Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / DAY 286 | Make a Gratitude List Before Your Travel Agency Year-End Break
Transcript
- Rachel: Agency in the Year podcast. Oops, hold on. Let me start that over. Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping other travel agents or people who are brand newbies to the travel industry. Let's build travel agencies. Let's not have this rando side hustle that gets you nowhere. That's what this podcast is about, and everything else that I do to help travel advisors. Head on over. God, I sound like a car salesman or an 80s mattress. add head on down to elevate with rachelk.com so I can help you build your dream agency. I wish it was like the 80s or early 90s so I could just do public access and random tea. Head on down to elevate with Rachel K and she's gonna change your life. Also, public access. If you don't know what public access is, you're probably too young to be listening to this podcast. Maybe, maybe not. No, yeah. You're you're like right there on the edge. public access was like these rando channels where you would pay to be on TV. And so like Wayne's World. If you know the movie Wayne's World, they were on public access because they couldn't get advertisers to sponsor them for the regular network channels. And fun fact, I was in one of those gifted programs in elementary middle school and the middle school one we had a whole little studio and we were on public. Public access. And I was like behind the scenes running the I don't know. I just remember there's a lot of knobs and switches. It's fine. I don't really remember a lot of what happened in that gifted program, which is odd. Today's day 286 of the podcast. Building your gratitude list and your case for a real break. Let's get honest here. We've been talking about like personal wins, thanking everybody, celebrating the wins, all the good things the last few days, and I've been setting you up secretly for a nice restful stretch of time off at the end of this year. Hopefully you are able to take it off, and that's okay if you aren't, because you can always do it next year. But the same kind of 12-week rhythm I go on for my quarterly reviews, week twelve, week twenty-four, week thirty-six, week forty-eight, so I'm I can get my annual review in and everything ready to go and take the last couple weeks off the air. so that's if you haven't listened to this podcast at all, that's how I do things and it's very nice. So we're gonna talk about that. a little bit more of this episode. Gratitude psychological benefits UC Davis researcher Robert Emmons You know what anyway, I'm not gonna think I'm going on tangents. His studies found Regularly noting things that you are grateful for, the gratitude journal that you paid five million dollars for a coach to tell you right the three things you're grateful for. I've been there, don't worry. That is linked to measurable improvements in your well-being, sweet sleep quality, and even physical health markers over time. Let's start a gratitude practice now, ahead of your year and break, right before Thanksgiving. I'm sorry. I joked about that a few episodes earlier. I've I realized like this is like near Thanksgiving when these episodes will come out. Gratitude's the attitude! Anyway, it gives you a real like real material if you would do a gratitude journal. to genuinely rest into rather than arriving at your time off, scattered, unable to shift out of work mode. it's it's crazy. I highly recommend journaling if you don't do it. And then also I've had to do this a few times when I was like feeling really down in the dumps. recently and I busted out my journal and I was like let's see what I was writing about just like you know like a few months ago you know and I just went back and I started reading it actually I started at the beginning I was like dumb stupid no I'm just kidding but I was just going through it and I was like my gosh I've come so much further than I thought you know so it's good to write things down in a journal whew So, if you want to start running a gratitude list today and add to it steadily rather than trying to reconstruct your entire year's worth of moments into a single rush sitting once the holidays sit, once you see that post from someone in Facebook, somewhere, or Instagram, what are you grateful for? I'm so grateful that I've got a dog, which is a great thing to be grateful for. But you know, those posts are coming. And then you sit there and you're like, well. I feel like shit today, so I'm not grateful for anything. And then you're gonna be like, I'm so grateful for my parents. But it's not real and genuine, right? Like you're just like doing it for the FOMO and just like to show up and say you did it, right? So why don't we start some gratitude today? If you're already doing a gratitude journal, just come along for the ride and laugh because apparently I'm in a mood as I record these. Okay. This way you aren't like like yesterday's like celebrate your personal wins, but if you're like, I haven't been doing that, okay, so start with a gratitude list. And then once a week or once a day at the end of the day, when you're doing your gratitude, you could do it morning and night. What are you grateful for? Every morning I say I'm so grateful to even be awake and alive. Cause