Celebrate LNC Success and Be a Boss
What are some key ingredients for LNC success? I hear from LNCs who are discouraged by some of their marketing efforts. They feel like they are hitting a wall. Discouragement will kill your business aspirations. Discouragement, disillusionment, and disappointment lead to doubts and to quitting.
There are some basic requirements for success:
1. Decide what you want
2. Determine the price you have to pay, and
3. Resolve to pay that price
When you face discouragement, ask:
- “How badly do I want this?”
- “Is this really in alignment with my true self and with my passion and purpose?”
- “What price am I willing to pay to make this happen?” Could I be giving up too soon?
Core Factors for LNC Success
Running an LNC business takes hard work. It takes commitment. It takes conviction. In a lot of ways, too, it takes courage. It takes facing your fears.
What are your fears? Do you have these?
I’m not going to be good enough.
Who am I to put myself out there?
They’re not going to be impressed with me.
Can I devote the necessary time to running my business?
Shifting Priorities for LNC Success
The first time I coauthored a book with two other people, I realized it meant shifting priorities.
The person that I was coauthoring with had a soccer-playing son. She was involved in the state’s nursing association, and she was working full-time. She expected that she would be able to continue to do all of those things in addition to writing our book. Then, she quickly realized that her stress level went almost out of control because she couldn’t shift her priorities.
She couldn’t give up something. She wasn’t ready to determine that there was a price that she had to pay for being involved in the book. By the time we were done with the book, she was wrung out.
Legal nurse consultants who are entrepreneurs also have to recognize that there’s a price to building a business. It means shifting priorities and sometimes giving up things that are no longer as important to you as answering, “How badly do I want this business?”
We get stuck in this trap of trying to be everything to everybody. In some cases, we are under the illusion that we are superhuman and can handle everything, stay strong, and suck it up with our heads held high.
We can have all of these balls in the air, and we can manage, but the reality is:
- You will wear yourself out.
- You’re going to burn out.
- You will become depressed.
You will become stressed, and that’s when that discouragement comes into play. You’re going to want to quit, and you will think, “What am I doing?”
You’re going to overwhelm yourself. But it does not have to be like that.
LNC Success Choices
For LNC entrepreneurs and in life in general, we have choices to make. You want to make choices that align with what will serve you and your path.
You have to make sacrifices, reprioritize, and shuffle things around so that you don’t burn out, so you don’t wind up derailing yourself on this path to what you want to be doing in terms of achieving your dreams and LNC success.
Resilience is a word that has been used so much lately. It means adapting well to adversity, trauma, and stress. Most people think that to adapt means to roll with the punches and suck it up; the past is in the past, and get over it. Nothing could be further than the truth.
The past will haunt you. If you don’t resolve your issues, they will continue to get louder. Remember that saying: “What you resist persists.” To be resilient and to adapt, we need to experience things fully. This means on all our lives, mind, body, emotions, and spirit.
We adapt by owning and processing what haunts us so that we can work through it rather than trying to get past it. Think about the difference between these two concepts. They sound similar, but they’re not. Being resilient means loving yourself unapologetically, claiming your power from a place of truth, and embracing how amazing you are.
“Life is a journey, not a destination.” Keep that in mind as you focus on success.
Reflection
We legal nurse consultants are analytical creatures. Think about how you can de-stress your life.
One way to do this is to discover what’s using up all your time. For one week, write down everything you do that takes more than a few minutes. This means you don’t have to write down every time you brush your teeth. Do write down how long it takes to make and eat a meal.
Warning: People like to cheat on how much time they spend on the Internet because they know it’s a time stealer. Be honest. You may initially be shocked about how much non-business-related time you spend on social media or the news. Shift your reaction to the happy discovery that you’ve just found a lot of time to use more productively.
Some of the uses I will suggest for this time may not seem productive to you. You may feel that yoga, exercise, and meditation waste time. On the contrary, they are proven stress relievers. In addition, many people report that while walking briskly (or slowly) or swimming, they get some of their best ideas.
What Haunts Me?
If you have resistance to any of the above, write about it. “I hate to exercise; it reminds me of gym class, and I was always terrible at sports.” From this starting point, who knows what else you’ll learn as you continue to write?
Deal with what haunts you. You may not know; in that case, write, “I don’t know what haunts me, but when I think of calling a potential customer, my stomach knots up and hurts.”
Focus on that sensation.
