Applying James Clear’s top-selling tips to final expense insurance agents
If you’re looking for the secret to insurance sales success, people are raving about Atomic Habits by James Clear. The book will change your perspective about goal setting, because it focuses your attention on the systems (habits) you put in place to propel you towards those goals. This post will summarize the secrets of Atomic Habits so they are easy to follow in a quick guide.
First step: Start with Easy Habits
One of the biggest mistakes final expense agents make when chasing success is that they focus on the big picture too early. Making changes in your daily habits is most successful when you start with small, easy-to-change habits. Clear calls this “habit shaping:” you take one goal and break it down into smaller habits. This is where you start, with bite-sized changes, and you build up to bigger habit shaping.
Second step: Stack Positive Habits
Once you have established some successful habits that are building you toward your goal, you add more habits to the stack. Think of it like adding a small step to your routine, for example, “After I send 10 first-contact emails, I will make 5 cold calls.” Because you are already in the habit of sending emails, moving to the next task will not feel as challenging. Keep stacking positive habits, adding more when the habits start to feel second-nature.
Third step: Make Habits Satisfying
For many of us, making these changes can get tiring, and the secret to success here is consistency. So, Clear recommends embedding some instant gratification into your system. Reward yourself after certain, difficult habits. “After I make 5 cold calls, I will take a 10-minute coffee break.” Don’t underestimate the power of incentive.
Fourth step: Make Success Easy
This concept is really crucial to final expense insurance success, or success in any field, honestly. Basically, we need to accept that as humans, we are hard-wired to make the least amount of effort possible to get something done. It’s not laziness, and it’s not going away, so the fourth step is to make the system you’re trying to change easier to change. This might mean setting up materials ahead of time, or bookmarking certain websites, or making it easy to track your habit. When positive habits are easier to do, they are more likely to get done. Setup, reminders, timers, trackers, these are all worth the effort they take because they make the important things easier.
Fifth step: Make Failure Difficult
Remove temptations that could pull you back into old habits. If you recognize that you spend too much time scrolling through screens when you should be making sales calls, set app time limits or block certain websites on your laptop during business hours. Just like we want to make habits easy to do by creating a path of least resistance, we also want to make failure harder by adding resistance down that path.
These five steps will get you started on the path to success. We recommend tracking your habits or designating an accountability partner to keep you successful for the long haul.
