Nobody tells you this when you get into insurance.

Product knowledge, carrier relations, prospecting know-how, they’re all fine and dandy. And you can learn all of that. But the thing that actually determines whether you make it in this business is what happens between your ears when things go sideways.

And things will go sideways.

You'll lose accounts you should have kept. You'll get ghosted by prospects for no reason. You'll have quarters where nothing closes and you can't figure out why.

Ask me how I know.

This industry will beat you down in ways that have nothing to do with your skill level. The producers who survive, and eventually thrive, aren't necessarily the most talented.

They're the ones who figured out how to manage the stuff between their ears.

Everybody knows this one.

Negativity kills your motivation, and poisons your mind. A producer who believes he can't win won't. It's that simple.

What makes it worse is saying it out loud.

Saying it to a colleague, venting it on a call, narrating it to yourself in the car on the way home, that's when it calcifies. It becomes part of how you see your situation. And then it starts leaking into how prospects read you, because producers who believe their doomed to fail walk into rooms differently than producers who don’t.

This is why agency culture matters so much. You can be completely disciplined about your own thinking and still absorb the negativity around you. It works like secondhand smoke.

You don't have to be the one lighting the cigarette to take the damage.

So we do the opposite.

Think positive. Visualize the win. Believe it and achieve it. Recite affirmations in the mirror every morning like some kind of insurance Tony Robbins.

And it feels good. For about a day.

Here's the problem:

Research shows negative words carry five times more psychological weight than positive ones. Which means the moment doubt creeps in, and in this business it always does, your positive thinking is no match for it.

You lost a big account. You tell yourself it's fine, something better is coming. But underneath that sticky note on your monitor you still believe you're in a slump. And that belief is five times louder than anything you're telling yourself out loud.

You're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

So if negative thinking sabotages you and positive thinking doesn't actually work, what are you supposed to do?

There's a third option.

And once you understand it, it’s a total gamechanger.

The idea is simple.

Positive thinking asks you to feel good about your situation, negative thinking makes you feel bad about your situation, but…

Neutral thinking doesn't ask you to feel anything.

It just asks you to assess the situation honestly, and do the next right thing.

So how do you actually build this?

You don't start by trying to control your thoughts. That's too hard and if you’ve ever tried, you know it mostly doesn't work.

You start by learning to notice when you're editorializing.

There's a fact, and then there's the story you layer on top of the fact.

For example:

"The prospect didn't call me back.” That's a fact.

"The prospect is never going to buy and I wasted three months on them.” That's a story.

Neutral thinking is catching yourself mid-story and stripping it back down to what actually happened.

Not to feel better about it. Just to see it accurately.

Next, just do the next action required.

What's the next call I need to make? What's the next fire I need to put out? What's the next action that moves something forward? Taking action cuts through the mental chatter every time because it pulls you from interpretation back into execution.

You're not pretending the lost account didn't happen or that it doesn’t sting. You're just refusing to let it leak into other areas of your business.

There's a version of "just focus on the next behavior" that becomes a way of never actually processing anything, and that’s no good.

If you lose a major account and something in your gut is telling you there's a real skill gap, a real positioning problem, a real reason it keeps happening, that feeling is probably worth listening to.

Neutral thinking optimizes your execution, yes. But, it doesn't diagnose your problems.

If you keep losing accounts on lack of knowledge and you stay neutral and make the next call and lose that one on knowledge too, at some point the framework isn't the issue, your approach is.

The most dangerous misapplication of this is using mental discipline as a substitute for honest self-assessment.

The goal is to think clearly, not to think less.

They’re not always the most optimistic people in the room.

But, they are the ones who shake something off the fastest and get back to work.

They take L’s like a champ. They don’t snowball it into something bigger than it is. It’s just a thing that happened. And then they move on to the next deal.

It's not a personality trait. It is a skill that can be developed. And it's one worth building.

This isn't a switch you flip.

It's closer to a reflex you train over time.

The first few times you catch yourself mid-story and strip it back to the fact, it'll feel awkward. That's normal. You're rewiring a default response you've probably had for years.

The good news is the reps add up faster than you'd expect. Before long you’ll notice a shorter recovery time after a loss. That's the first sign it's working.

Ok, that’s enough for this week.

If you liked this newsletter and want to learn more about neutral thinking, check out Trevor Moawad and his book It Takes What It Takes.

I can’t recomend it enough.

And if you need more help with th tactical side of building a book, might I suggest our playbook.

Link here.

See you Friday.

-MS