Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 121 - Spirituality & Your Travel Agency Pt. 2
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome back to the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. It's day 121. We're doing another episode on spirituality and I know this can be very... I don't how to say this. Like I don't want to be in conflict with anyone. Everyone has their own beliefs. I just want to say that. And if you are into anything, like any kind of spirituality or faith, I don't know how atheists like. If you're an atheist like... Let's have a conversation, because I've studied a lot of different religions and things, and I could never grasp that concept. So I'm not really sure how this would apply. But everything is energy. And the energy that you put in your business, even your spirituality, can affect your business. And your business can affect your spirituality. And that's a very important part of your life, in my opinion. So that's why I'm talking about it on these next or these past couple episodes. Now if you have any sort of like Christian upbringing, can almost guarantee you that fame, fortune, high profit margins are of this world and not of the next and why aren't you giving more back and you need to humble yourself, which is not false. I'm not saying like this is the worst thing ever. However, it may have been misinterpreted, especially if you have left that faith. and you're pursuing whatever else in your spiritual life. But that thought was put in your brain, the limiting beliefs, the theta brain state, I think that you're in until about age seven. So if you were taught that, like you have to give, give, give, and it was just like misinterpreted, then you may have that limiting belief of anyone who's very successful must be evil. ⁓ I'm not allowed to be successful because I have to humble myself. You can be humble and you can have a lot of great things happen in your life. But I think this is tied to a lot of people's reasoning to really take that leap and do it scared and take that risk because it's in conflict with a misinterpretation of the ethics of a variety of religions. We need money to survive, right? We need money to exist. I'm not saying you need to strive. We're gonna talk about how success can like disrupt a lot of things in your life. But we need money to survive. There's nothing wrong with making money. There's nothing wrong with making more than you need and you can share it with others, right? And there could be a deep feeling of, don't deserve this. It could be tied to your spiritual upbringing. And that could be something that you need to work on through prayer or meditation or whatever it is that you like to practice. So if you are spiritually minded, let's talk about alignment with your business. How Just like everything else in your life can affect your spirituality, your business can affect your spirituality and your spirituality can affect your life around you. How you choose to respond instead of react, a lot of that like. comes from your faith. So there's two main things to consider when you're starting any business. This is for travel advisors, but just like are you fulfilling a need for others and are you providing something valuable for society? If you are Sort of just like throwing out affiliate links and just letting see what happens happens. You're kind of doing a little bit of that but it's not that valuable for society. But all of us essentially are doing both of these in our businesses, Hopefully. And if you are like, I'm not doing anything valuable. I'm not as good as other travel agencies or online travel agencies. You are fulfilling a need for others by having your knowledge and expertise, by taking your time to help them with this trip rather than them having to DIY everything. by advising them properly, you are doing that work. You are fulfilling that need. If you want to get, like, at a minimum, all of us travel advisors are fulfilling a need in that capacity. And you could take it further than that. One of my students has this amazing project in the works. There's actually a few of us, like me included, but there's like a few of us that are like coming up with these offerings, so to speak. That can be very transformative in our communities. And it's becoming more more common. that, like if you wanna go deeper in fulfilling a need and providing value for society, that is a way you could do it. If you are brand new, I wouldn't go into that right away because it is a lot to take on. It has a lot more involvement. ⁓ And it requires a little bit of like, leadership experience in some capacity or understanding. Not that you're a tour operator. Don't think that I'm saying like, you're a tour operator now. I'm just saying if you are doing this to create a movement, make sure you know what you're doing first, right? Like make sure you know how to do like some groups and some FITs and how you want to structure your business. Then you can go beyond that and create something very transformative. for your community. Okay. In terms of providing something valuable for society, we all have the opportunity to bring in enough revenue to create more jobs. If you are looking at this from an entrepreneurial mindset rather than just like a self-employment mindset, eventually you are going to want to have people on your team and therefore you're providing jobs and income that's going to be, if you hire locally, it's going to be spread throughout your local community. Another thing is, is you can always