Episode 318: Leading When You Are The Bottleneck with Natty Lewis

Welcome back to the Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast, the show built for independent agency owners who are done being the bottleneck in their own business. I'm Daniel Metcalf, and every week I'm joined by my co-host Mike Stromso, one of the most respected operators in the independent agency world. Between the two of us, we bring you the real levers that move a $3 to $20 million agency from successful but maxed out to systemized, scalable, and running without you holding it all together. Here's what we focus on. Mike brings the people side, leadership, team development, niche sales mastery, and a three-piece system that helps agencies build a business worth owning. I bring the machine side. AI, automation, and workflow design that frees your team from the operational drag, eating your margin and your time. Together, we're building a framework that can grow an independent agency 4X to 9X without burning out your people or your checkbook. If you're an agency owner who's tired of growing by hiring, who knows you have a capacity sitting on the table but can't figure out how to unlock it, this is the show for you and your weekly edge.

Hey everybody, welcome. Today is gonna be game-changing, to say the least. I am privileged, I am blessed, I am honored to have with us today on the podcast Natty Lewis. Hey Natty.

Hey Mike, thanks for having me.

Hey, my pleasure, my honor. We wanted to bring to you this special podcast today because we're gonna talk about an arm of ELSA. And you may or may not be familiar with ELSA, executive coaching, leadership coaching, sales coaching, all tied together by technology and automation powered by AI. Well, Natty is the leadership coaching arm of ELSA. And we're gonna dive in today because the work that Natty is doing, I it's hard to describe. And I'm gonna see if I can I want you to start with one thing, Natty, because when as we've gotten to know each other over time, and and you came to events, and I saw you speak on multiple days, et cetera, et cetera, and I learned that you're doing work that's important to Natty Lewis, the human being. Let's start there. Tell us about, well, give us 30 seconds on who you are, and then I want you to dive into the work that you're doing in prisons and give us the short version there.

You bet. Yeah, I'm I'm Natty, as Mike said, and I work with human beings to optimize human performance. I love people, and everything at the end of the day is about people. We need people in our life to succeed personally and to feel fulfillment and joy. We need people to work with that find alignment and momentum and excitement in the things that we do. Otherwise, our journey in leadership is so lonely and so heavy. We need people to align with us. And we are surrounded by people. And very often, most of the problems that we think we're experiencing in life, we tend to believe they are people problems. If people would just do their job, if people would just think like I did, if people would just do what I'm doing, all these problems would disappear. You know what else would disappear if everybody was the same? Is any form of joy or diversity or fulfillment. So what I love to do, and what I have found deep levels of passion is in helping people understand that problems aren't people problems, they're understanding problems. And when we lean into understanding people, really understanding, we can find a joy in that journey. We can find success, we can find clarity, we can find alignment, we can find momentum, and we actually can find that we enjoy people again. And that that work kind of took me into the prison. Uh, there is so much pain and trauma caused by people that shows up in prison. And having the opportunity to walk in to a place where somebody is literally physically held captive, chained to by their arms and their waist and their feet to a desk when I walk in the door and be able to look them in the eyes and ask them who they are and what they want and why they want it, and not stop working with them until they can stare me right back in the eyes and answer those three questions. When that moment happens, something unbelievable happens. I experience somebody that is experiencing absolute physical, tangible incarceration that is more free than most leaders that I work with that dread their Monday morning. And I want you to think about where that comes from and why that shows up. And usually it shows up in the drama, and usually it shows up in the people. And I want to free, I want to liberate the captive mic and let people actually work with people to create freedom and create the the vision of freedom that they set out from from day one because they never meant to build themselves a business of captivity.

So good, so good. By the way, uh that's what Natty does as a passionate uh way to give back to society. Uh, she works with businesses, specifically independent insurance agents and agencies. And you just mentioned the word drama. Now, after 40 years as a licensed agent, 35 plus years owning my own agency, I had no drama in my agency, so I can't speak to that. I'm being facetious, everybody. It's present everywhere. Nanny, why does it happen? I think we know why it happens because we're dealing with human beings, right? Yeah. But give everybody here a takeaway or two on some actionable items that they can do as soon as they get done listening or watching this podcast to help that situation in their own independent insurance agencies. Because you work with lots of different agencies and you deal with this fairly often.

Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you guys the secret. Like this is the my the number one tool here. If we were just gonna give you one, this is the one I want you to remember. Start at the beginning. I know that sounds simple, but the number one problem that is wreaking havoc and causing drama inside of agencies is people start their conversation in the middle. We walk in the door and we've been thinking about something. We've been thinking about a problem or a process or an idea or a new innovation or a new process, something new or exciting, and we're excited. We've worked through the process. We've come up with the comings and goings, the pros and the cons, and we walk in the room and we're like, guess what we're gonna do? We we drop somebody into the middle of our story that has no idea where it started, who the characters are, what the plot is, and what the storyline is, and yet it feels like there's gonna be a quiz at the end. Every time we do that, all we do is manufacture resistance. We create drama because we create defensiveness. When somebody is missing pieces in the story, their most natural emotional mechanism of defense is assumption. The brain must fill in the pieces, so it's gonna start working a thousand miles an hour to fill in the pieces, and every one of those pieces is an assumption because you didn't start at the beginning.

Assumption normally doesn't work out very well.

No, and it happens inside of agency. I want you to think when you're really thinking about do I do this? I want you to think about the last conversation you had with a child of yours. Maybe you get a call from the school, and the school says your kid was missing class, and you're like, oh my gosh, why are they missing class? And are they behind in their school? And they're gonna fail out of class. Oh my gosh, they're gonna be living at my house when they're 50. They're gonna serve a prison sentence, they'd be playing video games, and I'm gonna have to support them. And they walk in the door from school and you launch rec. You gotta do better in school. The kid was just thinking about getting home and having a snack. You just dropped him right in the middle of the story, and how well does that turn out? How much drama do you create for a conversation that if it would have started at the beginning could have changed everything? Or with your spouse, single worst, most anxiety-producing text in the world, we need to talk. About what? Oh, we start filling in all the holes and assumptions, and before we even start the conversation, both sides have been acting like attorneys, building their case, and but and we're now gonna have a con and what we what did we even need to talk about? Neither side, uh what's happening right now? We're dropped right in the middle of the story. Drama.

Yep.

As business owners, I will encourage you, start at the beginning. As a owners, start at the beginning. Don't assume they know where you're at. Even if you ended a conversation with something was like, let's talk about that on Monday. We tend to come back. We pick up the conversation where we think it left off. But you know what? When the conversation ended, you took off on one trail of thought, they took off on one trail of thought. You can't come back to the same spot because neither of you ended at the same spot. Start at the beginning, lead with vision, always start with the objective and vision of the conversation, of the action, of the intention, of the expectation, of the process, of the system, whatever it is that you're talking about. Start at the beginning. Lead with vision, fill in the pieces, tell the whole story, and just watch what happens to eliminate drama.

Overcommunication, yeah. Overcommunication, I mean, we find ourselves talking about that often because you know, I had some big lessons in over-communication uh a number of years ago in the agency business. And when I learned about how important overcommunication is, changed everything. Email and text is for information, phone, face-to-face, zoom, or whatever your tool is, is for communication. Such good stuff, Natty. Thank you for your important insights, work, and everything to help people be better teammates. So, high performers, and that seems to be something that is our world. Uh, you generally deal with teams that are high performing teams, and you help them navigate those waters, including our own. Thank you for your work there. But why do high performers become sometimes the emotional shock absorber for the entire organization? I mean, why did that happen?

