This past weekend, I had a chance to spend times with two very close friends of mine, Shaun Peet and Kyle Depiesse, and I learned some life and leadership lessons from them that I had to share with you on this week’s podcast.

Giving myself a chance to declutter, strip away all the noise, and look at your life and business with a clear mind is something that’s become incredibly valuable to me over the years, and I feel like I learned how to become a better business leader, fiance, friend, and family member.

Tune in this week to learn 3 lessons I learned from the Northwoods that will help you look at your own business with a clear mind, and focus on what’s actually important in what you do.

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Video Transcript:

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You know, when I think about this trip, I get excited for it every year. It’s not the weather I’m looking forward to. It’s the time spent with Sean and Kyle because I know these two guys are just quality human beings. It was the conversations and the activities we participated in that really drove these lessons home for me. You might say.

Hey, hey, welcome back to the podcast We are Live. Andy Neary here. This is the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast episode 12. Today I’m going to share three lessons on life and leadership that I took on a little retreat this past weekend in the Northwoods of Minnesota. You’re going to walk away with three lessons that I know I am going to incorporate in my business and my life to become a better person, a better leader, a better business operator, and I hope they do the same for you.

So, yeah, hope you’re doing well. You might be fresh off a spring break. Maybe you, had an opportunity to take the family down to the beach, whatever it was. Even when you’re on spring break, especially with your, when you’re with family and kids, it’s hard to break away. It’s hard to detach. Right? And get really quiet with your mind.

So today’s episode is going. I’m going to share my experience. Last weekend, getting a chance to spend time in the Northwoods of Minnesota. Where you are almost forced to get quiet and clear. So a lot came out of it. Got to spend some quality time with two of my closest friends who I absolutely adore, so can’t wait to share this episode with you.

So let me set the stage. You know, every year I get the opportunity to spend three, sometimes even four full days with two very close friends of mine, Sean, Pete and Kyle. Deb’s, two individuals whom I’ve had on the podcast before when it was the Bullpen Sessions podcast, Sean’s episode, you may remember he is the NASCAR pit crew coach, and then Kyle Deb’s has a program for business, professional males called Guys trips.

And so every year we spend one weekend up at Kyle’s cabin, which is about 3.5 hours northwest of Minneapolis, about a 90 minute drive east of Fargo, North Dakota. So we always fly into Fargo. If you’re wondering what’s going on in Fargo these days, not much, but they do have an amazing hotel downtown. So we always spend the first night at the hotel, get up the next day, get in Kyle’s truck, and then head east to, his cabin just outside Park Rapids, Minnesota.

So, you know, when I think about this trip, I get excited for it every year. Not because of where we’re going. I’ll be honest. You know, going somewhere where there’s still snow and cold in late March is not appealing to me. One thing I’ve learned by moving back to Wisconsin, for the past two years is I hate I hate the winter.

I thought I may come back to enjoy it. I know we had winter in Colorado too, but not quite like we have it here. The gray and the cold. I just don’t like it. I will not come around to liking it. And so going up to, the Park Rapids area, I knew we were going to be dealing with cold and snow and all that, but it’s not.

It’s not the weather I’m looking forward to. It’s the time spent with Sean and Kyle because I know these two guys are just quality human beings. And it’s not just about hanging out and drinking and being and then doing the typical things you might do on a guy’s weekend. In fact, we didn’t drink at all. We only drank Athletic Brewing beer.

Nonalcoholic beer. Yeah, that’s us in our late 40s now. And by the way, we were probably in bed by 9 or 930 every night. But it was the conversations and the activities we participate in that really drove these lessons home for me. Because if you think about it, one of the things we struggle with as business professionals, especially in the insurance industry, is we don’t take the time to detach and declutter our mind.

Like I said, taking the family on vacation is a great way to detach. But my question is, does that really give you a chance to declutter, clear the mind, get quiet because you’re always spending time with your family, right? Which is great. But when do you spend that time to really get quiet with yourself and work on you and or your business?

