2022 BEN Talks: What no one tells you about being an innovator
At this year’s BenefitsPRO Broker Expo, four industry innovators shared their own recipes for innovation.
It’s often so easy to see the success of your peers and get discouraged. But being an innovator is about so much more than just having a new idea. It’s all in the execution. At this year’s BenefitsPRO Broker Expo, four industry innovators shared their own recipes for innovation.
A growth mindset
For Jessica Du Bois of Risk Strategies, the building blocks of innovation were instilled from a young age. She was one of four girls being raised by a single mom, and she credits her mother with teaching her the core values of hard work, motivation and education. “If you had asked me in high school, I would have told you she was strict, maybe even crazy,” De Bois recalled. “But what she was doing was training us for life. She worked multiple jobs and got herself through nursing school while raising four girls. Without even knowing it, she was teaching us how to have a growth mindset.”
The growth mindset was the theme of Du Bois’ talk, centering on the work of Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, who wrote, “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”
In contrast to the growth mindset is the fixed mindset. Du Bois shared a chart comparing the two. “If you’re looking at this chart and thinking you’re definitely in the growth mindset, you’re looking this wrong. We wall waver between fixed and growth based on your environment.”
For Du Bois, the growth mindset was built into her by her mother, and it’s what drove her from a small town in Iowa to Nashville, Tenn., and then Washington, DC. “I’ve been told often that I’m fearless,” she said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m just more scared of staying where I am than getting where I want to be.”
But a growth mindset is also something that people and companies can also do deliberately and consciously. ”Five months ago, I made the decision to start over and move to another firm,” Du Bois Said. “I’d found myself in this fixed mindset and was no longer creative, no longer inspired.”
Du Bois concluded by applying her personal experiences and motivations to the benefits broker community. “I would like to see us incorporate the growth mindset more as advisors and an industry,” she said. “When I look at the industry that we’re in, I get disappointed when I see some of the best advisors I know who are so innovative, and the only way that can keep doing that is to start their own firm because we’re not giving them the resources, the opportunity.”
Ride or die
Take motorcycle riding lessons from Nancy Giacolone of Olympic Crest Insurance, and you might inadvertently find yourself in a better position to tackle innovation in your career.
Years ago, Giacolone and her husband fell in love with a Harley Davidson motorcycle and took the plunge. But, said Giacolone, “it took two rides for me to figure out that the passenger seat was not where I wanted to be.
“This is where my story really begins,” she explained. “This is the story of a girl who wanted to move from the passenger seat to the drivers’ seat but wasn’t sure how to start.”
In this case, it started with a motorcycle safety class. “Learning the basic rules of the road was the easy part,” she recalled. “The second weekend, we had to get on the bikes. I very quickly learned the value of a coach or instructor. They had to have a lot of patience with me–I went from being absolutely terrible to kind of okay.”
Giacolone shared a number of other lessons from her experience learning to ride. The first: “Focus is crucial. When you’re on a motorcycle and riding with larger, heavier vehicles around you on the road, you have to be 100% present all the time. It’s the difference between staying on your bike and ending up in a ditch.”
Lesson number two: the value of the right gear. “When I was all suited up in my leathers, I felt good. And it protected me in the event that I did go down. I also chose the full-face helmet. If you’ve ever been hit in the face by a bug at 50 mph, it’s no fun.”
Another important lesson: “Looking through the corners,” she said. “You need to pay attention to where you are but also where you’re going, and not focus on what’s behind you.”
For those who haven’t caught onto the metaphor, Giacolone’s lessons are equally applicable to those looking to become innovators in the benefits space. “What is your ride or die?” she asked. “Everybody in this room wants to ride into their vision of what their career or life should look like. What is it?”
inNOvator
Colleen Blum of Combs and Company started her talk by introducing a character we all know too well: The mean girl in your head. She recalled her first big meeting with a client when the doubter inside of her spoke up: “Who do you think you are? You’re not ready to do this alone.”
That voice has popped up in her head so many times: her first meeting with her future boss, the first conference she attended, the first meeting with a client, her first podcast episode. But, Blum said, “Where would you be today if you never walked into that building, if you let your nerves get the best of you?”
