Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 273: Aligning Your Personal Life Vision With Your Travel Business
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, with my own Doolulu goal of scaling to eight figures and gross revenues in five years. I did get to multiple six figures in 18 months. That's why I'm doing this podcast, because I want to help you get there as well. If you want to know how else I can help you, this is free. The Know Your Numbers Guide is free. Business Plan 101 is free. You can sample the success circle for free. But I do have the success circle and I have customized one-on-one memberships available at elevatewithraachelk.com. Okie dokie. Today is day 273. Aligning your personal life vision with your business. This is the second part in the CEO mindset. Reframing we're doing in this little bit of series. I do a lot of mindset reframes in this podcast if you're new. But we're gonna make your business fit your actual life, not the other way around. There's so many episodes on this, but this is the mindset. It's easy to build the vis the business in a vacuum, reacting, not responding to whatever opportunity or pressure shows up next without ever stepping back to ask whether the business you're building actually fits the life you really want. So we're gonna do that today. Total leadership. I'm a big fan of leadership studies. Professor Stuart Friedman of Wharton often called this type of framework total leadership. It's built around a simple but important premise. Rather than treating your work, home, community, and yourself as four competing separate domains consistently fighting for the same limited amount of time, the healthiest and most sustainable approach treats them as an interconnected part of one whole life/slash ecosystem. Looking for ways decisions in one area can genuinely support the others rather than always treating one on one. Off against another. You will have to make sacrifices. I'm not saying that you can have this easy peasy, I work five hours a week life and make all this money. You better hope you have a very wealthy husband, because that's the only time I've ever seen that work out. So you don't really make a whole lot of money. So but You can build your life around four to five really simple values and you can interconnect all of them and you can build your whole day around that. And everyone's life is a little bit different. So if you apply this to your travel agency. This reframes the common question of I hear people asking, which is, how much time does my business need? You're also asking: Does the way I've built this business actually support the life I want outside of it? Does it support my family, my health, my other interests? Or is it quietly working against them? And if there's conflict between your travel agency and how you want to build your life, you don't have things aligned and interconnected. Which can be a struggle because I have mentor travel advisors that break past that six-figure gross revenues. And then they're like, I I just have to work constantly. I don't have time for my family. This is not how I envisioned this would go. And I'm just going, going, going, going, going, even with assistance. Some I've met that man, I remember the first awards thing I went to. There was one agent who does everything herself. She freaks out if she doesn't make thirty thousand a month. Like thirty thousand in gross revenues is her absolute bare minimum. But that doesn't leave a lot of time for her personal life. And there's not a whole lot else that she does. And I remember we had several conversations after we met of small changes she could make. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. It's just something to think about. when you do get past that six-figure gross revenues, there is a huge chance, especially if you become the primary breadwinner, you're gonna have to start sacrificing something in another part of your life. And I'm having deja vu. This is weird. Okay. I feel like I've recorded this entire episode. And I may have had another episode in this series where I did the same thing. It's really crazy. Alright, anyway. So An exercise that you can implement. Write out honestly what you actually want your life to look like. Over the next few years. So if you have younger children, like think about a roughly what age they're going to be in three to five years. Think about if you have older children, are they gonna be in college? If you have children out of the home, maybe you're gonna have grandchildren at that point. You don't have them now. Or maybe you have small grandchildren that you help take care of that are gonna be a little bit older in school by then. Maybe you're single and maybe you're like, okay, well I intend to be married. There's so many different ways. So just write out what you want that life to look like in the next few years. Not your business goals, your life goals. Maybe you're renting right now and you want to be a homeowner. Maybe you're a homeowner right now and you want to be renting instead. Maybe you want to be Excuse me, pretty close to retirement. Maybe you're one of the many travel advisors I've gotten to know over the years that's still working another full-time job. Or even maybe they've come back to part-time, but they're still working that other job. That's part of your life goals, right? How much time do you get to spend with your family in three to five years? Let's do three because five years seems too far off, and if you really focus on achieving these goals in three years, you might get to them much faster. What does your health and your energy levels look like? What kind of flexibility matters to you? As an example, if you're