#92 - How Business Travel Nearly Broke Me (200+ NIGHTS AWAY)

EXPECTATIONS vs REALITY: work trips. Yay! A vacation! Oh wait - I'm alone, with flight delays, rental cars that smell like ketchup, and strange grocery stores? Yes! Welcome to the commute. 

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Transcript

Welcome to the Talk to People Podcast.

This is your host, Chris Miller.

You are officially listening to episode 92, which just so happens to be the beginning of a brand new series of the Talk to People Podcast.

I have never, not once, started a series on this podcast feed, and I'm excited to give it a shot.

This series is going to be titled, The Recovering Commuter.

If you've listened to this podcast long enough, if you're just now meeting me, nice to meet you.

My name is Chris.

If you've been around, you've known that travel was a big part of my 20s.

And in about a couple weeks, I officially exit my 20s and I turned 30.

And it's caused a lot of reflection.

And one of the things that I've realized was, I learned a lot from travel.

So we're going to talk about it.

The next few episodes are going to center around my experience traveling.

And this episode that you're about to listen to is going to be called Expectations Vs Reality Traveling for Work.

So be sure to buckle up.

Make sure that your luggage is in the overhead bin or under your seat.

Make sure your tray is upright.

You are in a good mood.

You've said hi to your passenger, to the person next to you, and you are ready for blast off.

Let's get into it.

Today, we are going to talk about traveling for work.

If you've ever had a big work trip, then you know the feeling.

I've spent about 300 nights away from home in the past few years because I was traveling for work.

So I've learned a ton from that, but this video isn't going to be a long list of travel hacks.

Rather, we are going to explore that disparity between what we expect work travel to be and what it actually is.

This is the beginning of a new series called The Recovering Commuter that I'm starting.

So be sure to like this video.

Subscribe to the channel so you don't miss other videos of the series.

You can chat and react below.

Be sure to share your experience, because I want to hear about it.

And then I will start with a quick story, then get into five reasons, five big points, five big moments whenever I learned that this is going to be much different than I expected it to be.

So in 2020, I started a brand new job.

It was my first big boy official job outside of grad school.

I was going to be a consultant for a healthcare technology firm.

The job description said about 50% travel.

My interviewer was like, hey, don't sweat it.

It's really only a few days of travel each month.

So I was excited.

I had never traveled much.

I had only been on an airplane two or three times.

The first time I was ever on an airplane, I was 22 years old.

The people who were in my aisle were like, hey, if it's your first time, come by the window.

And I remember looking out the window and watching everything shrinking as we were going in the air, being able to see the clouds from above, seeing this end of the shelf of fluffy marshmallow cloudiness going off into perpetuity.

It was mind blowing.

And I vividly remember that.

I remember my first client site was outside of Phoenix.

I was leaving Kansas whenever it was frozen over.

It was completely snowy.

And then touching down in Phoenix, a little bit outside of Phoenix, where there was palm trees and orange trees and great weather.

I was staying at a resort, actually.

This place had a golf course on it.

What in the world?

What am I doing?

I was so excited.

And I remember checking into my hotel, closing the door and being like, all right, here we go, right?

Which leads me to the first time that I realized, oh, this may be a little different than what I was expecting.

The first time in 300 Nights.

And that was, oh, this is a little lonelier than I was expecting.

I am very socially wired.

I love people.

Community is arguably one of my top values.

I've listened to all the studies that say, high quality human relationships are the most important thing to a happy and healthy life.

And I found myself just sitting alone in the hotel room.

And I get it.

It's okay to be in solitude.

But I also recognized day after day after day after, I had to stay at the client site for the whole week.

I found myself getting pretty lonely because I was away from all of my people.

So we think about this whenever we're traveling for work, that we are going to be away.

But we think a little bit more about the destination where we're going.

And what's so different about work travel, especially if you first start it, that you don't expect is our framework or our standard for what plane travel and what hotels is like is much different than what it's actually going to get used to.

Because what we're used to in that moment is vacations.

Whenever we are going on a plane ride or whenever we're checking into a hotel, it is different than the norm.

And we get to go watch the movies and eat the things we don't typically eat and see the really cool amusement parks or see the big wild attractions.

But whenever we find ourselves at work travel, we can adapt that same mindset because it isn't like the, let's just go and dive into everything.

And I found myself doing this, which is number two of why it was much different, was I would find myself kind of taking on this summer camp or this vacation mentality.

So I'd go and I'd get the junk food, or I'd get the fast food, or I'd play video games really late, or I'd find myself scrolling social media, basically doing things that I didn't intend or didn't plan on doing whenever I was at home.

I was, I prioritized discipline and being able to focus on coming up with living in a certain way.

But in the hotel room, I would just watch TV really late.

I'd be eating candy.

I'd be on social media, and then I'd have to wake up the next day.

Because my mind associated hotel rooms and the plane rides with the travel and the vacations and being out of our norm.

And that was really tough for me.

And it was a lot different than I expected.

It was basically rebuilding up my discipline to not view this work travel as vacation, but actually as travel.

And if you're hearing this and you haven't been there, it may not make sense.

Like, well, it's work.

You don't plan on watching TV all day at work, do you?

But number three of what made it so weird for me, and the thing that violated my expectations was whenever you travel for work, you think about what you're doing during the day, the nine to five.

That's what you prep for.

That's what you work with your boss on is, okay, we need to make sure we get this deliverable to the client.

We need to make sure we do this presentation.

We need to make sure we lead this meeting.

But then after the job is done for the day, at 4 p.m.

or 5 p.m.

or 6 p.m., depending on what that time is, your downtime is so unstructured.

And we don't typically think about this because we have this built-in infrastructure of what our day looks like.

