Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 274: Stress Management Techniques for Travel Advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping other travel advisors bust past into multiple six-figure gross revenues because that's my goal. Let's do this. Build a business that builds you up. If you don't know me, I'm sorry. You're gonna love me. No, maybe not. I don't care. But if you have any questions on how I can help you, head over to elevate with rachelk.com. Today is day 274. Stress management techniques for travel advisors. Ba ba-pa. These are evidence-based tools. Part of the CEO Mindset series I got going this week because you should all be the CEO of your travel business. Duh. Running a business, especially one as personally invested and relationship-driven, I used to say that building a service-based business like this is like raising a child. So you're gonna go through the infancy stages, then you're gonna hit the terrible twos where nothing seems to be working and you can't scale past a certain amount, and you're like, why is nothing working? Cause the same stuff that worked in its infancy, just like raising a child, ain't gonna work for a toddler business. And what works for a toddler business ain't gonna work for a kindergarten preschooler business, okay? And so on and so forth. Anyway, travel agencies are very they're service-based, people are your greatest asset. You are personally invested because it's such a low barrier to entry in terms of financial investment to get started. You are wearing all the hats. And it's very relationship-driven. So that comes with a lot of very real and very recurring stress. So we're gonna look at specific evidence-based techniques for managing your stress rather than just pushing through it because the body keeps the score. Go read that book, okay? Why does this matter at a leadership level specifically? And if you don't understand, if you are running your own business, even if you're hosted, you are the leader. You are the leader with your clients, you are the leader with how this business is being built, and you can choose your own leadership style. Unmanaged stress does not stay contained to how you feel personally. It affects the decisions in your quality, your patience with clients, any team members if you have them, and your physical health over time. Yes. the American Psychological Association has published extensively on the physiological effects of chronic stress, including its impact on cognitive function and immune response, making stress management a genuine business input, not just a personal wellness nicety. Okay. And story time for me. I have been a very big fan of stress management techniques and unbeknownst to me, well benounced to me, but I ignored it, for years. I put myself in an extremely emotionally, financially, and physiologically and physically stressful situation. And I just wrote it out because that's where my self-worth was. It's fine. And it led to almost an autoimmune disorder. It's not an autoimmune disorder, but it's very sim similar. And I have had to take massive steps in I had already taken a lot of steps in the direction of like changing my life, retraining my brain, and now my body's catching up physiologically to like calming itself down. Because even though my brain's like, everything's fine, no more alarm bells, you can be chill, right? My body's still like, we're supposed to freak out. So now it's like a little rogue militia that I'm dealing with, which I'm laughing about, but I'm proof positive that if you don't properly manage stress, it will affect your body. And it's not just that, there's so many other things like hormones. I'm convinced a lot of women experiencing major perimenopausal symptoms have a lot of unaddressed and repressed emotions from stress from years ago. That they're just holding on to and it's affecting their hormone production and leading to far worse perimetopausal symptoms than past generations have experienced. And I could go on and on about epigenetics and how past generation stress can be passed down to you, but we're not gonna talk about medicine stuff. Okay? We're gonna keep it simple. All right. Number one, physical activity. Regular physical activity is one of the most consistently evidence-supported stress management tools available. Think back to Legally Blonde when Elle Woods is like exercise produces endorphins. Endors endorphins make you happy, and happy people don't just murder their husbands. Yeah, that's a fact. She's very smart. Go watch Legally Blonde. So Resear research shows measurable reductions in stress hormones and improvements in mood following like even moderate regular exercise. I think this is where the phrase go touch grass comes from. Like go outside into nature and take a walk for 20 minutes. It will clear so many of your stress hormones. Now don't make it a race. Make it a let's see what the neighborhood looks like. Chill, slow walk. Who cares? This is not an elaborate fitness routine. This is not HIT training. In fact, HIT training specifically for women, if you're already stressed out, that's gonna make things worse. It's just it's gonna make things worse. A consistent daily walk has real documented benefits, and it's one of the most accessible tools on this list for a busy travel advisor. Squeezing self-care between client calls and admin work and content creation and scheduling content and blah da da da. It's literally free to go outside and take a walk. Even if you're like, the but the weather's bad, Rachel. I can't go outside. It's too hot. I'm in a heat advisory. Or it's snowing at the time you're listening to this. Or there's a big storm today. Walk around your house. Just do laps around your house. Dancing is another one I like. Again, if yesterday's episode I talked about how much I like music. I'm a terrible dancer, but I will put music on and dance while I'm doing the dishes or cooking. I don't care. It's a great way. Shake it off. Okay. Breathing techniques is another stress management technique. Controlled breathing techniques. Like diaphragmatic or box breathing, have real physiological research behind them. Slow and deliberate from the diaphragm, not necessarily the belly, not just the chest, the diaphragm, the space in between. