing, but they aren’t listening.” That may be so. We cannot twist anyone’s arms to get them to do the right thing.

However, we can be examples for them. We leave the ball in their court. The young will then learn from their mistakes. Without customers and future financing, they will once again seek wisdom from the old timers.

Then, and only then, will online marketing be instrumental in economic growth so it can stand firm throughout the trials that face all of us.

If this article offends anyone maybe it’s time to take a look at the overall marketing picture.

Trust is built on the very foundation of honesty, especially when dealing with costumers. It’s a two-way street…the consumer gets what they paid for, their hopes are flying high and their wallets still have money in them so they can buy other things.

The marketer on the other hand, gets a repeat costumer that will tell his/her friends, who will tell their friends, and so on, making more money in the long run, while building great lasting relationships, and a fantastic reputation. To put a sugar coating on top, they are helping someone else.
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Have you ever wondered whether you’re cut out to be an entrepreneur? Nurses sometimes tell me they aren’t sure if their nursing career has prepared them to start and succeed in their own legal nurse consultant practice. Yet even the most routine nursing job is full of life lessons that apply to the business world.

My first job as an intensive care nurse in a major medical center prepared me for business success. Subsequent jobs reinforced those early messages. I invite you to look closely at your own nursing career and discover the lessons that will help you succeed as a legal nurse consultant.

Success Lesson 1 — Find Your Passion and Turn It into a Business
As much as I loved my work with critically ill patients and their families, my inner voice told me I wouldn’t be working in a hospital forever. As a young nurse, the vision of myself working in the ICU at age 40, 50 or 60 just wouldn’t come into focus.

With only 6 years of nursing experience, I left the hospital and started my legal nurse consultant business. From there, I listened to my inner voice and reconnected with my first passion teaching. At age 8, I spent hours every day teaching an imaginary class. Today I am privileged to teach, coach and mentor nurses to live their career dreams. I turned my passion into a business, and since then I haven’t worked a single day.

Listen to your inner voice, and you will find your passion. Many nurses have reconnected to their passion through legal nurse consulting, a choice unknown to them before they took my program.

Success Lesson 2 – You Have the Power to Take Control of Your Career Destiny

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.

I learned this lesson time and again as I struggled to gain control of my own nursing career. Each time I refused to give in to the frustrations of working within the healthcare system and took a positive step on my own, I felt better. With every step I grew, I thrived and I came up with new ideas to further my sense of control and satisfaction.

The same is true about your career. You have the power to practice the healthy habits essential to take control of your career destiny. Educate yourself about the steps to achieving career health, including new career options like legal nurse consulting. Then take action on those steps. You really can take control of your career destiny.

Success Lesson 3 – Don’t Give in to Fear

As a nurse, I frequently treated patients who had the same progressive disease, yet experienced 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 or didn’t want to live. The fact that so many elderly patients die within months of losing a spouse is a solid example of the mind-body connection. In almost every case, the patients who died too soon had given in to fear.

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. That was true when I started my business 19 years ago. That is true today.

Fear will paralyze you instantly. Practice mind control and exercise your mind daily for positive thinking. Shake off your lack of confidence and negative thinking. Don’t wait for an MI to stop inhaling the toxic smoke of fear. Don’t let fear be the reason you don’t live your career dreams. Always remember the mind-set of the patients who live and the patients who die.

Success Lesson 4 – Nurses Can Do Anything

As nurses most of us have brought patients back to life. We all can recall at least one miracle story a case where, with our help, a patient survived against all odds.

Whenever I face a business crisis, I remind myself, “I’m a nurse and nurses can do anything.” I’ve repeated this same message for 19 years, and it has helped me overcome every obstacle.

If you can 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 business.

Success Lesson 5 – You Can’t Climb Mount Everest without Practicing on the Foothills

I had to have extensive education and training just to qualify for my first nursing job. All the lessons from that job helped prepare me for the next. Each successive nursing position required new and different skills necessitating more training and education.

