Podcast Ep 379 - What Pumpkins Taught Me About Resilience in Business

What do pumpkins have to do with running a photography business? More than you might think. In this episode, Heather shares how her journey of accidentally becoming both a pumpkin farmer and an entrepreneur reveals a powerful framework for growth: the scientific method.

You’ll discover how to experiment, evaluate, and keep moving forward especially when setbacks (or deer!) threaten to derail your progress. Whether you’re trying to grow pumpkins or book more clients, this episode will help you reframe failure as fuel for resilience.

Show Notes

• Heather’s 6-step framework for growth based on the scientific method
• The parallels between planting pumpkins and building a photography business
• Why setbacks aren’t happening to you but for you
• How to manage emotions when plans don’t go as expected
• The truth about entitlement: why effort doesn’t guarantee outcomes
• How failure builds resilience, confidence, and grit
• Why experimentation is the fastest path to clarity in business

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Connect:

Heather Lahtinen: Website, Facebook, Instagram

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TRANSCRIPT

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

pumpkins relate to 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. Today's episode is being recorded with a live

studio audience. In other words, I invited my elevate friends to join me on Zoom.

And every once in a while, I like to do a live podcast recording so that we can

work together on these challenges. But I want to share my framework for how to grow

and improve your photography business. I mean, it turns out you may have noticed I

have a framework for everything and I like to keep things super simple and I'm an

engineer. So naturally I want to talk about the scientific method or my version of

it. So I have it as six steps. You number one, decide what you want.

Number two, make an educated guess at how. Number three,

you try it. Number four, you look at the data objectively. Number five,

if it works, you do it again. If it doesn't, then you go back to step two, which

is make another educated guess. And then the final step, number six is just repeat

that, just over and over and over with everything that you're doing. And at that

point, all you have to do is not quit. You just keep trying things repeatedly.

You try it out, you evaluate, you consider what's working, what's not working,

you make another guess, you do it again. For instance, if you want to get more

clients, then the only way to do that is to meet people, tell them you're a

photographer and make an offer to connect. So if you do those things and it doesn't

work, then it's just time to evaluate and then repeat the process. And when I say

evaluate, one of the things I ask myself is, "What are your top three guesses as

to why it's not working?" So if you're trying to get more clients, you could ask

yourself, "Okay, what are my top three guesses as to why I'm not getting more

clients?" And then if you look at that, the key word here is objectively and sort

of eliminate the emotion. Okay, there's going to be emotion. We'll talk about that

in a minute. But you look at the data objectively, and then you just try it again,

and you refine it, and you repeat it. If you do that over and over, you will

eventually figure out what works. And the good news is, the pace is up to you.

So you can do this as quickly as you need to, just all the while managing your

mind around it. So I think one of the best ways to teach a concept like this is

through stories. I know that sharing a story that can illustrate and draw parallels

with a concept is the best way to learn because you remember it. And that's because

you're able to process it on a different level. So that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to share a story in order to demonstrate this concept. I love the autumn

season, which is upon us. And every year we host a pumpkin carving festival called

BYOP. Bring your own pumpkin. Get it pumpkin? We've been doing this for 30 years

and it is legendary in in our community and on our homestead.

And typically we have about 50 or 80 people that attend. Now, the cleanup after

that day isn't much fun, but we are often left with a ton of pumpkins. And there's

not much one can do with these pumpkins except throw them over the hill. That's

what we do in the country. We throw things over the hill. Well, for the past few

years, we've had pumpkin and gourd plants just sprout up on their own and it was

like quite easy, meaning I didn't do much of anything. I didn't plant pumpkins. They

seemed pretty hearty, pretty resilient to me. I didn't even try and there they were.

So over the years, we've harvested maybe one or two pumpkins a year,

but gourds do really well. So we might get like 30, 40, 50 gourds, which is

Amazing because then I don't have to go buy them. So I call myself an accidental

farmer. I accidentally planted pumpkins. I am also an accidental entrepreneur.

I never set out to start a photography business. Friends asked me to take photos.

