The ‘P’ Word

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Passion is not a word we hear very often in the insurance industry. In all my years of listening to industry speakers, I can’t recall a single veteran agency principal, carrier CEO or consultant talk about his or her passion. OK, maybe one, but he was talking about golf.

The last time I heard someone in this business speak of passion was when I interviewed some young agents.

“I wanted a job I could love,” 29-year-old Meghan McGarry told me last year. She found it at a New York independent agency.

“I love it. I love every minute of it. Even when I’m talking about being overwhelmed, I say that with a smile on my face. It gets me up early, energetic and going as hard as I can every day and I just love it. It’s wonderful,” gushed 37 year-old Patrick Watkins of Austin, Texas, as he told me his being an agency owner.

Maybe it’s easier being passionate about your career when young. How do we stay passionate about it year after year? Perhaps the career Viagra for the over-40 (and way over-40) insurance crowd is continuing education.

Our very own Christopher Boggs suggested in our last issue that you must have a passion for learning about insurance if you want to be a true professional.

“Professionalism is evidenced by desire and passion,” Boggs wrote. “Professionals desire to discover what they don’t know and passionately pursue the information necessary to fill that knowledge gap; not just for the short run, but as a building block for the future.”

Boggs suggested that too many insurance people pursue continuing education not out of passion for learning but more out of desire for the completion certificate. But maybe continuing education is itself the force that unleashes the passion for this industry in a lot of us.

It is a beautiful thing when you find the career of your dreams. For many, this can take awhile to accomplish, maybe several jobs. For others, this passion is never realized.

William J. White, author of Do You Have Passion … for Your Profession?, the former chairman and CEO of Bell & Howell, and now a professor at Northwestern University, writes:

Finding greater alignment in your current job with your areas of interest will also help you bridge the gap to your dream job. This interim step will also help affirm whether your passion is sustainable if you were to undertake it for a living. It is worth the time to figure out if the grass truly is greener. No job is a panacea; challenges and problems are inevitable no matter what you do for a living. When you are in your true element, however, difficulties will not be insurmountable, and the good days will far outweigh the unpleasant ones.

Boggs is harsh in his assessment of professionalism in the industry but he is right that professionalism is worth striving for. This is so for insurance agents, teachers and grave-diggers.

Professionalism is learned outside the classroom, too. As we are so often reminded, this is a people business. Professionalism is also evidenced by how we treat customers, associates, even strangers. You can be the smartest person in the class but still not be a true professional.

Topics Training Development

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