Transforming Your Mindset for Success

Brent Kelly:

Oftentimes agency leaders and their teams will tell me that this is the thing that we believe is holding us back. Maybe the thing is a process or a strategy or a specific action they're not taking. And while that may be true in terms of the outcome, to some degree, what I found and what we found in working with hundreds of agencies and thousands of professionals is that it's not the thing ultimately that's holding them back. It's how they think about the thing. We'll talk about that specifically today. It's not the thing, it's how you think in today's Agent Leader podcast. Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. Thanks for being part of this episode today. Excited to be with you, and I'm excited to bring back a recurring guest. And the reason that we keep bringing him back is that apparently he's providing great value to all the Agent Leader Podcast listeners. Roger Sitkins, CEO, and founder of the Sitkins Group is with us. Roger, as always, welcome back to the Agent Leader podcast.

Roger Sitkins:

Well, Brent, thank you. It's always fun to get together and share some ideas, some things that'll help agencies get a lot better.

Brent Kelly:

Well, today we're going to talk about thinking, and we're going to take this in a few different areas, and I think it's such a simple, yet such an impactful topic and conversation. And I let the audience know right away that this podcast episode and some of the notes and outline that we put together today came from an authentic conversation that wasn't designed to be about this. Sometimes Roger and I have conversations that, I don't know, maybe they go off track a little bit, Roger, is that fair?

Roger Sitkins:

Thats a fair statement.

Brent Kelly:

So it went off track. But I think in a good way, because what we began to talk about was this idea. And of course, as we always talk about agency results, how can we help agencies get better results? What does that look like and how those are tied back ultimately to how we think, why we think the way that we do, how our thinking is impacted in different ways. And of course, Roger came up a number of different ideas and things that I want to dive deep with Roger today. And more importantly, share with you the agent leader audience, some of these ideas. Now, before I get into that, I want to remind you that we do have a brand new tool that's on our website. It's the Agency Transformation Scorecard. This is a super simple and very effective tool that you as an agency leader and your agency can go on anytime of the day 24/7.

Go to sitkins.com/scorecard. It's a simple sample of agency transformation scorecard that it's going to measure you against key areas and see how your agency is doing. And then from there, we'll send some follow-ups to help you on your journey all being part of that Best Version Possible experience. And as always, that's the mission. The mission here today, I know Roger feels much the same way, is that our mission is to educate, empower, and equip you the independent insurance agency leader and your team to become that Best Version Possible. So with that, Roger, you ready to dive into some thinking discussion?

Roger Sitkins:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Brent Kelly:

Well, before we get into some of the thinking, I don't know. I know we've got some video people that watch it on video. We've got a lot of people that listen to audio only, but you have something on your head. Do you want to share what's on your head?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, it is a cap. Those of you that are watching can see it. Obviously those who are listening can't. But the cap has a saying on it's no practice quoting. It says practice quoting with the universal slash like no smoking. And a good example of how you think because how you think normally is going to drive your behaviors. And so what we know with the best agencies, the best producers is they say, look, no practice quoting. I've got to super qualify people. That's an attitude we have, and tied to it. The best day to lose the sale is the first day. If you're going to lose a sale, lose it early. Because we've all had that happen where we get into a selling situation and we go, you know what? This is just practice. And these people are never going to move. They're never going to buy. So the attitude here is don't waste time, energy, and effort on people that are not willing to at least get a true second opinion, not just a quote, because they're trying to keep their current agent honest. So it's a great example of how we think drives our behaviors, drives our results.

Brent Kelly:

Well, that's a great example. And I talk about many, many more of this. It's one thing to, it's why I love it as a hat, because part of you had on there people go no practice quoting. What's that? And you start to talk about it. And what it really boils down to, and what we're going to talk about and dive deep today is ultimately, again, it comes back to, well, why do people think that way? Or should that be something I should think about? Or in some cases it's like, well, why would I ever practice? Well, I've never thought about that in that concept today. And so some of these, what I want to lead to Roger, are these breakthroughs in thinking. And you have a great story of, I think one of the most powerful breakthroughs that I've heard your friend that you spent a lot of years with, we still have conversations today. He's still very, very successful in the marketplace today. You give him a very special name. I won't steal any more of your story. Share with the audience.

