Podcast Ep 336 - Keep hitting dead ends in your photography business? This is how you move forward

Book a unique 90-minute coaching session with Heather during Black Friday Week, beginning November 25th. https://flourishacademy.mykajabi.com/2024deals

In this episode of the Flourish Academy podcast, Heather Lahtinen shares insights from a week of coaching photographers who are grappling with roadblocks in their business growth. Heather dives into how mindset and experimentation play crucial roles in overcoming these obstacles, focusing on how to reframe common struggles, manage self-doubt, and find opportunity in setbacks. 

She also shares her “scientific method” approach to trying new ideas, tackling failure, and continuing forward when things don’t go as planned.

Show Notes:

• Heather’s Coaching Notes: Insights and common challenges photographers face while growing their businesses.
• Mindset Shifts: The importance of reframing “dead ends” and embracing experiments.
• The Scientific Approach: Using the scientific method to test strategies, let go of perfectionism, and get creative.
• Facing Disappointment: Learning to trust yourself to handle setbacks and move forward with resilience.
• Inspiration from Thomas Edison: Lessons from Edison on resilience, persistence, and experimenting with courage.
• Resources Mentioned:
  • The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear

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Connect:

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TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to the Flourish Academy podcast, and today I'm sharing how to

reframe very common, challenging thoughts when it comes to growing your photography

business. My name is Heather Lahtinen, and I'm a photographer, educator, and

entrepreneur, and I founded the Flourish Academy as a resource for photographers of

all levels. We want to help you pursue your passion on your own terms because we

believe there is room for everyone. In this podcast, we focus on creating

breakthroughs with your mindset to discover the things that are really holding you

back in business and life. I have been averaging 12 to 15 coaching hours per week,

both in our Elevate program and in private one -on -one conversations with

photographers. And you can learn a lot when you talk to people this much about the

challenges that they are facing whilst growing their businesses. And it's also really

helped me sharpen my skills. And if you'd like to chat with me or work with me

one -on -one, I'm offering a super unique session during my Black Friday Week of

Deals, which is starting November 25th. I'll be sharing this to my email list and

all over social media, but I'll also include the link in the show notes today. And

typically the only way you could work with me in this capacity is by becoming a

private client for either six or 12 months. But with this deal, you can just book

one session with me for 90 minutes. After chatting with one of my photographer

friends yesterday, I thought, and everyone could benefit from this conversation.

And then I looked at my notebook for the week and I noticed that I had a ton of

notes from all of my sessions that would be valuable for others. So I decided to

periodically record episodes on Fridays, which I normally wouldn't do,

but I wanna share my coach notes from the week. And I guess we could call I'm,

I'm literally making this up. I guess we can call it the coach note series. We'll

see how it goes. But before I dive into these notes, we believe that the best way

to build a business, we at the flourish Academy is to take as much action as

possible, trying as many different things as possible to figure out what works and

what doesn't. I teach the scientific method in elevate. You make a hypothesis by

asking yourself, what are the top three things I need to do to get more clients,

for example, or what are the top three reasons I think this thing that I'm trying

is not working. And then you just pick one of those ideas and you experiment.

You try it out. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't, then you just move on

to the next one and you try again and you repeat this. Oh, I don't know. Pretty

much forever, but you have to be willing to have failed experiments,

which it turns out most people are not willing to do. I had a photographer friend

call me the other day and she asked me to help her decide what to do next in

order to increase her inquiries and bookings and based on her language, it became

very clear that she wanted the one exact right way that like she could be 100 %

certain would work. And she even said that. She said, I want the right way that's

going to work. And I was like, oh, sorry. That's just not how this game is played.

you have to be willing to experiment and try things and have them not work so that

you can learn and grow and get to the one that does work. And it was pretty clear

also, she did not care for that response. I'll come back to this in a minute,

but okay, I'm looking at my coaching notes from the week and These are just little

things I had written down as a photographer was telling me what was going on. Okay.

It says, nothing is happening. I need to make money. I'm afraid I won't be able to

make this work. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do it. I'm really

stuck. I don't know how to move forward. Posting on social media is not working

because nothing is working. I keep hitting dead ends. I feel very defeated.

Okay, I want you to just like think about those thoughts. Nothing is happening. Dead

ends, I'm stuck, I don't know what to do. How do you feel when you think these

things? I would have to assume it feels pretty awful. And then what do you do when

you feel awful. Well, you certainly aren't willing to try new things. So you just

ruminate on how nothing is working, which makes you feel worse, which continues the

spin cycle. And then you don't conduct any experiments, which means you don't get

any results or answers or direction. Nothing happens. So you actually prove those

thoughts true. Nothing is happening because you're not doing anything because you

think nothing is happening or that nothing is going to work. And you aren't willing

to try because you are afraid that you won't be able to handle the feeling of

disappointment. We don't even realize how much we are demotivating ourselves with our

thoughts and our words. And we also demotivate ourselves when When we decide whether

this decision is conscious or unconscious, we decide that we don't want to feel

disappointed because we don't trust ourselves to be able to handle the feeling of

disappointment. So if we go back to this conversation I had with my friend, she was

already feeling pretty defeated because inquiries and bookings have been down And what

she didn't realize is that she was not willing to feel disappointed because she's

already felt it so much. She's like, you know, I'm done. I just need the answer

that works. I'm not, I'm not willing to try anything that is not going to work. So

what was happening was she was avoiding taking action because she could not be 100 %

certain that It was the correct action that was going to move the needle. Well,

then in this scenario, you actually guarantee that nothing works or that nothing will

work because you aren't doing anything. So thinking or saying to yourself,

dead ends stuck. I don't know what to do. Obviously, these are not serving you.

