Reflect, Realign, Reset: Starting 2025 Strong

Shane and Tonya kick off the new year by exploring how independent insurance agents can Reflect, Realign, and Reset to set themselves up for success in 2025. They share insights on identifying what’s essential, eliminating distractions, and building a strong foundation for intentional growth. 

IA Forward to can help you take your agency from good to great. Learn more at iaforward.com, and follow IA Forward on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA Forward, your playbook for success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it out of the ballpark are your hosts, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward. It is 2025. The year is off and rolling. How are things in Texas?  

Shane: They're cold this morning. I woke up in the 30s, which is great. 

We really need that mid 30s to mid 50s kind of weather to keep the big mosquito hawks away. It makes for the new year excitement a crisp winter morning. It just gets me up and going.  

Tonya: It's in the 30s down on the coast as well, which is very unusual for us. And I am blaming this on my mother, because I have always said when my mom comes to visit us that it gets cold. 

It doesn't matter what type of year it is, and now that my mom is in the process of moving to the Gulf Coast, it has been cold since she's moved here. In [00:01:00] fact, you're going to be so proud of me. After seven Of being a part of the Integra team, I have purchased a puffer vest.  

Shane: We are puffer vest people.  

Tonya: The peer pressure finally got to me. 

I have purchased a puffer vest because it has been cold here for that long.  

Shane: Vest weather is the best weather.  

Tonya: And this is all Robbie's fault because during my last trip to Huntington, It was very chilly in the building and Robbie let me borrow his vest and I was like, I get it now. I am blaming my new fashion choices on Robbie. 

Shane: The vest is so non binding. I have a Carhartt vest that I work outside in the right weather and it is fantastic.  

Tonya: Back to the new year, last year in January you shared a book. with the leadership team, uh, Greg McGowan's Essentialism. And I have shared this book over the past year with several people, my husband included. 

We have listened to it twice [00:02:00] together. And I believe that the book had an impact on us as a team. I know it had an impact on me as an individual. And I signed up for Greg's weekly emails. And I love the one That. He sent out this week and he sent three words for 2025 reflect Realign and reset and of course, there's so many phrases that are always thrown about a new year new me And I'm like, I really like me the way I am I loved the phrase to reflect realign and reset and that's where I am today Going into the new year. 

What can we do to make those three things happen?  

Shane: One of the things I love about These three is because they go into this thought process that I have heard most of my adult life. If you get off course, if you take a slight wrong [00:03:00] turn, you're going to miss your target. If you do not course correct, I don't know how an organization of any kind Or us personally, individually. 

I don't know how we would be able to realign into the right direction without reflecting on where we are. Like, what have we accomplished? This was a book that caught my attention and the concepts caught my attention. Sometimes I want him to be a little more rugged. I just want him to tell me to, hey, shut up and get up and get after it, but that's not the Greg way. 

That's not the Greg McCallan way, but the concept is right, regardless of how you interpret Greg McCallan and his approach, and it speaks to a lot of people. We can't get to where we're going if we don't look to where we've been, reflect on how we've done things and then be able to realign. There is a lot of common [00:04:00] sense in this but at the same time we struggle seeing things that are really right in front of our face. 

Most intelligent adult people struggle with the obvious.  

Tonya: That goes back to the adage of you can't see the forest for the trees.  

Shane: Absolutely. I love the end of year planning that I've always done. It's even been more intense this year because it started a little earlier and you'll get the benefit of that in the next couple of weeks on our leadership team as other members of our leadership team will as I start talking about things that I am seeing and vision and a lot of those things are already out there. 

Tonya: Oh they are because you blindsided me a week early. I have in my calendar when things are gonna start and I like prepare myself mentally. And I hadn't started the preparation and we get on a call one day and it's bam and I'm going, wait a minute. Stuff like this doesn't happen till next week. What's go, what's going on with this? 

