"It wasn't about doing insurance the right way, but finding the right room," Monaco said. "There is no reason to not find comfort... For me, it was finding the right people."

Monaco started in the industry at age 26. At some point, he found himself at a networking event and he didn't know where or who he was supposed to be. He sat down with an industry peer one day, and said "I feel like I'm trapped... I'm not the person I'm being told to be."

His peer responded, "Just be f*****g real". These words hit Monaco like a brick. He didn't need to pretend to be someone else anymore.

"Just be yourself and the rest will kind of fall together," Monaco said.

Monaco shared that he grew up in a construction house with his dad being a builder. He joked that some people need classical music to calm down or feel at home, but for him, it was the sound of a compressor and a nail gun. Monaco even works on construction projects now, which include flipping houses with his father and one of his friends.

"The niche of construction is in my bones and in my genes," he said.

Early in your career, you are told to go find your centers of influence, and Monaco went immediately to his family, specifically his father. He explained that he immediately went through his father's Rolodex to find new clients. At this point, Monaco still had no idea that construction would become his niche. He was just trying to get new clients to build his book of business.

However, Monaco recalled a conversation he overheard between his father and mother "about not being able to afford health care bills for his the guys that worked for him". He spoke to his father about this and his father shared that the health care bills were the hardest thing to afford for his workers.

"Fast forward 17 years, I never thought of this conversation," Monaco said. Yet, it's clear the signs had been there all long, including playing with tools and legos as a kid.

Being comfortable, being around people you enjoy, and feeling at home is so important in life, Monaco said. "So why should our clients be any different?" He asked the crowd.

He explained that when he walks onto a job site, or a loading dock, that "it just feels natural".

"It brings a lot of realness to what I do... I understand margins and what it's like for the business owner to not be able to pay for health care," Monaco shared.

"They clients in the construction industry have allowed me to be myself, and they can be themselves," he said.

Monaco finished off his speech with a a pretty simple yet big take away: "Be yourself".

'Not everything can be overcome'

"I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of an overachiever," said Jennifer Berman, CEO, MZQ Consulting. Berman shares that at the beginning of her career, she didn't know how to stop. But, she had always been that way so it didn't seem like a big deal. "I was the top of my class everywhere I want," she said.

However, Berman had worked herself into the hospital multiple times. "And then I almost died. That's when I got the clue that maybe being unstoppable was not the best idea," Berman shared.

"What was I trying to prove?" She asked herself.

Yet, every time she went to the doctor, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. It felt like a million tests were run with no conclusive results and when the doctor ultimately couldn't figure out what was wrong, Berman was sent to another doctor.

With no diagnosis, Berman continued to work, taking conference calls from her hospital room and having a colleague bring work to the hospital. Even with undiagnosed, chronic pain, she knew she had to keep going and find her way through.

"You have two choices: You either live like a sick person or you don't stop," Berman said. "But it's hard when people don't understand and even harder when you don't understand."

Eventually, Berman was diagnosed with Connected Tissue Disease, which she describes as her ligaments being like "dry, rotted rubber bands". She posed the question, "Why didn't we know that?" Berman explained that in 19th century medicine, they divide everything by system of the body. Well, it's the tissue that connects all the systems together, which is why it was so hard to find a diagnosis because the medical community was looking at the systems rather than the connection of those systems.

"The real answer is one you all know as well. The system doesn't work that well," she said.

Berman asked a few more questions:

"How do you live as a patient?"

"How do you live a successful career?"

"What's the mindset?"

Her answer: "Finding the space in-between. Once that includes both accepting and understanding."

Berman explained that if you lean into the sick person mentality, you become stuck. Chronic sickness is not something that has a cure. However, if you don't accept and acknowledge your sickness, then you don't have much left. She said she had two choices left. She can either live her life only taking 3,000 steps a day or she can use a wheelchair and come and go as she pleases.

"Most people I know with my condition choose the 3,000 steps a day because they don;t want to be seen as disabled," she shared. "I don't want this to stop me, so why on earth would I not use the wheelchair and go wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go."

Berman shared that she started her own company in order to be able to control her own schedule for her family and herself. As a result of creating her own company and using her wheelchair, she is not in pain the way she would normally be.

"I am exponentially healthier today, than when I looked and seemed so much better," Berman said.

Berman can now travel for work and she can expand her career and journey, which are things she never imagined she could do, even in her sickest days. She explains that this only happened because "I leaned into and really accepted what I can and can't do. And I haven't let it stop me, but I've accepted that I can't do all of the thing I would like to do."

Berman finishes her BEN talk by saying, "There are pieces that aren't going to happen and that's okay. Not everything can be overcome, but there is always a way over, under, around, or through."

'Use your voice'

While the benefits industry is full of people with interesting and unique stories of their career journeys, Diana Miller’s story is one in particular that stands out. She was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, coming to the United States to attend college in Dubuque, Iowa. During her BEN Talk, Miller, now an advisor with Conner Insurance, shared the stories and experiences that helped shape her into who she is today.

“I’m starting to identify points in my life that really define why I do what I do today,” she explained. “It’s not because of luck. It’s not professional. It’s been deeply influenced by things that have taken place in my life.”

In Colombia, her father was a politician, not an easy career under any circumstances. But Miller recalled one instance where drug lord Pablo Escobar bombed a plane that her father was supposed to be on--but due to some issues with work, he wasn’t.

