Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 215: Discipline is a Skill, not a Genetic Trait
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, and I'm a travel agency owner helping travel advisors become the CEO of their business. Head over to elevate with Rachel K.com if you're like, I don't know who you are. Or just listen to the podcast. I don't know. It's fine. Subscribe to the podcast. Today is day 215. Discipline is a skill, not a personality trait. We're doing some mindset work these next couple days. If you are brand new to the podcast, I swap between like operational strategies, mindset strategies and reframes, general stuff, marketing strategies, all that fun stuff. Because I'm not gonna tell you like we all do things our own way, but I just wanna share with you all the All the different ways so you can make an informed decision instead of just being sold to. Alright, we reframed yesterday. I don't have the time to do this. You do, you do. We're gonna talk about the thing underneath. a lot of avoided tasks which is discipline. And the good news is it is genuinely learnable. Even if you're a little neurodivergent, it is learnable. It's just learned in a different way. Okay? There is a ton of research behind this. That was part of like my bachelor's degree. there's a psychologist, Roy Baumeister, known for his work on self-control, popularized the idea that willpower behaves something like a muscle. It can be fatigued by overuse in short term, and it can be strengthened over time through consistent practice, the same way physical strength builds gradually rather than appearing overnight. So people who have like attention issues. you can still build that muscle. Just think of it like You can still build the willpower and consistency muscle. You just have to think I am weaker than the average person right now. So it's gonna like I can't do it for as long. You know what I mean? Like if you were someone who hadn't done a push up in twenty years, you can't do a push up right now. I can almost guarantee it. And if you did, it would be horrible for foam, why did I say it like that? So What you need to do is like modified push-ups and back when I was a personal trainer, people in that scenario where they could not do a single push-up, we would start with push-ups up against the wall, and we would do very few, like five to eight at a time, up against the wall, and just make sure. They were doing it, you know? And then once they could do twenty-five push-ups up against the wall, like standing push-ups, without their arms shaking and tiring out, because everyone's at different levels in every aspect of their lives, then we would like go lower and we'd go to the Smith machine and like lower the bar, lower, lower, lower. Eventually on a step machine like a step. Then eventually on their knees, then eventually full push-ups. And if they stayed with me long enough, we'd go to full handstand push-ups. But there's a progression there. And same thing with willpower. If you have very, very low willpower and very difficult time managing your attention, you gotta start with the wall push-ups version of the willpower. You can't do what people are like what the average person is doing or someone who's been doing this for a long time. Like you can't be someone who is stuck doing wall push ups and be like, why am I not a bodybuilder? competitive bodybuilder winning all these awards. You're not on the same plane, and that's fine. So I don't want you to think I cannot develop discipline. You can. You just need shorter bursts bursts of time to do it. Instead of Like even the Pomodoro technique with 20 minutes and five minute breaks, you might only need 10 minutes to start. To be like, I need to focus on only this for 10 minutes and then give myself a five minute break. Or give myself a 10 minute break. And slowly work that up to where you can focus for 20 full minutes. Anyway, that was a rant. That was a ramblin'. There's also a well known study that's often associated with June I can't pronounce I can't Anyway, there's another study. I used to have this book by Angela Duckworth, I think. I remember studying Duckworth, showing that self-discipline was actually a stronger predictor of academic performance than raw intelligence in some student populations. T I L, I used to be one of those gifted kids, and people are like, Well, you're AQs, hey, you're so smart. I'm like, BFD, if I don't do the work, I'm not getting anywhere. It doesn't matter how smart you are. The takeaway isn't that talent doesn't matter, it's that consistent, disciplined, effort reliably outperforms ability and talent alone. Discipline itself is a trainable capacity, not a gene you're born with. You can develop it. If you've ever told yourself, I'm just not a disciplined person. I have squirrel brain. I hear that a lot with travel advisors advisors. I help. This research research suggests that framing is completely inaccurate. And you are just saying out loud a limiting belief, by the way. You're not, and I know you might have a full-on diagnosis, and also it is something you can train. Okay. You're not missing some innate trait. You're simply at an earlier stage of building a skill that anyone can strengthen with the right approach. Like I said earlier, start smaller than feels necessary. Discipline research consistently points to starting with small, achievable actions rather than dramatic life overhauls. This is why the Success Circle program is 52 weeks long rather than eight weeks of here's a bunch of shit, good luck. Also $5,000, please. Like There's a reason why I set up the success circle to be 52 weeks, you only get one week at a time, so that you don't do a complete overhaul. You do the baby steps because I know you we all have to strengthen our discipline. If content batching feels overwhelming at first, just do like idea generation for one week and nothing else. Small completed actions build the actual muscle faster than large abandoned ones. And I see advisors abandoning things all the time because it's a thing. Like we get in this weird mood where we're like, my life starts now. And then we like psychotically change everything. And then we instantly get burnt out. And we're like, well, this is not sustainable. It's like I'm gonna liken it back to health and fitness. It's like crash dieting. Like, why are you crash dieting in your business? Why do you think you can change your business in eight weeks or three weeks or four? Like, it is a long-term skill that you need to constantly be focusing on. Just like your diet. Like, you can still have a cookie, you can still have a Snickers bar. I don't care. But if you need to change your overall diet, Maybe not have a box of cookies a day. Maybe cut it down to two-thirds of a box for a week or two and then half a box. You know what I mean? Or if you need to get more greens or more protein, rather than just going on these crazy crass giants or just being like, I'll just