I was practicing with my Canon PowerShot G3 point and shoot. asked me to take

photos. A family member asked me to photograph their wedding. I've talked about that

several times. And it was just like, okay, that sounds fun. And I had my camera

and I would take photos. And it seemed pretty easy to me. And not speak just like

planting the pumpkins, it seemed because I didn't try. I didn't try. I wasn't trying

to get clients. I wasn't trying to start a photography business. But those first two

weddings, It may have even been the first three, but for sure the first two that I

photographed, I thought, "Oh, well, this is fun, and this is easy." They were small

outdoor weddings with good light. I was pretty shell shocked the first time I shot

in a real reception venue. Turns out it was not so simple,

and I did not know what I was doing, but it was just like accidental and fun and

oh I'm going to figure this out so I'm an accidental farmer, I'm an accidental

entrepreneur and then I just decide do I want to pursue this and could I figure it

out? So this year I thought I would try to deliberately plant and grow pumpkins.

I have have this idea of, I don't know, it seems to me like out of a hallmark

movie where I could have a pumpkin patch and people could come to our pumpkin party

and pick their own pumpkin and carve their pumpkin and it would just be so cute.

So I've had that idea for a while, but I never pursued it. So this year, I was

like, I'm going to deliberately plant and grow pumpkin. I mean, it couldn't be that

hard. Could it? I mean, I've done it in the past just by throwing pumpkins over

the hill. So this is where I decided to apply what I know about the scientific

method, which is like, you just have to take a guess, okay? I don't think it takes

a genius to figure out I need to get some pumpkin seeds and put them in the

ground, right? Okay, so I bought four different types that I'm experimenting,

I'm in the experimental phase, just trying things out. No clue what I'm doing. Just

like an entrepreneur business, no clue. I'm just experimenting. I bought four

different types of pumpkin seeds and I planted them in four different places on our

property. So the four different types in each of the four places. So I mean,

I don't know what I'm doing, right? I'm just going to experiment. They came up

really quickly and I became obsessed with these plants.

I am checking on them every day. I'm talking kindly to them. I am watering them.

It turns out for the past, oh gosh, probably two months, we've been in a terrible

drought with oppressive heat. So I am feeding these pumpkins.

I'm watering these pumpkins. I'm I'm treating them, I'm weeding them, I'm just like

constantly what can I do better and they're growing like crazy and I'm starting to

see blooms and things are working and you know I'm drawing a parallel here you take

a couple of photographs you like you photograph for someone else they like the

photos you're super excited and you're like all in. I have been all in with these

pumpkins I mean it's an obsession everybody knows that I have this obsession. My

family, my friends will now ask me, "Hey, how are your pumpkins doing?" It's become

like this thing. So this was about a week and a half ago, I decided to call a

team meeting, which, you know, there's no real team. No one was really interested in

attending. I'm just talking about my husband and my kids, but I'm like, "Hey, team

meeting, we're going to walk around, we're going to

But I should have called my chickens to the team meeting. They may have helped eat

the bugs. There were some bugs that were becoming a problem. But anyway, so I said,

"Hey, we're going to walk around to these different pumpkin sites and we are going

to evaluate what is working and what isn't working." I hope that you can see this

illustration. Yes, with your business, you can see this, you're experimenting, you're

trying to figure out what's working, what's not working. Okay, so we went to the

four different areas. One thing we learned is that pumpkins are not as resilient as

I thought. They require a very specific amount of sunlight. So there were some that

were like full sun, you would think that's what they wanted, but it's not. Then

some were just like too much in the shade. And then there was this one that had

the perfect balance. So out of four, They were all growing, some better than others,

but out of four different areas, there was one area that was really good and this

plant was just thriving. Okay, so what we learned first is like, it has to be a

certain area. Second thing we learned is they do require good topsoil. One of the

areas had topsoil, the others, my dad just took a rototiller and turned up the dirt

and they weren't doing as well. Okay, so I learned, they need good dirt. I also

learned they need a lot of water. They did not love this heat or this drought. So

one of the sections that I planted was not close to water. So we weren't able to

water it. So it's not, obviously, it's not doing as well as the other. So it has

to be somewhat close to the house or access to water so that we can water it.

