Finding Your Why in 2021 | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 126

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's podcast. I hope your year is starting off with a bang. Remember this, though, it always takes some time to build momentum back up. Very rarely between Christmas and New Year's will you have momentum, because there's a lot of people that just don't want to meet. And so you have to get back into making the calls, which I'm sure you did last week. If you were working. Some of you were, some of you weren't. I did. I actually wanted to start real hard right from the beginning because I really think, once again, 2021 is going to be a banner year. I already had an incredible 2020. I think I ended up over 26, I think 26.7 million for the year, which puts me a decent amount, over 200 million since 2008. But I just have this feeling at 2020 was a struggle. I. I don't want to go through that again the entire year, the whole vacation thing, not being able to rest the way I normally do, not being able to take the time to just get away and disconnect. And it was a struggle, man. It was a struggle. But I'm telling you, 2021 is going to be completely different. And I don't care what's going on with everything around me. I'm going to focus on what I have to do every single day. Because the reality is you're. Your attitude often determines how things turn out because you have two things. I have this saying that I came up with recently, that fear has nothing to do with what's around you. It has to do with what's inside of you. And we can have all these things. And I'll debate anybody all day long. This. And the reality is you can have two people look at the exact same situation. One will be fearful, one won't. Both are experiencing the same thing in front of them. But who chooses to look at the fear inside of them or look at the situation with the fear inside them, and it changes the entire outcome of not only their day, their month, their year, their entire destiny. And I would even go as far to say as generations can be impacted by how you choose to face each day. Every single day, your decision is determined, or your decision or your outcome will determine what your future is going to be like and the future of everybody else around you that you are directly influenced with. So that being said, I don't. I got my little rah rah, motivational speaking thing going on, but I just, I hear so many agents, why do some kill it every Single year and others just. Will this happen? Will that happen? Well, this situation. And once again, we're all experiencing the same thing. Why do some excel and some just die on the vine? Why is it that literally only 8% of annuity agents make it their first two years? Why is that the people that are willing to put into what they're doing, put everything they have into it to have that internal motivation through their identity and what their purpose is, that's what keeps them going. That's the one that sits there at the end of the year going, you know what? I don't know why 92% fail in the first two years. I've been thriving. Yeah. So, yeah. What are we talking about today?

Well, that's great, Chad. And real quick, just to kind of touch on a couple of things you mentioned is I think one of the big reasons is excuses. I think it can be really easy to use yours like 2020, where there are legitimate environmental factors that do play into it. They are real. But it's, am I going to look at these things that are affecting me? Am I going to push through those things, or am I going to rely on that thing as an excuse for why something isn't working out the way that I want it to? So I think excuses. And you said something about attitude, too. And it reminded me of a professor I had in college. He said, your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude. And I started thinking about that. I was like, well, you know what? In this business, that's a little different. Your aptitude is important. It is. But then I realized, you know what? If your attitude is good, the aptitude will come. And when those two things meet together, that's where you'll reach that altitude. And so take that as encouragement, too. But today we wanted to talk about the why. Why do you do what you do? What's the favorite. What's your favorite thing about the job you get to do? And walk us through that kind of the why behind the what.

Well, the why is way more than the what or the how. The why is what drives you. The why is what pushes you. The why is what keeps you going and going. I hear a lot of people say it's the what and the how. It's not, but the why. Why are you in this business? Why do you want to succeed in life? Why do you want to be a successful person? And the reality, most people.