Roger Sitkins:

Anybody that's been through our producer program already has heard the story about Grande Gringo. This is a great producer, great agency, became a great friend of mine, and he actually went on the first mission trip we did in Nicaragua. And he's about 6'7", about 280. He's a big dude to say the least. And most of the Nicaraguans are little shorter people and they're wonderful people. And I always say, boy, there, but for the grace of God go I that we would live there. And they struggle to say the least, but when he came on the job site, people, they looked up at him, they went Grande Gingo! But the story starts when he was a producer, so when he first came to our producer camp and it was held on Fort Myers Beach, and he called me, it was the second or third session, he called ahead of time and said, "Hey, coach, I'd like to go fish."

I'd love to fish there. Could we book something?" I said, sure. So he came in, we got a fishing guide, we went out, but about 12 one o'clock, the storms came in the afternoon, summer storms came in, we got chased off the water. So we were sitting at a beach front restaurant having some chicken wings and some cold beers and just talking about things. And I looked at them and I said, "how big do you think your book of business can get?" He said, "well, I'm at about $650 of commission now, and maybe $700,000, but I think that's probably it. And I looked at him, there's certain people you could look at him, them, Brent, we see this all the time. You can look at him and say, there's something in there waiting to come out. Now, of course we refer to it.

There's a Best Version Possible waiting to come out. And I looked at him and I said, Grande Gringo, still call him that. I said, I see a million dollar producer in you. He said, what? I said, I see a million dollar producer in you. And it was really strange. It was almost like I heard a click in his brain where all of a sudden he went, oh. And I said, well, what would a million dollar producer look like? And we talked through that, and we told the story for a long time now, and he bought into it at a very, very deep level. He finally believed it. He had some self-limiting beliefs. This is one of the things we're going to talk about here a lot today, but eliminating those self-limiting beliefs. But now all of a sudden he said, yeah, you're right. I can do it. Well, I'm here to tell you that his book of business right now is bumping up at 7 million of commission income. Now, that's not every producer in the world, but he believes it. He believes things now that he never believed before. Matter of fact, he's consistently writing accounts that pay more in commission than what he had total when we had that discussion. But he changed his thinking. He changed his thinking, and that's the key to it.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah, I just comment on that. I want you to dive more on this, what I'm going to share here, but in our producer camp, and I've shared this, I think at some point in the podcast, we really do build a foundation. In particular, our first session is about Best Version Possible and designing your future and identifying what are some of the self-limiting beliefs that you may have had so far that are preventing you from becoming that Best Version Possible. And oftentimes, this isn't shocking. I understand where it comes from is that whether it's an agency leader or producer, they're like, yeah, we'll tell you about the result. This is the result, this is the result. What's the result? What's the result? And you listen to grande gringo, what's $7 million? I mean, gosh, give that result. Well, it all starts with how you think. And as we build things back, and it's something we share all the time, is it's beliefs, behaviors, results.

And Roger, you touched on that. Okay, here's this result. What are the behaviors that get you to that result? And of course, those behaviors align back to your ultimate beliefs. And what we find so often is that our beliefs and our behaviors are disjointed in many cases. Or what we say about our results or what we want to result are behaviors. They don't align with that either, right? Well, this is what I want. This is what I actually do, and the reason why I don't do what I want is because I don't believe in what I need to do. And I know this is, well, that sounds confusing. It's semantics, but it's true. And so often, even in our first session in particular, and we reaffirmed this throughout the program, is that if you're designing your future as a producer, one of the questions is why do you want that? Here's the other part, why not? What has been happening that's preventing you from that? So I don't know. Again, I didn't mean to try to steal in your thunder Roger on this, but the belief behaviors result I think has been such a critical piece. And we don't say results, behaviors, beliefs, we say beliefs, behaviors, results. So in your point of view, Roger, why is starting with beliefs so important in what you've seen and learned over the years?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, you have to believe in yourself, number one. And again, this gets back to get rid of those self-limiting beliefs. If somebody has done something, you can do it.

