Avoiding Producer Burnout: Five Ways Elite Producers Harness the Power of Self-Care as a Distinct Competitive Advantage

TL;DR Version: Elite producers stave off burnout by harnessing the power of self-care in a way that enables them to stay fully engaged with, curious about and compelled by their work on a consistent basis. Best-in-class self-care goes beyond the limited definition of physical exercise and meditation, but cares for the whole person by harnessing five unique powers: The Power of Reflection, The Power of Reframing, The Power of Renewal, The Power of Relationships and The Power of Refinement.

Experiencing Burnout

A couple weeks ago I received an email from a producer experiencing full-blown producer burnout.

“Although I consider myself to be highly motivated and ambitious, maintaining a high level of energy on a daily basis is something I struggle with. Staying on top of my book, as well as managing emails, assisting associates and working on tasks doesn't leave too much time for marketing/prospecting. New opportunities are not very plentiful thus far. Nevertheless, they can be quite time intensive, depending on the risk. Not to mention energy draining.

I often feel like I end my days with the same or more amount of work that I started my days and not in a good, profit generating way. The stress of work is something that lingers in the back of my mind 24/7. Which in turn, makes for a less energetic and less productive work day/week. I often work nights and weekends which consumes my life. I am often too exhausted and stressed to take the time to take care of myself by either running or exercise. I find that I do get bursts of energy, courage and motivation every now and then and that's when I work on prospecting. However, I cannot seem to maintain the high level of energy this role demands.”

In my work helping hundreds of producers build their businesses every day, I’ve noticed many producers compromise or abandon healthy lifestyle habits and producer best-practices in order to work harder, work longer and get more done. This inevitably leads to producer burnout.

What’s frustrating to me is how much the industry glorifies burnout as a badge of honor and hustle. The truth is the place of burnout can be a dark place. It can be destructive, both personally and professionally. In its wake, a producer is left broken, battling depression and loneliness, and making uncharacteristically compromising decisions. The pace that leads to burnout is unsustainable, no matter how much it’s glorified, and the fall is fast and hard.

I’ve also discovered that no producer is immune. The amount of success or lack thereof, has little to do with a producer’s susceptibility or defensibility to burnout. I’ve seen it impact producers with $10M books of business to producers just 10 months in the business.

Sales, like life, can be empty in the fullest of places, or full in the emptiest of places. 

Personally, my season of battling burnout came in my 5th year in production. I remember feeling lost and alone, exhausted to the limit of quitting altogether. The anxiety and stress was powerfully suffocating. Success that traditionally came easy for me, seemed elusive. There were days and nights where getting out of bed and going to sleep seemed equally impossible.

It sucked.

A Better Definition of Self-Care

The demands on a producer never stop, so it’s important that we learn to take care of ourselves to avoid burnout, think more deeply, connect better with others and maximize our effectiveness and productivity.

The term “self-care” gets thrown around a lot these days and often it’s limited definition is used to describe the importance of exercising, eating healthy, getting good sleep and maybe even a little meditation. I believe physical self-care is very important, but I’d like to offer perhaps a more expansive definition of self-care beyond just taking care of your body.

I believe impactful self-care is about harnessing your best and maximum energy for your productive best. To do this requires far more than just physical maintenance, but learning to care for your whole person in a way that enables you to stay fully engaged with, curious about, and compelled by what you’re doing every day.

Ironically the healthy self-care habits that are the first to be neglected by many producers in the name of getting more done, are actually what give the most successful producers the leverage, endurance and creative brainpower to get more done better in a shorter amount of time. To the world’s best producers, self-care is a distinct competitive advantage. An investment in personal strength and growth.

As important as self-care is, I’ve never met a producer who’s been trained in it. So, I’d like to offer you a guide in the form of five simple questions you can ask yourself to monitor your overall health.

1. How’s My Margin? Harness The Power of Reflection  

As a producer, you can’t afford to have a low learning efficiency. The best producers are constantly learning, and doing so at an extremely high learning efficiency – milking every moment for it’s maximum wisdom. Reflection accelerates the learning curve.

Warren Buffett is famous for the amount of time he sets aside every day to just think.  He estimates he has spent 80% of his career just reading and thinking. Think about that! 80% of his career.

For some, reflection comes easier than others. But there are some helpful actions every producer can take to be more intentional about setting aside time for reflection.

A simple approach I recommend is what I call “1-2-1”.

1 Hour/Day – 2 Hours/Week – 1 Day/Month

Before you quickly dismiss this by saying you already don’t have enough time in the day, let alone for setting aside an entire hour just for reflection, let me encourage you that this hour doesn’t have to be all at once. Try breaking it up into four 15 minute sessions. Beginning and ending each day in reflection is a great place to start. I encourage producers to take 15 minutes after every client or prospect meeting for reflection as well. Even if it means just sitting in the car and jotting down notes. Too many producers rush immediately from a meeting to another meeting, hop on a call or back to the office without reflecting on what they learned.

The “2” represents a longer time block (I recommend 2 hours) set aside once a week for deeper reflection. I’ve found longer time periods lead to more strategic thinking.

