Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 255: Who Did You Become as a Travel Advisor This Quarter?
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency to Your Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner helping travel agents. My headphones can I just show you the tangle. Where is my producer? Do you see this knot if you're on YouTube? Big old knot of cords. Today is day 255. Who have I become this quarter? That's a great question to ask yourself when you are doing your quarterly review to help you step into leadership slash CEO mindset. We've been focusing the last few days since day 247 on the business, the numbers, the offers, the delegation, the pace. Today, let's ask a different and more personal question. Why did you actually like why? I can't I can't do this anymore. I'm almost there. Who did you actually become over these past 12 weeks? In large part a reflection of a business is the person leading it. So who have you become? Reviewing only the outputs, like the revenue, the bookings, and the leads, without also reviewing your own growth is an incomplete picture. And by goodness, I don't like people who are like, I don't need to grow, I'm too stubborn. I don't like it when I hear that. Because guess what? Those same agents are like, why am I why am I stuck at this revenue level? Why am I stuck? I feel so stuck. I ha and now I'm burnt out and I don't want to do anything. Because you're not reflecting and you're not seeing who you become or who you want to become. There is no goal. And if you don't have personal development goals on who you'd like to become and how you'd like your life to be built, your business will eventually become a reflection of that. anyway. You are never gonna be the same person you were at the start of this quarter. You may not be the same person at the start of this day, for better or for worse. that deserves some honest attention to pay attention to. Two travel agents could post identical revenue numbers for the quarter. One could have grown 100x as a leader and a person in that process, while the other repeated the exact same patterns and habits the entire time. The numbers alone can't tell you which one happened. So numbers are important, but you want to see numbers over a long period of time. So four categories that you are worth reflecting on when you're taking your time off when you're at your own corporate retreat for the quarter. Number one, skill. What did you actually get better at in the last twelve weeks? specific competency, a habit, a way of handling something, a way of thinking about something that used to trip you up. This might be something really concrete, like getting faster at building proposals, or something really soft, like handling a difficult pricing conversation with more confidence. that's one of the four categories. Category number two, yeah, courage. Where did you show real courage even in small moments that nobody else noticed? I'll tell you one way to grow your courage if you're like nowhere. if you put your face on a camera and showed up on social media at any point in time in the last 12 weeks, 12 weeks, and you haven't been showing up at all with your face on camera, congrats, you've developed more courage because it takes a lot of courage to put your face on camera to billions of people. People and be like, hi, I exist. maybe it could be sending the cold like outreach message that you've been avoiding or having the honest conversation with the client instead of the comfortable avoidant one, uh-huh, we're just gonna keep working on this trip instead of being like you violated my terms, I have to fire you. Whoa, that's pretty courageous. these moments don't really show up in spreadsheets again, but they are the big turning points and how your business will grow because you are growing. Number three is your belief. What's a belief about yourself or this travel agency that's shifted compared to where you were three months ago? Maybe you started the quarter unsure that you could even sustain a full-time income. A full-time client load. And now you know you can. Maybe you started assuming a certain kind of client wasn't available to you, but this quarter they came to you and it proved otherwise. Number four, pattern. Where did I where did I stay stuck? Am I in the same patterns I was in last quarter? This is a really hard question, and it's just as important as the first three. A pattern I can think of. I'm just gonna spill the tea over here. I know when I start to get very stressed out, I become an emotional eater. I like to eat the emotions. I become a bottomless pit, and I'm like, why did I gain all this weight? I know I am an emotional eater, and so I my gosh, I'm not sorry, I just had a little bit of a revelation here while thinking about that. So I have to check myself because I'll do it almost subconsciously. And I picked up on this, like I knew this was a thing 10 or 20 years ago. I don't know, a long time ago. I knew I if I'm really stressed, I'm gonna be like, I need a bag of Cheetos stat of family size one. And a few years ago I noticed I would just like walk like a freaking zombie to the pantry or the fridge and I was looking for something to soothe my emotions. And I was like, I don't need this. And I'd just shut the cupboard and be like, Nope, I don't need any of that. But I know when I'm out of hand with emotional regulation, because I just stuff them down with delicious food. I'll start ordering all kinds of food like takeout to be delivered. I'll just eat, eat, eat. And that's a big sign for me. That's a pattern I have. And can I change that pattern? And I have to observe patterns like that. So that's an example. I don't know if you're like that at all. You could be like, what a weirdo, Rachel. I don't care what you think of me. I want you to make money. Right? So those are the four categories. You're not just measuring the output. You're not just measuring how many bales of hay you got, right? That's a terrible farm reference because who eats hay? Cows. You're checking in on who you're becoming while faithfully tending to all of this that you've been trusted with. Growth as a person and growth in the business. They aren't separate tracks, people. They move together. Not necessarily at the exact same pace, but yes, they move very much together. reviewing only one half of the picture, like what are you doing? No. It also connects you to your founder's story, and that story isn't a fixed thing you wrote once and filed it away. It's still being written. Your story is still being written one quarter at a time. And this is where you can notice, like doing these kinds of reviews with these four categories, is where you can notice like maybe a new chapter's forming. It's cool when you notice one is forming and you're like, this is not meant to be affirming. If there is a pattern you're still stuck in, like avoiding the same task, holding the same fear, placing the blame on everyone else. Repeating the same mistakes, procrastinating on the same decisions, putting the burden on some other rando colleague or family member to make the decisions for you. Those are patterns. Name them honestly. It's far more useful than letting it persist. Because clearly, if that's a pattern and you aren't making money right now, any of those things. that's a pattern blocking you for making money. Why are you gonna continue doing the same thing and expect different results? Duh, we all know that's the definition of insanity. Noticing the pattern is the first step towards actually building something different. Like if you want to talk about addiction, like until you actually admit you're an addict to something, you can't break away from those patterns. You have to admit, this is a problem. A pattern named specifically like I keep avoiding talking about my fee until a client brings it up first. That's something you can actually build a plan around for an exporter. Pattern left vague and unnamed, just repeats and keeps happening. Then you're like, why is nothing working? Okay, go through those four categories. Write a short letter to yourself. Tell future you what this quarter taught you. Ooh, if you're in the success circle, you got something coming for you at the end. And this small practice is a really good reflection to like what you're gonna be holding yourself accountable for in the next three months and who you're gonna become three months from now. Okay? Okay, that was day two fifty-five. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.