So, I would recommend either dropping those words from your vocabulary or finding a

way working to reframe them so that they serve you. For example, I just don't

believe that there's any such thing as a dead end. I would never say those words.

I would never think those thoughts because I don't, I don't believe a dead end is

a thing. I look at it like that was just an experiment that didn't work, which

means now I have more data and I can try something else. And what if that thing

you're referring to is a dead end? What if that idea, the fact that it didn't

work, was exactly what you needed to happen in order to get to the idea that does

work.

If you thought that way, all of a sudden, these things that aren't working, they

would not feel like dead ends. Would they? It would feel like it was,

it was necessary or very important for that to happen because it's a clue to what

you need to do next. I often think of Thomas Edison in these situations because one

of his most famous quotes is, I have not failed. I've just found 10 ,000 ways that

it won't work. Can you imagine trying 9 ,999 ways to,

I don't know, invent a light bulb, which has never been invented before, and it

didn't work and still continuing to try experiments? Like, are you willing to do

that? Because that seems pretty intense, doesn't it? And by the Okay,

he had zero evidence to support the fact that it could work or he could invent it,

but he kept going because a photographer said to me the other day, I said, what

would you need to think or believe that you could get clients that pay you $1 ,000?

And she said, well, I would need to have the evidence of someone paying $1 ,000.

And I said, okay, so what comes first, the evidence or the thought because you are

not going to get the evidence until you have the thought that it's going to work.

Many of us have this completely backwards. We want the evidence like, Hey, I would

love the evidence that I can build a million dollar business, but I'm not going to

get that evidence until I believe that I can build a million dollar business and

Then that evidence will come. I grabbed a few more Edison quotes because they're so

good. He said, "Genius is 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration.

There's a better way to do it. You just have to find it. Many of life's failures

are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work and I

would add and it feels like failure and disappointment. You just need to be willing

to feel those things and maybe even more importantly, you need to trust yourself

that you can handle the feeling of disappointment or feeling defeated or frustrated

like most of the time. He also said, when You have exhausted all possibilities.

Remember this. You have not. Okay. I have a couple more. Next one is our greatest

weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just

one more time. I often share this in elevate. I always say you have one job and

then I'm like, wait, no, you actually have two. One is to just get paying clients

in front of your lens period. That's the only job you have. And then the second is

just don't quit. And he also said, just because something doesn't do what you

planned it to do, doesn't mean it's useless. So this goes back to the thought about

dead ends. I like, please do not say that. It feels awful and it's actually not

true. It's not useless because it gives you information and it tells you what

doesn't work. And if you are willing to rear through all of the things that doesn't

work that don't work, then at some point you're going to find one that does and

then another and then another and you're going to tip the scale and those are going

to compound and it's going to get easier. And if you believe that, if you truly

believe that that's going to happen, then you might find it a little bit easier to

conduct these experiments without any guarantees. I recently read The Obstacle is the

Way by Ryan Holiday.

I loved this book. Like it's probably one of my top three up there with Atomic

Habits by James Clear. You have to read this book. I definitely need to do a

series on the podcast, but I want to share this story about Edison. I didn't know

this story, so when I read it, I was like, whoa, that is so inspirational. From

the book, He says, "At age 67, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from

another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his

house with urgent news. A fire had broken out at Edison's research and production

campus a few miles away. Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene,

but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various

buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories threatening to

destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building.

Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire through the now hundreds of

onlookers and devastated employees looking for his son and he said go get your

mother and all her friends With childlike excitement, they will never see a fire

like this again. What? Don't worry, Edison calmed him. It's alright. We've just got

rid of a lot of rubbish. That's a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about

it, there really was no other response. What should Edison have done?

Wept? Got angry? Quit? And gone home? What exactly would that have accomplished?

You know the answer now, nothing. So he didn't waste time indulging himself.

To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We've got

to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to

find joy in every single thing that happens. and I would add we need to find joy

in quote the dead ends or the things that don't work. Okay, this story goes on.

You absolutely need to read this about how Edison rebuilt his building and what he

was creating and then went on. Okay, it says within about three weeks,

the factory was partially back up and running within a month. It's men were working

two shifts a day churning out new products the world had never seen. Despite a loss

of almost one million dollars, which is more than 23 million in today's dollars,

Edison would marshal enough energy at the age of 67 to make nearly 10 million

dollars in revenue that year, which is 200 plus million in today's dollars.

He not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it

spectacularly. I mean, for real. What an inspirational story.

And I think it just starts with a decision, at least it does for me, that there's

no other option other than "I'm going to figure this out." There will be setbacks,

you will feel defeated, you will be frustrated fairly often and all you have to do

is just keep going and manage your mind around those feelings and give yourself a

break when you need to and then get back in the game. I don't know who told you

this was going to be easy or a cakewalk, but it can be fun and joyful when

something doesn't work out instead of like berating yourself or letting that defeat

really get to you, becoming overly emotional, Edison said,

indulging essentially in those emotions. You could just shrug your shoulders and be

like, "Huh, okay, oops, that didn't work. So what, what's next?" I just want to

remind you that nothing is impossible. You just merely don't know how to do it yet.

And that's actually another Edison quote. I hope that you found this useful. I'll

see you in the next episode.