The last “1” represents one day per month. An entire day to step outside the daily hustle, and think about your business at a high level. This is where you’ll rediscover lost dreams or discover brand new blue ocean opportunities. You’ll find clarity of vision for your business and get a renewed sense of excitement and motivation.

One important thing to note here, because of a flawed view of reflection as “doing nothing,” many producers I talk to feel guilty about sitting and thinking. If you struggle with this, I’d encourage you to reframe your view. Instead, view it as improving your learning efficiency. Essentially getting smarter, faster.

Taking time to sit and think is not doing "nothing". Reflection is an investment in improving your learning efficiency so you can get smarter, faster.

There are no rules when it comes to how you spend your time reflecting, but it should be in a quiet space, free from interruption.

2. How’s My Mind? Harness The Power of Reframing

As a producer, you’re not going to build a unicorn business on a string of bad days. It has to be a sequence of your very best days. Attitude matters.

Harnessing the power of abundant thinking is one of the best facilitators to bringing your best attitude to the office every day. Abundant thinking gives you the creative agency and grit to reach your biggest vision of your business. But for most producers, it doesn’t come natural. Three tips to help you move into an abundant mindset:

1. Notice the more. There are always more options, more choices, more resources, more opportunities, more abundance ahead. The best is yet to come. Notice the more.

2. Detach from results. Release your mind from making judgements and assumptions. Focus on the process and seeds you're sowing. Meetings are not good or bad, just meetings. This will help you stay sober minded and always present in the moment.

3. Stay curious. Curiosity replaces failure with learning. Curiosity is the mindset of an explorer as opposed to a settler. Great producers are always curious and always learning.

3. How’s My Spirit? Harness The Power of Renewal

Are you happy? Do you find joy in your work? I wish as a young producer, someone would have taught me how to mentally prepare for the long sales cycles that come with this business. While never talked about, they represent one of the biggest mental challenges commercial producers face. Especially when the pressure for results peak.

If your happiness is tied to your goal achievement or wins, you’re going to struggle maintaining a high happiness quotient. Instead you’ll be like many producers I see who are a roller coaster of emotions, vacillating between really high highs and really low lows. Some days they're on top of a mountain, other days they're ready to jump off it.

A great therapy for keeping a renewed spirit is creating milestones to mark your progress. Elite producers find an immense amount of joy in the process itself. By creating measurable, meaningful milestones along their journey they stay engaged more consistently and move themselves into that magical flow state more frequently.

The world's best insurance producers find an immense amount of joy in the process itself, not just the results. They maintain a renewed spirit by using milestones to mark their progress. 

4. How’s My Support? Harness The Power of Relationships

Negativity is one of the biggest productivity and motivational killers. Producers deal with a high level of internal self-doubt, so it’s important you surround yourself with encouragers. Someone you trust, who has your best in mind and can offer you constructive criticism to make you better is one thing, but producer remove someone in your inner circle who is always negative and criticizing you. 

The role of a producer can also be very isolating by nature. Not only is it important to remove negative people from your inner circle, but it's also important to have an inner circle. A mixed group of friends, family, associates and advisors who you can be honest with, lean on, and who can speak into your life. It should also be a group of people who you can speak into their lives. Giving and serving often brings more life to a soul than receiving. 

We weren’t meant to do life alone, we were made for community. The quality of your community will directly impact your business. Are you being refreshed and encouraged? Do you have people around you speaking life into your spirit? Setting strong boundaries to keep critics, labelers, and others who speak negativity into your life at arms bay is extremely important.

5. How’s My Skill? Harnessing the Power of Refinement

Nothing brings life and rejuvenation to the soul like personal growth. Some obstacles fall with sheer unrelenting persistence, but many obstacles in this business require increased skill. The confidence gained by seeing personal improvement is accompanied by joy and renewed motivation. The reason I prefer to use the term refinement, is it suggests improvement through adding finer distinctions and superior elements to your skill.

Often times great breakthroughs can happen with just the slightest refining of a technique, process or skill, as opposed to a major overhaul to your business. For example, if you’re a producer who already has a great network, people skills and technical knowledge, but struggles to effectively create opportunities and run an effective sales process that results in wins, maybe refining your approach to the first meeting by becoming a masterful effective questioner could be the finer distinction you need to really launch your business.

This is where investing in yourself through effective training, coaching and education comes into play. The comment I hear many producers say of “I don’t have the time or the resources to invest in training” is both shortsighted and foolish. To get better, you have to train better. To be elite, you have to train like the elite. This doesn’t necessarily mean a major overhaul to your business, but small, directed refinements that distill increased skill.

How's Your Soul?

Caring for your body is important, but in a business where your success is more closely tied to your ability to string together long stretches of staying enthusiastically engaged in your work, you need to take your self-care to an elite level by caring for your soul or whole person – this includes your margin, your mind, your spirit, your support system and your personal skill development.

Are you feeling burnt out, exhausted, unmotivated, disengaged? Have you lost a sense of wonder, curiosity and whimsy about the business? Do you feel compelled every day to achieve your best? Maybe it’s finally time to take your self-care seriously.

Producer, how’s your soul?

Live abundantly,

- SB -