Controlling the Controllables

Foreign. Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. Excited to be with you today again. As I've been doing the last several episodes, I'm also streaming this live on LinkedIn. So hello to anybody that's on LinkedIn or also on some other channels as well. We're now on YouTube and Facebook. So we're just trying to grow to be everywhere that we possibly can to spread the message of the Agent Leader podcast, which is always the purpose is to help you, the independent insurance agency leader, regardless of your role, title or position. We're looking for leaders that want to gain influence in their agency and their community and certainly with their clients to help you gain clarity, to help you build consistency, and to help you make a commitment to become your best version possible. That's what we're all about. That's what this podcast is about, is to help agency leaders become better agency leaders. And we're all trying to go somewhere, we're all trying to grow right in different ways. And this is a podcast of growth and development. I do want to share a couple things before I get into the focus and the theme of today's content. There's a big announcement coming all of your way in the next couple weeks here. In fact, I will give you a date now officially that I can do of an announcement to be coming. It's on September 7th. So I said September 7th, there's going to be a major announcement made that we're going to be having here at the Sidkins Group, which impacts not just us as an organization, that's not the important thing. Who it impacts is you, the independent insurance agency. So we're going to make things more easier, we're going to help things make simpler. We're going to do some things that are going to help your agency gain traction faster than you ever thought possible and to get the results that you're looking to do. So be on the lookout. Nine, seven. And we're going to be launching a webinar and launch some things that are coming out. In fact, this time that I'm recording this live, which is on a Thursday at 11am Eastern. That'll be the time we'll be doing it on September 7th. So be on the lookout. More things to come. All right, now that I got that, and I won't say out of the way because that's a big deal, I do want to dive into the content for today's session and if you saw this on LinkedIn eventually or any other platform. The theme, the title today is Controlling the Controllables. How do you control the controllables? And this may be a phrase that you've heard before. It's not new. In fact, if you've been in sports in particular, that, you know, this is a saying that a lot of coaches will use. In fact, the first time that I heard this phrase was during a basketball game. And this goes back a long time now, but I was in a basketball game and it was a big, big game, right? I think it was conference championship. And in the conference championship, you know, it was a tight up, you know, back and forth battle. And at one point late in the third quarter, things started to slip away a little bit, right? We were. This happens with momentum and games, but, you know, we were making stupid turnovers and the crowd was getting in it from the other side in particular, in fact, their own fans. You could tell they were getting frustrated with us, you know, not doing the things that we should do. The referees made a few calls that were certainly questionable, right? And we go to the timeout and run over to the bench, you know, and maybe even have our heads down a little bit. Hopefully not. But, you know, you're just, you're going through a tough stretch here in the game. And the coach just looks at us and says, listen, stop worrying about all that. You know, we're like, what do you mean that? What do you think about the crowd and the refs and the other players? He goes, worry about you. Do your job, right? And what he said was control the controllables, right? Control the things that you can control. You can't control the refs, you can't control the other team in certain ways, right? You can't control the crowd. What they're going to say, you can't control the temperature of the gym. Okay, I go down the list, the lighting, whatever. All you can control is certain things that are going to impact the game. So focus on that. And that's what I want to share today. For independent insurance agencies, it can be very easy and understood to a degree. It's understandable for agencies in many cases to say, yeah, I know that this isn't happening, but in fact, there's a doctor, an evil doctor named Doctor. Yeah, but, yeah, I know I should do this, but. And a lot of the buts come into external factors. The fact that, you know, well, the market conditions are so crazy, there's nothing we can do about it, right? The underwriter didn't get back to me soon enough. What am I going to do about it? Right. The pricing wasn't what I wanted. What am I going to do about it? I mean, we could go through all these different things, right, that happen day to day. And these are real things that happen. And this doesn't mean there's not an impact on you as a leader or the people in your agency. That's not the point. There is an impact. The question is, certainly is a, how are you going to respond? But more importantly, does that distract you from the things that you can control? And when I think about agencies that succeed and we all go through cycles, but when agencies that get on the right track, one of the things they get really good at is focusing on the things that they actually can impact, not allowing the distractions, not allowing some of the external things to become their primary thoughts throughout the day. Which, by the way, some of those times when you worry about things or think about things that you can't control, it just makes the worry and the anxiety worse because you know subconsciously that you don't have control of it. What am I going to do? So part of this is not only to give you results quicker or get you to move on the right track quicker, but also just to get you to be proactive and intentional on things that you can do every day. So I'm going to share with you three