Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 275: Moving Forward Without Confidence
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, with ElevateWithRachel K.com. If you don't know me, head over there. But also, I own a travel agency. I want to see us all get to multiple six figures slash my goal is eight figures and gross revenues. I'm full on Dululu here. but it's totally so much easier than you think to make two, three hundred thousand a year as a travel advisor. You can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. Okay. Alright, today is day two seventy-five. Moving forward without confidence. Ooh. Why is confidence like never present when you're new to something? Hmm. Probably because you don't know what the F you're doing. If you're waiting to feel confident before you just take the next step in your business, like a new niche, a new offer, a bigger client, a bolder piece of content. Ba ba ba I have some genuinely freeing news for you. that confidence almost never arrives first. And you're like, that's not freeing. No, it's not, because I know a lot of travel advisors use I need more confidence as an excuse. Ha ha ha! Got you. so most people assume that the order goes, build the confidence, then take action. In reality, and we're gonna incorporate some research into this, the order almost always runs in the other direction. And there's so much data. The majority of the most successful and wealthiest people you'll ever hopefully get the chance to meet, maybe you don't want to meet them. They make decisions with only 60% of the information on average. They are not confident in the beginning. Like they are taking risks and they're doing it anyway. But anyway, back to the psychological research. So we talked about this with Albert Bandora's self-efficacy. Like his work that spanned decades of study, this was in in this I think probably episode two sixty six or sixty seven. I my phone danged, sorry. yeah, he consistently found that the single strongest source of genuine confidence is a mastery experience. Actually doing the thing, especially in smaller steps, and accumulating direct evidence of your own capability along the way. I mean anyone can get on a plane and go to a resort, but can you actually discern finding the best resort for a rando cold client that you've never met before? Get them to pay you a fee, send the proposal, service the booking, manage all the chaos that comes your way just by going on fam trips. Nope. No, you have to book trips. So it feels really backwards because the discomfort of acting without confidence is real and immediate, while the confidence that would eventually result from that action hasn't been built yet. So there's this really big uncomfortable gap. And it's tempting to interpret this discomfort as a sign that you're not quite ready. And rather, it's like honestly, it's just something normal. And it's an unavoidable part of doing something new for the first time. Okay. So what does this look like in practice? Think about the first I ooh, I got a story. An agent I've been mentoring for a while. We've got a first very, very large room block. And they were very nervous to send this booking page out. And they were like, I'm so nervous. And I'm like, why are you nervous? and I can't remember what they said exactly, but I remember I replied, You're nervous because this is the biggest group you've done. And I remember having to tell that agent, could you imagine if you'd gotten this group when you first started, I think they've been doing this six years maybe, when you first started six years ago, brand new travel agent. And now those first bookings that you had, you can do them in your sleep now, and now you've got this big group. And eventually you'll be able to do these very large groups in your sleep. And she's this agent's doing it without full confidence. That's okay. They can always message me and be like, I'm falling apart. I'll be like, calm down, it's fine. So Think about your very first client consultation that you ever ran, especially your very first cold client. Like your first client consultation, 99.99% sure that was not a stranger, that was a friend or a family member or a friend of a friend referral. Then think about the first absolute cold client. You have no idea who they are, they came from social media. Or found your website or whatever. Think about those first couple client like consultations, the gap just between those two. And then the gap between those two and how you do one today. The confidence gap between those three separate moments wasn't closed by waiting until you felt ready. It was closed by running the first one, the second one, the fifteenth one, the twentieth one, each adding real lived evidence that you could actually do this. Bendura's research would predict exactly this pattern: confidence as the result of repeated action. Not the prerequisite for starting it. And honestly, you really only need to they say masters masters need 10,000 hours. Yeah, I think this might only be in the music world. Like you're a master at a at an instrument with 10,000 hours of practice, which is a lot of time. However, I think I don't have my notebook on me. It really only takes you twenty hours. to be confident in a specific skill. So being a master at the piano, for example, is being able to do many, many, many, many skills on the piano. There's three pedals, there eighty, there's eighty-eight keys, there's ten fingers, there's I don't even know how many different types of scales, major, mitor, I don't know, I don't remember. I just I just play sheet music. I am not a master. And then emoting through your music, like there's so much to master a musical instrument and each skill takes 20 hours. That's 500 skills you're applying essentially if it takes 10,000 hours to master an instrument. So What I'm getting to is it takes about 20 hours to master skill. Every step of your process, from your content creation, your service processes, from the consultation all the way to the end, it takes 20 hours for each one of those for you to feel like you have mastered it. That can't be bought in a course, that cannot be done on a fam trip. It takes 20 hours to understand how you do your content to speak to your client to convey the challenge and the covenant that you're going to make with said client. It takes 20 hours to master the platform that is best for your client to find you. It takes 20 hours, not even master, but to develop the skill to use the platform. It takes 20 hours of constant. Doing consultations before you really feel that you're confident in it. That's 20, 60-minute consultations, or 40, 30-minute consultations, or 80-15-minute consultations. Okay? And it's every single step of the way. And you're gonna be tweaking things all along the way. So think about that, your first two, your friends and family booking, your first cold booking, your first group consultation, those were probably super nerve-wracking. But once you've done 20, 30, 40, 80 of these, you can do it in your sleep. Okay? And that's when you have confidence. So the next time you notice yourself waiting to feel confident before you do something about it, as a travel advisor, launching your new offer, pitching a partnership with someone, filming a video on a topic you're still building expertise in, excuse me, maybe a niche or a destination that