Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 257: Close Your Travel Agency Quarter With Gratitude and Vision
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. Don't know why I said it like that. Oof. Today is day 257. I'm a travel agency owner helping travel advisors build a business with this Free 99 podcast. You heard me, Free 99. At no cost to you, except your time, and you have to listen to me. Sorry, not sorry. Today is day 257, like I said. We're gonna talk about gratitude and vision casting. So days 247 to day 257 is all about mindset stuff because we are right around where where I would do my third quarter review. 'Cause I like to do stuff early, because I close my year up early, okay? So this is like the closing ritual for this quarterly review. This is the final piece. Gratitude is the attitude. And some vision talk. Without a deliberate close to your quarterly review, a review can just like trail off into the next task on your list, and all the honest, useful reflection that you just did doesn't really get a chance to actually settle. So closing ritual gives the quarter a real ending. And I will be teaching this from a Christian slash Catholic perspective. What is that? Your mileage may vary. Anyway, it's the same way a good trip has to have a proposend off rather than just quietly stopping when the plane lands. You know what mean? And you need a day to recover from your trips before you step back into the real world again. At least a day. So skipping this step is a little like doing all the work of packing away, canning a season's harvest, and then never actually sitting down to eat the meal that was made from it. If you've missed the prior episodes, I've been talking a lot about how farming and running a business is the same. So The harvest season is when you're like, I'm get actually earning all the commissions, and it's like steadily coming in. So what I mean here is like you do your quarterly review. Maybe you earned a lot of money this quarter, and we need to do some reflection closing, even if you didn't earn any money this quarter. Before looking forward, take a moment to look back with gratitude. Not just for the wins. the whole quarter as it actually was, including the hard parts. Every Difficult client conversation. Every slow week, every piece of content that flopped absolutely hard. Everything, every lesson you've learned that contributed something to where you are right now. This is not about pretending the hard parts were fun. It's about recognizing that the whole quarter, not just the highlight real, built something real. I'm gonna here's here's the whoop it do Catholic spin on this. So, A, from a psychological perspective, having an attitude of gratitude, your brain cannot have anxiety. They cannot exist in the same brain space. But B, There are a lot of saints, and I have noticed in my own like prayer who have written about the importance of suffering. And it's not a punishment from God, it is the forging season, right? Like God gives you this suffering to go through, and it could be he wants you to turn to him in prayer. Again, this is from a Catholic perspective, but he wants you to turn to him in prayer. He wants you to give that suffering and put it at the foot of the cross so it can be used for good for someone else in the world. there are many different reasons he wants you to learn this lesson. So that you can step into the person he wants you to be, but you've neglected becoming that person. So now he's like, well, okay. Now you gotta go through the suffering phase. and so when you're doing like your quarterly review, all of the good and all of the bad makes you who you are, and you should have gratitude for that because If you want to expand this from like a mathematical s perspective, I don't even know the number, I'd have to look it up. It's some crazy number. So the odds of you being born to your parents, where you were born, wherever on planet Earth, at the time and date you were born, with your exact DNA from each of your parents, that is the best DNA handed down from every ancestor before them to create you. It's like one in four hundred. It's either one in four hundred or one in four hundred and fifty terrellion with a T. Just the odds of you existing. Now, I'm gonna Google this because it's a crazy number. The odds of you that's just you being born, right? The I can't even read this number. Okay. The mathematical probability of you existing exactly as you are right now. with all of your past experiences, good and bad, every bit of food you've had access to, every person you've interacted with, like literally every second of your life that's happened, every dream you've had while you were asleep, the odds of you existing right now, listening to this podcast, is one in ten to the power of two million six hundred and eighty five thousand. the odds of you being on the path that you are being on that you are on right now are so The odds of one specific egg meeting one specific sperm to create a unique genetic makeup are one in four hundred quadrillion. Because every single ancestor through through hundreds of thousands of generations had to survive, had