Hamida Marie Trainor

I don't focus on the money, I focus on the end result for the individual or the company that I'm doing my work for. That moment early in my career when I helped that injured teenager in the hospital taught me that while my motivation was originally money, now I have the opportunity to make money and help people to that level. I've always realized from that individual perspective that I might be focused on getting corporate deals, but I gotta remember that that little guy at the end of the corporate deal needs to have protection. So my success comes from keeping that focus on the people I'm serving, not just the financial outcome.

The best career advice I ever received was to not be afraid to hire someone smarter than me. This advice helped me build winning teams for Aflac by treating people with honesty and integrity. I am one of the few people who had less than 50% turnovers because I trained and treated my team with respect. And we won, as a group, we won lots of awards. I've kept in touch with everybody who left my team, who went on to another field or a different career on a different path. Like, if I go to Atlanta, I visit reps that used to work for me here in Florida. So I think my biggest achievement was really putting other people into the business.

This field is meant for women, so not to get discouraged. It might be controlled by men, but it's meant for women.

Challenges in my field are abundant. People shy away from learning about employee benefits because they assume it's just health insurance and it's expensive. But that also is an opportunity, because when someone sits down with me and they learn that maybe the health insurance they have is the problem, and we can restructure and spend less and get more out of it. So it's just getting past that wall of, that's okay, I already offer health insurance, I'm not interested.

Honesty and integrity are most important to me. I'm a very direct person. I don't really know how to lie, and I can pick up on it when someone's lying to me because you can tell the nervousness and the different perspectives. In my business, what I'm doing doesn't work if you're not being honest with me. In my personal life, the same thing. I mean, I have a husband and a teenage daughter, so right now we're in that phase of learning to tell the truth, and the whole truth. That's how I was raised. My parents were big on integrity and honesty. You don't have to have wealth, you don't have to have status to have those things. You can have them no matter who you are.