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, aka the vagus nerve, and I will tell you some little tips to make sure your vagus nerve is activating. Which directly counteracts your body's stress response. If your vagus nerve turns on and your parasympathetic nervous system is like, we gotta go it's a lot harder for your body to get all riled up again because it's in rest and di digest mode. This is really useful in like acute moments, like right before you have to do a difficult client call or after receiving a really stressful email because unlike exercise or sleep, it can be done in like under two minutes, right where you are. So, how do you know your parasympathetic nervous system slash your vagus nerve is waking up when you're doing these breathing techniques? You as you're breathing, you might swallow. The biggest nerve starts at your brainstem and goes all the way down. But you might randomly feel a need to swallow. That means it's waking up. Okay? Another, you'll yawn. You will ha you will have a yawn come out of nowhere. God just think about it. It's big. Sorry. Made me yawn. But you will yawn out of nowhere. And that means like your vagus nerve is like, okay, you're yawning, it's time to start to go to sleep, right? Now, diaphragmatic breathing, box breathing, box breathing is like you breathe in one, two, three, four. You can hold, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four. Hold one, two, three, four. If you're watching this on YouTube, I kind of like make a little imaginary box. the fastest way to reset your vagus nerve and get your parasympathetic nervous system down, like turned on and ready to go and get you to calm down. is if you do your inhale roughly to like the count of four as an example, pause for one and then exhale through your mouth and like deflate your body, but do it very slowly. You want it to be longer than your inhale for count. So you breathe in one, two, three, four, pause, exhale. One, two, three, four, five, six at a minimum. You can go all the way up to eight. But six, pause. One, Two, three, four, pause. One, two, three, four, five, six, pause. And you want to be focusing from like just pay attention that you are breathing from your diaphragm when you're inhaling. And so you're gonna feel your ribs kind of expand sideways, and you'll feel your belly and your chest rising at the same time, like, or poking out a little bit at the same time as you're inhaling. When you're anxious, you turn in you turn towards shallow breathing, which is up in your chest. So you feel like you can't take a deep breath. And this also often happens if you have poor posture developing. I'm not a doctor, I just study this stuff a lot. Anyway, you have poor posture developing, or the anxiety itself starts to pull on your scalings and your upper traps, so your shoulders start to come up by your ears. And that limits your ability for your diaphragm to fully expand. So you Start chest breathing. So pay attention to your posture as well, as a side note, because if you're like, my gosh, my shoulders are way higher than they need to be, and you can lower them down, there are really cool techniques to like release the muscles in your traps in your shoulders, upper back, whatever. But y it's really hard to take a deep breath when your shoulders are up. And your shoulders are up physiologically, they don't have to be as high as they are as I have them in the video here. But they're up psychologically to protect your neck. Mm-hmm. And then you slump forward because you're protecting your guts, and then you brace yourself, and then your psoas muscles start to tighten up and nothing wants to work right. So This is why exercising regularly is good because you're moving the body, even if your posture isn't great all the time, if you can like keep it in better shape by lifting weights and doing body weight exercises. That was a crazy tangent. All right. Do the box breathing or the vagus nerve reset, parasympathetic, diaphragmatic breathing before a difficult client call, before or after you see a nasty email and you're like, I don't even know how to reply to this, but you feel your heart racing. Maybe you feel your heart pulsating in your ears, you're that mad. Let's let's take a chill pill and do some breath work. Let's see. Next on the list is mindfulness and present moment focus. Mindfulness based practices. This is also kind of tied to the tied tied to the go touch a grass phrase. But mindfulness-based practices, There's a big body of research behind that and there's stress reduction effects, including clinical studies, like several pretty well known ones on mindful based stress reduction programs showing measurable decreases in anxiety and stress symptoms among regular practitioners. So you can't just do this once be like, I feel great today, and then stop for a year. Like everything else in life, you have got to be consistent. This doesn't require lengthy. Meditations to start. In fact, if you do s if you're like new and you're like, I'm gonna start meditating, like everyone else in the world, you will not be