It's doable. Alright, and so we start off with the whole psychographics of what do you think? What's your vision? What's your mission? What are you really committed to? And something we've talked about before, there's a huge difference between being motivated and being dedicated, and are you motivated to do some things better? Well, yeah, for short term, but are you dedicated to do it? Is it a driving force in your life that you're saying, these are my beliefs. I want this for my family, I want this for my book of business. I want this for my team at the agency. So what are the behaviors and strategies that you've got to make normal? One of the many acronyms we talk about when what is normal? What are the things you're going to make normal that you're not only motivated to do, you're dedicated to do, and you hold yourself accountable to do them.

Then when you get to the results, part of it, as you've mentioned, it's pretty simple. Easy example. Let's say that I'm motivated and dedicated to having a higher closing ratio and working with future ideal clients only. But then I look at my closing ratio and it's 33%, 40%. When I really am committed to getting up to that 75 to 80%, what are the things I'm doing wrong behaviorally? So I believe it. I look at the actual results. So anytime the results are not congruent with what we think we want, we have to go back and look at how good of a job are we doing executing what we said we're going to do. Another example, obviously everybody in the world would say referral, a targeted referral, not a random referral, but a targeted referral where you're going after somebody you specifically want because you have first of all, expertise in that field, that industry, you've got the markets, the things that can make it different.

You know how you can help them control their total cost of risk or total cost of benefits. And you see, that's someone I want to get introduced to or referred to. That sounds really good. But if you don't have a reverse referral process in place that you consistently practice, get very conversational and comfortable, and then actually when you're with a client, you give them a list of, here's some people I'm thinking about calling out. Who do you know? What can you tell me about? Well, that sounds pretty simple, but it takes a lot of dedication. It takes dedication to say, I want to work on referrals only. I was with a large group of our producers three or four weeks ago, and this was an in-person event, which doesn't happen much anymore in this covid aftermath. But I threw out to them, I said, how many of you right now are working primarily on referrals?

And the good news was the vast majority. And I said, just threw it out, "Why is that important?" Of course, they started yelling things, well, it's a higher closing ratio. It's easier here. It's easier there. I said, it's not easier for you. It's easier for your team. It's easier for your team when you're working on a referral. They're not wasting capacity, chasing down markets, getting submissions and et cetera. So if I believe that's what I really believe, I want to work on the referrals only, but if I don't have the reverse referral process in place, if I haven't identified who I want to be referred to, if I don't actually ask, what a surprise. And then if I don't actually follow up, probably not going to get the results I want. So this all ties together. So I guess a big message here is pretty simple.

If your results are not what you want, go back to your behaviors, go back to your behaviors. Are you doing the things that are pretty much predictable and guaranteed to get you the results you want? It's straightforward, but again, it sounds simple. It's not easy though. We've talked about this so many other times that doing the work, the hard work now is what it really takes to get the results that you want. So you can take the easy way or the hard way, do the hard stuff now, have an easy life later. Do the easy stuff now you'll have a hard life later. It comes back to what do you believe? What do you do? What are the results?

Brent Kelly:

Roger, you're saying that it hit me. I'm going to get your thought on, this is just impulse in my head, so you can just tell me if this is ridiculous. But we talk about false beliefs or self-limiting beliefs. I think maybe this isn't the right word, so I have to think about this a little bit, but I think a lot of people have pretend beliefs. And what I mean by this is they say things of what they believe because they think other people would like to hear it, but they don't really believe it. I mean, just stay on the topic of referrals for a minute. I think this is an easy one that people can grasp, and I think most people go, yeah, it's probably true. But I mean we talk about the ultimate growth strategy in our programs, what it looks like, what it means, how to do it, the end result of some of this thing.

When you start to look at the results, if you do something like the ultimate growth strategy, which for the audience here, if you've never heard this before, it's pretty basic, but really powerful. I mean, just imagine the top 20% of your book of business. If you had them fully rounded out, you had a retention and a continuation process, and you were asking and earning referrals from the majority, the vast majority of your current clients that by the way, already pay you the most, right? And people hear it, and well, that would be a pretty incredible result. In fact, we run through numbers and they go, what? That would change my whole life. That would change my whole business. That would change the whole trajectory of my career. Yet they don't do it. Many of them, some do very successfully, many of them don't or they don't take the full plunge.