This is the first lesson of being an innovator Blum shared: Stretching beyond your comfort zone. “That’s the only thing we can do differently. You take a chance on yourself, you push yourself outside of your comfort zone.”
It isn’t always nerves or the voice of the “mean girl” holding us back, but sometimes just the insurmountable weight of what lies ahead. Blum was a hairstylist before making the leap into benefits. “At the time, I could not see myself being successful in life. I stayed in that situation for way too many years,” she said. “Trying to dream big when you’re drowning feels ultimately impossible. But it comes down to mindset shifts that you have to learn over and over and over again.”
Another lesson Blum offered: You’re not there yet. “The keyword is ‘yet.’ We’re not there yet, but we can be. We’re still all on this journey, and it takes the pressure off a little bit.’
She stressed that shifting into an innovator mindset is not a one-and-done process; she had to do it all over again this past winter, when she lost her grandmother, and her father was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness.
“Life’s real stuff comes in and knocks you down,” Blum said. ”How do you get back up?”
Blum noted that this was about the time she got a call asking if she would speak at this year’s BEN Talks, a call that helped pull her out of her depression. “What we feed ourselves and say to ourselves during the darkest times is going to project the next six to 12 months for us.”
It’s a perfect example of Blum’s third lesson for attendees: You’re always one decision away. “By saying yes, it got me listening again to the motivational talks,” she said. “They were in my ear. I had to change my mindset from ‘poor me’ to ‘let’s get back to the world.’ The people were feeding me to return back into the boss bitch.”
Burning matches or building an inferno
If the purpose of the BEN Talks is to light a fire under attendees, then Seth Denson of GDP Advisors is the man to do it. His campfire tale started with recounting his rocky path to starting his own agency.
While today he helms a successful agency championing the innovative solutions he envisioned, it wasn’t a straight upward trajectory. “I remember in 2016 and in a moment of absolute burnout, telling my partner ‘all of this is yours for a six pack’–I was done.”
But then he recalled the wisdom his father had instilled in him during his youth. Specifically, the proper way to build a campfire. “Every year we would take a family camping trip,” Denson said. “On the way to the campsite, he would tell us which one of us would have the responsibility of building and maintaining the campfire.”
Denson remembers the first year the duty was entrusted to him. It did not go well. “I was so excited, I threw caution to the wind. I grabbed all the wood I could find, threw it all in the pit, doused it, struck a match, and watched as what I had just created blew.”
The result was not unexpected. “Within a minute and a half, it’s gone,” he said. “I could hear the sound of my father from across the campsite yelling at me. “Did you build it right?’”
And these were the words that came back to him as he sat with his business partner, looking to make a quick and painless break from the agency he had worked so hard to build. But he hadn’t built it right.
“There are lessons all along the way of being an innovator,” Denson explained. “Those lessons are all pieces of that campfire. If you build it right, it can be powerful.”
Here are just some of Denson’s elements required to “build it right:”
Less is more. “There’s a saying, ‘Don’t miss the forest for the trees.’ As an innovator, don’t miss the tree for the forest. You’re going to want to do it all, and you’re going to want to do it now. Don’t fall into that trap. Focus on the success that you can have now and build upon it.”
A Jack of all trades is a master of none. “I wanted to be all things to anybody who takes my call. Your mission in life should be to find out what it is that you can be great at and do it over and over and over again.”
Repetition. “As an innovator, chaos is all around. Do as many things throughout the day consistent to the day before. It will give you peace.”
Own your mistakes. “Someone once said to me, ‘The key to success in business is learning to eat crow fast.’ Eat it hot. As an innovator, you are driving things forward. It’s all on you.”
Documentation is critical. “I tell this to my staff even now. If you don’t document it, it didn’t happen.”
Honesty. “There will be a tendency sometimes to want to bend the truth. Don’t. As long as you are honest both externally and internally, that’s one less thing you have to think about.”
Passion. “I live by the premise that knowledge breeds confidence, confidence breeds enthusiasm. Enthusiasm sells.”
Collectively, these lessons are what Denson called the fuel of the campfire. “The great thing about the campfire is that if you build it right, you can stop adding matches,” he said. ”It will build upon itself, it will go further, it will do more. It becomes an inferno.”
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