Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 208: Carrying Less
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner who also helps travel advisors step into their CEO. I don't want to say ER, but I almost did. I'm trying to like 208 episodes later, I still don't have a good intro. Anyway, I help travel advisors, is what I'm saying. Go to elevate with Rachel K.com if you have questions. We're expanding on yesterday. Are you an owner of your business or a steward of your business? And how stewardship e eases the weight of running a business when you're all by your lonesome self as an owner. I've implemented blah blah blah blah blah. I've implemented this in recent months. myself and it has been a game changer for me. So I realized actually I was actually watching a completely other podcast episode and it was talking about social media and how it has to be used to do the mission. Like the mission this was actually it was a really crazy story. It was an interview of a priest and I need to finish it. But anyway, part of it, like it it kind of inspired me to expand upon this because I'm like, yeah, I've done some episodes about this, but not this deep and I need to write about all of this because I was like half asleep listening to this and it just hit me. And I was like, Yeah, we do have to be a steward and he was talking about separating himself from he was talking about social media. in his experience with posting content as a priest to help evangelize people, blah blah blah blah blah. And he was like, it's really hard to separate yourself. From the mission, and you have to you have to know like this is what I'm doing, this is not who I am, and you have to like cut like shut off all the hate that you get and all the love that you get too, and you just have to like stay the course. And I was like, my gosh, I've been doing this stewardship, it just got me on the track, subject of stewardship in my brain. And then I was like, let's do some mindset episodes. Okay. So that's what inspired all of this. By the way. So yesterday we defined the difference between owning a business and stewarding one. And we're gonna talk about why that distinction isn't just a nice idea. It's really, really practical, helps develop discipline, and it's really good for those hard weeks. When you're operating as an owner with no help. Which, even if you have hired help, you might still feel like, I have no help. I have to do everything. I have to make all the decisions. I have to tell them how this is gonna happen. Carrying the business as though it's entirely you, entirely your responsibility to hold together through sheer will. Every difficulty lands directly on your identity. A difficult client conversation. I've oo, yep. Been there a slow booking month or quarter or an entire year a tech failure, a competitor frustrating the F out of you for some reason. Like we have pr I know I have experienced like all of these. All of it gets absorbed as a referendum on your own worth. That's an enormous, unsustainable weight to carry week after week after week. And this might be why honestly so many trs don't last very long. But it's a big part also of why burnout hits so many travel advisors, even ones who genuinely love this work. Mm-hmm. When you shift into stewardship. It's like I mentioned it yesterday, like a vagus nerve reset. If you don't know what the vagus nerve is, I'm not a scientician or a doctor, but from my basic understanding, it runs from the base of your brain. Or yeah, something like that. Or spine. It like runs up and down your spine at the base of your neck. Starts at your base of your neck, goes all the way down to your hips. And it tells your body whether or not you need to I'm yawning. Sorry, Vegas nerve reset real quick. It tells your body whether ne you need to brace yourself and like stop digesting and get ready to run and fight and like controls whether or not your HPA or Pituitary, what is the H1? Hypothalamus, pituitary access needs to dump a bunch of cortisol and adrenaline into your body, your bloodstream. Or it tells you, yawn. You can eat. Let's get your gut digesting this food now. You can rest, you can sleep. I think is highly tied to a lot of inflammation people have today, but people I'm not gonna get into that subject. Anyway, that's the vagus nerve. Vegas nerve reset. You can do manual exercises and if you are very, very stressed out at any point in the day, put your hands behind your head, elbows out, at your desk, and then just start looking. Keep your head forward, but just look to the right until you start to yawn. And if you're really stressed out, you're gonna be looking to the right for like forty five seconds with your arms up, being like, Rachel, you said this is supposed work. You gotta do it And then you look to the left and do the same thing and it tells your vagus nerve, you're in a safe place. You got your hands behind your head, you must be resting and you aren't looking straight ahead, so you're not in a fight. Let's chill. So stewardship is like the vegas nerve reset for your identity is what I'm saying. When I say something loosens, it's your identity chills the F out. You're not responsible, you're not solely responsible for the outcomes that were never fully within your control anyway. The economy, a client's decision making, another advisor's behavior. If you know like you're you've got a lead that's like interviewing multiple agents. What ups? Timing that you cannot engineer. You are responsible for tending well, and that is showing Showing up, doing the work with integrity and honesty and sincerity, making sound decisions, caring for your clients genuinely. Everything else, including the results, the parts outside of your control, gets placed somewhere outside your own fragile sense of self. I'm not trying to offend you by saying fragile sense of self. We are all very fragile human beings, okay? For those of you, I mean, most of my audience believes in some sort of higher power. That somewhere outside of you that has all the things outside of your control, that's that higher power. It's the divine in your own life. The divine God, the universe, gave you this task. It's not something you came up with your brain on your own. I'm not gonna get into how no. I'm just gonna say no. As a Catholic, that's a hard no. You don't magically create up with your own things. in many cases. it's not all you, you know what I mean? Okay, I'm not