you've never personally experienced, but you're passionate about the hero, the client, and you know exactly how. How to guide them. Try reframing things this way. I am allowed to do this competently without yet feeling confident doing it. Competence and confidence are not the same thing. Competence tends to arrive first. And small mastery experiences build faster than gigantic leaps. If a full leap feels like too much, Bandora's research also supports the practical middle path. Break the intimidating action into smaller versions, like I talk about all the time, that still count as like genuine mastery experience. Like I just said, like you need to understand, you can't buy someone's templated process and their frameworks and implement it and think you're gonna magically make all this money because you haven't mastered it and you haven't had the ability to. Sit and discern does this part of the process work for me yet? Because you haven't developed the skills to see if it's aligned with your business. This is why on my home page I say you can't just be taught someone else's framework because it's not you. Right? And you can take things, don't get me wrong, you can definitely borrow from them, but don't think if you make a large investment, in any sort of like templates or templatized process type thing. That it's going to instantly work for you. And this is why, with all of my courses, I refuse to say, just do what I did. Because it's not gonna work for everybody. This is why I teach all the possible options that are available to you, and you have to make the decision, even if it's a bad decision, because you don't know how to make decisions yet. And then you gotta fail, and then you gotta go back and be like, what are my other options? Okay. I'm not saying you're gonna fail. I'm just saying. Start smaller and master every little bit of your process. You can start with an advantage of someone else's templates or someone else's exact process. But no, if you attempt to replicate it exactly as they do it, that's not you. You have become a bot of their travel agency. And you will never have the confidence because you haven't taken the time to develop the skills and learn the skills necessary for every single step for your business based on your life and your values. But each small completed action, once you're like, I'm confident in this. So I, as an example for me, I'm a huge fan of the consultation script, like having a general outline of how your consultation calls go, the questions you are going to ask on every specific type of consultation. And then the close. And then you ha I have like the typical objections. When I first started doing destination wedding consultations, I didn't know what the typical objections were, except I need to talk to my fiance. Right? I wasn't sure of every possible common objection. So that part of my consultation, I had to do, I don't even know how many consultations, probably 30 or 40. to have those objections come up and feel confident in like overcoming those objections. I had to do probably five or ten consultations, even though I had the closing framework in my consultation script. I had to do five at least consultations where I could confidently sell myself. Like I could go through the whole call and be like, this is great, we're planning a wedding. But then I'd be like, so anyway, you want to give me money? And those are just The different aspects of the consultation call. And you, as a travel advisor or any service-based business owner as well, like over time, you're not gonna have the confidence, you just gotta do it, is what I'm saying. And then you gotta reflect on it and be like, how can I make this better? Okay. What I was saying, start with the smaller steps. If launching a full new niche feels way too big for you, start with one piece of content within that niche that you can pitch. Like post. Sorry. If pitching a big partnership feels too big, start with the smaller, lower stakes outreach first. Actually had there was a an another agent I was mentoring. Who was afraid to pitch retreats for this I would say, I don't know how big the organization is, but a pretty large organization of female entrepreneurs. And I was like, just do it. Well, I'm not prepared. Just you just gotta do it. And they finally did it. I don't know how much more prepared they feel. Maybe they feel a little bit more prepared, but they closed it. Like they're they're setting up the meeting. And it's not like this agent was some big hot shot travel agent, you know, just regular travel agent. They shot their shot, man. Anyway. But lower stakes outreach might be better for you if you're like, I don't feel quite ready to do the major partnership. But each small completed action is real evidence that your nervous system registers, even if the outcome isn't perfect, and it gets used to it, right? And that evidence is what eventually produces the confidence you were originally waiting to feel. What I'm saying is do the freaking work. Understand that your confidence will almost always follow the action, not the other way around. And this is based on so much research. Expect the discomfort of acting without full confidence. It's normal, it's not a sign that you're not ready. It's not a sign you need to go invest in someone's fam trip. I mean, take the fam trip if you need to, but it's not a sign that your lack of confidence is not a sign to invest in anything at that moment, right? Because we all lack confidence at varying levels, honestly. So you need to reframe your hesitation as I can do this competently without yet feeling confident. And there's so many advisors I know who are fully competent in what they're doing, but lack the confidence. And the gap there where they won't put themselves out there because of that lack of confidence is keeping them at such a low booking volume compared to what they're capable of. You don't have to do it. If you're listening and you're like, wait, is that me? It might not be you. But it might. Think about it. Alright, so break up the intimidating big scary actions into small mastery experiences. If a full leap, change a niche feels like too much right now, just start small. Like if you're like, okay, I want to do adult all inclusives. But eventually I want to get into destination weddings. Adult all-inclusives, you might it just really depends on how you want to take that path there. You can start with just like anniversary trips and get used to the romance side of travel and like understanding anniversary packages. That's gonna get you into the areas on resort websites. That also has the wedding packages, right? you might be able to expand into like milestone birthday trips to get a sense of how to do group travel and how you would like to manage group travel. and from there you can expand into destination weddings, but you can master these one step at a time and you can niche into adult-only, all-inclusive destination weddings. and you'll have a that's one way you could take to get into destination weddings if you're a brand newbie travel agent. Okay. Tomorrow we're shifting into a new stretch of episodes. There's only four. Client appreciation. We're gonna do some ideas that go beyond the magnet with your logo on it. I don't know why that pops into my head when I think of like fine appreciation. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.