Locus of Control – Parita Patel

Success is simply the acts of discipline, performed hour after hour, day after day, week after week, quarter after quarter. A consistent continuum of a ceaseless grind over a long sustained period of time that compounds into massive success.   
– Darren Hardy, Success Mentor

For Parita Patel it’s all in, all the time.

If there’s a challenge in front of Parita, she’s going to go after it with everything she’s got, keeping it between the lines, in her lane, and playing full out. Even with the see-saw of distractions to throw her off course, Parita has weathered the storm and instead, stormed ahead.

“Believe it or not this year falls into both categories of my biggest accomplishment and biggest challenge,” says Parita. “On a professional level, I have already been able to surpass anything I thought I was capable of doing for myself and my family in these past ten months. And on the personal side, I got divorced, something so hard to do that I never thought it would happen in my life. But coming out of it was all the right things. I wouldn’t be this successful and happy right now if it didn’t.”

For a new agent, success at USHEALTH Advisors is measured by your results. Parita is setting a new standard. She is currently one of only two women in the top ten in production with the company in 2021 and the only woman in the top five. She’s blowing them all away with an 80% taken rate, meaning 80% of the people she’s attempted to put in a better place with health coverage and benefits, are getting exactly what they asked for.

As of the writing of this story, Parita, who works out of the Tampa Florida office, has produced more than $2,240,000 in annual volume in a single year. She’s in control and she’s crushing it. For Parita, it’s loving what she does and competing in the challenge of the moment.

“You can’t put a challenge in front of me and me not accept it,” says Parita. “Even growing up, I was always a pretty smart kid, and everything was always a competition for me. In middle school, I saw awards and I liked to win things. So I saw if you got straight A’s, you’d get an award, so I did that. If there were medals and ribbons for academics, I won those too. If there were awards to be had, I was just wired to try and win them all. But no sports, no athletics. My parents said no, they told me just do well in school, that’s your job.”

But prior to success in middle school, the job of learning her parents focused so heavily on, led to an experience that changed Parita’s life.

“When I was 8-years-old I was sent to a boarding school,” she says. “My parents shipped my sister and I off to India, we didn’t see them for an entire year. My dad had no faith in the American education system so he hoped we’d get a better education in India.”

“They later learned that the school, while great with academics, was horrible in how they treated students. I was so naive back then and I didn’t know the rules but they didn’t care, beating me on a regular basis until I learned.”

“My sister had to really step up and take care of me over there, she even went directly to the headmaster to get a teacher fired because of how they had treated me. My sister hated my parents for sending us – she promised them she would never speak to them again. The school was so strict – they would cut our phone line if we were crying when talking to our parents, they would only let us send letters following their pre-written scripts so that we couldn’t complain about the treatment or that we were sad. I remember being so dramatic, one day I went to the nurse and pretended like I was dying, just hoping they would let me go home. It’s less painful to think about it now, but it was such a challenge to deal with then. Some of my strongest memories are from that year. We really had to grow up and come back completely changed.”

Coming back to the states and her life again in Florida, Parita says she continued to excel in school, got straight A’s, had walls of ribbons for academic accomplishments, and even competed in the world of art, a talent she discovered she had.

But Parita admits her solo competitive focus also led to a challenge for her. “The problem is not being on a team, but instead competing in all these things individually, so it did not make me a team player,” she says. “It was difficult for me to learn later in life because it has always been me, myself, and I. Plus I’m a middle child as well, with the attention needs that come with that life situation. So I had to learn to not be a controlling person.”

Parita says she comes by some of this naturally and she admits, culturally.

“My last name tells you the medical field is where my parents wanted me to go,” says Parita. “Both my siblings are doctors, and when I got to college, I figured I was going to be a doctor too. But I went to those classes my first semester I hated every minute of it. The first year of pre-med was difficult and so now I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Plus, growing up, my family was very conservative.”

“I entered the world of college, and all of a sudden it was like, ‘what is THIS?’ I was very, very sheltered as a kid and so the first year of college was rough. I was not allowed to date in high school, so when I got to college at the University of Florida, it was a wake-up call to what the rest of the world was doing! Plus, I was hating my classes, but I had a friend who was in business college. I picked up one of his business books one day, started reading it and I loved every minute of it. I didn’t want to put the book down. I immediately switched to business school and graduated in general business management with a focus on finance.”

When she wrapped school, Parita began her corporate life in Minneapolis, having been offered a position after an internship at Target headquarters the summer before her senior year. Leaving Florida behind wasn’t easy, but she knew she had to do it.

“I was always the one in my family to fly the coop,” says Parita, “to explore and learn new things. Being out on my own for the first time was scary, exciting, and fun. I’ve always been a career person. I like dressing up in my suits, paying my own bills, and the work at this job was not anything crazy. I worked as a business analyst for the ice cream department. My job was to make sure all the stores in the Target family always had enough ice cream. It was not really fun, but there were a lot of numbers and systems, and I love spreadsheets, but I was working a 40-hour workweek and getting my work done in 20 hours. I was very bored and not challenged at all.”

A promotion to being in charge of eggs, margarine, cream cheese, and bagels, while appetizing for Parita, didn’t satisfy her hunger for wanting more out of a corporate career than what she was doing. “I went to my manager and told him I needed more. I had already brought on and mentored new employees. He told me I was not next in line for a promotion. He said, ‘sometimes, we have to wait things out.’ “He said that, and I quit the next day.”

