How Life & Health Insurance Agencies Succeed in Tough Times
Insurance agents that survive difficult and chaotic times share two traits — and both can be learned.
A NextAgency Resource
Last Updated: May 29, 2026
The life and health insurance industry has been changing for as long as there have been insurance agents. The brokers who thrive are the ones who learn optimism and persistency.
The life and health insurance industry has never been stable. Today is no exception. New products and commission compression are roiling the small group market. Carriers are abandoning Medicare Advantage markets and, where they still offer plans, they’re often reducing agent commissions — sometimes to zero. Artificial intelligence is changing the way agencies and their clients work. Venture Capitalists and Private Equity firms are funding “roll-up” enterprises that are buying up smaller agencies, consolidating distribution, and squeezing the competition. No wonder 51% of independent agency employees report feeling burned out, and 87% say their workload increased over the prior year.
It is, to put it plainly, a lot.
Agents who navigate this successfully will share two specific skills: optimism and persistency. Optimism is the ability to interpret setbacks accurately; persistence is realistic assessment of the facts to determine whether to keep going or to stop. As this article explains, both of these traits can be learned. And both are documented predictors of sales success.
Health, Senior, and Life Insurance Is Getting More Complicated
Independent life and health insurance agents today are contending with pressures that would have seemed far-fetched even five years ago.
The small group market is undergoing rapid changes with new products and pressures.
- Level-funded self-insured plans have increased from 7% of small firms in 2019 to 37% in 2025 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey. This requires a fundamentally different conversation between brokers and their clients than traditionally fully insured policies did.
- ICHRA adoption grew among small employers by 52% between 2024 and 2025 per the HRA Council. And some ICHRA administrators’ business models are built on taking some or all of the incumbent broker’s commission. Yet brokers who aren’t able to address these Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements risk losing their clients to someone who will.
- Commissions on individual and small group plans continue to be squeezed, yet the expectation is that brokers will do more.
The Medicare Advantage market is in genuine turmoil. Major carriers have exited unprofitable markets, cut benefits, and zeroed out commissions on plans they want to shed. Nationally, enrollment in Medicare Advantage is projected to fall for the first time in nearly two decades, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. For agents who built their books around MA volume, this isn’t background noise. It’s a structural shift in how the market works.
Artificial intelligence is adding a different kind of pressure. Carriers agents work with are actively investing in systems designed to handle advisory, comparison, and enrollment tasks autonomously. That doesn’t mean human agents are obsolete. But it does mean the agents who remain valuable will need to demonstrate something AI can’t replicate: the judgment, relationships, and contextual understanding that come from genuinely knowing a client and their local markets.
And running through all of it is the consolidation of the broker channel. Private equity is buying agencies, and the deals favor scale. Smaller independent agencies face the choice of adapting, joining, or getting squeezed.
Optimism Is Not a Personality Trait — It’s a Practice
All of which is to say these are challenging and stressful times. The reality is, we’ve faced them before and life and health agencies have not only survived tumultuous times, they’ve thrived during them. How?
One of the central findings of the Trailblazed Sales Project Study — a research project by the Alan Katz Group and Miller Marketing Insights that surveyed producers across seven states — is that maintaining a positive attitude is a key driver of sales success. What separates High-Growth Producers (those whose business grew by 20% from the previous year) from their less successful colleagues wasn’t raw talent or favorable market conditions. It’s how they interpreted adversity.
That finding is backed by the research of Dr. Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, who spent decades studying what he called “explanatory style” — the internal narrative people construct when things go wrong. His research, detailed in Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, identifies a predictable pattern among pessimists: they frame setbacks as personal (“it’s my fault”), pervasive (“everything I do fails”), and permanent (“I’ll never get this right”). That pattern, Seligman found, leads directly to learned helplessness — a state in which people stop trying because they’ve concluded trying doesn’t matter.
He also found that optimists think differently. Failure is specific, not universal. A lost sale is a lost sale — not evidence of a doomed career. That distinction sounds simple, but it has measurable consequences.
Seligman demonstrated this directly in the insurance industry. Working with MetLife in the mid-1980s, he tested the explanatory styles of new sales agents and tracked their performance over two years. The results were stark. Optimistic agents sold 37% more than their pessimistic counterparts. Among the most extreme groups — the top decile in optimism versus the bottom decile in pessimism — the gap was 88%. Even more telling: agents who failed MetLife’s standard aptitude test but scored high on optimism, still outperformed those who passed the aptitude test but scored low on optimism.
The practical implication is significant. Optimism, in this context, isn’t about telling yourself things are fine when they’re not. It’s about refusing to let a specific, temporary problem become a story about who you are and what your future holds. Two brokers each lose a sale. The pessimist thinks: I can’t sell anything and never will. The optimist thinks: That particular product wasn’t right for that particular client. I’ve sold this before and I’ll sell it again. Same outcome. Completely different trajectory.
Dr. Seligman’s key insight — and the one the Trailblazed Study echoes — is that this way of thinking is a habit, not a fixed trait. Pessimism is learned. And significantly, optimism can be learned, too.
Learning Optimism
Dr. Seligman gives us a method for learning optimism: the ABCDE technique.
- Adversity: Identify the setback, rejection, or difficult event. I lost a sale I thought I’d won.
- Belief: Listen to the story you immediately tell yourself about it. I can never close a sale and I never will again.
- Consequences: Notice how that story affects your feelings and behavior. I feel helpless, hopeless, and defeated.
