FROM THE EDITOR How to Break the Feel-Good Addiction to Engage Big Things
by Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD
How does a busy professional like yourself cope with the mounting demands and pressures of career and everyday life and still achieve success as a Certified Legal Nurse ConsultantCM (CLNC
®)?
Whether you are a beginner starting a part-time CLNC® practice while still working full time at the hospital or a full-time CLNC® juggling a heavy caseload and the attorneys who come with it, the key to achieving BIG is breaking the "feel-good" addiction.
The feel-good addiction is an addiction to the small, easy "feel-good" tasks that bombard us every day – sorting the mail, answering email, checking voicemail and straightening, organizing and reorganizing. If you've got a big comprehensive report due tomorrow, even cleaning toilets can feel good. You know exactly what I'm talking about – we all have our favorite feel-good tasks. Mine is cleaning out the refrigerator (I leave the toilets to my husband, Tom).
Let yourself get caught in the feel-good addiction, and before you know it, you're majoring in minor things. You accomplish lots of little tasks, but achieve very little of significance for your CLNC® practice.
The feel-good addiction is insidious for those of us who get a charge out of checking things off our to-do lists. Sure you knock out some minor chores, but that check-mark high comes at a price. In the long term this cheap high is guaranteed to frustrate, overwhelm and stress you out. You'll start questioning how you can be so busy all day yet accomplish so little of importance. Soon, your enthusiasm and energy will wane along with your productivity.
Start Your Day Big
The feel-good addiction begins with the way you start your day. Most of us (yes, even morning people) like to ease into our workday. Ask yourself this: Is this feel-good start to my day really the best use of my professional time?
You start with a few small and easy feel-goods. "I'll just check my email to see if I have any attorney emergencies." Then you're off and running on all those other messages you "need" to answer, forward or research. After all, you tell yourself, firing off an email to a fellow CLNC® only takes two minutes. Since you're not yet feeling the day's time constraints, these tasks steal more attention than they deserve. Two minutes turns into 20 as one item leads to another. Soon the morning's gone faster than those first two cups of coffee. In a flash, the day is over, and you haven't written one page of that comprehensive report.
Even if you set these small to-do's aside, they can buzz around in your head like mosquitoes. For the rest of the day, they nag at you until you divert your attention from something important and swat them. You give in and start opening that stack of bills. This distraction now diffuses your focus on the complex report you're supposed to be concentrating on.
Knowing my inability to look at a stack of anything, trivia included, without diving into it, I start each day with a clean desk free of clutter and a clear mind free of trivia. I put small tasks out of sight and out of mind until the designated time to deal with them. Sometimes you can't avoid a really big mosquito that needs to be swatted NOW, but I've trained myself to forget about the small ones.
Engage Big Things for Big Results
What you engage and focus on is where you will yield results. Doing little things gives you little results, drains your creativity and saps your brain power. When you cease to accomplish really Big Things, you lose desire and motivation. The less important your accomplishments, the less important you feel. You start to believe you're not cut out to achieve the business success you imagined.
Engaging Big Things guarantees worthwhile achievements, and you'll become addicted to the momentum of accomplishment. That momentum is a far more lasting high than the transitory feel-good of checking off trivial tasks.
Once you're focused on accomplishing Big Things for your CLNC® practice, you'll approach even routine matters with laser-sharp focus, quickly delegating or deleting. More important, with fewer distractions to sidetrack you, your creativity and productivity will catch fire and the resulting momentum will keep you pumped. You'll glide through your day full of confidence and satisfaction from achieving significant milestones.
Start Your Momentum Rolling with 8 Easy Steps
Define three Big Things. Choose three important goals that support your vision for your CLNC® business. Then zero in on one of these Big Things to schedule your day around. Your vision might be to obtain two new attorney-clients. Define your strategies for doing so and the specific time each day you will implement your strategies. These strategies will be your target tasks for the day. Refer back to your Big Thing and make sure each task is really important and necessary (planning how you're going to spend the extra money doesn't count).
Challenge your commitment. Ask yourself, "Am I really going for it, or if it's too tough (if the first attorney declines my CLNC® services), will I quit?" Make sure you're fully committed to the Big Things you choose and that they're right for you. You can't accomplish a Big Thing if you're only committed to little things. Successful people do what unsuccessful people won't – not what they can't. Be committed to your CLNC® practice and what needs to be done, or one day you just might be committed involuntarily.
Set aside sacred momentum time. Start strong and you'll finish strong. First thing each week, schedule substantial chunks of uninterrupted time (aim for two hours per session) for projects that support your Big Things.
If part of your day is rarely interrupted (such as early morning or late evening), reserve it for momentum time. You'll finish that impossibly complex report or wrestle your new strategic plan into comprehension. My favorite momentum time is early morning before my office opens when I can knock out Big Things three times faster.