like, what do you mean by flexibility? For me, my son is out of the home. My pets that I had for nearly twenty years, they all passed away last year. I'm not seeing anybody. So it's just me, so I can have a lot of flexibility in my work day. I mean I do get to spend time with my family and my friends, don't get me wrong there. And also throughout the day, I get to work whenever I want and how long I want. Because I don't have any other obligations other than making sure I'm fed, I've brushed my teeth, and I've showered. Maybe laundry. There's not a whole lot for me to do here. The dishes. Not a whole lot. So what kind of flexibility matters to you? Do you want to have a strict working schedule and have more flexibility in your downtime? Or do you want to be able to take off work in the middle of the work week because you have aging parents and you want to spend the day with them? It what kind of flexibility matters to you? And then separately, you want to take a look at how your current business is actually structured, your hours, your client load, your delivery model. Where do these two different pictures align and where are they genuinely in conflict? Say your life vision includes being fully present for your kids after school hours, but your current business model has you filled in client calls until six or later most evenings. You can't even cook dinner. You know? That's a real specific conflict worth addressing directly rather than hoping it just resolves itself. The fix might connect back to several things that we've already covered in this year, which is batching your communication windows, we talked about in day. 211, be more deliberate about your boutique versus scaled travel agency business model from day 217, or simply setting clearer boundaries on your available hours and communicating them clearly to your clients. And this ties directly back to the stewardship conversation several months back. Being a steward for your business, God put you in charge of this business. This isn't all just you, and He's giving you the graces to be a steward to take care of this business. If you tend if you're tending to this business as something that you have been trusted with rather than something that owns your entire identity, I have been there. I've been there. It becomes so much easier to make deliberate structural choices that protect your actual life rather than letting the business's demands simply expend to fill every available hour by default. Okay, so your life circumstances are going to shift, which is why I mentioned like a three years from now type of thing. There's gonna be a new family situation. As mentioned earlier in this episode, a change in your own health or your priorities, a different season of ambition. So I have mentioned, I believe, gosh, there's so much content I work on. I don't remember if I mentioned this in the podcast explicitly. Or if it's some short-form content. I know I haven't posted yet. But your business. Like you are in a relationship with your business. Just like you're in a relationship with your children, your community, your spouse, your church, whatever, you're in relationships with all of them. And you do have to make sacrifices. And so this whole episode is about like what sacrifices still keep structural integrity to other aspects of your life. While also building this business as a steward to contribute in the future to other aspects of your life. And just like any other relationship, you and that person or entity in this case, you grow and evolve and change. And so then your priorities will shift. You might have a completely different season of ambition in a few years. You might go hard. Hard on your travel agency for like five or ten years, and then be like, alright, it's time for me to wind this down, I'm ready to retire. Everyone's different. So this kind of alignment check isn't just a one-time deal. it's just as important as like the monthly, quarterly reviews, the tech audit, the annual reviews, all the things that we talk about here and in the success circle. Building it into your regular rhythm, even just checking in once or twice a year, keeps your business serving your actual life rather than the other way around. So let's say you do make some sacrifices to grow your business because you want to have a legacy for your family. And that's the path you've chosen for said legacy. Like I said, you will have to sacrifice some late nights. I'm not saying abandon your family altogether. I'm saying occasionally you may have to work and your spouse may have to cook dinner. You may have to make a balance, let's say you have younger children, you want to be there after school hours, you would simply block off, instead of get home from the bus or whatever, you pick them up from the car line at three. You can block off three to five. Maybe start prepping dinner, but spend that time with your family, and then you have availability for a client call from five to six, three nights a week. Like that's one way that you can incorporate everything. Now I'm trying to think of all of you single travel agents. I feel like we have it super easy 'cause we don't have children or Maybe you don't have aging parents to care for. so you have a lot more flexibility and you can focus on really building up your business, but you also need to exercise. You need to take breaks to eat. you need to take breaks to like rest. So with the priorities in your life, if you're like, how can I tie all these things together? And this is my own personal thing. I'm a huge fan of sticking with no more than five priorities in your life and how they can all meld together. Because if you're doing everything everywhere all at once, you're gonna