And part of it is, I think this comes back is because if you would say to someone, are referrals really important to you? Yes. Are you more effective working on referrals? Do you believe that? Yes, they say it, it's lip service belief. It's pretend belief. But if you really believe, wow, I really believe that my best business model, my best success, the best way to help clients at the highest level, best way to empower my team, the best, the best. I really believe this and why this is important. Your behaviors will align because at a heart level, you believe versus this idea of, yeah, I like the idea of the result. And yeah, I think my boss or someone would like me to say it, but my behaviors are never indicative of what I actually need to do. There's disconnect across the board. I kind of rambled there, Roger, reel me back in, if that makes any sense.

Roger Sitkins:

No, it makes absolute sense because what you're talking about, Brent, is the imposter syndrome.

Brent Kelly:

There you go.

Roger Sitkins:

Okay. They say they want to be a great producer. They say this, they say that, and to the outside world, they're doing pretty good. It is a great business. But the reality is deep down in their heart, when they're all alone, they're going, you know what? I'm an imposter. And we challenge them. Obviously the name of the book, et cetera, the Best Version Possible. Are you right now an imposter as far as moving towards being the Best Version Possible? Are you absolutely not just motivated, but dedicated? You know what it will mean to everything that's important to you in life, because now you're going to be getting the results. And again, the thing that drives me crazy, and I've been doing this for a long, long time, is that when you do the right things, the results are predictable and guaranteed. I mentioned that earlier, but when you do the wrong things, those results are also predictable and guaranteed. So stop being an imposter. It starts saying, well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. Or one of my favorite sayings here in the south, I'm fixing to, I'm fixing to do this. I'm fixing to do that, versus saying, I've got to get back to the basics. I've got to master the basics. And when we can get them to do that, what we're doing of course, is what they're doing is they're changing their behaviors. And when you change the behaviors, you change the results. It's that simple. It's just not easy.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah. I want to make a note here. You said something earlier I was going to comment on, and obviously this is the agent leader podcast. We have a lot of different audience members that listen to this, but a lot of agency leaders, certainly in terms of managing or leading their teams, and as you were talking about your grande gringo story and other things that we talk about, I heard something from John Maxwell, I'm a big John Maxwell fan, but he said, great leaders see more and see before others. They see more and they see, before you kind of hear that, okay, that's trendy, that's cool. But you think about that as an agency leader, and that's what you did with Grande Gringo. And why I want to stop here is these things that Rog are talking about so often is it, it's something that your team can do, they just don't see it yet for whatever reason. They just don't see it yet. And you as a leader, if you say, listen, I can see more and I can see before you, in essence, back to Grande Gringo, I see a bigger better future that you don't even see yet. Let me help you paint it. And you start to do that. That taps into their why taps into the beliefs of, wow, maybe you're right.

I shared this on another podcast, so again, I apologize for if you've heard this before, but I've had so many impactful coaches and mentors in my career, and I had a coach that I hired. I don't know if I've shared this with you, Roger, before I shared the podcast. And I mean to think about the imposter syndrome, this was right before I met you and we were getting through our series of coaching calls. I was paying for coaching. Quite frankly, at that time, I probably couldn't afford, but I wanted it. And she said then to me. She said, listen, you have no idea of the brilliance inside of you. And I said, what do you mean I'm struggling here? I'm not doing well here. This isn't happening. I'm frustrated here. She's like, Brent, stop for a second. There's brilliance inside of you. And I say that not about me, about anyone.

There is true brilliance inside of people. They just won't allow it to happen because of this head trash, these narratives they put in their mind because of what happened to them five years ago or three years ago or last year, or quite frankly yesterday. So again, I'm on a bit on a soapbox here, but I just think it's important for leaders to understand of what an awesome opportunity and responsibility to be able to ask the right questions or be able to navigate people to go, wow, I never thought about it that way before. So Roger, you're moving around. I dunno if this is resonating with you.

Roger Sitkins:

Well, it absolutely is. It's a great saying if you think you can or if you think you can't, you're right. And that's one of the keys to all of this. And all too often we say things you want to work on referrals only. Isn't that the best way to work? Yes. But they immediately in their mind, they have all the reasons why they can't. So they take a positive thought going, God, if I worked on referrals only, it would be better for everybody. I'd certainly make a lot more money. And as an agency owner, what if our strategy was every, and we've talked about this, this is going to sound very simple if you've never heard it before, this takes a tremendous amount of pigheaded discipline. But is that every new client is a targeted referral that we've gone after, we've been referred to.