Well, I can't say most people. There are people that are absolutely driven by the monetary things, the possessions, the fancy cars, the Exotic house, the exotic vacations. Now, I'm not opposed to any of that, but if that's your why, then you've got some major problems. Because those are all temporal. They don't last. Houses break down, cars break down. You have some vacations just don't work out. I remember some of the funnest vacations we ever been on are the ones where a lot of things went wrong. I mean, we were in Sydney, Australia, one time, we decided to take this trip out to the beach and it started pouring down rain and my wife and I decided to stay on the top of the double decker bus and just put ponchos on and we were getting poured on. But it was so much fun because we still got to see everything, right? We weren't under the bus where there was all the fogged up windows, you couldn't see anything. And yeah, that rain at times felt like it was a whole bunch of little bees stinging you. But you know what, we look at that as a great memory. We chose at that moment when everybody else went down under. We're staying up there, we're just having a blast. And so when we run into those situations, the why is what keeps you going? Why did we want to stay on the top of the bus?

The.

The view is better, right? I mean, that's really what it comes down to. Yeah, everything's hitting you from all different directions, but we got to see things that nobody else saw. We had never been there before. So our why to see things that nobody else could because they're under the. In the bottom part of the bus, that was worth it to us. And so the view, what do you envision your life to be?

Right?

You know, too many times I asked someone, well, what do you see your future as now? I'm not a big goal person. I'm really not. I've learned that anytime I set goals, they get messed up. When I asked God to set goals for me, it always, always works. Never how I expected it, but it always works. And I say that for a reason. You know, my goal is to look down and lord, what do you want me to do today? This is just me personally, not what do you want me to do a year, five years, ten years from now? Because the reality, if he says, I want you to have this in 10 years, I'm going to bulldoze everybody over right in front of me. I'm going to turn around and go, whoa, there's a whole bunch of bodies behind me. Instead he might say, okay, go this way, go that way, go this way. And then I real that there are some trials that are put in front of us to strengthen us, to make us better, to put us through the fire. Through the fire comes refinement. And so it burns off a lot of the junk that we don't need in life. So then you have another one where you take another turn and there's a treasure over there. Well, if I would have went straight to there, I never would have found that. I never would have found that experience. So the why for me, and you have to find your own why, but the why for me is to do exactly what God has designed me to do. And it doesn't matter. Business doesn't matter, family doesn't matter. Relationships. It's what am I designed to do? And every single one of us knows, if you really take a moment to just sit and be still, once again, it doesn't matter how you do it. Some people want to be out in a deer blind. Some people want to be up on a rooftop, on a balcony. I mean, there's all sorts of ways. Some people want to be in the forest. There's different ways that we get away. And we really just think, what am I good at? And nobody can tell me nothing.

Right.

Because if you say, well, nothing, then you're good at being a Debbie Downer. You know, if you really want to be that bad, you're good at not being good. Right. And how do you change that? You think differently. You know, I can tell the agents that are going to make it and the agents that won't. The agents that are going to make it are the ones that have this internal drive to better other people's lives.

Absolutely.

So if you go into an appointment, I'll give you an example. If you go into appointment with the thought process of man, this is going to be a big sale. This is going to be a lot of commission. I'm going to get some recognition. I might get a trip out of this. That's not going to work. But if you get in there and you go, I need to find problems that this client might have, and I have the solution to those problems, and I want to help them be better after I leave versus before they met me. If you go on with that attitude, that's the why. The why is to create a better situation for your client. It's going to always work out.

Right?

And the reality comes into the one thing where you're saying, I want to do something better, that will always reap benefits for you. That's not necessarily why you do it. But if you're constantly looking to put people in a better situation after you meet with them, the side effect of that is success. Absolutely. The side effect of that is wealth, you know, but that's not my primary focus at all.

Yeah, no, that's great. And so how would you say for you that your why kind of doing what God has designed you to do? That why. How does that intertwine with your business? And I think about you, and one of the most descriptive words that I can think of for you is how just protective you are. You, you are, you are such a protector of the people that are in your life. And I see the kind of, the parallel between being a protector and, and what you get to do with safe money products Right. In retirement and dealing with that kind of thing. So kind of tie those two together for us.