See, that’s what this is for me. When I get a chance to hang out with these guys. Yeah, we call it the guys trip or the guys weekend, but it’s really a chance to work on me and my business, and I always know I’m going to come out of those three days together with some nuggets, that I can apply to my business.

And that’s what I’m going to share with you today, these three nuggets that I pulled from this past weekend, you know, and for, for a lot of us you’re chasing, I feel like we’re always chasing that next goal, the next scale in our business. And again, if you’re just in that mode of go, go, go, go, go all the time, you’re you are eventually going to burn out.

And if you’re listening to this episode, maybe that’s where you are right now. Maybe you’re just feeling a little burnt out. It’s only March. Q2 is right around the corner, and you already feel like it’s been a long year, right? So let’s get right into the lessons that I learned. Spending the three days with Sean and Kyle.

The first one this is goes right to what Sean Peat preaches, which is what are you doing to inspire brilliant human performance. Now, Sean, to give you some backstory, Sean is a pit crew coach for the Trackhouse Racing team in the NASCAR circuit. He’s been the coach there for many years. He’s got a great story from a kid growing up on Vancouver Island.

What he would say is an average hockey player who got the chance to come play hockey at Dartmouth University and then turn that into a minor league hockey career and ultimately becoming a member of a pit crew on the NASCAR circuit. And then today as a coach in the, NASCAR circuit. So one of the things Sean talks about in his book, 12 Second Culture is, what are you doing to inspire brilliant human performance?

And so we had this conversation multiple times over the weekend. And one thing I pulled from that is, as a leader of my business, what can I do to inspire the people on my team? And one of the questions Sean love to ask, and I love it, is, what are you doing to prove people right? When you think about where you are today, maybe you are a leader inside your team, your agency.

It’s so easy to spend time as a leader critiquing and criticizing, right? Letting people know where they need to get better, where they can improve. How often are you spending time showing them or commending them on what they’re doing? Right? And this is something I have really tried to focus. Focus on being better at is not always criticizing or critiquing my team’s performance, but making sure I’m spending as much time letting them know what they’re doing right.

Because this is what inspires brilliant human performance. It’s not constantly being told where you have to improve, it’s having somebody in your corner who’s going to constantly inspire you to keep doing what you’re doing, commending you on how you’re doing it well, but also encouraging you what you can do to be better. You know, I think one of the big challenges in the insurance industry is a lot of people hit a point where they hit a level of success that they’re happy with, and then they take the foot off the gas and they are on cruise control the rest of their career.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the leaders they work for and report to not inspiring these people to be better. And so my question to you today is, the first lesson I took from three days in the Northwoods is, what are you doing to inspire brilliant human performance inside of your team, inside of your family?

And what are you doing to catch people doing things right when they do something right? When they do something well, are you taking the time to stop and say, hey, that was awesome, keep it up. I really appreciate how you do this. Thank you for the work you put in and the effort you put in to our team.

I challenge you to take more time each week to do that. I know I’m starting to really focus on that with, sending text messages to my team, to my friends, to my peers, to my family, to my parents. Just trying to inspire more brilliant human performance, because the more people are reminded of what they’re doing, right, they’re going to want to do it right more often.

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So let me let me paint the picture here. One of the things we always participate in when we go up to Kyle’s cabin is our sauna. Cold plunge contrast therapy. Now, Kyle does not have a cold plunge up at his cabin, but he does have a very beautiful lake at his cabin. And so when we go up there, despite the temperatures, the snow, the ice, we will cut a hole in the ice on the lake and create our own cold plunge.

And this year was particularly challenging because it was colder than usual. Yeah, we’ve I feel like whenever we go up to his cabin, we always catch a break with the weather. It’s each other unseasonably warm. One year we went up there. It was in the mid 40s, almost 50 degrees. The second time we went up there was blue skies every day.