Yeah, high performers, Mike, have something that's a little bit innate, and and it's and it comes from a lot of times it comes from the way they developed the lifestyle that they lived and the type of person they became. There, there's a belief system that they have, literally truly, a belief system they have that came from understanding that if they work hard, if they set their sights on something, they can get it. And they genuinely and truly believe that they can get it, which then drives naturally their behaviors to go get it. What we don't realize is that not everybody grew up with that understanding. Not everybody had life experiences that establish that belief. And that means that a lot of people, and I mean a lot of people, do not do behaviors because they're self-motivated from understanding a belief. They do behaviors because of what they were told to do, because of what they think is expected of them, because of what they think will keep their job. And so what happens when that happens is there is a there is some drama that shows up there when a leader feels like, oh, I now have to babysit behavior. I have to remind them of what to do. I have to tell everybody what to do. Why can't people can't you see a project and figure out that this is what you need to do to succeed? Their brains, ironically, literally have been developed ever so slightly differently. And when we can understand that, we can teach them to shift that and actually show up self-motivated. Prior to that, however, we feel like we're a giant absorber of all of the emotional baggage that shows up when I don't understand and I don't believe what I'm trying to do anyways. I want you to think of a time to help you understand this. I want you to think of a time when you were doing something, it was important to you, but you didn't actually believe it was gonna work. You were just told it was going to. Like one of the best examples of this is dieting. Maybe somebody told you that if you eat like this and do this, you're gonna lose weight. And you're doing it because you saw that somebody else did it and it kind of works for them, but you don't actually believe it's gonna work for you because you've done 20 other things and they didn't work. So why is this gonna work? And you don't actually understand the physiology behind why those things would work. So you have no understanding. You're relying on somebody else's belief system and you're just trying to drive behavior, your own behavior. How long does it last? Not very long. Not very long. So that's why gym memberships start January 1st and end January 12th. It doesn't last very long because it didn't have understanding, didn't have belief. When that is the foundation of what's going on, people will get really emotional because we don't like failure and we don't like feeling like we don't know what we're doing, and we certainly don't like not being able to do things. We get emotional.

Yeah.

And then the leaders end up absorbing all of that emotional baggage that comes onto them, and then they feel like I gotta babysit this person's behavior and I gotta give them a day off because it's just too much stress for them to handle. So now I got to take on their work and we rescue them.

Yeah. Well, and I was just gonna say, because I've heard you talk about this before, that's where the rescue reflex might come into play. And unfortunately, it sends the wrong message, it provides the wrong modeling behavior, and actually teaches your team the wrong way, right? They stay dependent. And instead of being able to evolve and feel empowered and do the right work and everything else.

Oh, yeah. What I think most of us as leaders don't always understand is we don't recognize that if there is an environment where someone is being rescued, somebody else is also being persecuted 100% of the time. And usually it's the same people. If I rescue my employee from doing the job they needed to do because it was just too hard or overstimulating, or they've had a really bad day, I'm persecuting myself by taking on additional workload. And ironically, I'm now persecuting my employee because I'm not helping them improve. I'm not helping them get better, I'm not giving them coping skills at all. I'm not helping them with resilience, I'm not helping them with anything. What happens when they go home and they act like that with one of their children?

Right.

It we end up persecuting. There's never a time when we show up in a state of rescue that somebody will not be persecuted. Ever. They always play in tandem. And so if we if we rescue somebody because we we rescue ourselves from a hard conversation because the person comes in and we're like, I really should have this conversation with them right now. And I just, I just can't. I can't with the drama. I'm gonna just it's easier, it's faster for me to just do it myself. We rescue ourselves from the hard conversation. We therefore then persecute ourselves by taking on more responsibility than we should, and also persecute and rescue our employee because we rescue them from their job and persecute them all at the same time from learning something new and stepping up to earn opportunities for new growth and new experiences in every single situation that we rescue, we will persecute. I want you to keep that in mind and I want you to look for it over time.

Wow. I'm gonna pause right there and I want you to digest what Natty just said, and I want you to go look for that in your own business and see if it's present. I know the answer to this, Natty, but I want you to reinforce it in Natty's own unique way. What is the end result on the culture and the health of the culture when all of this is happening?

A victim mentality culture. I call it victimville.

Victimville.

Yeah, because it rescuing and persecution only show up in victimhood. If my life was too hard today, then I'm the victim of everything that's been happening to me. So I can't do my work. I need to be rescued. You come in and you rescue me. It's very dramatic. You're you're now dramatic about it. You're frustrated and irritated with me that I couldn't just step up and get my crap done. Why can't I just do my job? So now you're gonna rescue me while at the same time persecuting me in your head and persecuting yourself by taking on more responsibility, and there's all kinds of drama going on inside of here and here for you, even if you don't say a word out loud, everything about your frequency just changed. And everybody in the office can feel that energy shift. And energy is culture. And so when you're walking around like that, what is the culture of your office? Now here's what gets really interesting. Because they felt the frustration, are people now afraid to ask you for help? And now do they go screw up their job because they were afraid to ask for help? Or more importantly, are they afraid not to ask for help? Because now everybody gets frozen. And now it's like, uh, do I do it? Do I not do it? Should I ask for help? Should I not ask for help? And then guess what happens to productivity? Efficiency. And then you get more frustrated. And where's culture now? What's the energy like?

