Do less better, and get
more that matters done
[A]sk: What do I want more of next year? What do I want
less of? This is how we connect goals to values, rather than vanity metrics.
By Carolyn Smith, APR, CRA, TRA
As an insurance agent or risk consultant, you don’t just live with uncertainty—you translate it. You turn chaos into clarity for clients, quantify the unquantifiable, and build guardrails so that businesses can move faster without falling off the edge.
Yet when it comes to your own goals, you still may be relying on rigid, outcome-only targets that collapse at the first market wobble or client crisis.
The year 2026 deserves a smarter playbook: purpose-driven, process-oriented, flexible by design. The aim isn’t to be busier; it’s to be better at your craft for your clients and in your life.
This year, Zander Galloway of Peoples First refined his philosophy: What helps people reach their goals also helps businesses succeed. If a goal doesn’t align with your values, your clients, and your community, it won’t sustain your effort or yield your best work. Galloway is actively building systems that generate energy, progress, and meaning in his agency. He recognizes that when your work aligns with your values, momentum becomes natural instead of forced.
Start with reflection, not resolutions
Before setting a single 2026 objective, take a close look at 2025. Where did you win? Where did you wobble a little? What would you repeat? And more important, what do you never want to live through again?
Try this quick audit:
- Three wins. Moments you’d happily recreate in 2026.
- Three challenges. Not as self-indictments, just data.
- Three lessons. Practical truths you can carry forward.
Then ask: What do I want more of next year? What do I want less of? This is how we connect goals to values, rather than vanity metrics. A goal that isn’t anchored to your values is just a wish.
Align goals with values
Use Galloway’s “simple, human, strategic” direction as the test for your goals:
- Simple. You can explain it in one sentence.
- Human. It serves clients, your team, and your life.
- Strategic. It reflects who you are and who you’re becoming.
Write your top three values on a note: client trust, expertise, family, for example. Now connect each 2026 goal to at least one value:
- Value: Client trust Æ Goal. Launch a quarterly 15-minute executive briefing for top accounts, with one actionable risk insight, one decision.
- Value: Expertise Æ Goal. Pilot a “risk rehearsal” program before major renewals to pressure-test assumptions and loss scenarios.
- Value: Family Æ Goal. Protect 6 p.m. daily for home. No exceptions.
When a goal is values-aligned, effort becomes easier, and persistence becomes personal.
Five moves to increase your chances of achieving your goals
Let’s look at five strategies you can use to massively increase the likelihood that you’ll achieve your goals. While action is the ultimate separator between people who achieve their goals and those who don’t, science suggests there are five simple habits that stack the deck in your favor.
- Write down your goals. Maggie, an underwriter in a Beyond Insurance program, said that she was overwhelmed with too much to do. When she wrote down her goals and focused on one each morning, she quadrupled her productivity. The lesson stuck, and she shared it with her team: Writing down your goals matters.
Research backs this up. A study from Dominican University found that people who wrote down their goals were about 42% more likely to achieve them than those who didn’t. It takes only a few minutes, and the payoff is substantial.
The format doesn’t matter as much as the act. For example, try keeping a list of quarterly goals with three or four focused targets per quarter. This tends to work better than a long wish list.
- Review them weekly (if not daily). Your brain filters the world based on what it considers important, thanks to the Reticular Activating System (RAS). For example, when you set an intention to buy a particular car, you suddenly notice that car everywhere. That’s your attention system at work. You can harness this by revisiting your goals frequently.
The top mistakes are: (1) not setting goals, (2) not writing them down, and (3) writing them down once and never looking again.
Build a brief weekly review into your routine. Ask: “What are my quarterly goals, and how are they going?” Then set three priorities for the week and glance at them each morning. This takes seconds, but it keeps your intentions top of mind, so you don’t lose them in the rush of calendar invites and daily noise.
- Monitor your progress. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin reviewed 138 studies with nearly 20,000 participants and found that regularly monitoring progress significantly improves goal attainment. A simple “on track/off track” can be enough to trigger timely course corrections.