things specifically. Now, again, like a lot of times I do lists. I know there's more in some cases than three things, but I'm going to share three key areas or three things that you as an agency leader and with your agency team. So this could be twofold. One is think about you as an agency leader. And secondly is what can you do for your team? Whether you're running an apartment, whether you're running your entire agency, whether it's your high performance team, which is sales and service working together. There's your personal growth and development in this and then there's the what will this impact those around me? Right. That I can do. So I'm going to go again, go through three of these things that you can, you know, controlling the controllables. So I'm going to start with number one, which some of you might wonder, I don't know if this is how controllable this is, at least from my team perspective. Let's talk about it. Controllable, number one is your attitude. Right? Your attitude. Now sometimes you think about it, it's like, well, just change your attitude. Maybe someone just change your attitude, maybe you said this to your kid, right? Someone, hey, why don't you just improve that attitude? Now, that's easier said than done, right? But there are things that do factor to our attitudes that we can 100% control. As James Allen said in his book As a man Thinketh, he said, as a man thinketh, so is he or so is she, Right? As a, as a man or woman thinketh, so is he or she. How we think matters, right? And so part of this is how can we up level our thinking? Because it's one thing to say, well, just think more positively. Just think more with more energy. Think more with abundance and scarcity. Yeah, I think that's part of it. But here's what the couple of things I want to, I want to focus on, number one for you as an insurance professional and with your team, whether it's 2 or 200, what are you doing to feed your mind or their mind? What inputs are you giving this really complex, really powerful instrument called your brain? Because let's face it, if we just think about what normally is going to be inputted into our mind on a given day, if we don't try to control this part of it, it's going to be filled primarily with junk. The old saying, garbage in, garbage out. Just like if you feed your body junk, we know the outcome physically, it's going to happen over a period of time. If you feed your mind junk, what's going to happen over a period of time is that the output will be junk. Right. For the most part. Now, if you think about what we typically consume with news and social media and what do most people talk about? Do most people talk about solutions or most people talk about problems? So you just think about in a day what goes into this noggin. Typically, if we don't think about it and don't try to control it, it's usually negative, right? There's not a lot of positive things that just automatically happen. So what I want to get into is what can you feed your mind? Now, this is a leadership podcast. Leaders are readers, leaders are learners. And I love this. In fact, in one of our sessions this week, Roger Sitkins talked about it. Leaders are learners and learners are winners. Right there. There's a sequence to this. It starts with what you put in your mind. So what are you reading right now? What books are you reading? What books have you challenged your team to read with you? Maybe there's a book club. Hey, this book will help help shape our mindset. And by the way, with any book, or as I'll talk about any Podcast like this one and any video that you watch or any of those things. Obviously, there's different ways you can do it, but one of the things is that you have to agree with every single thing in it. When I read books, I may not agree with everything, but it does change the way that I think, right? So find books, find videos, find podcasts that you individually and your team can use to feed your mind the good stuff, right? Feed your mind the good stuff. So just think about it. What does that do for attitude? I can tell you. I'll give you a personal example. I've been very good over a long period of time with my morning routine. And part of my morning routine is reading something or listening to something that I can learn or will encourage me, get me to think differently. Over this past summer, I got off that for a while. I started to focus so much on other things, and I was still getting up early and doing stuff, but I missed some of that. And what's interesting is I got back into, hey, I need to listen to this or watch this. Even if it's five or 10 minutes, right? This doesn't have to be three hours, 10 minutes. It's amazing going, you know, I'm thinking different or I haven't thought about that way before, or I haven't considered that, or why am I doing this, right? So it up levels your thinking, right? You change your thinking, you change your results. So again, what books, what podcast, what videos? I mean, gosh, there's TED Talks for all kinds of things. I want to improve my communication. I want to prove my influence. There's so much availability that we can feed our mind. The problem is there's so many options to feed your mind junk, and that's usually what happens. So just be cognizant. You can control what you put in your mind if you're intentional with it. In conjunction with this controlling the controllables of attitude, who do you surround yourself with? Who's your sphere of influence? Who's your circle of mentors? Now, this takes some work, but you can control it. My guess, there are people in your circle right now that probably shouldn't be in your circle. Now, if they're a close family member, you may just have to find some distance to it, right? You may have some of that, but you also may have some other issues going on where you've got some friends or mentors or people that quite frankly, don't challenge and encourage you. In many cases, they actually restrict you or inhibit you, right? So controlling the controllables is I'm gonna control who I hang out with. And if there are people that either are gonna hold me back or prevent me from going where I want to go in different