If you want things to change, you have to change. If you want things to get better, you have to get better. If you want to have more, you must become more. – Jim Rohn
Success is built on a swivel. You have to adapt at any given moment, be nimble, be quick and always look to give for the better good. A great business requires all of this and more. But in the end, if done right, the story you write will be one which will be revered and remembered.
Everyone has a story.
I am Mark Brodinsky and this is Storytelling for Business.
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Storytelling for Business: Changing Lives
You can have excuses or results, but you can’t have both. Delores Soto is all about the latter.
Lore, as she’s known, says she’s so driven because she cares about people and has a talent for getting things done.
“My greatest challenge is I’m a perfectionist to a fault and sometimes I have to slow down to see the forest for the trees. And it’s every day, I don’t know how to turn it off,” laughs Lore. “I have to remind myself of all the blessings I have to stop and enjoy them. Even as a child my mother told me you never stop to appreciate what you have in your right hand because you are always looking at what’s not in your left. You always want more, you’re in the relentless pursuit of more.”
Yet Lore says she knows she is definitely blessed because of her family. “My greatest accomplishment is my children, Izzy, Sebastian, and Samuel,” she says. “They are perfection realized. They are such a great representation of what is honest and pure in the world. They are 100 percent the reason I do what I do. My daughter, Izzy, is just a little version of me. I am in awe to have made and help to sculpt such perfection.”
As well Lore says she is perfectly aware of the reason for so much abundance the past few years, her association with USHEALTH Advisors. Lore is a Field Training Agent for USHA, which is a subsidiary of USHEALTH Group, offering flexible health coverage and supplemental products to individuals, families and the self-employed.
For years Lore had a very successful career in retail, running stores which produced millions of dollars in sales, teaching others how to be productive and turning around others that were failing. “I was kind of the broken store fixer,” says Lore. “They’d send me in like a wrecking crew to deal with these busted stores. I’d spend six-to-nine months and turn them around to platinum status. It was exhausting, but it was fun and I was really good at it. But things started to change when I had my first child. I fell victim to people’s unsolicited advice about balancing a retail job and being a mom… so I went into banking for a minute and hated it. I went back to retail and became manager of a $40 million Macy’s store, but then we decided to make the move from Missouri to Texas. I found another retail position, but my mindset had already started to shift. I didn’t feel like I was making a difference.”
They say success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure and Lore knew it, she wanted more.
Lore says, “I thought to myself, ‘I’m really doing well at this, but I’m not really changing the world. What is my footprint?’ “If I don’t sell denim jeans, the world won’t stop turning. I’m kind of a hippy at heart and I started to have a lot of guilt about the consumerism of all of this. I started to have problems with the morality of all of it, plus I now had three kids and I was tired. It was kind of a rat race in this retail corporate world. I was missing out on so many Christmases and Thanksgivings. So in the spring of 2017, I decided it was time to change. I parted with my job on a Monday and then immediately I got a call to come in to interview for a new opportunity… just one day later, on that Tuesday!”
Everything happens for a reason. For Lore, that happening was a quick turnaround into something she had never experienced before.
“So I come into this interview, just one day after leaving my retail job, not even knowing it was about insurance,” says Lore. “I sat through a pitch from Jay Still and I was intrigued, especially intrigued by the part about HOPE, Helping Other People Everyday. That message seemed to be part of my path in life. I also hit it off instantly with Jay’s wife, Teaira. I figured what’s the harm in trying this? But first I took a short break. I had been working so much, so I took a few months to get going. I started training with USHEALTH Advisors in June and wrote my first application in July of 2017. I was wildly successful right out of the gate.”
What drove Lore was her perfectionist attitude, drive to be the best and the chance to get back out into the “adult” world.
“I had been dealing with my kids now for years,” says Lore. “I still had one small child at home and I craved the adult interaction. Plus, the career forced me to go out and network. I’m a pretty social person and this drove me to get out and meet people. I wanted to meet enough people because I didn’t have enough people to just call, plus I didn’t want to sit around and just make the phone calls. So I used my best asset which is my people skills. I built up a network which is now quite vast. I had to learn a new skill which was great and scary at the same time, because I had come from the retail world where I knew everything, into this insurance world where I knew nothing. But I learned as I went along and it was nice to see I could succeed in something completely new.”
The desire to succeed pulses through Lore’s blood – as of the date of this story – late August of 2019 – she just finished the week as the number one producing agent in the country. It’s the second time she’s accomplished this feat, the first time while Lore was on the beach in Mexico!