And then because the client experience is so great, within 18 months, every new client gives us a targeted referral. Why? Because we've earned it and we have a process that drives, so that sounds great, but all of a sudden people start telling you all the reasons they can't do it. How come you're not working on referrals only? Well, because of how come you're not in the green zone 80% of the time as a producer? Well, because, well, because, and then that great guy, you talk about Dr. Yeah But, but this, and yeah, but that you've got to get rid of those things as an individual. It's tough for all of us. I'll be the first one to raise my hand. You've got to look in the mirror and challenge that person. You've got to look in the mirror and say, why aren't you doing this?

And then more importantly, how can I do it? One of the things that's really fun is just to think forward. Maybe I would hope everybody would do this, but think forward as a leader, and let's pretend we already are at the end of a journey. So as an agency leader, I could say, well, in a year from now, I want all my producers in the green zone 80% of the time and a year from now, I want to have executed what you've talked about, the ultimate growth strategy, round out, retain and replicate A's and B's. A year from now we've got all these things lined up. And now you take yourself forward and say, we're already there. Then you turn around and look back at the journey you went on. It's kind of a reverse engineering. I'm not sure what the proper term is, but all too often what we see is people that start here and look in the future, they see all the obstacles and the best people take the obstacles and turn them into strategies.

Well, I couldn't do that because of this. Well, let's assume you did do it. What did you do? What did you do? I think we talked about this before. I know we certainly have in our programs, but it's a concept of that's not possible unless, because all too often people hear these things, they get a new belief in their head and they immediately say, well, that's not possible. Or they say, that's impossible, how you phrase it. And the answer is, you are right. That's not possible. Unless what And when You can start answering the, unless what questions or until questions, then you start saying, well, wait a minute. I just changed my belief. I've just changed my belief. So what did I do, what did we do as an organization where our producers were in the green zone doing only four things, sales, relationship management, continuations and pipeline building.

What did we do as an agency to get there, other than of course, joining Sitkins? What did we do to get there? Well, we did this, we did this, we did this, we did this. Oh, that's how we got there. And so if we can begin with the end in mind, that right away is starting to change our beliefs. We begin with the end in mind. And whether we're saying no practice quoting, no unpaid consulting, we've got to earn and generate referrals. We've got to make sure that we have a high performance teams, not high maintenance teams, whatever they may be, if we sit there and say, it already happened, and then look back. Now those negative, those, yeah, buts start going away and I have better beliefs. But as you said, the leaders that best would see before others, but then they've got to cascade that new vision to everybody on the team and getting people to buy in. People understand why we're doing this because of this, this, and this. Again, it takes such discipline, Brent, maybe I hope that, I hope that's maybe the biggest message here is what do you believe? Are the behaviors congruent with that? And are the results what you want? And you start just saying, that's what we talk about all the time. Concept. We reinforce it. It's really cool when it happens.

Brent Kelly:

And I'm going to reinforce more, I think you said earlier, but it just hit me again, some of these things is like, it's what you believe. And then I would go further and why do you actually believe it? And I mean, I know it's part of our conversation today, but I think I've shared this with you as well at some point. But there's so many things in life that I think of examples of other areas outside of insurance that it's the same type of thing, right? Different actions and different results we're looking for. But again, I'll just use myself on this, but remember years ago when I realized I've starting to get a lot of shape, say the least, the belt got a little bit just whatever. And I'm like, I want to do some stuff on this. And anybody, here's an example I guess I want to share of this is that if I didn't do anything, and nowhere am I near perfect on this, but if I didn't do anything, it's not the end of the world.

Life isn't that bad. It's okay. I'm still better than other people. All these things. And by the way, pretty good parallel that we hear a lot of producers, if I don't do anything, it's still okay. But I was starting to think about this of like, well, why do I want to do this? And the reasons why initially I thought I wanted to get in better shape and all these kinds of things was because that's just what I'm supposed to do. That's what someone else said. Or that maybe I'll look good or whatever. It was superficial. And I'll never forget when I saw it again, this isn't to be negative to this person, but I saw a gentleman about 20 years older than me, very much struggling to walk up stairs or bleachers at a basketball game. And I had these little kids and I'm thinking, that's me.