ways, I need to separate myself from them them. If there are people that I know could up level me, that will challenge me and encourage me, I need to spend more time with them. Same is true in your agency. Right now, this is a hard one for agency leaders because let's face it, if you get a larger agency, you're going to have a multitude of people with experiences and backgrounds, good and bad. But a big part of this is are you getting your in particular your younger producers, your younger talent, your newer people in particular, are you getting them positioned with people that will really up level them or are they getting surrounded in some toxic culture issues? Right. Maybe you get someone on your team, this is a separate discussion. Maybe they shouldn't be there, whatever. There could be other things, but they're there and they're getting some negative feedback or you don't need to do that, you don't need to worry about that. That's kind of silly. There's nothing more frustrating from a leader when you've got an idea of a vision of a culture you want to build in your agency and you've got certain people that are continuing to pull you back, right? Especially when you put your impressionable people with some of the people that may be toxic. So who's your circle of influence? In fact, and I've shared this, I quote different times, but I love this quote from Charlie Tremendous Jones, right? The next five years you'll be the same person you are today, except for the books that you read and the people you meet, right? You talk about attitude, that's what I'm talking about. You can control your attitude. So here's my question to you. To think about number one and control number one of your attitude. What must you change as an insurance leader, as a professional? To think better, to think bigger. I mean be real honest with yourself from an attitude because we're all guilty of it. I am too. I have times where as positive I try to be that I get sucked back into stuff. None of us are perfect. But it had me thinking, where is it that I can do a better job of up leveling my thinking and my attitude? And to me it's just continue to feed myself the right stuff and to get around people that'll challenge my thinking, right? It'll challenge my thinking. In fact, just recently, and this is a side, there's Some other things that we're going to be announcing here in the future at Sitkins, but we had a team meeting. We have someone who had never been part of this meeting before. And just to have these higher level conversations, higher level thinkers, it's amazing what can happen, right? It's amazing what can happen. So find ways to control your attitude. All right? Controllable, number two, the processes that you have. Now, I'm going to try to keep this really simple because this could go a lot of different directions. But to me, the process that you have, this is both for you as an individual and of course within your agency. They've got to be installed, meaning you have to know what they are and they have to be monitored. And you can control those. You can control what processes are actually installed, right? Means we're actually going to do them and which processes are monitored versus those that were ideas or random thinking or random processes that aren't installed necessarily and never monitor. Nick Saban, Alabama Head coach Whether you like Nick Saban or not, he's been pretty darn successful. And he has a very basic quote. He says, do, do your job and trust the process. Right? Do your job and trust the process. And there is power in proven processes. Sometimes it's just taking a roadmap and actually following the directions. A bad analogy. Maybe this is a good analogy. I don't know. It's very simple analogy, that's for sure. It's no different than if you put in your navigation system, right? The path slash process that you're going to take to get your desired destination and you continue to go your own way. Why are we never getting there? I've never really installed or monitored the process. I haven't been consistent with the process. One of my favorite movies this past year. I'm sure many of you have watched it. Maverick, Top Gun sequel. All right, there's a great quote in there. It says, don't think, just do. Don't think, just do. Well, you can't just do if you haven't put a process in place. The idea is you've been trained for things. You've installed the process. Now just do it right? Just do the process. Do the thing right. Do the thing you're trying to do. And oftentimes I find with insurance agencies and leaders and certainly producers is they don't like some of the processes and or models they should be following. It feels like a lack of freedom. It feels like I'm being restricted. Here's the bottom line with any great process. Processes give you Guardrails. Without guardrails, you may think you can go really fast, but too often we run into each other, we fall off the edge. Right? Guardrails actually allow you and your agency to run faster, to drive faster, because there are certain guardrails in place knowing, hey, we've got some wiggle room within the guardrails, but we're staying within the guardrails or staying between the lines and we can go really fast. Now, we see this producers all the time, right? Certain things to set up. Well, if I had this process in place, I could just execute on what I do best. And too often we show up or with our teams or individuals and we go, gosh, what should I do today? How am I going to do this? What is that going to look like? Versus showing up going, I know what I'm doing, How do I continue to execute this? At the highest level, there's just a different level of action around that. Right. So a few things to think about. I'm going to share three processes that we work with our agencies with, right? And the producer team and the service team and the sales leadership team. Right. Because they all work in conjunction. One of the things that we believe at SID Kids at the bottom of our heart, it's really hard to train and develop pockets of individuals or departments. The agency's got to train and develop together, right? Because it works together. Same goal, different