Then, “When I was six years old, we were heading down the stairs of our apartment complex,” she said. “This person comes to us and says to us, ‘If it wasn’t because your daughter was next to you, I would blow your head off right now.’”

Despite events like these, her father persevered in his political career, fighting back against Colombia’s notorious drug cartels. Miller credited these experiences for developing “that grit in me.”

Fast forward to college, where not only did Miller get a scholarly education, but cultural, as well. She shared how she learned that in the United States, it’s NOT customary to bribe your way out of a speeding ticket. But she also shared her first experience with the U.S. health care system, an emergency room visits that resulted in a $40,000 bill.

“I had no insurance and I had no way to pay for that. I was sent to collections, I was scared, I thought I was going to get deported,” she said. “I couldn’t understand how it was $40,000 when it would be $1,000 in Colombia.” It turned out… okay. An advisor helped her negotiate the bill down to $10,000 and set up an installment plan.

Her college years also gave Miller her first taste of sales, from selling burial plots for her uncle’s in Los Angeles, which she credits with helping her develop empathy, to pedaling encyclopedias door-to-door, which was not a particularly successful endeavor and involved a lot of struggle--and a lot of PB&J sandwiches.

“From this experience, I learned independence, resourcefulness, camaraderie, the power of relationships and how much humanity is still out there,” she said.

Miller started working in insurance in 2013, and like many in the industry, it did not take her long to realize the system was broken. “After a while, the wakeup call came. I started looking at 20%, 30%, 40% premium increases. How can an employer afford this? … I realized employees and employers were getting less and paying more.”

She started attending industry events, started following industry leaders such as Nelson Griswold and David Contorno, which led her to Ben Conner (a 2020 Advisor of the Year finalist). “We started talking about what I did and what his agency did and I just thought he was a godsend,” Miller said. “This is my sign. This is the way I can pursue finding a better way to work with employers. I understood the answer was that you need to use your voice, your story.

“Think about the different places you’ve been in your life,” Miller concluded. “Find your why. I have started to pay attention to where your heart breaks and where it burns. That’s where it all begins.”

'Cracking the mask'

Spoiler alert: By the end of Lisa Hutcherson’s BEN Talk, the entire audience was in tears.

“I am a product of the housing projects of St. Louis, Missouri,” Hutcherson, a consultant with LME Consulting, began. “When talking about my niche, I had to really think about that.”

Hutcherson was shaped, for better and worse, by her upbringing, but it wasn’t until later in life that she began to unlearn those lessons, to fight back against many of the values instilled in her by her father. Some of them were good, and worth carrying through life:

“One good thing my dad always said was, ‘We’re not going to live here forever. Better days are coming.’” Hutcherson said. “The other thing he said was, Never burn your bridges because you might have to cross them again.’ ”

Some of them were a little more harmful: “The other thing he said to me was, ‘There’s good white folks in the world and some not so great ones. But never look a white man in the eye.”

That experience was just one of many that left Hutcherson with an intense sense of shame. Another was simply being a darker-skinned Black woman--even in a Black family. “I was teased and made fun of a lot. I was the kid who got the last pick of stuff. That put a stigma on me for years. Even how I felt about myself, how I functioned in work, my career, my professional life.”

But Hutcherson learned to cope by, as she said, “wearing a mask.”

“I put it on real good,” she said. “I fooled myself most of the time. I was so good at it and nobody else knew. I was good at my job, good at my work. I did it in a way that you would never know about all this other shit going on inside of me.”

It took a “fortuitous encounter” with Michael Newman, a white, former police officer from Wisconsin -- the representation of “everything I was afraid of,” Hutherson said, to crack the mask. She first met him while interviewing for a job -- one that her coworkers at the time told her she would never land. “This was a new bridge for me. I’m crossing into new territory, but I’m scared to death.”

But all it took to knock down that imposing facade was a clump of mustard. “I looked at the bottom of his blue Brooks Brothers pants, and there was a big clump of mustard,” Hutercherson said. “Oh my god, he’s like regular people!”

Hutcherson overcame her fear, and while working with Newman, learned the ins and outs of the insurance industry. Eventually, the mask that she still wore cracked. “He cracked this emotional mask that I had been wearing for years,” she said. “There was so much unexpected joy in the relationship with this guy. I felt seen for the first time in my career.”

That was just the beginning. From there, Hutcherson began attending benefits conferences. She met another industry legend, Jessia Woods. That led her to BenefitsPRO’s Paul Wilson, and then Susan Combs… and eventually, she found herself standing on stage at the Broker Expo, with a crowd full of loving supporters. “My ladies are here in the room today,” she said. “We support each other. I’m pulling from their strength right now.”

Hutcherson has written a book about her journey, freeing herself from the mask and finding her true self.

“That encounter with Michael was healing in so many ways,” she said. “I began to shed the armor, all of the walls, all of the bad things. I look white guys in the eye all the time. They don’t bite. They have mustard on their pants.”

Hutcherson has become deeply entrenched in the benefits community and even hosts, with Newman, her own event. And at events like hers and the Broker Expo, she preaches the power of connecting and hopes that others were lucky enough to experience the same “fortuitous encounters” that shaped her journey. “I hope you met the people who are going to change your life,” she said. “It may not happen tomorrow, or even next week. But when you make them, expect them. When you come to events like this, I hope you come expecting. But more than that, I hope you come to give.”