Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 122 - The "Optimization Trap" Travel Advisors Face
Transcript
- Rachel K: It's day 122 of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host Rachel K and ⁓ if you got questions about me go to elevatewithrachelk.com. Today's episode is not about spirituality, thank goodness, because I love to talk about it, but I also don't want to offend anybody, so it's like the hardest thing for me talk about. I don't want to be like, sorry. Today's episode is the TA's optimization trap. The optimization trap, what is the optimization trap? Are you in it? And if you aren't, let's talk about signs that you are slipping into the over-optimizing. All right, Rachel, can you define the optimization trap for us? Sure, Rachel, it's always improving. It's always improving, always optimizing, always making everything better. That isn't necessary. It's when you're trying to improve everything. So it's kind of like, I'm gonna be really, people are just gonna hate me, it's fine. It's kind of like people who start getting plastic surgery and they're just like, oh, just a little botox, a little filler. And then they start looking like a Halloween mask in like three years, because they're over-optimizing and it's like, Margaret, you're 80, it's okay. You know? Like, it's okay to age everybody. It's fine. That's kind of what you're doing in your business when you're in the optimization trap. It's perfectly fine. But you're just like, ⁓ let's add more filler and now implants and now a BBL and now liposuction here and now a facelift and now this second facelift. ⁓ my facelift is melting now. Better get another one. Let's, it's, know, taking care of yourself is one thing when it's like too excessive. There is a point where it gets too excessive, right? I have no problem with people being like, ⁓ I need Botox or I feel like I need a little filler. It makes me feel better. It's when it's like you turn into a giant pile of plastic, OK? Or then you're like, I need veneers because my teeth aren't perfect. Like, calm down. Nobody's teeth are perfect. OK, so always improving isn't necessary. And it actually impedes development. I wrote like a perennial plant. Why did I write like a perennial plant? That's probably the better example than looks maxing. Let's see, perennial plants. ⁓ that's like if you have a perennial plant and you're like obsessing over pruning it and optimizing the soil every single season and I'm gonna have these award-winning whatever the heck plant blooms. ⁓ What? What are you doing? Just leave it be. If it's a native plant and it's a parent, like native plants are often perennials and gardens, just leave it be and like take care of it when you need it. You don't have to like perfectly prune a blackberry bush. It's gonna turn into a giant pile of thorns and berries anyway. Like it's, who cares? Now, if you don't want it to get invasive, because they, at least in my area can be invasive, you can prune those back. and they're still gonna come back. signs of you are over-optimizing in your business. ⁓ gosh, this is a long episode. I might have to break it up into two. I'll watch the timer. ⁓ completely different content strategy. Every single week you decide, ⁓ Facebook doesn't work after one week. So you're like, I'm gonna try Pinterest one week later. I'm gonna try this one week later. Well, none of this works for me. We'll talk about how this gets you into like nothing works for me spiral as well. Not sticking with the system long enough for any kind of feedback or results. Any kind of system. This could be... how you are time blocking, this could be ⁓ how you are managing your finances, this could be the CRM you're using and the workflows that you maybe even purchased and paid to have them set up. You gotta stick with stuff for a little bit longer than you think. Go back to my Discipline is Freedom episode. ⁓ You feel like nothing works because you don't give it enough time. anything that you're trying out and you're like, this isn't working. I'll give you an example here in a second. This isn't working, I'm just gonna give up on it. Flashback to like 2020 when I was like, I'm gonna market on TikTok. And I had no idea how to use the app because I was 37. Was I? I don't know, I in my 30s. I was old enough to not be cool with all the hip caps learning, hip cats learning a new platform. And I didn't want the app on my phone and I was very, I was that old person that refused, very, very stubborn, like, this isn't how I did things from back in my day. Like, that's kinda how I was. I'm gonna do it all on my desktop and I'm gonna schedule it all out. Back then, you could schedule out on, I think you could, anyway. And then I was like, I'm gonna make this really cool content, it was terrible content, by the way. I remember my first TikTok because I refused to put the app on my phone because I was that person. Took, I think, three hours. I was cussin' in my office. Why isn't this working? What do you mean I have to do it this way? I was trying to do things like the old YouTube way. And I was so mad, I downloaded all this useless software I didn't need to download. All I needed to do was whip out the old phone and be like blah blah blah blah blah, beep bop boop to the sound, done. And if I gave up on that first three hour test and it's like, it's like a 10 second video and it's