Yeah.

Drama. That is drama. It's the definition of drama.

Yeah, now you got drama involved, and it goes in a lot of different directions depending on directions. The number of team members, etc. But I'm gonna ask you a different kind of question. And you weren't you weren't expecting this one. So one of the things that you do so well is helping teams navigate change management. And you know, it's my belief nowadays. I mean, back in the days when we grew up, there were two things that were certain in life, right? Death and taxes. Well, I believe there's three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and change.

Yeah.

So you help people with change management, just without getting too far into it, because I I know that you do a minimum of 90 minutes on this. So but what is one or two simple tips that agency leaders and owners can use to begin to navigate change management because it's happening multiple times every single day.

Yeah. So I will I'll go back. The first tip I'll just reiterate would be start at the beginning because what you don't realize is you come into the conversation, again, all the research, all the background, all the understanding, you've seen the numbers, the analytics, you've talked to everybody in the company, and you have a holistic perspective of why the change needs to be made. But what's the per what's the hearer's perspective? This is new to me. It's gonna require a different job, different training. I don't know how. Is it gonna take longer? Is it gonna replace me? We come in with only one side of the perspective, and so we start in the middle. Start at the beginning, tell the whole story so that they have an understanding of your perspective. That's step then. Then the next thing I want you to do is do not be afraid of honoring concerns that pop up and allow concerns to direct instead of trying to protect. We have a situation with concerns where as leaders, we feel like if somebody voices a concern, we read into it like it's resistance or like, hey, you're not it's it's you're you're not paying attention. You're not you're not you didn't hear me, you're not listening to me, because leaders have gotten in the habit of feeling like communication is actually dictation. Dictation is not communication. Communication is the art of being able to tell something starting at the beginning, telling the whole story and actually hearing the perspective and coming into the conversation with both sides of understanding. And when I understand both sides, there is always, always a right next step that honors the movement forward and the concerns about the movement forward. And when we show up and honor concerns, we're not afraid of them, we don't treat them defensively or like somehow this is resistance. When we actually honor the concern, we find our right next step, and it actually makes change management possible because it gets everybody bought in and moving in the same direction. What happens so frequently, Mike, when people want to make changes in their organization, they come in, they start in the middle, they dictate the solution, they ask if there's any questions, and there's silence in the room because the conversation doesn't happen right there because they haven't given perm they have not given anybody in that room permission to actually say how they feel. So the leader walks out of the room and thinks we had a successful meeting, everybody's on board, and we're gonna start tomorrow. But then the conversation starts where you don't want it to. It starts in the other room, it starts on the text message, it starts on Slack, it starts by the water cooler, it starts outside by the car, and next thing you know, you've got 12 side conversations of people saying, Why are we doing this? Because they're like, who whose idea was this? Do you guys know how much work this is gonna cause for us? And those little things in the background drama, drama, drama, drama, drama. Drama drama. And because we we didn't allow for and open up the opportunity to receive concern, our entire company's operating in concern. And we just manufactured resistance and created drama because of the way we communicated change. So that's a that's a big one. I did that's I know it's super super brief, and that's about as much as you can get on a on a quick podcast, but I hope it just gives you something to think about. Why don't you think about when you last time you started a conversation with this is what we're gonna do? Hey, this is the idea we had, and we're gonna implement X. I want you to think, how are you starting the conversation? At the beginning or the middle?

Start at the beginning.

Start at the beginning and then honor concerns. Don't don't the concerns are not defensiveness.

Yeah. Fabulous. Honor the concern. So you also help businesses set up boundaries that actually protect performance, that really allow them to fly, right? Protecting the performance. And when they can perform at the levels that they need to perform to re you know, help the business reach its goals and beyond that, okay, without actually damaging culture. So they can they can operate faster, more efficiently, and get to scale. Talk about that. I mean, while honoring concerns to begin with, by starting in the beginning.

