Many insurance agents and agencies share a common challenge, struggling to find ways to keep motivated. An insurance agent that is motivated will willingly engage with their peers and clients, actively search for potential opportunities for improvement in their professional relationships, and is comfortable with reflecting on their personal performance as well as their opportunities for personal growth. It doesn’t matter where you are in your career, rookie or expert, being aware of your motivating factors and being inspired by them to expand and keep expanding is what determines your success.
Besides determining your motivational factors, you must first conquer the difficulty of keeping focused and engaged each day. You are human after all, there are certain expectations of life that can make focusing on work a difficult task. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to help make it easier, here are a few things you can do to help yourself or your insurance agents keep their eyes on the prize.
Group Motivation
You are a product of your environment, this means that the environment that you are in will directly impact your ability to carry out your work. An unpleasant space filled with distractions like irritating sounds, stale air, or not-so-friendly co-workers will prevent you from excelling at your job. That being said, are there ways to motivate your agents despite these sometimes unavoidable distractions? Here are a few things you can do, as a leader or a fellow co-worker, to help build a more motivating work environment.
Set Goals To Achieve
Goals are a great way to motivate people while also measuring their productivity. The feeling you get from achieving a goal can empower and encourage you to be consistent at achieving long-term goals. It builds confidence.
Provide Regular Opportunities To Improve
Having an abundance of opportunities for improvement will make a person feel encouraged and valued, it makes you feel like you’re not alone and you can ask for help. Things like regular training or development programs can help agents find new ways to do their job better and improve their numbers.
Team-building
Teamwork makes the dream work, it can also help your agents build trust among themselves and improve overall communication. Holding regular team-building exercises that allow agents to speak their minds and share useful ideas for bettering the agency as a whole can create and maintain a motivating environment.
Keep Up With The Times
Being an insurance agent means there’s going to be a lot of paperwork that is often repetitive and time-consuming. Carrying out these mundane tasks every day can drain your energy, leaving none to be used for doing the fun stuff. Taking the time to research digital solutions to automate these tedious tasks and investing in them will improve the work experience of your agents and allow them to focus on more motivating tasks like bringing in new clients or managing existing ones.
In general, everyone will benefit from a motivating work environment. So, even if you’re not a manager, making the effort to create a positive but constructive work environment for everyone will only bring success.
Personal Motivation
Besides being motivated in a group setting, you must also find ways to motivate yourself as an individual. After all, you must learn to help yourself first before you can help others.
Turn Boring Into Fun
Regular everyday tasks can get excruciatingly boring, but with the right attitude and perspective, you can make it fun. Try giving yourself tiny rewards for every small task you complete, like your favourite snack for each task you finish.
Ask For Help
It can be demotivating when you make mistakes or feel lost in your work. When this happens, you should reach out to co-workers or others who are more well-versed than you for help. Learning from others can help you feel less overwhelmed and give you the motivation to keep going.
Take Your Time
Sometimes, looking at all your tasks or goals all at once can be overwhelming. This is why it is important to break them down into smaller and more manageable tasks so you can take things step-by-step. This makes things a lot less scary.
The secret to motivating yourself is to have a clear view of your short and long-term goals. Agents that understand this are able to objectively view their goals and find ways to continuously achieve them.
Use Your Values To Drive Your Motivation
Your values are closely intertwined with your work as an insurance agent. More often than not, you will depend on your values to make decisions in your job. Listing them out to see can serve as a great motivator for insurance agents to use as their motivating factors. According to Inc.com, these are some of the values of insurance agents that most resonate with clients and leave a positive impactful impression:
- Professionalism
- Integrity
- Empathy
- Knowledge
- Creativity
By demonstrating these values when carrying out your work as an insurance agent, you can be confident that your clients, employees, prospects, and competitors will see you as an insurance agent with strong values. This allows you to be proud of yourself and your work, keeping you motivated.
Accept Failure As It Comes
For many people, the fear of failure can be paralysing. But it’s important to understand that failure is part of the process, and if you only focus on your failures, you’ll leave no room for opportunities. Being a successful insurance agent means accepting that you will make mistakes, and instead of blaming yourself for them, you learn from them. Not everything will go exactly as you want it to go, no matter how hard you try. But this doesn’t mean that you are doing things wrong. The next time you make a mistake, remind yourself that it is normal, then anaylse the situation from a different perspective. Instead of being hard on yourself, be kind and ask yourself what you could do better next time and think of ways to improve. There’s nothing wrong with failure, the only thing that matters is that you keep trying.
Keep Focused
One way to help you keep your focus on the job is by prioritising your tasks, this will also help with avoiding distractions. If you’re not already the type of person that makes plans and writes lists, this might be difficult to start at first. For some, looking at all the tasks you have for the day all at once at the beginning of the day might overwhelm you. But for others, you’ll need a clear plan of all the tasks you’ll be tackling for the day before starting your work. Everyone is different, but the key to prioritising is to understand what works best for you. Then, you can create an action plan for your tasks.
Here are some ideas you could try:
• Delegate smaller and less urgent tasks to others – This allows you to focus on your big and urgent tasks.
• Dedicate time to specific each task for the day – This helps you fill up your time and avoid overscheduling
• Schedule your break times – Your body and mind need rest to do well at work
Be Confident While Staying Humble
An insurance agent that is confident won’t stay stuck on their mistakes or shortcomings, while an insurance agent that is humble understands that they don’t know everything and will always be on the lookout for ways to learn and grow. Having both these characteristics as an insurance agent will help you achieve your goals and motivate you to never give up or stop trying. This passion will drive you in your career to take on every task with 100% of your efforts.
Persistence Is Key
In life, things that are worth doing will most likely not be easy. Success doesn’t come overnight, you must continue to be persistent and never give up even if you keep failing. Disheartening things will always happen, such as losing a long-time client or a prospect not falling through last minute, but this doesn’t mean you just give up. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, pick yourself up and move forward. Understand that failure is not making mistakes or not achieving certain goals, it’s giving up.
If you’re struggling to find the motivation to keep going, it can’t hurt to take a look at some success stories of others that may have been in your shoes before.
Be The Best That You Can Be
A sure way to stay motivated is by being great at your job. As an insurance agent, you will be highly valued and praised if you can aid in the growth of your agency. Nowadays, a business’s growth can greatly benefit from the available modern technology but can be a daunting task without a proper understanding of it
But once you have familiarised yourself with these useful digital tools, the confidence boost and skillsets you will gain to help your business growth will be well worth it. Invest the time into improving yourself by educating yourself on the latest technological advancements and maybe even what your competitors might be using to their advantage. The information is all readily available, if you just take a look, you’ll find what you’re looking for.
The insurance industry is quite a competitive one and if you haven’t necessarily been doing well yourself, it can be very discouraging. This is why you must continuously find new ways to motivate yourself to do your best and keep going. Here are some final tips we can recommend:
- Always remember to regularly analyze areas of improvement in yourself
- Don’t sit on your mistakes and shortcomings for too long, focus on moving forward
- Take advice from others who have more experience in the field; there is always room to improve and grow.
- If you really can’t find the motivation in yourself, try looking for it externally.
Even though it’s important to remain humble and be aware of your faults or weaknesses, you must identify and utilise your strengths. The next time you find yourself doing well for yourself, think of what you did and how you did it. Recognise your achievements and be proud of them.
As an insurance agent, your number one priority is to keep your clients happy. Your job is to help them and provide services that they can depend on in times of struggle. So, if you’re really looking for motivation as an insurance agent, find it in the joy and satisfaction of knowing that you are making a real difference by helping those in need.
