Starting a new career can be scary. If you’ve worked as a nurse for a long time, the concept of starting a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant business and being your own boss can seem overwhelming. This is true for any entrepreneur or PLNC. We all have fears and doubts we must deal with when we try something for the first time.
In your mind, do you ever hear the following (or similar):
- What kind of nurse do you think you are?
- I can’t do this.
- What was I thinking?
- I am so dumb.
- This is impossible.
If you don’t hear such things in your mind, you are one of the lucky one nurses. Most of us have these negative thoughts sometimes. Some of us have them a majority of the time. But these thoughts are dangerous and need to be stopped. Such thoughts:
- Undermine our efforts as a nurse and as Professional Legal Nurse Consultant.
- Stifle our creativity.
- Lower our self-esteem.
- And, most dangerously, become self-fulfilling prophecies.
How can you stop negative thoughts that are limiting your nursing success? You need to do two things.
- You need to interrupt the negative thought. You can do this by mentally shouting “Stop it!” or by creating a physical interruption. For instance, you could make yourself do the chicken dance every time you hold onto one of these negative thoughts. This might be sufficiently embarrassing to help you stop. Just imagine doing the chicken dance in an important meeting! Or, you can choose something less obvious to others, but just as effective. In the book, The One Minute Millionaire, the authors suggest that you wear a heavy duty rubber band around your wrist and pop yourself enough to sting every time you catch yourself thinking these dangerous thoughts. How you choose to interrupt these thoughts is up to you, but you must do it every single time.
- You need to replace the negative thought with a positive one. Simply replace the thought with its opposite. “I can’t do this.” becomes “I can do this.” Nothing fancy. No memorizing. Just a replacement of a part that does not work for you with one that does.
Try this for the next month and you will be well on your way to being the best nurse, and, the best Professional Legal Nurse Consultant (PLNC) you can be.
