I have been talking to my advanced coaching students about how as we get to this point late in the year we have a lot of people hitting their goals early or breaking records and there is a lot of celebrating happening in our community. This is fun and everyone celebrates yet it can be tough for the students who haven't hit their goals for whatever reason. If you're feeling dissatisfied with your business today is for you. I'll show you what the happiest photographers I know are routinely and it has nothing to do with whether or not they are crushing their goals.
The happiest photographers I know are routinely doing one thing. How they learned it is different for each one of them. For me, I started the habit when my daughters decided at a young age that they wanted to play a college sport. It was exciting for me because I adore the time I spent in college playing volleyball. But once my girls started playing competitively, I saw it’s much different. I was enduring getting up all wee hours of the night, spending long days and weekends in gyms. Weekends were passing by like a blink, I was eating nasty concession stand food and waiting in lines to check into hotels at midnight. And this often happened for months at a time
When we'd wake up, it'd be dark outside. When we'd get home, it'd be dark outside. In the rain, snow, spending hours in waiting rooms at doctors' offices for minor and major injuries. Everything from blisters to broken bones and many MRIs. It's the things we mamas do without question to support our kiddos dreams. Here's where the lesson comes in. During one of the early tournaments, I remember thinking this is going to be a lot of brutal years for me to get to a point where these girls are actually good and fun to watch. And that's when it hit me. I can choose to be miserable for years hoping for the outcome of my kids getting good enough to play in college which they said they wanted to do. If I choose to focus only on that outcome, between now and then is going to be very painful. Or I could choose the alternative and enjoy the process and focus on that. And that's what I did.
Instead of focusing on the hours spent in the car driving to and from practice and games, I learned to love the windshield time with each of my kiddos. We would talk about their lives, their dreams and all the things because we're sitting there for hours together. I found parents on the team that I enjoyed and I tried to be the rally parent. I planned meetups in the lobby at the end of the day where we all come and we have pizza. I had to stop focusing so hard on the outcome of playing in college and focusing on making the process of reaching that goal fun.
I think the same is true in business. So many amazing and talented photographers come into my business programs with huge goals. They start taking action and the more they do the more results they get. When obstacles come up we are there to coach them so they can keep going when something happens that slows them down and frustration sets in.
The truth is, part of creating a business that is sustainable is having to learn some of the hard lessons that you can only learn by doing and getting coached. Just like my girls playing volleyball. They had to get the reps in and keep showing up day in and day out and they had to keep getting coached. They had to lose a lot of matches, watch the film and practice their skills. They had to deal with teammates who were not nice to them or teammates with different attitudes. They had to surround themselves with others who loved the same sport as them.
There can be joy in all of this if you make that choice. That’s why I created this community of photographers within my coaching programs. They're surrounding themselves with others in our community who are enjoying being a photography business owner. Photographers who are winning some days and losing some days, but they know they always have fans cheering for them in our community and the happiest photographers have learned how to enjoy the process of building a business.
There are going to be hard days. You have to make a decision that you want to be great and then you have to consistently take actions that get you there. That keeps you improving. That keeps you growing. The biggest decision you can make once you make the decision that you're not quitting on the goal is to set yourself up to enjoy the process.
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