That's me. And that Why became why because I owe it to myself and my kids. It became bigger than me. And I say all this too, and I wrote this down, Roger, if this is something that we could start using even more in our programs, but I'm going to give an example of this and I want to get your thoughts. One of the things that we try to instill to our team or to our attendees of our programs and producers is I will never lose to someone more prepared than me. Now, that would be a belief, right? My belief is I will. Now, here's the deal. If I say it, it might be true If they say it and actually believe it, it is true. So my thing is, well, do you believe that you will never lose to someone more prepared? Yes. Why do you believe that?

Why does that matter? And then what behaviors are mandatory to make that true? If you really believe that, what behaviors, and by the way, you tell me, what do you think? What behaviors would be absolutely necessary to align with that belief? You just told me? Because let's talk about if this is really true. And by the way, how will your results look if you achieve that? How will your life be different? What will it feel like? Oh my gosh. So to me, it's just tying this all together. So again, I went on another rant, sorry about that. But let's just use as an example. You wrote that down on one of the things about this idea, I'll never lose to someone more prepared than me, and you've dealt with this for years. Where do you see this getting out of whack?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, this is going to sound so basic. Take professional athletes, take Broadway stars, take movie stars, take bands, take orchestras. What do they all have in common? They practice. They practice golfers. Guess what? They practice. And a lot of you that are golfers take lessons and go out, and there's called the practice range. Why? So you can get better. You can get better. And it drives me crazy when I see that agencies and individual producers, they'll actually go out and work on an account. They do all the work on it. They get the final presentation together, proposal, which I hate the word, but it's not a proposal. And they show up. And the first time they actually give the presentation is live to this, what I would hope would be a future ideal client. And you think about that, and one of the questions we ask in early sessions of the producer program always is, how many of you after you left an account and you're driving away at a prospect know that you're not going to get? Now, how many of you have ever said, boy, next time I'm going to do that different.

Yeah next time I'll do it different. One of the things I'm very proud of that our team does is every event gets pre-brief and every event gets debriefed. We pre-brief this. We're going to debrief this. That's not bragging. It's what we have to do to become our Best Version Possible. And the fact that any agency would allow a producer or the individual producer would allow themself to go out and get in front of a future ideal client. Because let's face it, you work hard to get in front of future ideal clients. But these aren't people that just call you and say like a quote to keep a current agent. Honest. We're talking about where you are marketing to them, you've targeted them, you work hard to get in the door. And then as we've said before, just show up, throw up and blow up. And afterwards you wonder why it never went any further.

Or you do all the work, you give a presentation that's nothing more than a quote, and then they won't call you back. They won't call you back. And you realize, yeah, I wonder what went wrong. I wonder what wrong. I'll tell you what went wrong. You went wrong. A good example. How many producers, when they start the producer at camp, what percent of them, Brent, have ever filmed a presentation they made in practice? Low risk practice, not high risk, low risk in front of people in the office where they do the presentation and film it.

Brent Kelly:

And film it, it is a percent or two at tops.

Roger Sitkins:

Yeah. And yet, when we get done people, and by the way, I'd love to say everybody's doing it. No, they don't. No, they don't. This is such a great example of beliefs, behaviors, and results, beliefs. Every event deserves my very best beliefs. Boy, I'm going to have to rehearse to do a great job. Behaviors. Look at it in the car on the way there, okay, the results, you didn't make the sale. And you wonder why You wonder. Such a high percent of sales are lost because you weren't prepared. And we've talked about this before, but one of the great, great lessons we heard from a younger producer in one of our in-person events, pre covid, we said, what did you get out of today? And one guy raised his hand right away. I know we've talked about this before, but he raised his hand right away and he said, coach, I got it.

I will no longer rehearse my presentation during the actual presentation. And we sit here and say, this just doesn't make sense. Professionals practice, it's champions practice. Amateurs don't. But they can show up, throw up and blowup, and they still make a really good living than we can run, more than they'd make a real job and a real job. You might be lucky to get a three, four or 5% raise. And in this job, go out there and do a great job. Get yourself a 10, 20, 30, 40% raise because it's doable when you believe it and when you do the right things, it's very doable.