So the warmth of the sun helped. This time around, we didn’t catch that break. It was gray. Windy, very windy. And, the ice was very thick. So we cut a hole in the ice and a can recall him leaving the sauna. So the whole plan is you go in the sauna. By the way, we had the sauna at 190 degrees, which is typically beyond my level of comfort.

And we just rotate between the sauna on, the cold plunge on and the cold plunge. We do that 2 or 3 times and we do that every day. And so the first time I headed down to, the cold plunge to jump into the, hole we had cut into the ice, I had noticed it was cold enough that the hole had already started to develop slush.

So that tells you how cold the water was. And I have been sitting in that sauna that first time. No matter, even even as somebody who cold plunges every day here at home, knowing I was going to be going into lake water, that was frigid cold again, probably barely over freezing. Heading down the stairs to the lake, you have a lot of chatter going on, a lot of self-doubt.

Right? And what’s always interesting when I partake in this up at his cabin is you go in, we stick a ladder in the hole right now to the bottom. It’s probably about 5 or 6ft deep. We just climb down the ladder till we get to the bottom. It’s about chest, neck high. Every time I do that and I get out and I walk back up the stairs to go into round two of sauna work, I realize it’s not that hard.

It’s not as hard as I thought. All that self chatter that had gone on, the minutes leading up to walking down and jumping in that hole. Once you’re done, you go, wow, that really wasn’t that bad and you’re actually looking forward to the next time to do it right. And so I took a lot away from that. I’d actually take that away.

Every year I go up there because no matter how often I cold plunge at home doing it in a lake where the water’s in it in third, you know, in the 30 degree temperature range. It’s just always a lot harder on the mind. But once you do it one time, you realize, man, not as hard as I thought.

And I bring that up because I challenge you, whether it’s in your personal life, in your business, what are you avoiding right now? Because it feels really hard. You know, one thing we see in our world is with a lot of the clients we work with content. Putting yourself out there, building a brand for a lot of people, it’s uncomfortable because putting a putting yourself out there comes with a lot of other people’s opinions, right?

It comes with a lot of fears of comparison, judgment and failure. And it’s amazing the people we work with that are deathly afraid to put their first video out there. And then once they hit post, they realize, oh, that actually wasn’t that bad. Or as a leader, you got to have that tough conversation with an employee and you’ve been avoiding it, and then you finally have it and you realize, man, well, it wasn’t that bad.

All right. You’ve been trying to get inside the door of that big prospect, and you’ve been avoiding picking up the phone or sending the email, or maybe even dropping in. And then you do and you go, man, it really wasn’t that bad. This lesson about do hard things. I think it’s something we have to apply to our life every day.

If you choose to do one hard thing every day, I think you will be absolutely blown away by how far you come as an individual in the course of a year. You know, for me, it’s that cold plunge. It’s why I do it every morning. It’s hard when you wake up, especially in the winter months here in Wisconsin, and it’s already kind of cold outside.

You’ve got that sub layer of cold inside your body, and now you’re going to jump into a pool of cold water that’s uncomfortable. But I do it because I want to start my day doing something hard. One of the hard things for me in business is having difficult conversations. So I tend to be a people pleaser. And so when I know I have to have a tough conversation with a employee, a client or a vendor or whatever, I try to avoid those, I admit.

And then I do it and I go, man, that actually really wasn’t as hard as I thought. So my question to you, and number two is, are you intentionally doing hard things in your life, in your business? Because I guarantee the more you do them, the more you’ll realize you’re not as bad as you think. In less than three.

This came from Sean as well. It’s not the hours you put in that matter. It’s what you put in to the hours. And this conversation came up. Sean and I were working on, cutting down some trees for Kyle, chopping up the wood. Now, I’ll have to share this with you. I am not a handy person, so every year we go up to Kyle’s.

He definitely has yard work for us to do. And we do it with the intention that it forces us to be present. Now, I little typically let Sean and Kyle do the Saw work. I don’t really trust myself with the chainsaw as I would them, and so I go with the grunt work, which is typically chopping up the wood from the trees that they’re cutting down.