not even me, it's so sad. That is an example of like, nothing works. Well, I was the problem in that case. And then I started posting and I'm like, what do you mean I'm only getting like 10 views or something ridiculous, you know? And I had to stop and be like, okay, Rachel, you've got to do this for at least three months straight. Make a commitment to post once a day for 90 days. It's not gonna be good content. Just make sure like you can always improve it later. And it was like, 30 days into consistent posting is when I started getting connections with my ideal client avatars. Shoot, I know the name of the first person I got from TikTok. I'm not gonna give that name out, but I can't remember when their wedding was. I feel like they got married in March of 2022. and we worked together for over a year. yeah, I started this journey in like July and then I remember in August we did the consultation and it took them a few weeks to make the decision to work with me. ⁓ But I could have given up and been like, I'm not getting any consultations, this doesn't work two weeks in. And my life would be completely different. Okay another sign, you are exhausted from the constant changes you're implementing in your life because you can't just stick with one routine for three weeks. And here's the thing, if you create a team and make a team, a routine, if you create a team, super friends, all right, you create a routine, test it out for like three weeks and don't beat yourself up if you don't adhere to it perfectly. I have a lot of ⁓ agents. that I do kind of like coach and mentor, talk about how difficult it is for them to stick to the schedule that they have created. You got to start with small steps. I mean you can time block out everything, but once you get that time blocking done, because this is part of the constant changes, like this is the biggest thing I see with agents is like I can't seem to stick to a set schedule, I feel like I'm all over the place. So. Force yourself to only stick to one departments. You can screw up if you're like, I've gotta focus on marketing. Time block out time for marketing. You can have everything else scheduled out. And tell yourself for three weeks, my main goal is marketing. I'm gonna focus on that. I will do my best to try and hit these other quote unquote departments like operations, service, finance. And marketing is my main focus. That's the one. I got to get through three weeks of consistently creating, posting content. And this is how I kind of have it on my schedule. You don't have to follow it perfectly. A lot of people, especially more creative minded, leans, entrepreneurial. We don't like to stick with set schedules. I have everything time blocked on my calendar. More of, at this point, a reminder of what I need to do that day. Like I have lunch at noon. Sometimes I don't have lunch at noon, but I'm like, okay, well, I finished working at 12.15, and then I'm like, ⁓ it's lunchtime. I can rest until one, and I can't feel a need to do something else, you know? And sometimes like I have on my calendar when I'm recording these podcasts when I'm doing the editing when I'm doing all the different things and all the other things in my business unless it's a client call if I want to record my podcast stuff like Seven o'clock at night because I feel like it I can and I can swap things in my schedule. So just know that When you are testing out a schedule, test it for three weeks or any kind of change. Test it for three weeks at a minimum and do your best to at least get the tasks accomplished that you have. Don't beat yourself up if you aren't perfect, okay? So when you are exhausted because you're constantly changing, you spend a ton of energy of how can I fix this? How can I this problem? How can I fix this problem? That takes a lot of energy from your brain. Your brain already takes up a lot of your calories and energy throughout the day. So, if you're feeling super exhausted, because you're constantly like, I can't get my schedule right, I can't get my VAs to do things right, I can't get my clients to follow my procedures because you're constantly changing them, just stick with what you have for a while, okay? Do your best to stick with it, stop changing things. But, You are over-optimizing also if you're doing that. All right, analysis paralysis. You can't make a decision because there's too much information and noise. So maybe you're torn between one CRM or another. That should be a decision that you can make within five minutes or less after reviewing cost, features, benefits. And no, you're not. When you get used to being the leader, being the CEO, That would be a pretty easy decision to make. When you're new to that kind of thing, it can be very difficult to make those decisions. So you get into analysis paralysis because you're trying to optimize your business constantly and that is also a little bit of a sign that you're lacking the confidence in what you have now. So it's like, let's pretend you're a seamstress. Oh, that's my knee hitting my globe over here. Let's pretend you're a seamstress. and you have a pattern for a dress and you worked very hard on this pattern for a dress and you start creating these dresses and people are like, ⁓ this is such a well-made dress. Ooh, you got this, it's bias cut fabric so it'll drape real well and show off the old curvy-roonies. Whatever, I