donate to schools, churches, any nonprofit organizations that you prefer to support in your community to help promote and provide value in society as well. But outside of that, like, deeply, I feel like many travel advisors mission statements should have some, and you do whatever you want for your mission statement, I don't care. But I just feel like the mission statement should have something to do with... giving people the experience of interacting with different cultures so they can see how small they are in the world truly, you know? And how awesome the entire world is. I'm not gonna get into, I could go on a rant about how everything's becoming the same, I don't like it, but I'm not gonna get into that rant right now. Okay. When you think of online travel agencies or like a competitor you aspire to maybe reach that level someday, you use a competitor as inspiration. Do you view them as profit mongers? Is there part of you that's like, ⁓ gross. That is something that you should look at and can affect your spirituality is affecting your business. ⁓ And from a let's see, let's do it from a Christian standpoint. ⁓ Love thy neighbor. If you can't see your competition as your neighbor, then you're not loving your neighbor. Like you're not loving your neighbor if your competition is like, they're the worst people ever. You're not loving your neighbor. They're allowed to be different. And they may not be exactly how you would like to do things. And you can still be inspired by them. ⁓ But if you're like, I can't charge fees because Expedia doesn't charge fees and that's my biggest competitor. Are you actually providing value to society or are you, is that coming from a fear of? Is that coming from a fear of I have to make it just as easy as this giant 25 year old tech travel agency company is or I'm just not gonna be worth it. People aren't gonna view me as an equal. And therefore, they're the big bag boogeyman of the industry. because again, they take too much money, they make too much money. Newsflash, a big chunk of the stuff that we end up booking through suppliers is probably contracted through one of those big online travel agencies somehow. So you can't really avoid it. ⁓ But if there's something that you do, if you are in that conflict where you think that anyone successful is big bad, evil, evil. then you need to look at why you perceive them to be evil and almost always it is a reflection of something about you. And it could be you get angry, I'm trying to think of examples, you could be angry that they are greedy and taking your ability to generate revenue, I've got air quotes going if you're listening. ⁓ But that's more of like maybe you need to calm down and understand it's not all about you and there's plenty of business to go around. So calm down about it. They aren't evil. Hopefully they aren't evil and you just go about your business. Okay. But that would be like a conflict in your spirit because if that's leading you down the path, again, this is kind of like from a Christian standpoint, I'm trying to relate to, it's difficult because I did do a lot of like manifestation woo-woo stuff and it's all about I, I, I, me, me, me, which is. Not good. I'm just going to say that. Like not good in my opinion. So from a Christian standpoint, if you are having those thoughts, like these are, these things are bad and evil and this is bad and evil and this is bad and evil, like everything has the capacity to be evil all the time. We can't, we can't change that. Like anything or anyone can succumb to. Oh, I wanna do something evil. The only thing we can control is ourselves. And if you have those thoughts of like, they're terrible. And like you just start getting angry, that's going to lead you, you're in a state of pride because you're like, I'm better than them. Right. And then you're in a state of pride and that could lead you to do other negative things. And this is what I was talking about with the butterfly effect of your actions in your business back on day 118. So you could start to get short with your clients because you've got it in your head that you're never going to be good enough and you need to have the respect and you could be like super hardcore with your boundaries and just end up providing poor service. And it can all stem from just having these thoughts of like, booking.com is an evil conglomerate. I'm not saying they aren't. I'm not a fan of corporatism myself. ⁓ But that's just something to think about when you start having that with your competitors or even your colleagues if you get that little spark of, man I wish I could have that. Be careful. The pursuit of profit should never be your main goal. And I got a story for you. Money's nice, money's necessary. When you put it above everything else including your spiritual life, that money has now become an idol to you. And that's, mean, money is energy. Money is. shouldn't be idolized to that extent. It shouldn't be idolized, period. Now story time, I was at an award show, one of many, I can't remember which one it was, I remember it was daytime, but I feel like it was after the actual awards dinner, so it may have been the next morning. And I brought my ex with me because he worked for my company, and they're like, ⁓ you got a trip for two, and I was like, well, I mean, you are my second in command here. So let's go. And we're together, it just makes sense. We can share a room, it's fine. So we go, and I remember he just was walking around the room and I was sitting on the couch in the suite working