Shane: We're getting a headstart. It's your fault in a way [00:05:00] because. You always talk about January being the throwaway month, or something like that. Yeah,  

Tonya: it's the free trial month. Free  

Shane: trial month, there it is. And it's like throwaway month, like that's the way I interpreted that. And I was like, no, I really have been thinking about that over the last year. 

No, why are we losing a month? It's not necessary. We need to hit the ground running at the beginning of January. And what do you do when you're late all the time? What do you do when you're, Not prepared. You get up earlier, or you start earlier, or you make an adjustment. Speaking of realignment, you look at where you went wrong. 

Reflect on what didn't work. Reflect on what did work. And then you realign, so that you can go, Okay, what do I need to do differently? What do I need to do better? We struggle seeing things right in front of us. It's going to be this, Perpetual thing, maybe just that's too much work. I don't want to mess with that. 

I don't want to do that I don't feel like it. There's a lot it goes into [00:06:00] this Reflection and then seeing and then you got to take action to realign and you're like Yeah, that's the right thing to do, but I don't want to. I don't know why we do that. I see a lot of that in people today.  

Tonya: Part of it is we tend to focus on the negative. 

And when we take a look, when we do that reflection, we rarely look at the things that we did really well. We have a tendency to focus on all of the places that all of the things that we need to change to, to be better and balance between what went really well and what could be better. is important or you're going to get stuck there and you're going to stop. 

Shane: Really good example of this is the game of baseball, softball, the failure sport. 3 out of 10 equals Hall of Fame. Just that kind of mindset to pick on my youngest. She's extremely competitive, extremely [00:07:00] hard on herself. She's a Power 4 player, Big 12, entering her junior year. Just a super competitive, super hardworking player. 

She's a lot better than I was. I really do believe that. She's super hard on herself, which is the thing that we're talking about, focusing on the negative. She had 27, 28 at bats in the fall season. And she spent weeks focusing on four bad at bats. She had four, what I would call bad at bats, bad approach, just bad result. 

Everything just didn't go well. Four out of those roughly 30 or more. That was the focus. Why are you focused on this negative aspect of the fall? Why are you focused on The four at bats, instead of focusing on the 26 at bats, that went really well where you hit a rocket but it was right at somebody, or you hit a ball off the wall for a triple, or you did this or you did that, [00:08:00] and it's what part of our brain and psyche makes us go negative. 

Why do we do that? And mentally, it's taxing. It really can hold you back to think about things negative first. That's a great point. A lot of that reflection purpose is to be able to reflect on both the negative and the positive because you're gonna beat yourself up. If I would have done this, if I would have made this move, if I would have closed that account, man, that would have been such a better year or such a better month. 

But what about all the good things you did? What about the things that you're not thinking about?  

Tonya: Looking back at 2024, it was hard for all of our agents out there. It was one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult year. You've had as an agency owner, and that's where we go is how hard it was, but a lot of things went right to  

Shane: yeah, a lot. 

And look, [00:09:00] there's going to be some folks that don't like this comment, but I really need you to. I need you to back up for a minute and think about it. Be honest with yourself. It was not the hardest year of my life. Okay. It was probably not the hardest year of your life. There may be some out there listening where it was the hardest year of your life. 

You might have had a death in the family. You might have had illness. You might have had something personal. Terrible year or just a struggle year or whatever it was. And I have been seeing that like I've been seeing a lot of linked in post and a lot of messaging around. Thank goodness. 2024 is gone. 2024 was so hard. 

2024 was this. Yeah, the market's been tough. There's been a lot of customers. That have been frustrated and you probably like I get it but at the same time I really need you to reflect further back because there are many years In my 29 years in the insurance industry that were worse than 2024 There were [00:10:00] years where we were trying to figure out how to cover payroll 48 hours from now and there were years where we were just My gosh, we can't get anywhere. 

We're struggling. There is just this reflection opportunity here to go, wait a minute, maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought it is. Now, some of you who might have started an agency in 2024 or might have started an agency in 2022 or 2023 and then 24, the gauntlet hit. And so I, I really think that it's a good point to come back to this negative, like, why do we always go to that negative? 

