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Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Struggling with Confidence as a Photographer? Here’s How to Build It [Replay]
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Foreign I'm your host, Brooke Jefferson. I'm a wife, mama, tattoo and business coach for moms with businesses. I'm on a mission to help you go from the best kept secret to a reputable brand that results in a profitable business. And the best part, you don't have to sell your soul to social media to achieve it. My very first business was a photography business that I started back in 2014. And by 2018 it became my full time career and I was able to leave the classroom. Along the way, I've built and scaled multiple six figure businesses. I started this podcast as a way to encourage, equip and inspire you on your entrepreneurial journey. If you're ready to find a community that supports you, implement strategies in your business that work and uncover that confidence within you, this podcast is for you. Grab your kids some snacks and pop those earbuds in. It's time to grow and scale your business. Hello. I am so excited for this particular presentation. So I am bringing to you your CEO Confidence Blueprint. Before we dive into this, I wanted to take a minute and introduce myself. My name is Brooke Jefferson. I am a wife, a mama, a believer, a family photographer, and most importantly, a photography business coach. So a couple of things to note. I started my business with a borrowed camera. Yes, it was my husband's mother's camera and she was just so great, like so grateful to hand it over to me and let me learn how to take pictures of my daughter who you see in that image when she was six months old. And I kind of never gave the camera back and started having clients come out of the woodwork. So I officially started my business in April 2014. In 2018, I left the classroom teaching and pursued photography as a full time career, which is something I had never imagined to be possible back when I started my business in 2019. Just a year after leaving the classroom, I started my podcast to help others the book More Clients Photography Podcast. And finally, from 2020, when the pandemic first started, all the way to now, I now coach and teach other photographers how to build profitable businesses for themselves. All right, so the first thing I want to get into here is that confidence comes through taking action in your business. Confidence does not come by waking up one day and feeling like you finally made it. It's not given to some people and not to others. Confidence doesn't even come from necessarily a compliment that you get or a nice review that you receive from your client. Confidence comes through continuously taking action. It comes through failure. It comes through lessons learned it is developed through mistakes and it is developed by taking action every single day in your business, rain or shine, whether you want to or you don't. The other thing that I wanted to say is this is the hardest lesson to learn when you're in your business, especially when you hit those low seasons. I don't know if you figured it out yet, but entrepreneurship, owning a business is not this on a graph, right? Sorry if that's backwards to you, but it's not as it's not a straightforward scale up. It looks more like that roller coaster. It goes up and down and up and down and then little bitty ups and downs, right? And the thing that you're going to realize is you're not always going to have highs and you're not always going to have lows, but they are going to ebb and flow. And as soon as you think, oh my goodness, I'm at the tippy top of this mountain, I'm feeling good about myself, you're going to roll into your very next season of low. But I want you to know that that's normal. That's not. That doesn't mean that your business is broken or that you're not operating it correctly. It means that you're simply on the journey to whatever destination you're headed to. Right? So again, confidence comes through taking action. There's no secret editing style there. One event that's going to happen to where all of a sudden you feel confident. It's just something that happens day after day, month after month, year after year in your business. So just know that you are always developing your confidence muscle. The second key piece to having that confidence and ensuring that it sticks with you is to surround yourself with a community who is going to support you. And news flash, unfortunately, this is usually not our friends and family. Or not always at least, right. Sometimes it's the people closest to us that we feel the least support from. And that's just kind of the way that it goes. Now if you're someone and you have like your whole family backs you and your best friend, you know, she doesn't get free sessions from you and she pays you in full, then that is amazing and such a blessing and I want you to hang on to that. But I want you to realize that it's okay if it's not your friends and family. You can find community in a variety of different ways and that can include industry peers, whether they're local and in your area or not. You can meet them in Facebook groups, you can find your Community through courses and programs that you're in. The other students, I will tell you right now that the students that have joined my blueprint program are like a close knit family. And that group, there's not a day that goes by that someone does not post in there or support another person. And I love that. So just know that you can find that amazing, supportive community through different things that you join. Another form of community is having a coach or a mentor. Having someone that gets it, that's been there, that's a few steps ahead of you, that can tell you, hey, you're on the right track or hey, I see a hole in what you're doing, I see a blind spot that you're not seeing and can pour into you and help you get over mindset blocks and strategies and all the things. So I really want you to surround yourself with a community that supports you. And if you don't have one yet, make this your priority to find them. They're out there, you just have to search for them. The other piece is that your mindset is truly everything. I remember a pivotal, a pivotal moment in my life when I went from low level poverty thinking to changing my mindset completely and seeing the world in a completely different perspective. And that was the year 2016. That was my low point. That was the lowest of the low for me. And knowing that I just, I don't know, like, it's just kind of like something switched within me. Which I will tell you first and foremost, I am a believer. My Christian faith has been what has carried me throughout my entire life. But really specifically in the last 10 years of my life, it has been everything. And so my confidence comes from me knowing whose I am, who created me, who my Creator is, and knowing that I am made in his image and constantly being in the Bible for me. So a lot of confidence comes from me having that strong foundation of faith, my values and what I align myself with. This goes back to your mindset, right? I had to switch my mindset. And so yes, faith played a major role for me, but it was also in finding community, surrounding myself with people that were either headed in the direction that I am or have already, they're already there or they're a few steps ahead of me. And by doing that I was able to up level my thinking. So your mindset is everything, right? I can give you all the strategy in the world, all the business advice, but if your mind is not right, then you're not going to see success because you're going to be caught up in your mind, right? It's going to be so hard to get out of