There is no doubt Lindsey Limerick knows how to take a deep dive and make a big splash.
A competitive swimmer from the time she was very young, Lindsey eventually became a national swim champion representing her high school in Chatanooga, Tennessee.
“One of my greatest accomplishments in life is winning that championship,” says Lindsey. “My childhood consisted of a lot of swimming and swim practice. I swam for like 16 years with my brother, and we swam a lot. My parents started me out when I was young. They wanted me to try a bunch of sports and then they narrowed it down to one – because it was the thing I was best at I guess, swimming. The year I won the championship the swim team was the highest placing team in the nation.”
Any competitive sport, whether it’s swimming or the like, takes a tremendous amount of dedication and discipline, tools and traits that you develop when you’re young and serve you later in life – even though at the moment, it might be hard to see the path where it will lead. For Lindsey, the rigors of the pool life have led to a work ethic like no other.
“There was a lot of discipline in my life,” says Lindsey. “My parents were very strict at home and then growing up and always on a team, whatever swim team I was on at the time was always one of the higher-ranked ones. Those coaches are usually a little sterner and maybe a little meaner to a point, and I definitely learned a bunch of discipline from those days. I would say even the team sport aspect, I learned a lot of how to work with others and all have one single goal. But also on the individual side, I learned how to just look at a goal and try to hit that and the repetition of having to do something every single day toward that goal.”
Work. Discipline. Dedication. Those concepts Lindsey internalized have led her to great success where she now resides, which is as a Field Sales Leader with USHEALTH Advisors. And Lindsey’s on a roll, leading her team to more than $21 million in team production and having issued more than $2.8 million in personal business, all in a little more than four years, and all in the face of some adversity, for there were those who believed she couldn’t do it.
“Sometimes God puts critics in our lives to keep you stirred up. He’ll allow critics, discouragers, even some haters in – so when you feel tired, think you wanna give up, you’ll keep pressing forward, shaking it off, not because you feel like it, but because you don’t want to give your critics the joy of seeing you defeated.” – Joel Osteen
“It’s been a pretty exciting ride because plenty of people didn’t know if I would be really good at this, including my family,” laughs Lindsey. “It’s funny to talk now to friends like Carson Rodgers (now a successful Division Leader) and another agent, Josiah Harwell, (now a Field Sales Leader). They didn’t really think I’d be good at this. They actually contracted me, but they did it in a different office because they were worried it would be awkward if I failed, essentially. I think I proved a lot of people wrong in the beginning. People started calling me the Carson Rogers of that division, which was fun. I started out pretty fast and I’ve improved year to year. It’s just been a lot of fun proving everybody wrong, family and friends included!”
There may have been doubters in Lindsey’s life because of her former track record just before coming to USHA. Her wonderful water success aside, she had recently come out of a position where she was working a lot, but not focused on just one thing… kind of just treading water you might say.
During her senior year in college and then for about a year or so after, Lindsey worked at a local TV station in Knoxville, Tennessee. But not “feeling it” in the TV business and wanting a change of pace and feeling like, in her words, “the grandma in that college town,” Lindsey decided to make a move.
“I didn’t know what to do,” says Lindsey. “But I knew that I needed to make a change and so I packed up my stuff up and moved to Nashville, but there was nothing here. I had no jobs. I applied to a bunch. In my first year, I kind of struggled to be honest. I had four jobs. I was a dog walker, a nail salon receptionist, a swim coach, and a financial advisor.”
“I took the Series 6, 7, 63, and 65 and was trying to do that. It just didn’t work out. I was pretty poor for a year or so, even struggled to buy food at Taco Bell and it got to the point where I could not afford rent one December. I had met somebody who worked at USHA and I asked for them to give me a shot. It was supposed to be just trying it out because I’d already had the certifications in the other job and then ended up just loving this and telling financial advising that it could go by the wayside.”
“All things must change to something new, to something strange. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“I just knew I could make this happen. I mean, this opportunity is something I think where you get a formula by watching other people doing it. So to me, I thought if somebody else can do this, there’s no reason I can’t. I worked a lot. I mean I was there all the time, wanting to learn quickly, I was super poor. I needed a lot of money, I had to pay my rent in two weeks.”
“So I just found the person at my office who did the best, who wrote the most business, and I just copied him. I beat him to the office every morning. I stayed every night and left only when he left. I just copied him until I finally figured it out myself and could create my own schedule. But really, I mean, I was annoying. I just would go find the person who was doing the best that week and I would sit next to them and I’d be like, “what are you doing, can I follow you for the day? I didn’t really have the option to not succeed. I kind of put all my eggs in one basket. There was no option but to succeed.”
