A short personal-reflection video by Andy Neary describing a major mistake he made as a health insurance adviser: repeatedly procrastinating a difficult conversation about a client billing error. He recounts delaying admission of fault, how the delay amplified the problem, and notes losing accounts as a likely consequence.
Chapters
It's so easy to push those tough conversations off, right? To procrastinate in having that difficult dialogue. You know, I think about as a health insurance advisor, when I had a client who had a problem arise, it was a billing issue, it was, you know, a very.
Big problem that was going to lead to a very difficult conversation where we, the agency that I worked for, had to admit our guilt or I had to admit my guilt that I had screwed something up. You know, it was so easy to put that activity, that task of calling that client right on your to do list for today and then you just get going with today, you feel good. You don't have to really deal with that right now, nor do you want to deal with it because hey, you're having a great day. And if I just push that call, that difficult call, I got to make my client off long enough, maybe the problem just go away. So what do you do, right? You, you put the task on tomorrow's list and then tomorrow shows up, you show up at the office, you get going, you get some momentum going, maybe there's another fire you have to put out. Then you have to go to a prospect meeting and all of a sudden around three, four o' clock in the afternoon, you look at that to do list again and crap, I've got to make that call to that client because we screwed something up. I've got to let them know what happened. I'll just wait till tomorrow. And on and on and on this goes. And before you know it, a week, two weeks go by and you still haven't made that call to the client to have that difficult conversation to talk about the billing problem or the screw up, whatever it is. And I can specifically tell you about specific moments in my past where honestly, if I go back long enough, 10, 12 years, I think I lost an account or two because of that, because I waited, I hesitated. I didn't want to have the difficult conversation. Before I knew it, it was now a full blown 5 alarm problem.