Yeah. I want to help shape this by changing people's perspective of boundaries. Most people see boundaries as a gate that keeps things out. I want you to think of boundaries as your little perimeter that says, this is my light, this is my force, this is my frequency, whatever it is. When you're ready, you may enter. When you're ready to match that, you can come in. What if your boundary was the invitation to join you and not offense to keep everybody out? See, people think of boundaries and they think of restrictions. I want you to think of boundaries as, hey, this is the standard we hold. And we love this standard because it gives us fulfillment, it gives us joy, it gives us respect and dignity, it allows us to do more with our day. It allows every one of us to show up every day and work in a space where we feel safety, respect, and joy. Heck yeah, I want to work there. And that is our little perimeter of joy up here. And if you feel like you can join us up here, we want you. Like you, and so the invitation is yours.

Yeah.

If do you do you want to be part of that? Because this is how we show up to have that. And you're invited to show up. And we and we don't keep people out, we bring people in, we invite people to level up. And when people are invited to level up instead of feeling the FOMO of missing out, something different happens.

That's right. Invite them. I love that. Invite them to show up, invite them to level up. Great stuff. Hey, we're talking with Natty Lewis, EQ under pressure, leading when you're the bottleneck. And everything that Natty and I are discussing today are surrounding leaders who may be the bottleneck between where you're at now and actually scaling your independent insurance agency business. Great, great stuff, Natty. Um, I want to talk about a subject that may be controversial, but I love to go there. And that's your special. Let's go there. Let's talk about building emotional consistency.

What?

Emotional consistency, why? And especially from the leadership chair.

Yeah.

Building emotional consistency so leadership isn't mood dependent. Because, you know, one of my greatest leadership philosophies that I've learned so far in my career, and I'm still a work in progress in a big, big way. They're watching everything you do and everything you don't do, don't do, and they're listening to everything you say and everything you don't say. So help us, Nanny, with that, building emotional consistency so leadership isn't mood-dependent.

Yeah. Well, let's let's make sure everybody realizes the important need for this comes. I know of nothing where my leaders that I work with are more frustrated than feeling like they have done everything in their power to empower the people around them, and yet they still keep coming back to me. Why do they keep coming back to me? Why won't they make a decision? I've told them how, I've shown them what, I've told them they have permission. Why do they keep coming back? Like I don't want to be the bottleneck, and I'm tired of carrying the weight of this, and everybody just keeps putting the weight back on me, no matter how hard I try to get it off. And that is frustrating. It's also frustrating to care more than anybody else about the results, which you will always do as a leader, as a leader of your own organization. And so I want you to, and you will also experience one very important thing that I want to touch on now. So I'm going to get just a teeny bit geeky, but this is fun stuff.

Yeah, it is.

Every leader, every good leader operates from a place of vision. Something they're trying to go get, something they're trying to go create that doesn't exist today. I'm trying to go create growth. I'm trying to go create momentum. I'm scaling. I'm moving to two times what I've been at before. I'm increasing these things. Every single one of those moves lives in what we call the unknown or the uncertain because it hasn't been done before. Not by you, not by this organization, not by this team. But it is critical to recognize that the world of vision lives outside of your brain's window of tolerance because it's unknown. Your brain operates in the known. It creates patterns in the known. Everything it does, it fills in the holes so that it can have a known outcome. You operate in vision, you're operating in the unknown. So it's important to recognize as a high achiever, you feel that energy. Some of that is a little bit of hyper-arousal, which is maybe why you might be quick triggered to get a little frustrated, quick triggered to get a little bit angry, quick triggered to get a little bit irritated. And it's because you operate in this place of extending your window of tolerance. So I'm going to give you three quick little tips today to expand your capacity to tolerate stress.

Nanny, I'm going to ask you a favor. Yeah. When you say the three, slow down so they get it.

Okay.

I know these are so important. Go ahead.

Yep. The first one, sleep. Do you know nothing can expand your capacity to tolerate stress more than adequate sleep? I want you to think about what your capacity is to tolerate people when you're tired. Just consider that.

So simple.

So simple.

Yeah.

Second one. Sunlight.

Sunlight.

