Lesson #1

Lesson #1: Confidence is key
When I became an employee at Liberty it was expected of me to do following: 1) to save the company money in our negotiates with claimants and attorneys, 2) mitigate our losses by handling each claim fairly and accurately; and 3) provide the best customer service possible to people who have had THE worst day possible by the time you have the opportunity to speak with them. Now all the things that I have mentioned I don't have a problem doing, however, there is one major detail I neglected to add.....I'm a new employee and when you have to tell someone that their car is totaled they could careless about the fact that this is your first REAL job out of college.

So today after I got off the phone with a claimant who practically destroyed my self-esteem and told me that I failed at life, I emerged from my fetal-like position and asked one of the trainers, "What does it take to make it in this job?" He looks at me and simply replies, "Confidence. Even though I supervise you, you ultimately make the decisions here." (Umm...Jesus, was that a parable or something) He continued with, "You gotta remember that confidence is the internal trust we have in ourselves or others and even though it may appear that you're failing, you're still building. So take confidence in the fact that you are building experience and endurance. I'm telling you, unless you have confidence in your decisions, you won't have trust in yourself. So instead of quaking everytime this woman bombs you out, you need to trust your training and tell her 'Miss I don't specialize in rentals and appraisals, I handle bodily injury so unless your talking about doctors, or chiropractors, I can't help you with issues revolving around the fact that your car is still in the shop.'"

So with his advice swimming in my head, I bravely marched back to my phone called the claimant and repeated everything the trainer had said and.......she cursed me out and told me that my promises meant nothing and then she proceeded to hang up on me. Sigh. So despite the fact that my self-esteem was in the trash can next to my desk I learned a valuable lesson, regardless of how inexperience I may feel I still need to have confidence in the fact that I have been trained to do my job which makes me qualified to some degree, and that everyday my confidence is allowing me to build/create something for the future. What am I building? Honestly I don't know, but the sounds of construction keeps me coming back to work.