roles. So one of the processes that we teach and talk about all the time is having a high performance team, sales and service proactively working together. I've done podcasts on this with a true service hand up, right. That we understand there's same goal to retain and obtain ideal clients with different roles. What is sales role responsibility? How are they accountable? What's the service role? How are they accountable? And we communicate together. It's a marriage, right? It truly is. Marriages aren't easy, but they're really fulfilling when you do them. Right. Right. And then we have a true service hand up that we're giving our client the best experience in that process. So that's one example of a process that when agencies do it, they can say, listen, I know I'm showing up for the high performance team meeting. Now I just have to make sure we're doing it really well. What did we not do last week that we need to do this week? How do we get better? How can we communicate better? What things do we miss? What, where am I going to go? What do you need from me? What do I need from you? How do we make sure. That we're preparing so we don't have to repair. Right. So that's a huge one. Proactive calendar management. We teach a lot, in particular with producers, but this is with all agency about controlling your calendar. Talk about controlling the controllable. This is a process that you can control. You do have control of your calendar. Now. Do things happen? Yep. Do things come up? Yep. Are there emergencies? Yep. Is the calendar? Sometimes there's just things that you've got to move. Yes. But if you don't control that up front, it's all chaos. Part of this is being able to set up your ideal week. What would an ideal week look like? How do I control that? As much as I can. If something happens, Maybe it affects 20 of my week, but that other 80% I'm locked in. And by the way, if it's a really good week, maybe it's 90, 95, close to 100 gets fulfilled. I'm going to create my calendar, my schedule. It's going to give me the best, predictable and guaranteed chance for success and I'm going to hold myself accountable and show up to that meeting. That's a really good process. I just got to show up and do it right back. The maverick. Don't think I've already done that. I did that Friday or Saturday. I lined it all up. Now I got to do. Now I got to execute. Another thing to think about to another process that we talk to agencies about and producers about and teams about, is the ultimate growth strategy. What if we had a process that we followed? And just think about this. We go very deep in our training and our development with agencies around this. But just think about this for a second. If the top 20% of your clients in your agency produce 80% of your agency's revenue. And by the way, if you're like 90 some percent of them, it does. So 20% of your clients produce 80% of your revenue. If we had a process that we followed consistently that we would make sure that all those top 20% of clients are rounded out, they are full time clients, that we have a process in place that we retain them with a true continuation process and we make sure because he does such a great job that they replicate or refer or introduce us to another high level client. If we just did that process, which by the way gets pretty deep. But it's one main process timeline we have in working with our clients. The power of that one process is incredible. And we've seen agencies deploy that process and they look back six months, nine months later, and go, wow, right? Did you do a 5,000 things? No, we followed this process really well. We did it and guess what? It creates momentum. So here's my question for you, the agency leader and your team. What process in your agency today needs to be installed or reinstalled and monitored? Right. What's the process to go? Well, maybe we've installed it, maybe we haven't. But what process needs to be installed officially? Like this is going to be our process and then monitored, Right. So how are we going to do that? So that's my second controllable and second question for all of you, which leads me to number three. These are all my favorite, but this one's probably my favorite of favorites. Okay, control number three. Your skill set, your skills, skills must be mastered. Here's the problem. Most people get bored with mastering the basic activities. That's why most people don't master them. When. Well, I've already done this for three months, three weeks, maybe even three years. So I'm good. I. I've done that skill, right? The definition of mastery is being so good at it that you could teach it to others that it becomes just part of your subconscious if it shifts a little bit. If in a conversation, for example, you've mastered this so well and the things shift. You're so prepared, it doesn't matter you're in the moment. In sports or even in music, they call it being in the zone, right? You're just, you're locked in. You've done it so much that you could do it again and again and again. And even if the landscape ships, landscape shifts a little bit, you're in control, right? So, skills. So again, the idea, the NBA, do you have your NBA? Mastering the basic activities, matching the basic activities. Even the most professional professional basketball players. I'm just going to stay with basketball, right? As much as they've dribbled a basketball, if they for one year or one month, even during the season, stopped dribbling the basketball, would they get better or worse? You know the answer with, with us as leaders and our team of professionals, if we don't work on our skill every single week, right? Or at least consistently, is that skill gonna get better or worse? The number one role of an agency leader, the number one role of an agency leader is to develop your people. The best practice study that came out last year, the big I and Reagan consulting puts us out. It's a great report. It talks about this again and again and again. In fact, at the beginning of the report, it mentions the word people. Eight times. We know the importance of developing ourselves and the people on our team, we like to talk about it.