Make it your goal to start each day with a two-hour momentum session, then gradually add more two-hour momentum sessions each day. You'll have to fight to keep your momentum time sacred. Learn to say things like, "I'll be available in one hour. What time after that works best for you?" Claim your momentum time and you'll have found those lost hours you've been looking for.
Let nothing stop you. Set a start time and stick to it. Don't lose momentum by "warming up your engine" with feel-good busywork. Banish all thoughts ("Will the attorney hire me for a second case?") and interruptions ("What will I cook for dinner?") that don't relate to your Big Thing. Put your phone on voicemail and don't open your email. And stop worrying about your sick neighbor or co-worker. Worry is a useless emotion. You can do it all later after you've completed your task.
Develop a ritual to cleanse your mind – music, a cup of tea, an affirmation. A cluttered or tense mind accomplishes little. If you get distracted, even briefly, acknowledge the distraction and commit to stopping it. While writing this article, I caught myself reaching for the phone to make a call that would have turned into a distraction. Instead, I made a note to do it later. Keep a pen and some sticky notes handy for sudden bursts of distracting brilliance. Write down the thought and put it away for later. Don't let even the smallest energy waster slip in. Minutes add up to hours, hours to days. Those days saved could add up to a renewing vacation.
Don't be too hard on yourself. A decade of poor work habits won't change overnight. As with exercise, what's difficult at first becomes easy with practice. The more progress you see, the more addicted you'll become to momentum.
Alternate momentum time with "weed pulling." Miscellaneous routine tasks are like weeds – no matter how often you get rid of them (or how good it feels to pull them), they always come back. You'll find most of your feel-good tasks fall into this category. Eventually, they do have to be handled and pulling a few weeds can provide a welcome break from more intensive work.
After each momentum session, devote 30 minutes to weed pulling – handling mail, email, phone calls or other minor chores. Clump several small tasks together. If you devote a short session to opening mail, paying bills, filing the receipts and dropping the outgoing mail into your out box, you're being efficient at weed pulling. If possible, never handle any communication (paper or email) more than once.
Don't tackle all your weeds at once. Prioritize them. Decide what's really a weed that needs attention and what just feels darn good to do. If your weeds are really deep (and I've got a few of those growing in my office), set aside one day per quarter to do the deep weeding and organizing. Deep cleaning is cathartic and energizing. Who knows what buried treasure you'll find under a pile of weeds.
But don't get addicted to pulling weeds. Occasionally instead of weeding, substitute a relationship-building lunch with a client or add time to your momentum sessions.
If you need a five-minute break during a momentum session, don't tackle the weeds. They will only distract. Use those five minutes to refresh your energy for your Big Thing with a cup of green tea, a stretch or a bit of healthy nourishment.
Focus on one Big Thing at a time. When you engage in too much at once, you risk finishing nothing. Some of us are born multitaskers, but just because we can doesn't mean we should. And if you can't multitask effectively, you definitely shouldn't. Watching my husband work around the house makes me crazy. He'll have a can of paint open in the kitchen, a ladder in the office and the hoods open on both our cars. He moves from one project to another and usually ends up with at least one task unfinished after running into difficulties on another. Then he rushes to clean up and store everything for next time. Meanwhile, my kitchen is still only half painted. Finish your first Big Thing or at least reach a significant milestone before embarking on the next. I have difficulty following my own advice on this – I often have to remind myself to get back on focus.
Let go of bad ideas. When my company decided to develop a product for attorneys, we put extensive time into it, but we did not get the response we had anticipated. I quickly realized that putting any more time or money into this project would be a bad idea, so I let it go. It still hurts to think about the hours and creativity we expended, but I'm glad we moved on to something bigger and better.
When a "great" idea isn't so great after all, you have to let it go. This frees you to work on the next genuine Big Thing. Be open to figuring out that some of your great ideas really aren't – and be ready to let them go.
Safeguard your momentum. Accept that you won't please everyone. Someone is bound to be unhappy about the changes you make to focus on your Big Things. A friend gets upset because you stop meeting for lunch on Wednesdays. Your spouse fusses because you won't run his errands on a weekday. Don't worry. They'll get over it. Shed the guilt. Set your own expectations for your life and CLNC® business, and stay true to those goals.
Engage momentum today. There's more to feeling good than feeling the feel-good addiction. You can have time in your life and still have the time of your life. Make that your Big Thing for today.
Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD is the founder and president of Vickie Milazzo Institute. She is credited by The New York Times with pioneering the legal nurse consulting profession in 1982. Inc. named her to the Top 10 Entrepreneur list. In her new book,Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn't Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now, published in March 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., this multimillionaire entrepreneur shares her vast experience which has revolutionized the careers of thousands of RNs. An international author, educator and speaker, Vickie coaches and mentors RNs to take charge of their own professional destinies for lasting success and fulfillment.