Brent Kelly:

Well said for sure. And I made a little illustration on my tablet here, but when you said that it reinforced something, because this idea of the behavior, for example, is to practice, right? Behaviors, I need to practice and set time. And I was thinking about this when you say, oh no, I believe that preparation is the key. I believe that I need to be at my very best and then I don't practice. Here's what I wrote down. To me, this is almost a bit cyclical in the terms of that. When you reinforce behaviors, you're also reinforcing your beliefs. They kind of spin around a little bit. And this is what I wrote down. When your behaviors don't align with the belief, your belief is a talking point at best or lie at worst. And what I mean by that is it's just, oh, yeah, I say it, or deep down in your gut, I'm really lying to myself.

And that's what happens. And it sabotages everything that you're trying to achieve. So, alright, Roger, I told you we keep this to about 30 minutes. So here's what I want to get from you. Agent leader out there is listening. Again, maybe they've got a large agency, they're running a team, they've got, maybe it's a smaller agency with a few people. Whatever it is, they're trying to lead themselves better. When you think about this idea and this concept of it all starts with their beliefs and our thinking, what would be your big final conclusion? I don't know if there is a conclusion, but for at least the podcast today, what's your final thoughts in this area?

Roger Sitkins:

One of the most important words we use is alignment. And that's the first phase. And the whole Best Version Possible, getting everybody aligned. Well, I would challenge agency owners, leaders and individual producers, whoever's listening to say, what are you aligned? What you really want to become? Where you really want to go? Is it aligned to what you're actually doing or reverse what you're actually doing? Is it aligned? And it goes back to looking in the mirror. Stop lying to the person in the mirror. Be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror and say, am I doing the right things? Because if you're not getting the results you want, I'll guarantee you some way, somehow you're lying to yourself and its, well, I know I should practice and we should work on for, but, and I should really get producers in the green zone 80% of the time. And we do all this, yeah, buts and we allow ourself to become way less than what we could be. And one of the things, as the obviously much older in group here, one of the things that I see all too often is that people towards the end of their career, and by the way, none of us are going to get out of this alive. We're all going to get out at some point. We're all going to leave what we do for a living. And at some point we're going to leave this earth.

Make sure that you're not the person that at the end of their career has a lot of regrets. And we just see this too often that people don't do the right things and then later on they have regrets. Something we've coined in one of our early sessions that we absolutely believe in, you have regrets or you have regreats. Get the great things, make the great things normal, consistently. Do them. Build a great team, have a great living, have a great future, have a great retirement. Provide for anything that's important to you, your community, your family, your church, whatever, and have no regrets. That's it, Brent.

Brent Kelly:

I love it. Thanks, Roger. This is, again, this is, use the word foundational, but it is, and I say this, I mean a hundred percent, this is not anything written down just from my heart. People ask all the time about different things, and this is not a knock to any other programs or things out there, but what we believe and what we do is different. And the fact that to me, I'm just one of those believers that to have external results that you want to see, it starts with, look at internal and a lot of places, do this, do that, do this, do this. Yes, we're going to guide, instruct different things that you can do, but ultimately it comes back to your beliefs. And last note I had is that you don't have to believe everything. In fact, Roger, you know this better than anybody because you say this all the time, you're not going to agree with everything that we say.

You're not going to implement everything that we say. That's not the point. That's not our job as coaches. But I wrote down the things that you are going to implement and you say you're going to implement that you say you believe, actually believe in them and do them, right? You don't have to do everything but the things that you say you're going to do, do you really believe them? Right? And the impact that it's going to have. And if so, going back to our whole conversation, how do our behaviors and what behaviors need to be there to align with that? So Roger, thanks so much for coming on here. This is a great conversation. Reminder to agency leaders, maybe this is a bit of a look in the mirror, but it's a great way to start the agency scorecard. Go to sitkins.com/scorecard and see where your agency is today. There might be a few things that you go, I believe we do this, and then you look at it and go, well, maybe we don't actually do that. And by the way, there are areas that we'd love an opportunity to help you. So Roger, thanks again for coming on here, agency Leaders, thanks for listening and we appreciate you. We'll see you next time on the Agent Leader Podcast. Take care.