Tonya: Let's look ahead. We're in 2025. And there were three questions that Greg McGowan asked in this email that he sent out about Reflect, Realign, and Reset. And let's start with the first one. What is essential that I'm under investing in?  

Shane: Yeah, what is essential? I really [00:11:00] wanted to save this statement for the second question, but I got to throw it in here. 

I'm going to go to stop doing list. You got to figure out what your stop doing list is to figure out what your essential list is. What are the things? In our partner network, our agency network, what are the things that agents really care about? And what are the things that agents don't really care about? 

That's the question that I want to answer in 2025, preferably first quarter, because here's what happens. Things are rolling well, things are successful, and then we start creating Things because we think this is a really great idea and everyone needs it. Everyone wants it. Everyone loves it. And we do those things in a vacuum without really getting tremendous feedback across a big enough sample size. 

If you're a retail agency, do your customers really care? Are they really caring about the [00:12:00] automation that you're putting in place that does cartwheels? Or do they want basic things like, hey, answer the phone when I call you? Is, which is important? What is a really important thing and what matters? And that's the essential part to me, is what is essential? 

And why do we do the things that are not essential?  

Tonya: I am all about asking why. So, why do we underinvest in what is essential and why do we overinvest in what's non essential?  

Shane: This is the shiny object syndrome, the comparison game syndrome. We see what somebody says they're doing. We see what someone is selling because they say that they have been tremendous at it. 

If someone is really successful and you make all kinds of money at it and you love it, then why do people shift their focus to coaching other people on how to do the [00:13:00] thing that they're so successful with? I've struggled with this.  

Tonya: Two reasons. One is, they have a heart for service, and they want to help other people be successful. 

Two would be, they get bored, and they think, okay, I'm great at doing this, maybe my time would be better spent helping other people be successful, and then I'm not going to be bored.  

Shane: I don't disagree with that. Either of those. I'm going to add a third one. I'm really not that successful, but I know how to teach others how to be successful. 

That's the one that worries me the most about what agents do and see across The spectrum, the mirage of social media, the lifestyle of social media, the my world is awesome. And if you do what I say and pay me this money, your world can be awesome to the nature of being an influencer. The day that we're [00:14:00] in, and so that one is the one that I worry about. 

That's why we underinvest in what's essential, is because we lose focus on what it is that we do well at, and what it is that we are good at, and we start playing the comparison game, looking across the spectrum, going, Oh wow. I know I make 250, 000 a year and I have this really cool agency and I'm a practitioner and this is awesome, but man, if I did what that guy does, I could make a million dollars a year. 

I'm not saying that I'm trying to hold people back. I would never say that. I'm just saying that's why we underinvest in that essential piece. That essential piece, if you continue to invest well, and you continue to focus on it, who's to say it can't take you from 250, 000 to a million dollars a year? 

Five years from now. It's just the American way. Look for the shortcut. Where we're at's not enough. [00:15:00] We got to have more. And I've crossed that threshold of maybe, but maybe not. We need to really think about investing strong and investing well in what is really essential.  

Tonya: Here is the flip side to the coaching question that you just asked. 

A great coach A great mentor is never going to tell you what to do. A great mentor is never going to give you instructions on how to be better. They're going to ask questions, and they're going to ask the hard questions, and they're going to keep asking why, and they're going to keep making you dig. 

We're not going on this podcast about Greg McKeown saying, you need to Invest in this, you need to stop investing in that. We're talking about three questions that he asked, which are, what's essential that I'm under investing in? What's non [00:16:00] essential that I'm over investing in? And how can I make it effortless to get the most important things done? 

He's asking questions. And that's what a great coach does. And that's what I'm seeing as the answer to your question. If I pay somebody XYZ to tell me how to be successful, that's not going to make me successful.  

Shane: If that's what you're doing, you just wasted your money. Hey, I'm going to pay you. You tell me what to do. 