We typically have an agenda.

Like for me, I have an incredible wife, and I have a dog at home, and I have friends, and I get to go home, and we get to do dinner, and then I get to work on this podcast, or work on a project, or do something for work, and then I have to take the dog out.

There's a lot of built-in structure that we don't think that we've built until we remove ourselves from it.

And we find ourselves at the Hilton, or the Marriott, or the IHG Hotel, and we're sitting there, and we are like, okay, what do we do with this downtime?

So the downtime after work is the hardest part.

Working, showing up to the client side, being able to interact with the clients, that's the fun part.

But the thing that we think is going to be really fun whenever we're first getting started, like, ooh, I'll be able to go and explore the restaurants and all of the cool places around, like, technically, you can do that, yeah.

But after work, whenever you're in a brand new spot, it's really hard to force yourself to get out there, and you find yourself staying in the small hotel room.

And it got to a point for me to where I had to intentionally switch up the hotels I was at, because I couldn't see the same layout again.

I was like, nope, this is too much for me.

I need to switch it up.

So having that unstructured downtime ended up being a lot more difficult.

And the best trips that I was ever on after I got used to it a little bit, I joined a pickleball league for that town that my client site was in.

I showed up to a few different places to watch movies by myself.

I basically had to build an infrastructure for myself.

If there were a church, if I were there on Sundays, I'd go to a local church.

It was like I was living there, because you basically have to plan for what you're going to do in your downtime to keep your sanity and to make sure you don't slip into this vacation mode when you're not in vacation mode.

The fourth thing I wasn't expecting was the things that we put in our body, aka all the different foods we're eating, it really adds up.

And when you're traveling, it can be very hard to be consistent with what you eat.

It's so easy to eat fast food.

It can be so easy just to eat whatever's at the hotel check-in desk.

Several times, I had so many delays.

I found myself flying in, in the middle of the night, getting the rental car, getting to the client site, and being like, okay, yeah, I'll do some almonds, I'll do a banana, and I'll do some potato chips, which is actually a little healthier than what you could have done, right?

But then you do fast food, and then the schedule is a little inconsistent, so you have to run here and pick something up real quick.

The first time I started trying probiotics, it was travel.

Like my gut, it was so hard on your gut, because another big thing that really affects your gut health is the stress and unpredictability of travel.

You can't control whether or not there's going to be a big flight delay.

You can't control on whether or not this car rental line is going to be two hours long.

You can't control if you're sitting next to someone on a plane, and then they get sick, and then you have to land, and then your flight gets canceled.

I remember spending the night in Atlanta in the airport, and they're like, okay, your flight's canceled.

This is the last flight of the night.

You have to book a hotel.

So then I go to book a hotel, and all the hotels are booked.

So I had to sleep in the cafe in the airport, next to these people who are watching TV on their phones out loud with no headphones.

It's like, oh my goodness.

So all of that unpredictability and that uncertainty puts a lot of stress on your body, and it will put a lot of stress on your immune system, on your digestive system.

You could get to breaking out.

You can gain weight.

There are a lot of different ways where that's going to go downwind and affect you.

But that unpredictability, it is something I wasn't expecting, but the reality turned out to be a little stress for me.

And then number five, the thing that was quite interesting to me was I found myself trying to balance two different lives.

So whenever I was out on my client site, I would, I got into a pretty good routine on the, whenever I flew in, I'd go to the grocery store, and I'd get all the groceries I could.

I had a pretty consistent list of foods that I would eat, just to maintain some basic routine for myself.

And then I would go back to the hotel and I try and structure my downtime and I try and call people and I try and stay physically fit by going to the gym.

But then you have to wake up really early and you return your rental car and you board your plane, you find yourself going back home.

And you have to tap back into everything back home again.

And this can be really hard after a while.

Like I was gone Monday to Saturday, and then I was home Saturday afternoon to Sunday and then flying again Monday.

And you have to build a routine, a persona for whenever you're there, just for yourself, just for sustainability, because it can't be so much unpredictability.

You have to basically control as much as you can control.

But then whenever you get home, it's completely different, because now you're no longer by yourself, you're no longer traveling all the time, but you have to be consistent at home, and you have to show up as much as you can because you don't get that much time with your loved ones.

So balancing the two is really hard.

And I remember whenever I left my job, whenever I left this high travel job, after 300 nights on the road, I was so relieved that I could just focus on this one persona now.

And I'm not saying like my attitude was different or like I was a different human being.

It's just you have to build a completely different lifestyle to be able to be healthy in those different circumstances than you do back home.

And to get rid of that and to say, okay, now I just get to focus on this, was such a relief.

And I got to build a community at home.

I longed for a consistent community at home.

I needed that so badly.

And I talked to so many people on the road who were young, successful, but they didn't have anybody in their life.

They lacked strong friendships, or maybe they had friends, but they just never saw them, and they didn't have the best relationship with their family.

And I understand how in our economy, we need people to travel.

That's integral.

But it does take a certain personality.

And if you do find yourself in a job like that, you just need to have so much preparation, and so much routine, and so much discipline.

And you also need to have a lot of investment in a consistent community back home.

That way, you can come back home, get charged back up when you go back on the road.

So that was five different ways that the reality of traveling for work was much different than the expectation.

And in this next episode, I want to be able to share with you the ways that I set up my life whenever I was on the road, to thrive while I was on the road, and to survive while I was on the road, rather than wallowing and not enjoying it.

I did make the decision to leave that job, but if I had to stay, I was getting to a point where I was figuring it out.

So if you're on the road, be sure to chat and react below, share with me your experience.

I'm here for you.

If you have any questions, just send me a comment.

Without further ado, we'll see you next time.