- Disputation: Argue back against the pessimistic story with evidence. Wait a second. I sold this policy before, why wouldn’t I sell it again?
- Energization: Notice the motivation that returns when you win the argument. So it wasn’t right for that client. Who else might need it?
When something goes wrong — a prospect goes cold, a renewal doesn’t close, a client you’ve served for years moves to a competitor — the natural response is a story. Adversity triggers Belief almost instantly: *I said the wrong thing. I’m not cut out for this. This market is impossible.* That Belief has Consequences: you feel helpless, you avoid the next call, you slow down. Most people stop there. The ABCDE technique insists you don’t.
Disputation is the step that changes things. It means arguing back against your own pessimistic interpretation — not with affirmations, but with evidence. If the belief is “I can’t retain clients,” the dispute is: *What’s actually true here? I retained 14 of 15 clients last renewal cycle. This particular client left because their new CFO had a prior relationship with another broker. What does that actually tell me about my ability to retain clients?* Usually, the honest answer is: less than you thought. The final step — Energization — is simply noticing that when you successfully dispute the pessimistic belief, the paralysis lifts. Energy returns. The next call gets made.
The more specific you can be at each step, the better. The loss will feel less personal, permanent, or pervasive. A specific challenge or setback is a data point. A vague one becomes a verdict. That single habit — refusing to let a setback stay vague — is the practical heart of what Seligman spent decades proving works.
What Optimism Is Not
There’s an important distinction that gets lost in any discussion of positive thinking, and it’s worth making explicit. Optimism, as Seligman and the Trailblazed Study define it, is not denial. It is not the belief that the good guys always win, that the market will always cooperate, or that hard work guarantees any particular outcome.
High-Growth Producers, the Trailblazed Study found, don’t naively assume things will work out. They believe that hard work, perseverance, and a smart approach give them a good chance that things will work out. That’s a fundamentally different proposition. The first is wishful thinking. The second is a reasonable read of the odds combined with a commitment to influence them.
An agent who looks at the changes occurring in the small group health insurance marketplace today and concludes that the disruption makes success impossible is being pessimistic in the clinical sense Seligman describes — treating a real but specific challenge as permanent and pervasive. An agent who acknowledges the disruption, adjusts their approach, and continues to prospect is being realistic and optimistic simultaneously. The goal isn’t a cheerful attitude. It’s an accurate one.
Never Give In — Except to Good Sense
If optimism is about how you think, persistence is about what you do. And the advice producers most reliably give to newer colleagues, according to the Trailblazed Study, is some version of “don’t give up.” That instinct isn’t wrong. High-Growth Producers don’t fold under adversity. When a marketing campaign underperforms, they analyze the results, adjust, and run it again. Their less successful colleagues tend to simply stop.
Winston Churchill, in a 1941 address that has been quoted in every conceivable context since, put it this way: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
The second half of that sentence tends to get dropped. It shouldn’t.
Ori and Rom Brafman, in their book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, describe what happened to the football coaches who faced University of Florida’s Steve Spurrier in the 1990s. Spurrier ran the “Fun ‘n’ Gun” offense — a high-speed, pass-heavy strategy that most coaches at the time simply weren’t built to defend. The logical response would have been to adjust. Instead, most opponents kept running their established systems, grinding through the same plays against an approach that exposed those plays as inadequate. Spurrier’s teams took four conference titles and a national championship. The coaches on the other side of the field were persistent. They just weren’t right.
This is where persistence becomes a liability. Sticking to a strategy that isn’t working isn’t admirable — it’s an expensive way to learn a lesson you could have learned earlier. The Trailblazed Study is clear that High-Growth Producers are not blindly persistent. They adhere to both parts of Churchill’s instruction: they don’t quit and they use good sense.
The hard part, of course, is knowing which situation you’re in.
Popular culture doesn’t make this easy. We are surrounded by stories that celebrate persistence against impossible odds. Rocky Balboa goes the distance against Apollo Creed. The startup that survived forty rejections closes a Series A. The agent who worked the same territory for three years finally lands the anchor account.
Some of these stories are even real. However, so are the stories of people who spent years on strategies that were never going to work, and who would have been better served by redirecting that energy sooner. We don’t celebrate those stories because they’re not satisfying — but they are common.
One practical method for cutting through the noise is what the Trailblazed Study describes as a Decision Memorandum. The concept is straightforward: write a short document to yourself that covers four things. First, describe the challenge you’re facing as specifically as possible. Second, list the actions you’ve taken to address it. Third, describe the results of those actions honestly. Fourth, and most importantly, write out the best argument for abandoning the effort alongside the best argument for continuing.
That last step is the key. Forcing yourself to advocate both positions breaks the emotional loop — the mental replay of Rocky that keeps you fighting a fight you’ve already lost. It imposes the kind of objectivity that’s genuinely difficult to achieve when you’re in the middle of a struggle. The decision you reach after writing the memo may be the same one you’d have reached without it. But you’ll have reached it deliberately rather than by default.
Agents who come out the other side of the current disruption won’t simply be the most stubborn — they’ll be the most clear-eyed. That means learning to distinguish a temporary setback from a permanent reality, and learning to distinguish admirable persistence from wasted effort. Those are two different skills, practiced in different moments, and the research is unambiguous: both can be learned.
Learn More:
You can find additional resources for running and growing a life and health insurance agency in the NextAgency Resource Center.
Author Information:
This article was co-written by Alan Katz, NextAgency’s co-founder and author of Trailblazed: Proven Paths to Sales Success from which much of this article is taken, and Claude AI.