get stressed and overwhelmed. But if you stick to your five priorities, And for me, I tie them all back to my faith. Like I didn't before I came back to the church, but I tie them all back to my faith. So you could tie it into your spirituality too. So my priorities are my friends and family. I put them in one priority because my friends are my family. Like if you if I consider you my friend, you are like a cousin to me. So at a minimum. my spirituality is very important, my faith. Music is super important to me to the point where I'm pretty sure I could never live with anyone again because I don't really watch a lot of television, but I play music. I have like 300 stations on my Pandora and I hit shuffle and I don't care if it's Christmas music in July, I'm jamming out to it. Alright, so music's very important. Listening and performing. my own physical health, but I can't do this. Okay. My own physical health Because my physical body is very much tied to my soul. Like with regards to my own personal faith. So I gotta take care of my body, and God has entrusted me with this body to be a steward to fulfill his will that he has given to me. And I have to do it in this body, right? This body makes the visible the invisible. Like you can't tell I'm here and without this body. So I need to take care of it. So health is up there on the list for me as well. and business development. So I love building businesses, I love running, I love entrepreneurship. So we'll just call number five entrepreneurship. I can integrate all of these under my faith. So spirituality isn't just faith in my mind, but it's just like spirituality, right? So My friends and family, I'm going to love them as my religion teaches me to love other people, right? My spirituality, I'm going to follow the tenets and the catechism of the Catholic Church to the best of my abilities. My love for music, I use that for like when I play or even when I listen to music. It's a big way for me to process emotions and maintain my sanity. It's really weird. That's just me. like I said, my body is tied to my soul, so I better take care of it to the best of my abilities. And I can build my businesses as a steward of my businesses so that I can serve not only you listening to this podcast, but build it to a level to where I can also employ so many other people and provide for them as well. So And I have to tie it all into Catholicism somehow. That's what I that's my goals. Those are my personals. But I only have these five things. So if I feel like I'm spending too much time on my business, I can pull back just a little bit and focus more on my health. If I'm feeling too stressed or burnt out, I turn to music. If I don't know. Maybe I'm having some conflicts with friends or family. It doesn't really come up a whole lot. But maybe if I were or having conflicting emotions about anything and I feel like I'm reacting instead of responding in any aspect of my life, I can turn to prayer and my spirituality, my faith, to give all of that worry or whatever, put it at the foot of the cross for Jesus and be like, please take this off me. So That's an example of how you can create the vision for your life and integrate being a business owner and integrate all of the things that are most important to you in your life. And like I said, I even before I came back to the church, I was always telling people like five things, five things. That's all you gotta worry about. Nothing else is relevant. And if you think about it, those are the five things I'm going to be investing in for me. So, friends and family, spirituality, music, my body, and my business. or businesses, right? You could have golf in here. That's when if golf is in your top five, that's when you should make an investment in lessons. or a golf club membership or a new set of clubs or taking trips to different golf courses around the world. If that's in your top five then absolutely. But if I don't have these five things for me and you don't have your five things for you fully feeling comfortable and fulfilled And like fill those cups up. Don't waste your time on anything else out of those five or outside of those five categories. Alright. Quick recap. Sorry, I went on a I'm just on tangent town, it's fine. You should treat your work, your home, and your personal life as interconnected rather than constant competition with each other. Write out your actual life vision, what you'd like to see in three years, hopefully less than three years, then honestly compare it against how your business is currently structured, how your daily life is currently structured. you can address specific conflicts between how your business model is working right now and how how you'd like your life to be directly using so many different tools that we've built on this year. If you're brand new and this is your first episode, sorry, you got 272 other episodes to reference. And revisit this alignment check periodically since your life and priorities will continue to evolve. I personally like to check in with my top five priorities life and the life vision I want about once a year. but I will start kind of thinking about it like by the end end of the third quarter, moving into the second, the fourth quarter. Second comes after third. All right. Moving into the fourth quarter. So that when I do my annual review, I have a stronger conviction of how I want my life to look and apply that to next year's plan. All right, tomorrow we're gonna look at stress management techniques. Evidence based. For anyone who is a leader, which guess what, chicken butt, if you have your own business, you are a leader. Congratulations. I hope you have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.