Parita believed a move down south to Houston, Texas where one of her friends lived, would be a welcome change of pace. But it also exposed what Parita says is one of her biggest weaknesses. She says her friend, a very successful entrepreneur told Parita to come work with her. “She said live with me and we’ll split the rent. Then a month later, she ghosted me. She moved out and I never saw her again. Sadly, that is one of my biggest flaws. I put my trust in the wrong people. It happened in Minneapolis as well, where myself and a few friends had a falling out. I have friendship abandonment issues. It’s strange. I have my dad’s brain, but most of me is my mom’s heart. My mom is all heart, all day. I put my heart out there and see the absolute best in people, I don’t see the red flags or flaws.”

“But then again, growing up, I watched my dad have the same challenge. He had helped build a small company and work as a day trader, but then he ended up trusting the wrong people, and he lost nearly everything. It was very difficult for the whole family. Some families never fully recover from that. I learned then that money doesn’t buy happiness, but not having it can prevent happiness. I was on a mission to make sure we could provide for our family, but that everything would be ok.”

Flash forward to a move to Tampa, Florida, and eventually working on a passion of Parita’s, fitness. She had come across a workout style and a studio called 4U Fitness, a small startup company.

But after a five-year, all-in effort as COO to help the founder of the business grow in Florida, and even expand with a center in Manhattan, New York – Parita was let go, right before Covid rushed in and nearly crushed the fitness industry, with only the strong and the financially stable able to survive.

Challenge, change, and circumstance can be a triple threat that few can survive, but at USHEALTH Advisors, Covid found its match. During the pandemic year of 2020, USHA was thriving, and right at the end of 2020 was when Parita found the company that turned her life around.

“I was coming out of nearly a year of being quarantined and unhappy with my marriage and lack of employment, “says Parita. “In December of 2020, I put my resume up online and within hours I got an email from USHEALTH Advisors to come in for a presentation/interview. There I was in a big room with about 30 people, when Regional Leader, Jason Greif rolls in on a hoverboard with headphones around his neck and talks about the company, the opportunity, and the paychecks. I still remember my interview after the presentation when I was asked what my husband did. I told them, he’s a dentist. My interviewer said, ‘that’s cute, you’re going to make more money than him!’”

“I began with USHA on January 4th, right after the holidays and I was so excited to be back working and doing it for myself. The hardest part is getting started because this is all a mental game and until you hit that first sale you  think this thing is impossible because you’re also comparing yourself to others.”

“But I was working with superstars like Max Willett, Brian Fuller, and Tierra Bianchi. I hit my milestone of $100,000 AV in my first seven weeks. I still remember I told Max early on, I’m bringing you dinner and getting ten minutes with you. He had so many appointments I couldn’t get to him until 9 pm. He told me about the CRM and the different ways to approach leads, so helpful.”

“Then one day there was a panel of all the top producers, and I literally asked Brian Fuller about 20 questions about how he did what he did. I learned how important social media is in all of this. I reached out to people on social media and got lots of no’s, lots of questions, but kept doing it until someone said yes. My first two big clients were medical professionals. They told me, you need to go find more like us. That’s what I focused on with social media and stumbled upon different influencers, asking them how can I help with insurance and introducing them to our referral program. Then I was on the way.”

It was back to basics for Parita. Her own basics, the same she had developed from when she was much younger, and going after academic success. You must learn, gain knowledge, and then the most important ingredient, implement, take action.

Parita says it’s also about rituals, routines, and rhythms. Her day rolls like this:

5 am for an hour of cardio.
Be in the office by 7:45 am.
Make calls until 1 pm.
Do weight training in the middle of the day.
Run errands, visit the therapist (Parita says everyone should have one :))
Back at the office by 3 or 4 pm and run appointments until 10 pm.
Sleep, then rinse, wash and repeat.

It’s the secret to success, which actually holds no secrets, but simply leaves clues.

That’s Parita Patel’s world and she is relishing every moment of it because she says she loves what she does and who she’s doing it with. She says USHEALTH Advisors means the world to her.

“The past six years I had lost little bits of myself until there was nothing left by the time I arrived at USHA. I owe a huge thank you and have so much love for Rachel Waddington and Krystal Roberts for helping me build my mindset and heal my heart to help me find myself again. What they, Jason Grief, and above all else, what USHA has done for me is more than just given me financial freedom, it has given me myself back. I’ve found Parita again and the return of my confidence and self-worth and learning how to self-love are all priceless. I owe all of that to USHA and will always work my hardest to give back to this company.”

Yes, finally Parita feels like she’s back in control.

“I want people to understand that they need not give control to anything or anybody. There should be an internal locus of control. We all want to focus on the external circumstances to determine what happens in our lives, but the internal locus of control is appreciating and realizing that everything that happens for you, is because of you. Everything that has happened is because of decisions I made, good or bad. Don’t give control of the happiness that you want to anyone else. This is your life. What are you doing with your time here?”

“You can’t live a life of regret and go and get what you want. This is my biggest message, forever.”

Until next time, thanks for taking the time.

Your Storyteller,
Mark Brodinsky