Yes, I'm a protector, but I wouldn't say that's the root of why I am the way I am. It's stewardship that's good. You know, I am a steward of what God has given me. So therefore I need to protect it. That's really what it comes down to. So the why is this stewardship? I need to be a good steward of what God has given me that means anything that's put before me. I need to protect if there's harm potentially coming that way. So if I feel someone's in harm, someone has a chance of losing money, which, come on, if you're with any sort of variable account, you know, you have a chance of losing money, you have a chance of outliving your income. You have the chance of not even being able to retire me to retire. So being a steward, I am giving my client and I am responsible for what I do. So the stewardship is, is making sure everything that's in front of me is taken care of. And that's where being protective comes in. You can say, well, you're overprotective. There's no, no such thing in my book as overprotective. There's intrusive, sure. You know, if I sit there and I'm trying to make decisions for everybody that's in my life, that's micromanaging, that's intrusive. They have their own free will. But when you're talking about protecting.

Once again, I go back to who I am. I can't get around this. Jesus died on the cross for me, and that's most protection that anybody could ever give in the history of existence. He protected me from hell. So that's that's the ultimate. But he was also were his children. God's our father. He's were his children. So therefore, stewardship, right? So when I have a client, I get that lead, and that comes across that lead just to me didn't happen by chance, right? They're seeking my expertise, they're seeking my knowledge, they're seeking my years of experience, right? And what can I do to help them? And so that's just being a good steward. That's really how I tie. I tie everything. You know, I hear people say this, well, I want to be in ministry. And I'm like going, I am in ministry. My everyday life, I talk with so many agents. I get to help them change lives. I got it. This agent last year got to take his kids to Disney World. He had never thought that was gonna happen, and he got take them to Disney World. I mean, that's the ultimate to me is watching other people get to do things they never thought was possible.

And a lot of times, for your clients, that pans out in retirement.

Retired.

I think they're never going to be able to. And somehow there's a way you make it work. All of that great stuff.

Well, because you retired. When you retire, do you want to exist or do you want to live?

You want to live?

So if I can show them. Now, this doesn't always happen. Obviously, there's people that just don't have the money they need to have. But if I can help them. Favorite appointment. Two or three weeks ago, the client thought, no way are they going to retire, right? And I'm going. Do you realize you're in the top 5% of all my clients? It had nothing to do with the dollar amount, had to do with how he and his wife were going to be able to retire because they kept their expenses low because they were able to. They had no debt. They had plenty of money to be able to live off of probably four or five thousand extra a month. That's.

That's amazing.

It is. Now, they had a very modest house. They lived in it for three, 30 years. But you know what? That wasn't a huge deal to them. Now they can retire, literally. The millionaire next door.

Yeah.

Is incredible.

That's awesome. I love hearing stories like that. How would you say, Chad, how would you encourage an agent who maybe they see what they get to do in the industry as a job, and that's the extent of what it is. How would you encourage that mindset shift to actually see it as more than that?

Well, first of all you never look at something as a job. You look at it as a responsibility. I don't look at anything as a job. A job. A job is, goes with job. It's a pain, there's suffering, there's misery. I mean, if you ever look at your job as a job that's so sterile, if you look at your job as a mission and a purpose and that you get to go to work every single day and change people's lives, that's what it comes down to. I mean, I can easily sit behind a desk and twiddle my thumbs and get bored out of my mind. And because the reality is, everything we do for the most part is very repetitive.

Sure.

We're doing the same thing over and over. And every once in a while I get there, I'm going, okay, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed. You know, it's my mind kind of gets. I'm going, wait a second. How many lives was I able to impact and change today? So that's really what it comes down to, is what am I able to do today? And if as long as I have that and purpose driven, it will never be a job.

Absolutely. That's amazing. And I hope that they hear that, take that as an encouragement, see what you get to do as more than just a mere job. Because it truly is. I mean, the impact that you are having is. Is phenomenal. And so I think we just keep pushing on. Make 2021 a great year.

Oh, absolutely. Let's knock it out of the park. I hope you guys have a great day and happy selling.