“We practice hard, so the game becomes easy.”
Professional athletes practice essential skills for hours before each game, even though they are already elite and earn millions of dollars to play their sport.
Similarly, we need to create this “muscle memory” in our insurance Agency so we don’t need to think about what we will say during every live-time, real-life scenario. Instead, we just respond. Why? Because we’ve practiced. Over and over and over again.
Many of you reading this are shaking your head in agreement.
But you don’t take action on practicing, even though you know practice sells insurance.
Lack of practice comes down to these three problems:
- Everything is new and there’s too much to learn.
- The Agency is busy or your personal life is busy – there’s not enough time.
- You don’t know how to start.
Good news! Each of these problems has a solution:
- The ONLY way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Yes, there is a lot to learn within an Agency, but you can’t do it all at once. Play the long game by learning and practicing something new ONE step at a time. Don’t forget to celebrate your SMALL WINS along the way (it’s a huge help).
- Life will ALWAYS be busy. That will never change. With anything you want to accomplish, you will either take the time to get it done or choose not to. That choice is ALWAYS yours to make, though. The good news is, there is a way you can begin learning, practicing, and inching your way to mastery by only finding 20 minutes each day. It requires you to become DELIBERATE with your practice time.
- Don’t know where to start? Here is our 4-step breakdown to get started on the new skill-building endeavor.
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- Break the skill down. Identify the MOST critical aspect of the skill you are going to learn and start THERE.
- Learn enough to be dangerous. According to Josh Kaufman, you can learn anything new by practicing for just 20 hours. Let’s put that in our terms: how about 20 minutes a day? Can you find just 20 minutes each day to practice your craft? If so, that means 60 days from now you will have put in your 20 hours! You don’t need to know EVERYTHING; you only need to know enough to be able to “self-correct.” Too often, we struggle with “paralysis with analysis.” We think we need to know it all before we do anything. THIS is the #1 killer of productivity in our industry. All you need to know are the basics and then start practicing those. When you hear yourself say something you like, stick with THAT. When you hear yourself say something you don’t like, self-correct it. That’s it. Don’t overthink what is a relatively simple business.
- Remove distractions. It’s 20 minutes. You can live without an office phone, cell phone, texts, e-mails, social media, television, music, or any other distractions for 20 minutes. Eliminate them and focus on the practice task at hand.
- Do this consistently each day until you reach the 20-hour mark.
Some tasks you can implement this tactic on and add to that “Insurance Learn and Practice List”:
- Learn and use your gratitude statements
- Learn and use your personal value statements
- Learn and use your transition statements
- Learn and use your comparison statements
- Learn and use overcoming objection statements
- Learn Referral Practice techniques
- Learn and practice the multi-line sales process
Your call-to-action: Go through these four steps and identify the 20 minutes you will practice each day. Take the essential content for you to succeed at your job and START practicing. It’s no different than a PGA golfer hitting balls at the driving range before a tournament. Even if you’ve done it before, even if you’ve said those words hundreds or even thousands of times… keep practicing and create that muscle memory!
Important to Know: While we aim for you to put this lesson to use learning something new in insurance, it applies to learning anything new in life.