“I did it before, not long ago. It was in July and I wrote $100,000 in annual volume in a week, most of it while I was on vacation, sitting on the beach in Puerto Vallarta,” laughs Lore. “I tell people all the time you watch those commercials and they say, results not typical. That’s me. I’m not smarter or funnier than anyone. I’m just consistent, I’m a hustler, I will outwork people. And if I can do that for someone else, teach them the way, then that’s a responsibility I have. It’s a disservice to the talent I was given if I don’t share that along the way.”
When asked what inspires her, Lore will tell you she got a lot of it from watching a great role model, her mother.
“My childhood was good,” says Lore. “My parents split up when I was young, it was tough, but it was good. My mom was a hustler, she kind of walked away from a marriage that wasn’t working with only the clothes on her back and me and my younger brother. She worked her tail off. We went to private schools and we never lacked for anything. She is one tough cookie. I was raised in a way that you do for yourself and never count on anyone else to give you what you need. I was more of a grown-up child. My mom is only 19 years older than I am, so we kind of grew up together. I was like this weird, grown-up little girl. I remember my very first job when I was nine-years-old and worked the cash register at Norm’s Zesto Burger in Kansas. I was this little girl teaching all these high school kids how to count change and even back then I was directing everybody. As kids, I was always the teacher when we played school and I was always at the helm. I’m a Leo and it shows in the truest sense. My mom is a Leo, so is my brother and my eldest son. There’s so much fire in my world, it’s crazy!”
The fire that Lore carries around inside of her she says is what she loves to share with her clients and her agents.
“A typical day for me, I get going early,” says Lore. “I get the kids up first, get them fed and get them off to school. I go to the office, then I’m there for morning appointments and use the middle of my day to be there for the agents. I try to very much be in service to my clients, my mornings are busy because that’s when my clients seem to need me,” says Lore. “Many of my clients become my friends, they are part of my life. I’m always servicing them. The other parts of my day are about training the new agents. I’m a leader and I don’t mince words. I don’t like things to fester and so I let them know what’s up at the moment when I see it. If there is a coaching moment, you can bet I’m coaching at that moment. I try to teach my agents all the little things you might not be told at the beginning, the lessons you learn the hard way. Any way I can help, I do.”
It’s also all about freedom and flexibility for Lore. The freedom that comes from earning a great living and the flexibility of being there for her family.
“For evening appointments I leave the office and travel home,” she says. “I have the ability to get the kids dinner, maybe do a presentation, finish up, give baths, put the kids to bed and then do another appointment. I love when I’m doing a virtual appointment at home and my daughter Izzy will climb up on a chair behind me and play with my hair or rub my shoulders. I do work weekends too, front loading my day with appointments or customer service, then spending the day with the kids. I work parts of every day, but I don’t work all day.”
When you find something you love, you don’t consider it work. Lore says she loves the USHEALTH Advisors opportunity because it’s like nothing she has ever experienced.
“It almost takes your breath away, you can’t even believe it sometimes,” says Lore. “It’s an exceptional opportunity and culture. Where else can you go and find a career and say to someone, if you do better, I do better! It’s such a unique culture. I came from the corporate world and it’s like night and day. It makes me sad when someone comes here and just doesn’t get it. When I get a full day with an agent, I’m talking about goal setting and things I am really passionate about. And I tell them, you are on the precipice of never working for anyone again. Some of you will take it and run with it and others will never understand. This opportunity is all you want it to be and when someone can’t see that coming in, it’s unreal to me. It’s not all about the money. Money doesn’t fix all problems. It helps and makes things easier, but what this is really about is, all for one and one for all. I believe the people who come here, inspired by the mission of HOPE, their hearts are pure, they’re in it for the right reason and they will make great money along the way.”
“I brought a friend into this business and she worked hard and has had great success,” Lore says. “That kind of success to me is immortality realized. That’s what I was missing before. I didn’t feel fulfilled. I was not changing the world and this feels deeper and more profound. It’s a really cool experience and it’s definitely changed me.”
For Lore, now it’s all about the success that brings fulfillment.
“I love getting a random message from someone because I said something that really affected them, either in person or maybe when I spoke at their office. Those things are priceless to me. That’s when you live on. We all die and turn to dust, but changing people’s mindset and changing lives, that’s forever.”
Forever, indeed.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Your Storyteller,
Mark Brodinsky
Make USHEALTH Advisors your next career! Click and apply: (https://www.ushacareers.com/apply/)
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Become part of The Billion. You can learn more about Mark Brodinsky at: (http://markbrodinsky.life/)