you never know when that's happening. Like I got another day to do my mission. So doesn't matter how crappy of a day it is or how stinky of a mood or if I'm just tired. I'm just every day I'm like, I get to be here another day. Because apparently God wants me doing something, but I'm just gonna drink coffee and think about maybe what he wants me to do instead. Like, I don't know. Alright, run your gratitude list. It can be specific client relationships. It can just be the fact that you're alive today. Like, that's pretty amazing. The odds of you existing, I think I've talked about this in past episodes, at this j at this point in time, listening to this podcast, probably driving in the car, and be like, what is this lady talking about? the odds of this all happening. For each of us, for for me recording this and for you hearing it, each of us is like such a high exponential probability. It is almost zero. But the fact that you are in existence right now and I'm in in existence right now makes it not zero. Like that's it's like ten to the power of almost three million. Ooh, that's it's like a ridiculously high number. I don't even know what number that would be, because it's ten times it's ten times ten, three million times. Like how many zeros is that, right? Be grateful for that. Be grateful that you're just alive. But anyway, you could also talk about client relationships, new clients you've acquired, old business wrapping up, people paying deposits. When I started really making money as a travel advisor, but the commissions hadn't been paying out quite yet. Like I'd gotten all my fees, I had all these weddings, and I was like, okay, I'm breaking 300 this year. I remember I would book stuff and I would just at the end of the day, or Yeah, I would say or I'd see in my CRM that bookings were coming in and like my assistant would be booking them. And then at the end of the day, I'd be like, My gosh, if we actually got paid for what work was done today, like if you could get your commission the second you do the booking, you know? Like, we're making a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a day. That's mind-blowing. Like, how grateful is that? And it was all built from scratch. And it was all just it just came to fruition. And that was happening like every single day of the week. And I was like, wait a darn minute. And I can like this isn't even this is like a cakewalk for me now, you know? So how much more is possible? Okay, and it doesn't even have to be work stuff, it could just be like support from your community, support from your family members, support from your dog or cat. I currently do not have any pets. I might be in the market for a cat soon, because I'm definitely I like both. But I feel like I'm more of a cat person. Anyway. Then Once you have like a decent gratitude list going for the next few weeks, start considering how you're generally going to mark this last quarter of the year for yourself, not just the business. This might be like a meaningful experience booked for you on your own time off. And that could be as simple as like a spa day locally. Or maybe you book reservations for yourself or you and your spouse at a nice restaurant. It doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be a trip. maybe give yourself a smaller weekly ritual of acknowledgement that you're building towards the larger closer closure of the year and some something so much bigger than you ever could working a nine to five. Just give yourself some time that's not distracted to look back over the year with that gratitude list. In whatever form this takes, it doesn't need to be baked, doesn't need to be a showy affair. It could be just a genuine quiet marking that the year is enough. So maybe you didn't hit your sales goals, but maybe you've learned a lot and you're implementing new strategies to catapult yourself next year because businesses will ebb and flow. That's just how it is. Okay, so hopefully if you're in the success circle and you did your time blocking in PTO for the year. You've got some built-in quo I call it PTO. We're not getting paid time off, but you're I call it PTO because that's what we all understand it as, you know. Rest that you haven't prepared for tends to be restless. But if you know you have a day off coming up and you're you're you're setting that boundary regardless because honestly, when you work in travel, unless someone is traveling Okay, let's talk about this for a second. Like, there's no real emergencies for the majority of the time. no one's gonna die if they don't get their deposit paid or charged or whatever, or if they don't get let me think, their email answer to right away. Nobody is this is not an emergency. Okay. And if you pre-build in your time off for the next year out, when you do consultations and they say, I want to travel for Christmas vacation, don't go scarcity if you're giving yourself Christmas off and be like, that's great. Say, I'm sorry, I'm already booked for Christmas. Would you like me to refer you to someone who can help you? or any like if they're like I wanna travel August fifteenth through the twenty second and you've already time blocked off as that's your whole week or something, or part of it is your three day weekend, you can say, I'm sorry, would you be comfortable