able to quiet your mind for the first two to three weeks. You're gonna be there and like, Well, I'm gonna suck at meditating because everything else in the world is going through my brain right now, and I'm supposed to be still. But even just like brief little regular moments of deliberately returning attention to the present moment rather than looping on a stressful future scenario have documented benefits. And here's the easiest way, okay? Your five senses. When you're starting to feel stressed out, even if it's like too much screen time and you start looping and you're like, I need like, I don't know what your anxiety might be about, but you start developing anxiety, like, I don't have enough followers, I'm not getting enough consultations, things aren't enough, they're not enough, whatever. My revenue is not where I wanted to be, my bookings aren't where I wanted to be. I better go chat GPT help me figure this all out. Nope, first, get present. Get present. And you do that with the five senses. So you could tell yourself What am I feeling right now? So I'm just sitting in my office in my chair. I can feel I have shorts on, so I can feel the fabric of the chair on my legs. But you can touch the chair, and then you can describe out loud, which sounds crazy, or you can just think in your head, what does this chair feel like? Or maybe you have a blanket in your lap. What does this blanket feel like? What do my hands feel like? Like just things you can touch. What does my desk feel like? What does my mouse feel like? Like, does this feel smooth? and then things you can see. What can I see out the window? If you are facing window, I have a window right across from me. What can I see out the window? Is the sky blue? Is it cloudy? Is it going to rain? What can you hear? Can you hear, like as I'm recording this, I can hear my air conditioner running. And you can do it numerically, like name three things you can feel, two things you can see, and then like go into detail describing it. One thing you can smell, one thing you can hear, and describe it. And that's a really easy, fast way to get you back into the present moment and stop thinking about crazy disaster future scenarios that may or may not be reality. All right. Social support and connection. genuine social support. Talking through a stressful situation with someone else rather than carrying it all alone measuringly buffers the impact of the stress. this connects back to like the theme earlier from this year: a bad review, a hard week, a stressful client situation processed alone tends to feel a lot heavier and more distorted than the same situation talked through. with like a mentor or in a mastermind or even just a trusted friend. And again, if you do air your grievances, what is that Seinfeld holiday? Where they have the airing of grievances. Anyway, if you do air your grievances to someone and there isn't support in it, I'm not saying they totally enable you. There should possibly, I mean, you should be open to the idea of constructive feedback. Although if they are like negative Nancy's about it, that's probably someone you don't need in their life or in your life. and not someone you should be telling your business to anymore. Okay. And then you want to make sure you build something like this into your actual rel rhythm. Not religion. Rhythm. None of these techniques work if you only reach for it in a genuine crisis. This helps you to develop your resiliency. And it's kind of like, you know, you need to take rests. We talked about that on day two fifty-four. but these techniques are most effective as like built-in and regular practices, like a daily walk, a few minutes of just breathing before your first client call. Actually, before I did this whole batching, I knew I w wanted to do sixteen episodes of the podcast in one batch. And with my recent MCAST diagnosis and medication, it's been really hard for me to get past. the first couple weeks, which is why they're kind of out there last few weeks. It was hard for me to do more than like maybe five episodes at a time. So I did a 30 minute somatic vagus nerve meditation before I started recording to kind of like get myself out of any potential stress mode. So I could show up for you. So you can do some breath work before your first client call. or you could do standing weekly check-in with someone that you trust rather than any like treating these as emergency last ditch efforts that you scramble for once the stress has already peaked. Okay? So, recap of this episode. Do your best to build in physical, regular physical activity. the controlled techniques, there's so many free like breathing and meditation videos, as shortest five minutes, and then some of them go on for hours. Just pick a short one, start to learn how to do the controlled breathing. Present moment mindfulness, genuine social support into your ongoing rhythm. Like build all this into your rhythm, not just as an emergency measure. You need to treat stress management as a business input because you are the leader and you are the CEO. And if you're stressed out, like I said, you're gonna make poor decisions. You're gonna start doing fear-based activities. And it's gonna affect your health. And I don't want to see that. Favor the small consistent practices over the occasional and elaborate ones. we talked about this a few episodes ago. We're gonna move forward with confidence tomorrow, without confidence tomorrow. Because you kind of need to do that. Sorry. You need to do it without the confidence. It's an excuse if you're like, I just need to build more confidence. No, you don't. Start doing it. That's tomorrow. In the meantime, have a wonderful day.