You think your failures and lack of success is someone else’s fault. Ok: your sales manager’s a jerk, the underwriters just ruined a perfectly good product, no one is providing you with good marketing materials, everybody already has an agent, you haven’t got a great presentation or all the gizmos the competition does, you can’t get compliance to approve anything, etc. So what, all that may be true and more, but if you want to succeed it’s entirely up to you and no one else. If you want insurance sales success your first biggest step is to accept that no matter what isn’t working, no matter what you don’t have, no matter who’s a jerk, you and only you can change all that and make it work in spite of all your obstacles.

When you can’t sell or you’re just a little stuck it feels rotten, and it’s easy to lose your confidence and feel down on yourself. To overcome reason number 1 you have to change the way you think. It will take a conscious effort on your part to change the way you think because what you think is an ingrained habit that formed early in your life when things didn’t work out for you, and as you experience troubles in your sales career you automatically think a certain way about the experience based on your past experiences.

There are really two parts to overcoming reason number 1 and neither are about rah-rah motivation. Overcoming reason number 1 requires self-leadership and opportunity expectation. You can have the most positive outlook and mindset around, and still be an absolute sales flop. Having a positive attitude and mindset is good because it makes you a pleasant person, and if you’re not a pleasant person you aren’t going to sell anything to anyone. But thinking happy thoughts alone will not put money in the bank in the form of sales.

Self-leadership is essential for insurance sales success. Leadership isn’t about a set of characteristics or traits that someone is born with. Leadership is a developable skill set. Leadership is all about achieving results through yourself and others. A leader sees the world as it is and accepts it. A leader takes responsibility for their own results and never places blame on others. A leader does the things others won’t to get results others don’t. A leader is totally responsible for their sales successes and their sales flops.

Opportunity expectation comes from accepting every situation and acknowledging there is an opportunity. The opportunity that exists in situations that outwardly appear poor is potentially your greatest opportunity of all. Be glad you may be struggling to sell anything or to get unstuck now because when you figure out what you need to do to change that you will learn a valuable lesson that will serve you over and over again. I’ve had clients that were terrifically successful their first couple years and then all of a sudden there success came to a screeching halt. They came to realize and related to me that during that time of great success they were accidentally successful, and that now they needed to learn how to be intentionally successful. Learn how to be intentionally successful by: learning how to turn failures into successes, learning the lesson to be learned in every temporary defeat, finding creative ways to turn temporary defeats into future successes, and using your imagination to make connections no one else has thought of. You have more opportunities in front of you at this very moment than you could ever handle use your self-leadership to start turning those opportunities into results.