The same applies to owning a business. Today I handle things easily and successfully that seemed impossible 19 years ago. But that’s because I’ve been in training for what I do now ever since I became a nurse.

If you’re frustrated with your nursing career, don’t feel like you’ve thrown your life away. No experience or job is a waste. Everything you have done has trained you to move up to the next level. Above all, don’t let the fact that you’re not trained to climb Mount Everest stop you from pursuing your dreams of becoming an independent legal nurse consultant. Your nursing training and experience was the first step. Start the next step of your training today, and you will make that climb to start your successful legal nurse consultant business.

Success Lesson 6 – The Nursing Process Is Your Friend

When I left clinical nursing, 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 project I take on requires me to assess the possibilities and needs, diagnose the problems, plan how to achieve my goals, implement the plan and evaluate my 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 in running your business, you will rely on the process they taught you.

Success Lesson 7 – Act Quickly and Decisively

As an ICU nurse, I learned that seconds made a difference in patient outcome. That’s true for nurses in any specialty. I rarely had lots of time to ponder or brood over a clinical decision.

I have applied the same principles of acting quickly and decisively in business, too. Am I always correct? No. Do I make mistakes? Yes. Yet because of my nursing experience, I’m never paralyzed into inaction and I’ve been able to make the most of numerous opportunities I would have missed without acting quickly.

Don’t miss your chance to succeed. Learn to act quickly and decisively, and you will grow your legal nurse consultant business.

Success Lesson 8 – What You Focus on Is Where You Achieve Results

In nursing I was often overwhelmed by short staffing, heavy caseloads and lack of support from hospital administration. I soon learned to triage and focus on what I needed to do to heal patients in this less-than-ideal environment. Nursing taught me that where I focus my time is where I achieve results.

That skill comes in handy in business. It’s as important to triage and prioritize your actions in 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 multi-tasking skills I learned as a nurse have served me well.

When you start your legal nurse consultant business, you will not receive any extra hours in the day. In fact, the days will feel shorter. Even the general public knows that working conditions for RNs are worse than ever. Your ability to focus on what’s really important under these conditions is the perfect preparation for your successful legal nurse consultant practice.

Success Lesson 9 – This Is Just Business, It’s Not Breast Cancer

Ministering to patients and family members helped me 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 breast 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 they never helped me solve a single business problem.

As you grow your legal nurse consultant business, it helps to ask “So what if this month is not as successful as I planned?” or “So what if my best attorney-client retires?” and to remember its just business, not breast cancer.

Success Lesson 10 – Illness Can Wake You Up

As a nurse I treated many 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.

Not every day is a healthy business day. Some days I wake up to a disease challenge in my business. Surprisingly, it’s the business ills and mistakes that often awaken me to creative ways of injecting my business with new life.

If your career is facing a health crisis, this is your opportunity to wake up and change things for the better. Legal nurse consulting is one way to restore the health of your career.

Success Lesson 11 – Business Is Personal

Even though technical skills are vital for an ICU nurse, the relationships with patients and their families were what mattered most to me. Those relationships paid off one day when I made a mistake. Because of our relationship, the patient requested that I continue being his nurse despite my error.

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 12 – Healthy Patients Take Care of Themselves

We’ve all worked with healthy and unhealthy patients and we’ve seen the effects of poor health habits on the human body. The health of a pregnant woman is often dramatically reflected in the health of her offspring.

To run a successful company you must enjoy an optimal state of health. Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. I love my business, but I love myself more. After all, without a healthy me, I couldn’t muster the energy to give 110% to my clients and employees every day.

Every lesson I learned from nursing, I apply to my business today. You’ve already learned similar lessons yourself. You don’t need another hospital job to help you succeed in business. Take a moment to revel in all nursing has taught you. These lessons will multiply your success when you transfer them to your new legal nurse consulting practice.