- Where it is
- How it feels
- Does it have a shape or color
- Can you remember feeling it earlier in your life?
The secret power of memories and our decisions to avoid reexperiencing unpleasant ones lie in their hidden nature. Bring them to the surface.
LNC Success Facing Your Fears
Are you afraid of becoming the boss? This fear can keep your LNC business small.
You were excited when your LNC business became full-time. No longer did you have to work for a boss.
Here is the myth some LNC business owners believe:
- You can do what you want to do.
- You’d have freedom.
- You didn’t have to answer to anyone else and set your own hours.
When you own your LNC business, you might work fifty hours a week, but they are your fifty hours. At last, you are independent. No one is making a schedule a month in advance and telling you when you need to work.
If, as you hope, your business grows successfully, you may notice that the fifty hours have turned into eighty or more. Your family and social life are suffering.
You don’t think about anything other than your business and how you can get everything done.
In fact, your business is turning into a monster. You can’t take a vacation or be sick – there is no one to pick up the slack.
It occurs to you that maybe you need one or more employees or virtual assistants. This idea terrifies you. It means you must face becoming a boss.
Face Your Fears about Becoming a Boss
Recognize that most of your opinions and fear of bosses are based on your relationships with the bosses you had in the past. Separate facts from opinions.
How many of your negative opinions are based on your past frustration over being an employee who lacked independence? If you longed for years to have your own business, it’s reasonable to assume that you experienced resentment that colored your opinions of your various bosses.
Your frustration and resentment may have led you to make broad assumptions. “Bosses are insensitive and callous.” “They ignore employees’ needs.”
It’s a normal element of human behavior that sometimes we imagine a situation to be worse than it is to push ourselves out of it. The more difficult we experience working for someone else, the more we want to be our bosses.
Having Employees is Part of Being an Entrepreneur
Before you began your business, you did a lot of research. You asked others’ opinions and read books or took an LNC course. You may have asked for advice from other LNCs. You’ve compared prices, strategies, and suppliers. You did whatever was necessary to give your business a good start.
Learning how to deal well with employees is more of the same. Whether or not the list you make of bosses’ faults is completely accurate, it can serve as a guide to the kind of boss you want to be.
Decide that well before you hire your first employee. Ask other entrepreneurs who have employees how they handle various issues.
Lots of books are in print about how to be a good boss. Here are some examples.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, by Kim Scott. This book has hundreds of Amazon reviews.
Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst by Robert L. Sutton.
I list them as examples of the resources available to you. If you read books on being a boss, you’ll learn that others have shared your fears, and you can discover strategies for dealing with them.
You can decide, instead, to continue as a solopreneur with no employees, but is that your vision? Do you most effectively use your time to generate invoices? Doing the technical work on your website? Being solely responsible for your finances?
You didn’t let fear kill the dreams of your own business; don’t let fear stifle its growth.
Your Turn
Write down every negative thing you can dream up about experiencing bad bosses or being a boss. Your list might look something like this:
I never had a boss whom I liked.
Bosses are insensitive and callous. All they care about is money.
My bosses never asked employees’ opinions.
They ignore employees’ needs.
If I become a boss, I’ll have to fire people.
I’ll have to generate enough cash to pay someone a salary – and what happens if the work slows down?
I’ll be responsible for my employees’ lives.
Get even more valuable information by remembering what your parents and other significant adults said about their bosses.
Rule of Thumb
One rule about memory is that the earlier in life you hear adults say things—especially if they said them frequently—the more deeply they became imprinted in your mind as THE TRUTH. This happens because children don’t yet have the experience to judge for themselves what may or not be true. They do, however, know that they are best off trusting the adults on whom they depend for their survival.
And that knowledge has led to the adoption of many false conclusions. The more you can discover, not only in this writing prompt but in all of them, the clearer becomes your entrepreneurial path.
If you found this blog helpful, check out my book, Be the Boss of Your Own Business. Grab your copy today and be ready to take notes.
Pat Iyer is president of The Pat Iyer Group, which develops resources to assist LNCs in obtaining more clients, making more money, and achieving their business goals and dreams.
Pat’s related websites include the continuing education provided on LNCEU.com, the podcasts broadcast at podcast.legalnursebusiness.com, and writing tips supplied at patiyer.com.
Get all of Pat’s content in one place by downloading the mobile app, Expert Edu at www.legalnursebusiness.com/expertedu. Watch videos, listen to podcasts, read blogs, watch online courses and training, and more.