shoot myself up full of GLP ones. I don't know how I feel about those. They can be helpful and I think people using them strictly for weight loss is very dangerous if they aren't doing the diet or exercise changes. Not dangerous from a health perspective, but also maybe because it depletes your muscle. We're not talking about that. I'm not a doctor. But you know what I'm saying. Like slow baby steps. Alright, reduce some friction around the behavior that you want. If you want to make hundreds of thousands or millions as a travel advisor, first of all, are you acting like that that version of you right now? Or are you like, I can't act like that, I can't do that, I can't dress like that, I can't have my day like this. Well, then you're never gonna get there, But research on self-control repeatedly shows that disciplined people. Often succeed less through raw resistance to temptation and more by structuring their environment to make the desired behavior easier and the undesired one harder. If you say I need to get off social media, it's eating up all my time, I'm just reading all these crazy threads about drama. The most successful travel advisors aren't on social media all day. They're working. They don't pay attention. They aren't joining every single webinar for every single possible training because they already know this is what I'm doing. None of that's relevant to what I'm doing. So I don't need to do that. And so they structure their environment. By not attending everything, by not checking some some of the like highest performing TAs I've met don't even have social media. Some of them don't even use it. And a lot do. Like newer advisors, you're probably and depending on your location, you're probably going to need to market on social media. But there are so many that are just like, I've shaped my environment. I have the people that I speak to. I have the people that I work with. I have my method on acquiring my clients. I have my niche and what I have to offer. I've only done training on my niche and what I want to offer. And I don't need to worry about all the other noise. And it takes time to build that environment, especially if you're new to the industry and you're like, well, I don't even know what I want a niche in yet. That's okay. Just be aware. And there have been many times when I was new to the industry, I would like become friends with like colleagues. And I realized very, very quickly these people are not doing anything, but reading about drama in Facebook groups. They make zero money. I cannot have these people in my environment because they're going to bring me down. Are the five people you spend the most time with? Okay. Alright, but if you keep avoiding filming, that's another one, and you want to do video content, set up your spot in your office, be your own butler for the future you have it ready to go so there is no excuses. and just have it out and have your spot. That's another thing. I like I mentioned this at the first Unfam retreat. I like, be your own butler. Be the butler for the future you. It's really nice. You feel like if you take care of the things that you know you're going to enjoy and like find convenient later, it's so nice, by the way. All right. Track the small wins. Completing small committed actions and acknowledging it. Even just boop, check in a box. Check ity check, check, check reinforces a neural pathway that supports future discipline. This is why, like, you could have your daily tasks. This is why I say, write it down, put it on a sticky note, get a dry erase board, put it on the dry erase board, tat like I used to cross off my wedding groups and be like, It's done when I was like in crazy mode with weddings. We had t two big dry erase boards just full of weddings, and it was like and I did that so when people would schedule calls and stuff. Or email, I could just glance at it instead of being like, let me go into my CRM and see when the final payment dates, because it would just be on the board. And I'd be like, final payment dates this date. But also when it was done, I crossed it off. And once that season or year was over, I'd erase that entire board and be like, ha. But track those small wins. This is part of why the batching systems from earlier in this week, like episodes 2, 10, 11, work so well alongside discipline building because a completed batch is a visible, trackable win. If you're like, I got all my ideas done. I like to do a checklist every day of No more than ten tasks if I want to be really detailed. And once I do them, I'm like, cross that mother off. It's done. Go me. Look at me getting stuff done. Sometimes there's only three things I have to do. And you need to expect fluctuation, not perfection. Willpower research also shows discipline isn't a constant, steady resource. It fluctuates day to day based on stress, sleep, demands elsewhere in your life. If you're a lady. The luteal phase, there's like two weeks out of the month where we're just like, I cannot be at nearly as productive, and then there's two weeks out of the month where we're like, I'm a rock star. And those fluctuations, I believe, from what I read this book, because I'm not quite there yet, mmm, Fast Like a Girl, I think it was. And the doctor who wrote that book, she's like, it carries on into menopause. So if you're menopausal, it's a whole diet thing around. your cycle by the way, fast like a girl. And so you'll have like higher carbs during certain times and lower carbs and higher protein and fats other times to keep your hormones a little more imbalanced or more in balance, not imbalanced for like the whole perimenopause and menopause stuff. Anyway. So, your willpower is not gonna be perfect every day. It's not gonna be super high. You're not a superstar. Like I said, stress, sleep, any other demands in your life. Anything else is going to affect your ability to do everything. I mentioned in yesterday's episode I'm dealing with a weird health issue and I just gotta take it day by day and do the best that I can each day. Yes, I'm working 7 a.m. to sometimes eight or nine p.m. but I have a lot of breaks in between in an attempt to keep on the path I want to go on with my businesses and also take care of myself. So a day when discipline feels harder isn't evidence that you've lost the skill, that you're no longer disciplined, you're never gonna be good enough. It's evidence that you're a human being. It's worth simply returning to the small, small, tiny actions of the day. Discipline is not something you either have or you don't have. It's not something you were born with. It's something you build one small repeated action at a time, which connects directly back to every system we've covered this last week. Tomorrow we're going to bring storytelling back into the picture, specifically how it fits into your content batching system. This is the Travel Agency in a Year podcast, day 215. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you tomorrow.