So okay, we're about like weeding and not touching the stalks and where the root

systems come and and how they're getting pollinated and the males and the females

like so many things i'm learning about these pumpkin plants just through these

experimentations and i'm i'm really excited about this i learned the four different

types i planted were regular carving pumpkins cinderella pumpkins they're like wide

and they're like kind of squatty white pumpkins and then i planted the North

Atlantic, great American pumpkin, these giant pumpkins, I couldn't wait to grow some

of those. Like this is honestly out of control for sure. But I was thinking,

here's what I was thinking. I don't know if it's gonna work this year or not, but

I know for sure I'm gonna be the world's best pumpkin farmer next year because of

what I learned this year. And the thing is, I have to wait a full year to conduct

the next set of experiments to see what happens. But in business, you can conduct

experiments as fast as you can like turn things out and try things so you can see

really rapidly what's working or what's not working and you can make adjustments.

Okay, same thing, scientific experiment. This is the method we're using. The faster

you try things, the faster you'll get the info and you'll get the results. Lucky

for you, you don't have to wait a year. I have to wait an entire year, that's

okay. I said to everybody, I'm learning so much this year and I can't wait for

next year 'cause I'm really gonna try to grow those big giant pumpkins. Okay, so

this is, like I said, maybe a week and a half ago. Things are going well. It's

challenging with this drought, but okay. So now it was not quite a week after that.

So now maybe this is like the end of last week as of this recording. My mom comes

into my office one morning and she says, "Hey, did you check your pumpkins yet

today?" And I was like, "No, what's up?" And I could tell something was very wrong.

And she said, "Well, there's been a development, a situation." And I was like,

what has happened? And she said, I think the deer found them.

I said, whoa, what do you mean? So I hesitated to go out there because I was

anticipating something very terrible. And sure enough,

the deer had decimated my pumpkins. I mean, first,

she ate all You know, pumpkins have big giant leaves, all of them. She ate all of

the big giant leaves. So there's just these like bear stalks. And then I had

probably, I didn't count, six, maybe eight decent size pumpkins growing and several

more babies. I mean, tons of babies. She took a bite out of every single one of

them. She didn't eat the whole pumpkin. She just ruined each singular pumpkin. And I

mean, she must have told her friends because there was a lot of damage here. And

it was just like everything was wrecked. To say I was devastated was an

understatement. I had put so much time and energy and love and care into these

pumpkins. And just to see it wiped out immediately with no, no return on my efforts

was I mean really devastating. Like I may have even shed a tear. I was so upset

about this. I couldn't even stand it. And, you know, I can see my role in this

because we have deer on the property. And when I would encounter said deer in the

woods, and she would, you know, run off, I would yell after her, I want to be

friends. We can be friends. I promise. I will never harm you I'm friendly to the

deer and I'm thinking she took that to mean she could eat my pumpkins Okay, that's

not what I was talking. I was just trying to be friends So, okay, I'm gonna come

back to this but the interesting super interesting thing is 30 minutes before this

recording 30 minutes ago. I Took a quick loop in the woods and I saw her and And

she ran off, of course, well, because she knows what she's done, right? And as I

turned the corner, her friend was right there in front of me. She couldn't have

been 20 feet from me. She was just standing there staring at me, completely still,

which my husband tells me can be dangerous if she has a little one, but she

didn't, and the little ones are like teenagers at this point. But anyway, I thought

that here's my opportunity, right? So I said, "Listen, I know I said we could be

friends, but you cannot eat my pumpkins. You just can't. This is not what friends

do. Would you like me to play at something else for you? Because I could try to

do that. Or do you need a formal eviction notice?

Let's get it clear right here." And she looked at me as if maybe she was

contemplating these scenarios, and then she hightailed it in the opposite direction,

which is like, okay, she's not going to cooperate. But I just, I'm looking at this

whole situation, I'm thinking, okay, in your business, you put so, so much effort,

heart and soul into getting clients or into your clients, and then it doesn't work

the way you think it should work and you are devastated. And that is very real.

And Let's say, let's play with this for a minute. So I had the team meeting before

the deer situation. We talked about everything we were learning so that we could be

the great American pumpkin farmer next year. Okay. So let's say this deer situation

didn't happen. And then next year, I take all of the learnings, everything I've

learned, I've set myself up for success. I'm so excited. I get everything out. It's

going really well. They're growing. And then the deer gets them. Let's say that so

it didn't happen this year. Let's say I set it up for myself up for success and

it happens next year. That would be even more devastating. So I needed deer to eat

my pumpkins this year so I could do better next year. I mean something else might

happen of course but it certainly won't be related to the deer. What I am

suggesting here, is the things that are happening to you or in your business, and

by the way, I don't think it's happening to you, I think it's happening for you,

just like it happened for me, this dear situation, is like, it has to happen so

that you can get better the next time. And again, you can experiment with your

business over and over again as rapidly as you want. I have to wait an entire

year, and you have to be willing to do this you have to be willing to try again

and again you have to be willing to experiment a million times full well knowing

that things aren't going to work for the most part and that you will be

disappointed but what if that wasn't to be avoided but expected you just like take

a deep breath you you can feel a disappointment, that's fine, and you keep going.