with like shifting that one week or one way or another? I've got a lot going on that week and I wanna be able to serve you. So if you have everything wound down before your PTO, right? That you've given yourself. Then you can rest fully. Like you can just like be a zombie the first day, you know, and just chill, watch a movie, read a book, whatever it is you want to do, knowing you have no appointments. But if you don't give yourself that PTO, you end up spending the first few days like trying to decompress. rather than genuinely resting because you're carrying all the unprocessedness weight into your time off. And so think about that like all you all all y'all travel advisors who are like, I just have to bring my laptop when I go on vacation. But that that doesn't mean you necessarily have to open it. And yeah, you are a one-man band. Many of you. And the feasibility of even hiring like a B2B VA doesn't sound like you can do it just yet. So yeah, bring your laptop, but if you have PTO, you should be primarily unbothered. It also depends on your marketing strategy, because I know some people sometimes they have to get quotes in, right? that come in randomly while they're supposed to be on vacation. But honestly, once you're comfortable enough with the revenue you have and you are like totally secure in what you're doing, why would you I mean I think it would be okay for you to those one or two little one-off bookings that might come in, if you don't really need them, why don't you forward them to an agent to serve them and just be like, give me 20%. Something like that. Like you guys could work out a deal if you aren't on the same like if you don't have a bunch of agents on your team already. But you could also, if you do work on a team of agents, you could also ask them, like, hey, do you want to work out a deal? Let's collaborate and make sure our PTO is where we can like cover each other. And if leads come in, we can start them and transfer them to you or something. excuse me. Something. I don't know. You'd have to work that out. But anyway. So if you start doing the gratitude practice and you have intentional reflection time before you go into any of your time off at the end of the year, and it's built into these final weeks, which if you're in the success circle, it is that is built in. Week 48 is Q4 review, week 49 is annual review, week 50 and week 51. Week 50 is like get the first few weeks of the next year out there in terms of content, email, newsletters, all that fun stuff. And the week after that is just like simply checking in to make sure it's all good to go. Just a quick double check. Everything's good to go. Alright, we're shut down. It's the holidays. Cause that's how I operate. So you guys are in for a treat for week 52, because it's cool. Anyway. But if you get all that stuff done, you are grateful for everything, everything's kind of wrapped up, and you don't have this like pent-up tension or anger because you decided to practice gratitude instead, and you're like, I resolved this issue, awesome. Then it's if you write it down especially, then it's like resolved on paper and more resolved in your mind, so that when you do get your time off to rest, you are actually resting, not doom scrolling for the first four days non-stop. And then being like, I don't feel like anything got done. Okay. So, all of that rambling to say, start a gratitude, list a gratitude journal, a journal in general, and add to it steadily rather than trying to reconstruct the entire year. Don't worry about stuff earlier. If there's anything the big that comes to mind, write it down now. But moving forward, the little things. There's science behind it. Gratitude is the attitude. Really good well-being benefits when you are just grateful. And I think I mentioned this a few days ago, but there's also something, some other study that came out. If you are in mentally, if you are in a state of gratitude, your brain cannot be anxious. Ooh, so the next time, like, I wonder if you're like nervous to show up on camera. And you're like, I I just am not feeling it today. What if you took a pause and you were grateful? Remember, I have to, I get to, I am made to. Step into the I'm made to, and therefore I must speak to my audience. And I'm so grateful that someone's going to find this piece of content and decide to book travel with me instead of being like. I forgot what I was gonna say. And I can't speak in my real voice because I'm not used to this. I don't know why it's so much easier for me to yap on the podcast, but I've taken a two year break from social media, like video content in general. And I used to be to like snap out quick short videos. And now I Pull my phone out and I'm like, let's get to it. My giant list of content. And then I'm like, So anyway, if you could be my friend, that'd be great. I don't even want you to do business with me. Like that's I don't know what it is. It's weird. I get it. I'm with you in that. Just keep doing it, okay? Anyway, tomorrow we're gonna talk about The team. Celebrating the team beyond bonuses. So if you are developing your team or you currently have a team, even if your team is like low-key, your kids just doing the most basic of admin work, let's talk about it. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.