“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
It was from the lessons Lindsey had learned earlier in life – if you jump in with both feet, focus on one thing and swim like hell – good things can happen. That’s how champions are made.
“Joining USHEALTH Advisors was an exciting and scary time for me,” says Lindsey. “Back at the news station, the last time I had a steady job and a steady paycheck, I think I made like $900 every two weeks. At the time I thought that was good. So starting here, I took the job just because I literally could not afford to pay rent that month and I was just hoping to make it. The second week after I issued my first new business, I made $4,000. That’s what really hooked me with this company… I mean, you’re telling me if I work really hard, I can get paid for that, rather than just hourly? I was all in.”
All in means living the life and the USHA culture focusing on HOPE – Helping Other People Everyday – and hard work. Hard work in service to others. And doing it all with what Lindsey says is her secret sauce… a positive mindset.
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar
“If people said, I like Lindsey Limerick, they would probably say because of my positivity, I would guess,” she says. “It can be kind of annoying sometimes, but I think it’s definitely one of the reasons that my team has taken off. We’re really big into the culture. I am. Just having an environment that is a positive one and one that you want to be around because this job isn’t going to work if you’re angry. I am the annoying positive poly who tries to find the bright side. I would say with this career, that’s also really helpful because there are a lot of ups and downs. It’s a lot harder at this job to be angry and still work it. So for me, annoyingly, I know it’s a weird answer, but I would probably say positivity, just having a positive outlook, being optimistic.”
Looking at the bright side of things is a big driver since attitude steers the bus, but it’s the work you put in that gives it gas… and as Lindsey has learned your tank best be full if you want to make it to your destination. Here, there are no secrets, hard work works.
“Whew, there’s plenty of work to do,” says Lindsey. “It is even more time-consuming now as a Field Sales Leader. I am incredibly passionate and involved with my team. My goal is just to get my team to see this opportunity and experience it like I have because it’s just been the most incredible career ever. I run a lot of contests for my team to incentivize them. We do a lot of dial sessions where we’ll be at the office starting at 6 AM (CST). Tonight, for example, we’re having a dial session and everybody’s staying until 8 PM. I usually work until about 10 or 11 every night, not always necessarily at the office, but doing work that needs to be done. I’ve learned so much from mentors like my Division Leader Carson and my Satellite, Kyle Weller. We hang out and discuss work all the time. I would say a lot of my success is from learning from and bouncing ideas off of both of them. We vibe very well and it makes sense that our downline of agents and leaders are all on the same page.”
“Monday through Friday I come into the office. I come in on some Saturdays. I don’t do as much on Saturdays, except if I’m holding a meeting or helping agents with calls. But Sunday, I actually stay home, and that’s one of my big days for my business where I send out texts and try to make appointments for the week. Just because being an FSL for me has certainly limited the amount of time that I have personally, to write personal business. So I try to get that where I can. Sunday is definitely one of those days.”
The Sunday business routine is something Lindsey picked up from Carson. For years, this was Carson’s go-to day to reach out to people and do applications. Lindsey has learned a lot more from Carson… and the two became close, close enough that Lindsey’s dream with USHA has now led to a new team… just about a month ago, Carson asked Lindsey to marry him.
“It was really cute,” says Lindsey. “Carson had a divisional 2021 end of the year awards party and gave an award to everyone who made their bonus, the top writers and whoever hit a million in production for the year and things like that. Then the last award was the team unity award. I didn’t know what that was about. I was like, “Why am I receiving this?” I got called on stage and he proposed to me in front of everyone, which was really cool.”
The two are now making wedding plans and continuing to live life together and with their dog, Baker, the six-year-old Jack Russell Terrier with whom Lindsey says she’s obsessed. “Baker’s been with me since the reporting job in my senior year in college,” she says. He was the only one that slept the same hours I slept during my overnight shift at the TV station.”
And what of that TV career? Lindsey went to college and graduated with a major in journalism and electronic media and thought her dream would be in the TV business… but after giving it a shot, Lindsey learned that it’s ok to switch gears, to make a shift, and to think outside the box.
“But dreams change. Fate has a way, showing you paths you want more.” – Abbi Glines
“It’s ok to drop the dream, so to speak,” says Lindsey. “I just didn’t love the dream I thought I had. The challenge was finding something that I really loved to do. Oddly, sales is not something that everybody talks about. So just the fact that I somehow found this and stuck with it, got good at it, and have made it to the point where I’m today. I would almost say is also my greatest accomplishment because I overcame all of that. It’s crazy to think where I would be if I had just stayed stagnant and not explored and tried to find something that would ignite the fire that I was looking for.”
Not only that, but when so many doubted she could do this, Lindsey felt that fire, took the deep dive, held nothing back, and proved them wrong.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Your Storyteller,
Mark Brodinsky