But even that just chopping the wood really forces you to be present. And especially when I was putting the thicker logs on the chopping block and, you know, it’s going to take 4 or 5, six different swings of the ax to really break through that piece of wood. It forces you to be present, but it also forces you to put the right amount of effort into every ax chop that you make.

And it really got me thinking when Kyle or Sean and I were talking about that. That’s not the hours you put into the work. It’s what you put into the hours that matters. Just that little activity for me, forcing me to be present and forcing me to put the right amount of focus and effort into every swing of the ax.

Now, when you’re cutting down chopping wood, a missed swing could have dire consequences, right? So you had to be present, but it was about what kind of effort are you putting into every single swing of the ax, so that you can chop the wood with the least amount of swings as possible? Right. And it really got me thinking.

Yeah. What is the effort that I am putting into every single hour of my day when I’m in my business Monday to Friday, and I think a lot of people in our world get so caught up in this badge of honor that I work 12 to 14 hours today, or I put in 17, and I’m traveling from here to there and everywhere.

It is not about the hours you put in. It’s about the effort you put into the hours. I would much rather have somebody in my business who absolutely kicks ass every minute they work, and they work four hours a day than the person who half ass is it and shows up first to the office and leaves last. When everybody else leaves, there’s no badge of honor.

If you’re half assing it and put in 12 hours a day, and in fact it is the quickest, it is the most ineffective way to work. And so I really thought about this lesson about how can I be more intense in the hours that I’m putting in every day on this business? And how can I be more intentional to put effort in when I’m spending time with family and friends?

And it’s about being present, and I want you to challenge yourself for a minute. Have you caught yourself lately spending time doing a project in business, or preparing for a meeting, or hanging out with your kids and realizing that you’re not president, you’re not intentional. You’re not putting the right amount of effort in, or at least the amount of effort you know you’re capable of.

One of the things I’m really going to work on with my team moving forward, including myself, is, guys, this isn’t about working 60 80 hours a week. It’s about being so intentional on the hours what we’re putting into the hours we’re spending that I hope we actually create more free time for each other because we are so effective in the time we’re putting in or the work we’re putting into the time.

And I want to challenge you to do the same thing as well. Quit getting focused on how long you’re working and start focusing on the effort you’re putting in. When you’re working, you want to know whatever the six most successful people do in this business, it’s not about the fact that they are putting in 80 hours a week.

They are not more successful because they work longer than you. They are more successful than you because they’re working smarter than you. They’re putting in the right amount of effort in the hours they choose to have. And I’m going to try doing the same as well. So those are my lessons from the Northwoods. I hope you can use them and apply them to your business and your life.

You know, remember, it’s comes down to these three lessons on leadership in life. What are you doing to inspire brilliant human performance? How can you be more intentional about catching people doing things right and inspiring them to keep doing things right? Number two, always challenge yourself to do hard things. Put one hard thing in your schedule every single day because you’ll realize they are not as hard as you think, whether that be cold, plunging, exercising, having a tough conversation with an employee or a family member or friend.

Keep doing hard things every day because you’ll realize they are. They are not as hard as you think they are. Number three, it is not about the hours you put into the work. It is about what you put in to the hours you are working. So be more intentional, be present, put more effort in every single day and you will actually get more done and have more free time to do what you love.

So that’s my advice to you. It was an amazing three day trip up to the Northwoods of Minnesota. Though I’m not a fan of winter, I am a fan of spending time with two of my closest friends, Kyle and Sean, and I always take a lot away. Kyle. Sean, if you’re listening, thank you for being great human beings because you inspire me to be better every day.

And if you’re tuning in, thank you for doing this every single week. I hope these lessons that I took away from my weekend up north can inspire you to take your business and your life to places you didn’t think you, didn’t think were possible. All right. Be good. That’s all we got for this episode of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast.

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