to find a partner, and they had to have children. A 10 followed by 2.6 million zeros. Is a number so large it is practically zero. It is far rarer than the total count of all atoms in the entire universe. Because life already happened, the actual present chance of existing is 100%. Probability only measures how unlikely an event was before it took place. I don't know what any of that means. What I'm saying is, that's your entire life. Everything that's happened, good or bad, for the last quarter, you've got to be grateful for everything that's ever happened to you, good or bad, has led you to this exact moment. Whether it was terrible or not, be grateful for it. The odds of me doing this podcast and speaking to you would not have happened had I not had some things happen in my past. Hopefully I'm helping you. But you know what I mean. The odds of you listening, the odds of you becoming a travel advisor, deciding to maybe you're on the fence about it. Be grateful for everything that happens, is what I'm saying. Everything you're genuinely grateful for from this last quarter, write it down. Name it specifically and why. Not just I'm grateful for my clients, but I'm grateful for the Smith family who trusted me with their first big trip to Disney after a very hard year for them because it reminded me why I do this work in the first place. Specificity, which I mentioned quite a bit, is what turns a generic gratitude exercise into something that actually lands emotionally the same way specificity. Made your content and your outreach more effective earlier in earlier episodes. Okay. So when you're like being grateful for the day, like I'm so grateful I can take this breath right now and I can witness the sunrise. I don't know how early you get up, but I'm up before sunrise. And I can see like the world waking up and be in this quiet stillness. That's a really good gratitude thing to do too, but think about it for the entire quarter. Then you want to look forward connecting this quarter directly to your big picture, the five-year vision, and the one single priority that you named in yesterday's episode if you if you're actually doing the work on a daily basis. You don't have to. You just listen. Picture specifically what a genuinely great version of next quarter looks like. Not a Make positivity. I want you to be able to see your CRM and see the numbers for your bookings listed. How much money is that next quarter? How many bookings do you have? How big is your client list? How big is your email list? Like be able to like envision in your head all of that. Nothing vague. But what's different from in that vision for next quarter compared to this last quarter? What's grown? What are you proud of? But the time you sit down for your next review. And when you're like writing that letter to yourself, write it in past tense, as though you've already done it. By the end of Q4, I had blah blah blah successfully onboarded my first contracted employee. Not contracted assistant. my response time improved from I don't know, four business days to one. I don't freaking know what your response time is. I finally took that full week off in November without checking my inbox one time. Writing it like this, it's an already complete done reflection rather than a wish list. And it tends to make the vision more real and more achievable. And it gives you something concrete to measure against when you sit down for your next review. If you do pray, you can also pray for like this is what I'm going for. And also when you pray, don't just tell God what you want. I mean, you can do that, I don't care. Take some time to listen. Because what if God comes back to you and is like, I have a little bit of a twist? Anyway, just something to consider. Again, this is early. I like to close my doors the last two weeks of December. So my quarterly review for Q4 is week 48. My annually review, annual review is week 49, and then I wrap everything up, weeks 50-51, and our rest. So across these the last my gosh, across these last 11 episodes, we build a full CEO level review practice from our real framework instead of just the vague failing. Should I just talk like that? That weird froggy there's actually psychology behind that froggy voice. It means you desperately want to be dominating. The vocal fry, I think is what it's called. anyway, separating your results from your self-worth, learning without blame, genuinely celebrating your wins, thinking in seasons instead of judging every quarter as the same identical path. we've gone over so much audit auditing what to delegate. Are you persisting or pivoting with your decisions? Choosing one clear prioriti. You can have your other ones, but that's your first focus and your main focus starting the quarter. And now we're going to close the loop with some gratitude, a little bit of prayer, and a little bit of vision casting. these are not one-time exercises. This is a regular repeatable practice you should be implementing about every three months. Okay? And you're like, no, I don't want to do that. Alright, well, fine. You you do you. I hope you have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.