Sunlight. Photonic energy is one of the single most important and powerful energy sources that we can input into our body, and most people do not. I want you to think about your mood when you have not seen sunlight. When you don't go outside. When you're stuck inside all day. Are you intentionally giving yourself some morning sunlight, some afternoon sunlight, some evening sunlight? Are you intentionally just get outside five minutes, ten minutes? If you want to expand your window of capacity to tolerate stress, you have to expand your window of tolerance. To do that, you need input, additional energy sources. Sleep is hormonal energy. Sunlight is photonic energy. The third one that I'm going to tell you is hydration. Water and electrolytes, the four horsemen, okay? Sodium, magnesium, um, potassium, though these electrolytes are important. It's not just about water. Why? Because your brain, which is your single most important tool that you're going to use all day long, operates on electricity. So you need electrical energy, which comes from electrolytes.

Right.

If you want to expand your capacity to tolerate stress, and you want to show up every day more capable of working with people, more tolerant of people, more patient, more communicative, more able to hear concern and not get defensive, more able to live in vision without getting rattled by the unknown and the uncertain. Expand your window of tolerance. Sleep, sunlight, hydration.

Window of tolerance. It's so simple. And I'll suggest that a lot of people don't even think about those two things. Sleep, sunlight, and what's the third one?

Hydration. There's three more, but we're on we're short on time, so I'm just gonna give three.

But the power of three. I mean it's a great three.

I know you yeah, I know you're about your threes, Mike. So I stay. I'm like, I'm not going to all six today. We're gonna stay in the three.

Yeah, no, this is this is so awesome. So awesome. Thank you, Natty. So as we begin to wrap up, uh, this great conversation about EQ under pressure, leading when you're the bottleneck. And remember, all progress starts by telling the truth. Thank you, Dan Sullivan. So if you say you're not the bottleneck, I want you to go look in the mirror of truth. Is that true? So, Natty, any last big tips to share with everybody watching or listening?

Just I think just one. I think it's leadership, people call leadership a lonely journey. And it's it can be it can feel lonely because you feel like you're the only one that cares as much. You're the only one trying as hard, you're the only one pushing as much, you're the only one striving for that vision. You care more than everybody else. And so I want you to recognize loneliness is an emotion. And leadership is emotional. And I want you to recognize the power of the fact that you are a spiritual being having a physical experience, and those two things are not separate. You do not have another being out there that's your mental emotional self running around without you. You you are one thing. Something happening to you emotionally is happening to you physically, and vice versa, which is why you can actually dramatically improve your emotional intelligence by caring for yourself physically. So even though leadership is a lonely journey, which isn't again an emotion, one of the most important things you can do as a leader is take care of yourself. Like you can't go, you can't outwork the problem of being the bottleneck. You have to get smarter and better at managing your own emotions and communicating with your team and layering in these just little tools. Because I promise you, the drama is not a people problem. It's an understanding problem. And the good news about that is that means it's fixable.

Say that one more time.

Drama is not a people problem. We think it's people. We question whether we should fire somebody. Drama is not a people problem. It's an understanding problem. And again, the good news about that, if you think about it, you're like, huh. Well, if it's an understanding problem and we can gain tools that help us understand, then drama is fixable, which means it is not an inevitability of running your company. It's a choice.

Wow.

Wow. I hope you caught all that. Drama is not a people problem, it's an understanding problem. And I wanted to hear it multiple times because I need that sometimes. And I also learned that people fear what they don't understand. And so that's one of the major, major benefits of working with Natty, uh, which our team here at Onyx has, by the way. And she did her magic uh just so we could get a first-hand taste and benefit, most importantly, from everything that she does. So, Natty, thank you.

Thank you for letting me be here, Mike. It's a pleasure and keep pursuing vision. It's challenging and it's worth it.

Vision is the art of seeing things that other people can't see. And it says in Proverbs, where there is no vision, people perish. All right, everybody, thank you for joining us for this episode of Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast. If you want to learn more about, you know, working with myself and Natty and the rest of our team, or you just have any questions, there's some information around this podcast in the show notes that will lead you to get there. And more importantly than that, if you got good value out of today's podcast, take this link to the podcast and share it with somebody that you care about that might be sitting at the top where it is lonely and help them because loneliness is an emotion. I learned so much today from Natty as well. So make sure you share share this wealth of incredible knowledge and leadership from the one, the only Natty Lewis with anybody you care about. Send them the link or invitation to visit this podcast. And we can't wait to continue to serve all of you in your journey as a leader to make sure that you are not the bottleneck. And I will see you along with my podcast partners on the next podcast. Until then, be unstoppable.