that. So these are three common myths and limiting beliefs that I see play out in the photography industry as a whole. And I want to bust them for you right now. First one is, I'm in a saturated market. There's not room for me. The flip side to this is everyone is in a saturated market. Why? Because photography is something that everybody wants it. Saturation is a sign that your service, your skills and talent are needed. Your service is needed, your business is needed. There is no way that 300 photographers in a major city could even handle the millions of people that live there. There's no way to give you another perspective. I live in a small town. There are more cows than people in one stoplight. And I will tell you right now that there are multiple photographers. I would say there's probably five or six of us now in this town. And we are all successful in our own ways and in our businesses, and we don't all get our clients from this place. So that's something else that I want to bust right now. You're like, stop saying that. Stop letting the fact that you guys have what feels like a photographer on every corner hold you back. There is room for you. There's more than enough clients to go around. Number two, undercharging. So the mindset here is that, well, I can't charge that much because no one will pay that. Or. And this kind of feeds into that third one. I don't think I'm worth charging a certain amount. Or I. I'm new, so I have to start here. Here's the thing. The longer you stay in the cheap neighborhood, the harder it's going to be for you to get to that profitable number. This is why I tell my clients, my students, my community, my listeners, basically, anyone that will list, listen to me. I don't want you just slapping a price on things and rolling with it because it feels good or rolling with it because it's what you want to do out of fear. You need to price for profit. And there is a strategic, formulaic way to do this, okay? And I have a free training on it. You're welcome to go search for it. Pricing for profit training. Okay? But with this being said, you're going to see the target of what you actually need to be profiting. And that's going to give you a good indication of, am I way too cheap right now and I've got to work myself there, or am I already there? Am I close to that number or am I well beyond that number? Which is fantastic, right? So we've got to stop telling ourselves all this mindset junk about pricing because it's not true and it's not serving you. And then the last one is, but am I worth it? And again, this is where you gotta have community, you've gotta have values of some kind so that you know, outside of a photography business, what, what worth you have, what your purpose is for even being on earth, right? Because if you don't know that, then it's going to keep you stuck in your business. So your mindset truly plays a major role and it will keep you stuck. So again, here are two specific things that are keeping you stuck from moving forward and going next level in your business or even hitting your booking goals. You're overthinking and you're over consuming and you feel like the pinball in a pinball machine. Yes. So you are in your head all the time, ideas and everything is just going back and forth and you are just like, am I good enough? Am I not? I have this idea, I'm so for my business. And then all of a sudden, nope, I don't think I am. Right. It's just overthinking. And you are getting yourself in paralysis analysis. The other thing that I see is that you are over consuming on everything. So you're listening to multiple podcasts, multiple gurus, you're on, you know, several different educators email list, you're consuming so much social media content and when you do that again, paralysis analysis, because then you're not truly committed to trying things out and you don't even know what's best for your business. That's really, really dangerous. So with all that being said, these are the two things that I see that will keep you stuck, it will keep you from taking action and it will keep you feeling like you don't have any confidence in the world. So what do you do? First of all, you do everything that I've already mentioned, right? You've got to work on your mindset, you've got to surround yourself with community and you got to take messy action. But the best solution, truly in your stage of business, if this is like hitting you hard and it's resonating with you, is to find a mentor or a coach that can fast track your success. So here's what happened in my business. I got myself so far, right? I was able to DIY and Google and watch all the YouTube and listen to all the podcasts up to a certain point and then I knew the only way to get past myself onto the next level was to get out of my own way. And I needed clarity and I needed strategy and I needed an unbiased person to come in and speak on behalf of my business. And so if you're in a place where you're like, I'm done with the diy, I'm done doing this by myself, then honestly find yourself a mentor or coach to fast track your success. And here's how you do that. And this is also the solution to over consuming. Right? I want you to eliminate all the voices that you're listening to right now. Podcast, email lists, social media, who you're following, all the things, limit all of that and then start asking yourself, okay, who has gotten results that I'm looking for? They have proven the results for themselves and for other people. They have a lifestyle that I desire. So for example, I will only coach now with people who have families. I can't be coached by someone who's never had kids because they don't understand the lifestyle portion. Right. So lifestyle and values, I want someone that we at least are consistent in our values are very, very similar. So that when they are being that mentor and that coach for me, I know that they're giving me sound source, solid advice that's not going to, not going to go against what I believe and don't believe. Right? So that is my solution for you. And here's the amazing thing. If you're listening to this, you're going to hear so many amazing speakers throughout this summit, including Ashley herself. What I want you to do is I want you to really pay attention to who strikes a chord with you, who do you best relate to because you're going to get so much solid advice here, but you're going to naturally connect with one speaker over another and that's totally fine. So I want you to pay attention to who those people are and then limit it to 1 or 2 to follow or even go get mentored and coached from, join their program, do one on one coaching. If I'm the mentor for you, fantastic. I'm not going to read you all of this. You're welcome to take a screenshot. You're welcome to, I don't know if you have pausing ability, but you're more than welcome to do that. And you can just see, you know, these are the types of clients that I work with, portrait photographers, all of those things. I teach non wedding photographers. So that's a good thing to note. But yeah, I would love to be the mentor for you. And you can email me brooke@brooke jefferson.com if that's something that you want to get more information about. Connect with me. And then finally, let's just connect. Even if I'm not going to be someone that you mentor or coach or join my program, that's totally fine. But I have two ways I would love to connect with you, and that is by tuning in to my podcast, the Book More Clients Photography Podcast and Come say hello. Tell me what your biggest takeaway was from my presentation. You can find me on Instagram at Brooke Janae Photo. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the summit. Thank you, Ashley for this opportunity and I'm looking forward to connecting. Bye guys. Sam.