We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful John Wetmore. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with John below.
John, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
I would say watching my mom as a kid, showed me how working through adversity is possible and important to get where you want to go. My mom was a single, teenage mom, having me her senior year in high school, on welfare for probably my first 10 years, and we lived in the projects. She always wanted to keep me out of trouble, and talked about getting out for as long as I can remember. She went to school to get a degree while I was in elementary school, and eventually got herself a “real job”, getting our first car when I was about 10, always using public transportation prior to that. Along the way she kept me from the traditional public school starting in middle school, sending me to a very small Catholic middle school, where I had maybe 10 classmates total. High School, she sent me to the local Technical High School, again keeping me out of the traditional High School, that certainly had more trouble around. Eventually after several years of working, several moves a little further away from where we started, we moved to a nicer suburb allowing me to finish High School in a new town that didn’t have near the problems. Although at the time I hated it, looking back I can see how she worked through very tough times to achieve a goal and I’m proud to continue that journey allowing my kids an even better life due to the duplicated work ethic I watched as a kid!
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am in the Life Insurance sales space, where after several years of selling life insurance and simultaneously building an agency, today I manage our agency of over 2,000 life insurance agents that sell a policy monthly. I do a lot of training, speaking and coaching on how to build an agency and teach others how to be successful in life insurance sales. We help agencies by building out automations, processes and systems that allowed us to be very efficient in growing our agency!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
For me personally, the three qualities that helped me were discipline, consistency and efficiency.
We all have life’s issues thrown at us, and all have our own “stuff”. Having the discipline to do things that bring you towards your goals, when you aren’t always motivated to do them or they’re not convenient, and more importantly doing them for an extended period of time, is going to make or break most of you.
I also think it’s important to be very productive during these times so paying attention to how efficient you are, meaning getting as much done as possible in the given time period, without wasting time on meaningless items in between is super important.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
I have read 100’s of books in the last 10 years, after reading literally zero, the first 15 years of adulthood. The book that has impacted me the most would be John Maxwell’s 5 levels of leadership. This book taught me how I am viewed as a leader through the eyes of others, and I can be a different level, to 2 different people at the exact same time, and how I speak to and interact with them has to be adjusted based on that level. So the more I can understand where I fall in the eyes of others, has helped me in coaching and guiding agents towards their goals. A quick example would be when I have a conversation with someone that is in my industry that knows the things I’ve accomplished, the advise I give is 1000x times more received, compared to someone that I talk to about a position in the industry that doesn’t know or care about anything I’ve done in the past, and I could just be the janitor doing interviews that day. Knowing how I am viewed as a leader person to person has helped me know how to adapt conversations accordingly.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.johnwetmore.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnwetmore347/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnwetmore34
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-wetmore-50709097
- Youtube: http://johnwetmore.tv/