Because here's the thing. I am not entitled to pumpkins this year or next year,

no matter how much I've learned, no matter how hard I've worked or what I've done,

I'm not entitled just like you aren't entitled to clients, no matter what you think

you know, no matter what you try, no matter what works for someone else, but it

works for you or it doesn't work, et cetera. It doesn't matter. And even then,

let's say you figured out, let's say you get some clients and I get some pumpkins

and things are working. Well, that doesn't mean they're going to keep working 'cause

you're not entitled to that. There is no quote done here.

It's just constant experimentation and willingness to try and fail over and over and

over again. But what if that's not a problem? I will not stop trying to grow

pumpkins, but it's like we're looking for something that works. You're looking for

something that works, how to get clients make money, so that you can be done with

that, that particular challenge. You know, Heather, just tell me how to go get

clients and then I'll be done with that and I'll get clients and you know, I'll

move on to something else. But those are just unrealistic expectations and having

those expectations is what is keeping you stuck in miserable. What if everything

that's happening is there to show you what you are made of so that you can

increase your confidence by what you experience through your experiments.

What if every catastrophe that befalls you happens so that you can learn and get

stronger and it's necessary? I always ask myself, what is this teaching me?

What am I learning about myself? How is this helping or serving me?

How is this perceived catastrophe working in my favor?

When I was in the height of my emotional response regarding my pumpkins, I know

it's great. It was unnatural. I was so devastated. My friend actually brought me a

dessert and some gifts that she added in a box and she said, this is, um, this

gift is, I'm sorry, you lost your pumpkins.

Okay. When I was in the height of my emotional response regarding the pumpkins,

I thought, this is what I thought initially. I was like, you know what? Forget it.

All right. You know what? I am never growing pumpkins again. This is too much work.

It's too heartbreaking. I have to go buy pumpkins anyway, so probably should have

just bought pumpkins to begin with But later when I was feeling a little more

reasonable the more I thought about it Of course, I'm going to try again Because

it's showing me what I'm made of which is grit determination and resilience and I

love that about myself. I love these things.

If, if I didn't, I would just like go buy the pumpkins. And I think to myself,

where's the fun in that? Where's the fun and just going and buying the pumpkins?

And if I love these things that show me what I'm made of, these challenges, then

why wouldn't I want to put myself in situations where I get to use and practice

them more. It's like I learned these tools, you know, in Elevate, we learn the

model, we learn this. I get excited to practice them.

I mean, and don't worry, something is going to happen probably tomorrow, where you're

going to get a chance to experiment with your tools. And that's great. Because then

the more you learn it, the more capable you feel, and the more confidence you

build, it's self confidence. Like I can handle anything. If I can handle the

devastation of the loss of these pumpkins,

I can handle it. I know it's silly. Okay. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I've

even applied this in very difficult life circumstances where I've said,

what is this making? What if this situation is showing me what I'm made of?

I want to know what I'm made of and I'm proud of that. So let's quickly review.

The scientific method is number one, decide what you want. Number two, make an

educated guess as to how. Number three, you try it. Number four,

you look at the data objectively after your initial emotional response.

Number five, if it works, do it again. If it doesn't, you go back to step two.

And then six, you just repeat over and over and over and everything in life,

but especially business. This works. I know this works. I'm sure it makes sense to

you so you know that it works. So the only thing left to do is execute the steps

and then manage our minds around the emotions that will invariably arise.

I like to think that I am always increasing my capacity to feel disappointed

insecure anxious or defeated and not let it stop me.

I am increasing my capacity to experience the feeling of Failure or defeat and not

make it a problem. If you would like some help in these areas or if you're curious

about coaching or you'd like to just talk with me about your business, head over to

www .getcoachedbyheather .com to jump on my next free fast track coaching workshop.

You will be surprised at what we can accomplish in just a few minutes. I hope that

you found this useful. I'll see you in the next episode.