Tonya: I've done it. You've done it. We've done it. The investments that have helped me be successful are the people that have said, I'm not telling you what to do. You know what to do, but here's the questions I'm going to ask, and I'm going to keep asking why, and I'm going to keep digging. And every time I would answer the question why, they would say, but why? 

And when you get to your fourth or fifth but why, that's your answer.  

Shane: Tanya is the most question asking person that I know in my entire life. That's what makes her great at what she [00:17:00] does, is she does ask questions well. Maybe the most important question out of the three. For me, is what is non essential that we are over investing it. 

I know this because we're doing it now, and we've got to stop, and we've done it in the past, and we said we weren't going to do it again, and then we did it again. This is the more important question, because if you figure out what is non essential, what is essential, will rise to the top. If you're going into this process, Saying, man, what is essential? 

And you just get locked into that. If you get stuck, then I'm gonna suggest that you stop right there and move to question number two, which maybe should be question number one, which is, what is non essential? What are the things that I do? This is what I call the stop doing list. This is the Shane version, the simple guys version. 

What can I stop doing? What is non essential? You figure out what's non essential, and you're going to [00:18:00] make a lot of progress. You're going to have some expense reduction. You can start investing better into the essential things. This can go down to the very simple approach of personal budgets. is non essential in my monthly spending habits that I really need to not be doing. 

And if you need an extra couple of hundred dollars a month, it's probably in your non essential list. If you're an agency owner and you need more time, which is your most valuable asset, you need a non essential review. You need to reflect and you need to realign Based on your non essential review that tells you these things just are not important and I need to stop. 

Tonya: I had a mentor years ago give me two Maya Angelou quotes that are framed and they're in my bathroom. I see them every morning and this is a very flowery, [00:19:00] very warm and fuzzy way of saying this. So look past that, but one of them is surviving is important. But thriving is elegant. So many people can't get past surviving to get to thriving. 

And that stop doing list is how to make that happen.  

Shane: Totally agree. And believe that. The stop doing, non essential, these things are synonymous with each other. And it should always be a part of your thought process. It can go down the path of we've always done it that way. A potential place. If you're an older agency, if you're a multi generation agency, if you have a lot of tenured people, then that tends to creep in. 

I'm not saying that some of that stuff isn't essential. Some of it is and some of it's just better. I shared a short video from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania's business school, just [00:20:00] about whether or not AI is truly affecting the workplace. How is it truly affecting the workplace? The evidence. 

Is different than what the perception is that the reality of it is that people say they are heavily involved in AI and really if you get down to it and you start asking questions what part of AI or what tool are you using what they discovered in this Wharton study is that basically people had just shifted from Google search to chat GPT search so they just took one tool and they replaced it with another tool and they maybe got it. 

answer. Maybe they got something and maybe it helped them write a letter better, an email better or whatever. It improved work, but really nothing really changed. The thing that changed was capacity. Someone's capacity went up. What didn't happen is people lost their jobs. And we're talking white collar stuff. 

And the [00:21:00] whole topic was around professional services, white collar jobs, right? And this particular professor, he spot on was like, it's very difficult to think about how AI is going to replace white collar jobs. There's too many exceptions. It goes down this path of the driverless car that everybody has stopped talking about. 

I know there's some Waymo's and Uber and all that, but I'm talking about the thing that was happening 10 years ago. We're just going to get in our car and do the Jetsons thing and push the button and it's just going to take us there. Well, a lot of that big talk has backed up. This is going to be very similar in the sense that people are saying they're AI, but they're really just using ChatGPT instead of Google. 

It might do some things for you, but we're still hiring the same people, and we're still needing the same people. Do you have to have AI in your agency today or you're gonna die? The answer is no.  

Tonya: It's impossible to thrive. When you have a bunch of noise around you, [00:22:00] you can't focus enough to do what you need to do. 