At the heart of any legal undertaking is the mass of data that legal professionals need to perform their jobs. The demanding job of acquiring and organizing the documents that comprise this data is known as litigation support. It’s a demanding task that requires a high level or organizational ability and a painstaking attention to detail. And with these documents increasingly in electronic form, litigation support professionals need even more skills and knowledge.

The legal system runs on information. Any law suit or court case involves a veritable sea of documentation ranging from witness statements to affidavits to any documents that can be applied as evidence. And the legal system demands impeccable documentation with accuracy, security, integrity, speed and efficiency. The management of this rigorous process is known as litigation support.

Litigation support can be defined as any operation involving human and mechanical systems to process information for use by attorneys or expert consultants in preparation for a lawsuit or a trial. And in these high-tech times it’s an especially demanding task.

Nowadays, a major part of such documentation is likely to be in electronic form and stored on a computer system. The retrieval and authentication of such digital documents is a field in itself and one of vital importance in a successful legal undertaking.

What’s more, paper documents also have to be scanned and stored in digital format. This allows easy access to concerned parties. It’s a process that demands impeccable organisation and supervision. Documents have to be tagged and indexed and stored in document management centers in a way that they’re instantly retrievable.

Clearly people working in this field have to skilled in both technology and law. And generally employees in firm that offer litigation support services are qualified paralegals.

The challenges of dealing with digital media are many. For one thing, there tends to be large volumes of such data and each document may have many copies or exist in several versions. Also electronic data is much more volatile than hard copy. So it requires special handling. What’s more the data may be concealed or encrypted which demands special expertise.

Other than procedures such as the scanning, imaging, and indexing of documents, litigation support firms also provide such sophisticated activities as electronic discovery and computer forensics. These are essentially the same procedure – the retrieval of data from computer systems for a specific purpose. The difference is just in the reason for the retrieval; electronic discovery is for general purposes, while the term computer forensics is generally used when the retrieved information is for use in a law suit or in a court of law.

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What do employers look for in potential employees? That was the question that was posted recently on a career discussion forum online. Naturally, for each different position, the particular answers to that question would be different. However, there are some common skills that employers look for in all employees, whether the employee happens to be a network engineer or a fry cook.

In-Demand Skills for Success

1. BASIC SKILLS‚ Reading, writing and arithmetic! Believe it or not, a good portion of high school graduates (and some college grads) do not read at an 8th grade level and cannot do multiplication in their head. Employers are seeking employees who can read well, can write coherently, and who can calculate mathematics in a business environment (fractions, percentages, etc.) Add to that the modern basic skills of keyboarding skill, basic computer knowledge, and ability to use most computerized tools (e.g. fax machine, basic word processing program, etc.) to round out the basic skill sets needed for employment success.

2. PERSONAL SKILLS‚ Can a potential employee speak well? Can he/she answer questions of customers in a positive, informative manner? Can the prospect provide good customer service? While not everyone has an outgoing sales’ personality, successful employees can communicate in a non-confrontational, positive manner with their coworkers, team members, subordinates, management, and customers. Being able to work well with others is a vital skill for success in all jobs.

3. JOB ATTAINMENT‚ Job search is a process that requires a great deal of dedication and attention to be conducted successfully. It follows the old principal that many veteran programmers refer to as GIGO ‚ Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you put lousy effort in, you will receive lousy results. Employers are seeking employees who know how to present themselves in a positive manner and who display enthusiasm and knowledge about the companies they approach. Not only do candidates get evaluated on their skills and experience, but also on how they are approaching the job search. Enthusiastic candidates with fewer skills have an even chance of getting the job as dull candidates with better skills.

4. JOB SURVIVAL‚ Now there’s a hot topic in this period of layoffs. Who gets the ax and who doesn’t is often a matter of numbers, but it is also often a matter of performance. Employees who have consistently demonstrated their worth, taken initiative, and made themselves a valuable asset to the company have lower incidences of being downsized than employees who put forth mediocre or average effort in their jobs. Surviving within a company through layoffs or moving up the career ladder is a success skill that is learned and is consciously cultivated among successful professionals.
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