don't know what your dress is. I got it in my brain, but I don't know what your dress in your brain is. And then you see another shop open up or there's a hat maker. I watched Howl's Moving Castle over the weekend, so I'm just like in pretending that we're all just little shop people mode. I'm picturing all of this in Studio Ghibli animation, by the way, if you want to join me on that journey. So then the hat maker comes by. And they're like, ⁓ well, we have this new pattern for a dress. We got this from blah, blah, blah, country, whatever. And it's innovative because it has pockets. And then you're like, uh-oh, it has pockets. I better optimize my dress pattern that's been working just fine. I need to add pockets. But unfortunately, because it's maybe a bias cut, I don't know anything about clothes making. or maybe where the seams are, it's really, really hard for you to get the pockets in, so you have to recreate the entire pattern and start from scratch. Meanwhile, everyone that loves your dresses are coming into the shop and like, why don't you have any dresses? And you're just like, because I need to make this better pattern because the hat shop has a dress with pockets. Do you understand what I'm saying here? Like can you imagine going into a Studio Ghibli dress shop and seeing a little woman just slaving away on a pattern and perfecting this pattern when she had perfectly good dresses that people wanted, that you wanted to buy, but now she doesn't have them in stock because she's not making them, because she's like, stop everything, I gotta optimize this dress. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Analysis Paralysis, but at the same time, she can't figure out how to get that pattern done, right? She's not offering the product that people already like and enjoy or service because she's feeling the need to always be doing better and always optimizing. So with Analysis Paralysis, there is a lot of information out there. There's so many tools that can help travel advisors and you don't really need all of them. There are many travel advisors who don't use any special tools and some build out their own tools and that's okay too. But. Sometimes it can be hard to make a decision and you get it stuck in analysis paralysis. That is part of the opposite. Blah, blah, blah, trap. Okay, do do do do do. I need to make a second episode out of this. I'm gonna have to change these days. So, just so you know, habits in general. Day 122, yep. Habits in general. take three weeks of consistent daily behavior to truly form. Habits good or bad, going for a walk, doing five minutes of jumping, jump roping, doing push-ups every day. It takes three weeks of consistently doing it even when you don't want to, to really get that habit to form. Daily Commitment. So when you are working on optimizing anything, please give yourself four to six weeks of consistent effort, even if it's just like I'm gonna make a TikTok or real or short whatever, short form video. Every single day, that's, it will start out three hours like me. If you're like me, it's just terrible technology. But eventually, that ends up being three to five minutes of your day. Especially like once your weekend and you stop worrying about am I confident enough to do this? You just put it out there, right? ⁓ But you need to do it for four to six weeks consistently before you have enough data to really make a decision. And this is why I mentioned you should do the monthly review because that's, ⁓ guess what? Four, sometimes five weeks. Huh, weird. And you can be like, ⁓ now if you really, really struggle, there's a number of reasons why you can really, really struggle with maintaining daily habits. My best advice that I can give you because I don't know, we're all a little neurodivergent so I don't know how neurodivergent you are, but the best advice I can give you is to tell yourself this is my goal for the day every single day, right? I will post one video today or one social media post or I will schedule out one every day, make that commitment. Say it out loud, write it down if you need to, and also if things come up to where you're just like, is no way, like emergency surgery type stuff, that's okay, it's okay. Just start again, keep going. Because if you make a commitment to do it daily and you still miss a day here or there, like over the course of 30 days, you're probably gonna end up hitting 20 to 25 of those days. And that's still enough relevant data to like make an informed decision versus, oh, well, I posted once here a week ago and nothing's happening. I must be the worst. Well, you're not doing it daily. You gotta show up every single day. All right. Um, tomorrow we're going to talk about this is a long episode. ⁓ when you get that four to six weeks of consistent data. I wrote long form about something here in my notes. Guys, I'm, it's fine. ⁓ yeah, so tomorrow's gonna be about these habits. It was all gonna be one episode, but we're at 20 minutes, folks. That's where I stop. 20 minutes. Alright, thanks for listening. Share this with someone who is like slaving away and not getting anything done because they always need bigger, better, bigger, better, bigger, better, not good enough. The optimization trap, be like, low key, this might be you. And then they might get mad at you. It's fine. Or they might thank you. Otherwise, have a good day.