or something. And he was just, fuck those guys. Fuck them all. They're all fucking idiots. What are they even doing here? We're so much better than them. And I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, they're all assholes. They're all worthless. They're all assholes. Like da da da da da da. And I was like, ⁓ okay. Like you barely spoke to anybody. What made you come to this conclusion? Like I feel like everyone's okay. Like I don't know them all that well, but the handful of people I've gotten to meet here have been nice and fun. And I remember he said that I had to work more, I need to close more weddings and I need to be number one because fuck these guys, next year I'm gonna show them, we're gonna show them, we're the best, we're number one. And I was like, I do not care about being number one. And I was also at that time, I'd been doing dozens of weddings a like around 25 to 30 weddings a year. And so I was like burnt out. Because yes, I had him on my team. He pretty much just did the piddly little group stuff, which was a lot. ⁓ But like sending off itineraries, occasionally answering emails, sometimes running payments. That was about it. And I was doing a lot of wedding planning stuff, like helping the brides sort out the day of timeline and their final budgets. And so that's a lot of, like, how many entrees of each and how many, like that's a lot of work, especially if you ask people with a form, like, hey, please send this on, and they don't, like you have until this day, and then if you don't fill out the form. We just have to assume you have no allergies and you want the cheaper entree. And that's fine. And then people are submitting them late and it's like, no, we have to finalize all these things. Anyway, so I'm doing all that kind of stuff too, plus the marketing and the travel side. It was a lot of work for me. And too many consultations and planning calls. So I was like, I need to change how I'm doing my business. and I need to cut back, I do not need to make this much money every year. It's good that it came in. I don't need to make this much money. I'm fine with a third of this coming in. Like I'll still break six figures, you know? And he was saying all that to me that I needed to do more, more, more, more, more. And it was like a conflict because I'm like, I want to kind of pull back. I want to really start mentoring travel advisors and helping them because I don't need this much money. You know what I mean? I don't know. Anyway, then there was all this pressure on me to continue performing at that level. And I see travel advisors that I've helped get to that level and they can't even see themselves that they have now started placing money above all else because they're like, ⁓ my sales are down. I must be the worst thing ever. I've got to do something. And some of them understand it's just a cycle, but some of them are like full on panicking. I gotta do more, more, more, more, more. I gotta be better, better, better. I wanna be number one, number one, number one. Why, why? And they have a spouse that makes plenty of money. They have no reason to need to make 500,000, there's no reason to make $500,000 a year, especially when... there's pushback on whether or not they should hire more people and make that investment. It's like becomes very greedy. And these people, some are fine, some I see, and I was headed in that direction of more, more, more. And I was like, nope, I got to stop this, right? But when you get into that pursuit of money first, money is the end goal, I'm gonna increase my fees to like ridiculously high amounts. ⁓ Money, money, money. I've seen many advisors like, yeah, they can get people to pay those higher fees, but their revenue drops significantly because they've lost the real reason why they started this in the first place. and it's not aligned with their spirituality. Okay? So that took 20 minutes to ramble on. I want you to be aware, just a few more minutes, if you become the quote unquote overnight success where you're like working, working, working, toiling away, barely breaking even for years and then you have that one good year, please, please, please, yes, that's a reward for your hard work. That's like the garden you were working on and then it just like your tomato plants. I don't know why everyone only grows tomatoes in my brain, but your tomato plants just like went crazy and you had buckets of tomatoes. You didn't even know what to do with them. You had so much same thing in your business. And then you're going to have to go to the winter season. You're going to have to have the seeds and hopefully they're heirloom tomatoes people, but you're going to have to have the seeds ready for the next season. So you have to keep on performing the labor of love. instead of like, could you imagine if this was a garden scenario and you just happen to have one good harvest and you're like, I'm the best producer of tomatoes in the world. I'm gonna go commercial everybody on my quarter acre lot that I live on. And then you try to do that. You're gonna toil away for what? For Someone at a Food For Less in a different state to buy your tomatoes, that's just crazy. Anyway, all that to say, that is a temptation. That is a temptation, the pursuit of more money at whatever cost because you came into a lot of money is a great temptation that may or may not cause you to go in conflict with your personal values. and your company values. Alright, that's the weirdest episode ever, sorry. Think about it, journal, have a good day, bye.