Use any tool you like, such as a to-do app with projects or a spreadsheet with weekly status updates. The key is making progress visible, like a leveling-up bar in a video game. Visible progress feels satisfying and sustains momentum.
- Visualize obstacles and make a plan. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen’s work on mental contrasting suggests that simply visualizing success can sometimes have unintended consequences. Instead, imagine the desired outcome and identify the obstacles that could get in your way—then plan how you’ll handle them. Her WOOP method captures this: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.
For example, if your wish is to write an operations handbook by mid-year, obstacles might include not making time, running out of ideas, or feeling demotivated. Your plan could be to block three hours each morning for writing, schedule brainstorming sessions, and use tools that make writing more enjoyable.
A few minutes of WOOP per goal can meaningfully improve your odds of success.
- Tie goals to identity. People act consistently with how they see themselves. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, participants were asked whether they would “be a voter,” which led to higher turnout than asking whether they would “vote.” The former frames the action as identity, not just a task.
So, link your goals to who you are becoming: “I am a healthy person,” “I am a risk advisor,” “I am a consistent risk professional.” Identity-level goals make it easier to choose aligned actions, especially when motivation dips.
McClone’s efficiency journey
During the BIGN Exchange, Sarah Klapperich and Megan Wencel of McClone led a standout session on “Creating Efficiencies & a Sustainable Support Infrastructure for Your Agency.” Their story proves what happens when you apply purposeful, process-driven, values-aligned goal setting at scale.
The journey began after McClone acquired an agency in 2022. The influx of a high volume of small commercial and personal lines accounts strained McClone’s back-end infrastructure and capacity. Rather than allowing that challenge to derail growth, the team used it as the spark to rethink processes, save tens of thousands of hours, and build a stronger, more scalable agency.
They set a bold goal: to save 23,000 hours without staff cuts. Growth was achieved through intentional decisions about when and how to replace roles, ensuring that resources stayed aligned with long-term needs.
To get there, McClone focused on three initiatives:
- Automate—leveraging technology to eliminate repetitive tasks.
- Stop—discontinuing activities that didn’t add real value.
- Centralize—consolidating processes where scale improved efficiency and consistency.
The results:
- 23,000 hours saved in 2023.
- 10,000 more saved in 2024.
- 12,000 targeted for 2025.
Because the team was part of shaping and driving the initiatives, efficiency quickly became part of McClone’s culture. Service centers were particularly impactful—freeing account executives from repetitive tasks and raising client satisfaction with faster, more consistent responses. What could have felt like a threat instead became a rallying point.
Teams competed to identify new efficiencies and celebrated wins together. Transparency, collaboration, and recognition fueled buy-in, with tools like Monday.com and peer recognition programs making progress visible and celebrated.
The ripple effects extended into culture. Hours saved weren’t pocketed—they were reinvested. Team members were repurposed into higher-value roles like claims advocacy, compliance, and safety management. The message was clear: Efficiency isn’t about doing less—it’s about doing better.
For 2026 goal-setters, the lesson is powerful: Efficiency goals tied to identity (“we are a high-value agency”) and values (“we put people first”) unlock growth, satisfaction, and sustainability simultaneously.
Three simple shifts for maximum impact in 2026
- Do fewer things, better. You can’t be world-class with twelve simultaneous goals. Pick three.
- Two 90-minute blocks a week or one focused hour first thing in the morning will change your pipeline and your craft.
- Default to stewardship. Don’t wait for renewal to ask better questions and deliver better insight.
Final thought: Do less, better
McClone’s and Galloway’s stories prove it: The right goals don’t just move numbers—they shape culture. The best goals are simple, human, and strategic. When efficiency becomes empowerment, agencies build futures worth having.
In 2026, be the obvious choice where it counts. Do less. Do it better. The numbers and the culture will follow.
The author
Carolyn Smith, APR, TRA, chief training officer for Beyond Insurance, creates and delivers transformative programs, including the Trusted Risk Advisor certification, BIGN Producer Boot Camp, and Quest for Success, that have positively impacted the lives and careers of countless professionals. These programs help industry professionals build a career that they love and achieve the success they deserve.