One of the things that I have loved, uh, helping me with, is scheduling my time. It is an incredible tool if you have a huge list of things. That is completely overwhelming. It is incredible how it can help you plan a day, help you plan a week, and really help you figure out what's essential. And what's non essential, how much time you need to spend on this versus this. 

And I know very few people that are using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever to help them schedule their time. And it is a fantastic tool for that.  

Shane: When you compare me And my wife and our traits. There's one thing that glares. I'm terrible at time management and she's unbelievable at time management.  

Tonya: Same thing with the [00:23:00] cute boy and I. 

Shane: What you're saying is exactly the point in my mind. You're using AI to do something to help you attack a weakness. You're using that tool to make you better, to make you more productive. That's where the opportunity is short term. I have no idea where we're at five years from now with AI. But short term, what is it that you're not good at that maybe something like AI could help you with? 

Many of you listening to this. Time management struggle because your marketers, your salespeople, probably mostly salespeople, which means that you're probably not great organizer, especially if you're like me and you're the back of the napkin kind of sales guy. Then. You probably need to look into some of these AI time management blocking tools. 

You need to think about that because I [00:24:00] could see where that moves into the essential because of your personality, because of who you are. What may be non essential is that you spend 20, 000 to go to some place for somebody to tell you what you already know. And that's the part that I struggle with. Some of you may need to go to that, but what are you going to do when you get back home by yourself and you need to set appointments, you need to do all the little things to make the sales goal. 

That's the thing that we have to come back to. What's essential, what's non essential. And it goes into the last question, how can I make it effortless? How can I make this so that I get these most important things done?  

Tonya: Most salespeople, most of us didn't get to question number three because we got distracted somehow in the first two questions. 

Shane: No, we got lost in the first two questions. We made lists. [00:25:00] We lost our list. We made a new list.  

Tonya: We put the list in the freezer to find six days later. Don't ask me how I know this. Okay.  

Shane: We made it in our nice little moleskin, and then we can't find what page we made it in. So we just started a new list, and then we did it on our phone, because how could I lose it on my phone, but then I can't find it on my notes. 

We know. We are with you. We are speaking from failure. That's a really important thing here, which is why the leadership team here at Integra read this book last year. Is to help us be better, help us understand what's really essential in our lives, what's really essential in our businesses.  

Tonya: Welcome to 2025. 

This is not a free trial month. Reflect on these. What's essential? What is essential that I'm under investing in, what is non essential that I'm over investing in, and how can I make it effortless to get the most important things done? I'm going to post [00:26:00] these three questions on our social media pages, and I want to encourage you not only to think about these, but to challenge your staff to think about it as well, and let them share with you their thoughts. 

That might really help you learn more about your agency. To see things in a different way  

Shane: 2025 is going to be an awesome year The good news is that you get this Process that we go through every year where even though it's only two or three days apart It feels like we get to turn the page on a new year So if you need that symbolic kind of theme This is your permission to turn the page from what was a bad year if you've If you've been in stride and you've been killing it, then there's nothing to do different but keep going. 

That's really important is don't get bored. If you get bored with what's working in your business, then find a hobby. Don't completely disrupt your business because you get bored. And because you're awesome at [00:27:00] something. And you just need to keep going and going. And it's just, this is such a long cycle, long tail business. 

That what is over the horizon, what's coming at you when you're having these successes is even better. And so I want to make sure that you hear that today is that's something to think about into the new year and into 2025.  

Tonya: I'm going to leave us today with this quote from Thomas Edison. If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. 

Shane: Attitude's a choice. Make a great one.  

Tonya: Bye y'all.  

Announcer: At the Integra Partner Network, we understand that carrier access is the key to your agency's success. That's why Integra offers direct access to top rated personal and commercial carriers, ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging market. And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing, and bonus opportunities, Technology and peer support, all while you retain 100 percent of your book with no penalties to exit. 

Integra is ready to [00:28:00] empower you and your agency to find sustained growth. Find your way to Integra. Visit IntegraPartnerNetwork. com today. That's IntegraPartnerNetwork. com.