gonna get into it. Never mind. But for other people who don't believe in like a God or the divine, they might believe in some kind of like higher energy. It could simply be the parts of this that were never mind to control that somewhere, th those there's just parts you were never meant to control in the first place. and that Is something you can work on, and it's not gonna be an overnight change. But either way, the weight shifts off. A single Exhausted sh set of shoulders. Okay, and you cannot and this is like a huge part of like when they say detach from the outcome and when by by they I think I've done episodes about it too. This is another way to help you detach from the outcome and remain disciplined because now you're entrusted with this travel business that was never yours to begin with. So how are you gonna manage it? You've been given this special job. Like you are What is it, Bilbo? Is it Bilbo Baggins that gets the ring? And you gotta go to the mountain? Is it Bilbo? I feel like I got the wrong baggins. You're the one tasked with the ring and you gotta get it thrown into Mordor. Okay. It's not your ring. And if you've ever read or watched The Hobbit Is it The Hobbit? Lord of the Rings, whatever. I'd Clearly it's been a couple decades since I've partaken in any of that media. But if you've ever read it like He's tempted to keep that ring for himself and make himself powerful. Your business is like that ring. And you had no idea when you were born that this was gonna be put in your hands, okay? And you have no idea what's going to happen with this business. You just know you gotta do it. And you don't know how you're gonna survive it because you're tiny with giant hairy feet. And all you got is a wizard named Gandalf. Alright? So, like. You are not any other character in the Lord of the Rings. You are just trying to get that ring and follow the mission that you were tasked with. Okay? That's how you need to treat this business. Honestly, if you really get into it, that's like you could apply this to many areas of your life. I'm trying to think of another like epic where that I remember better. we could do a quick Game of Thrones reference like Daenerys Targaryen was given dragon eggs. yeah, we could if you watched Game of Thrones, listen up. You are Daenerys Targaryen. This business is your dragon eggs. You are tasked with With caring for these dragon eggs. They are your children, but they are not you. You can use them and leverage them to do some pretty badass things in your life, like Daenerys did. And you can love them and you can care for them, and they can be gone for a while, and you can leave it alone for a while and come back. And you still aren't quite sure what they're there for. But like Daenerys is the steward for those dragon eggs. Okay? All right, that's really weird references. I don't want you to think that this is an excuse to like disengage is what I'm trying. I don't want you to like miss here and be like, well, I just don't have to care about anything. No, you care so much more. It doesn't mean you stop caring or stop working hard. It means the caring and the hard work comes from a steadier place, service and a responsibility rather than anxious self-preservation or validation. Okay? A steward who has a rough quarter can say, very Very honestly, I tended this well. The outcome this season wasn't fully mine to determine and mean it without that being excuse for laziness. It's simply true. There's a real difference between carrying full isolated ownership of every outcome, every routine, every task, and faithfully stewarding something that you were trusted with one season at a time. Okay? Okay. I feel like I say okay too much. So the next time you feel that familiar tightness after like a sh crappy week, a difficult client, seeing someone else doing what you were like, this is my genius idea. Ask yourself one honest question. Am I carrying this as the owner of my own worth right now? Or as a steward of something I've been trusted with? It's such a game changer. It's such a game changer. If the answer is the owner, that's you're it's not a failure. You're not a terrible human being. It's just information and it's a chance to consciously hand that weight somewhere else. You might say it out loud, you might write it down, this business isn't my identity. It's an assignment I've entrusted to steward well. The outcome is not entirely mine to carry alone. Because it's not. If you say it honestly and you say it often enough, that sentence genuinely reshapes how the hard weeks feel. From my own experience, like I have No. I do my work. I do what I'm supposed to do. I like I said yesterday, like I take care of myself to the best of my abilities. I take care of my home because they're all things that have been my body's been entrusted to me, to my soul, you know, like this is my body. It's not necessarily my identity. But it's been entrusted to me. I better take care of me. You know what I mean? I gotta take care of me as best I can. This is my home that I was very fortunate to get, which I know if you're watching this, you're like, what plain psych ward walls? Yes. Anyway, but this is my home. Which I was very fortunate to get on a very short basis. And just the fact that I could I'm sitting here doing this for you, like I've been entrusted to help get this kind of message out to people so that you too can like have a life where you're making real change in your family and the income and still have time with them and just I got a big I got big reasons why I do this and why I do my travel agency. And it has nothing to do with me becoming wealthy or having ten thousand followers or a hundred thousand followers or a million followers, like none of that none of that matters to me. What matters to me is making sure that I get what I what I've been tasked to do out there. Okay? Anyway, and it's like so stress relieving because I'm still bringing in revenue. Okay? It's like you're you're still gonna bring in revenue. You're gonna be fine. Tomorrow we're gonna take the same shift and apply it to the maceteen, which we kinda touched on a little bit today. But actually the reference of the podcast and he was like, I don't know if I want to show up on camera. So that episode's gonna be and s it was inspired by it, but n it's not gonna be his story 'cause I can't even retell it accurately. All right, this was day two eight of the Travel Agency in your podcast.