Hey girl, I am so excited that you’re here. Today’s episode is filled with so much juicy info. Raise your hand. Have you ever felt like you have been running around in circles in your business or in your life? You know those moments where you’re chasing after something really big? Maybe it’s a really big goal or just a big dream that you have, but you find that when you stop to slow down, you’ve lost track of where you were even going in the first place.
Well, this was me for so long in my business. When I created my photography business nine years ago, I had no idea where I’d end up or what my business would look like in 10 to 15 years. The only thing I really knew at the time was that I wanted to be my own boss and I wanted to make enough money to eventually be able to support myself and my future family.
Have you thought about the live you really want to live?
That was all, I really didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of life that I wanted to live. Like how many vacations I’d be going on or how many clients I’d take on each year or what my values were. I really didn’t think about the type of person that I wanted to become. I really just thought about how I wanted to make money and to be able to support myself. And can you relate to that with any of your own dreams?
I think so often we get these dreams that feel so massive and we know that they’re going to be a game changer, but we don’t really pause to take the time to figure out exactly what we want from them. So circling back 22 year old me just starting my business. I just wanted to be an entrepreneur that made a decent amount of money.
And so I put in all of the work to build up my business, created a website, I took on shoots for friends and I slowly started to get my name out into the world. And his business started to pick up, I continued chasing success. I felt like I was constantly looking for the next client, the next big project or the next big collaboration. And I spent so much time focusing on building a “successful business” without really taking time to actually define what success looked like for me.
What does success really look like for you?
Maybe you can relate to this, but I felt like no matter how many sessions I booked or how busy I was or how much money I was making, I always felt like I needed more. This really pertains to any business or any big goal, no matter the industry, no matter the goal that you’re working on. No matter what you’re starting, we often get so caught up in launching it and getting it off the ground and just like getting stuck in this loop of constantly trying to figure out what’s next.
You know what I mean? We’re always wanting more, more money, more clients, more validation. We want to feel like we’ve made it. But how often do we pause to think about our values and all of this? I know that for me, I didn’t spend any time at all thinking about my values, my day, one idea of making money to make a living just stuck with me for the next eight years of my business and my life.
And it was really all that I focused on. I just wanted to make more money. And then when I made more money, I wanted to make even more money. Even though I was booking clients, I always wanted MORE clients; until one day I realized I was tired of chasing that feeling. I constantly felt like I was in this cycle of not feeling fulfilled with the work that I was really doing in the moment.
I realized I was chasing a never-ending money goal
And I was constantly looking for the next thing. And maybe if you’re an entrepreneur, or even if you’re just starting a new hobby or a side business, you can relate to this, but there’s a lot of pressure in society to prove your worth as an individual, specifically your monetary worth.
So often in my journey as an entrepreneur and an early photographer, people would find out what I did that I had my own business. And they’d ask questions that were basically a way of asking how many clients I was booking. And if I was making a lot of money, like they wouldn’t just come right out and ask those questions point blank. Everything that I heard when someone found out that I was an entrepreneur really kind of circled around this question of how successful was I in my business. And for a long time I felt that every time someone found out that I was an entrepreneur, they kind of immediately judged me and my business and my business’s success based on how much money I was making and how many clients I was booking.
How are you judging the success of your business?
So I have to honestly say for a very long time, that’s what I base my business goals around. I based my goals around what other people defined as a successful business. This is often something that isn’t widely talked about because this idea has really become the framework of a successful business. To most people, is this idea of how much money we make and how many clients we’re booking and how busy our is. But honestly, spoiler alert, focusing on the monetary success really just led me to a lot of feelings of disappointment and unfulfillment. I was constantly feeling like I needed to prove myself, like I needed to book more, I needed to make more money.
I needed to show myself and my worth.
If you feel anything like that, I want you to know that you are not alone and there are ways around it. So let’s dive in and chat about a few things that I changed in my business and in my mindset in order to help me find alignment with my goals and my own personal values, which once I found those values and got that clarity, my work and my job, I got so much more fulfillment out of it every day. So first we need to just put less significance on how other people view our business.
And honestly, this could be a whole podcast episode in itself, but all I really want to say is that we can’t control what other people think about or how they view our business the way in which someone else views the world or views us honestly tells us a lot more about them as individuals than it does about ourselves
Someone else’s doubt in you has nothing to do with your true success
In other words, just because someone might question or doubt your business success, or maybe only value your business based on how much money you’re making. It doesn’t mean that you are unsuccessful. And I’ve seen this time and time again, when I feel like someone doubts my business or, you know, they only value it based on the money that I’m making. I’ve learned over time. It really has nothing to do with me or my actual definition of success.
So in short, I’ve just learned and something that I hope you can take away from today is just letting people believe what they want to believe. And basically just bless and release. That’s honestly not a saying I use often in my life, but I feel like it pertains so well here because it’s just that idea that people are going to believe and think what they want to think.
Let people think and believe what they want to believe
And I’m not going to let it affect me as a person or let it affect my overall business success because I’m not going to get so caught up in their judgment. And second, we need to take a step back from our goals and figure out the actual feelings and the type of person that we want to actually become. Once we’ve achieved those goals, oftentimes we get caught up in what success will physically look like or how it will manifest in our lives.
So for this example, when you know, day one, I wanted to make enough money as an entrepreneur. It’s simple enough, but that goal doesn’t really tell me anything about myself or how I wanted to grow my business. We find so much more clarity around our goals when we dig deep and take the time to figure out what we will look like and the personality and the character traits that will embody when we’ve hit or we’re close to achieving that goal.
Take time time to dig deep and find clarity around your goals
So for example, maybe you’re like me and your goal is to make a certain amount of money from a business that you’re creating. Instead of just focusing on that end goal, spend some time figuring out how you’re going to show up in order to achieve that goal.
And this might sound a bit weird, but when I’m looking for clarity or working towards a goal, I always ask myself this question, if this is the last project that I get to work on for the rest of my life, or in other words, if my life were to suddenly, and at the end of this project or this goal, how would I want people to remember me? And I know that that can sound a little bit like a bit of a shock, but I really think this helps you ground yourself in your beliefs and helps you remember the things that are truly important in life.
So maybe you want to be seen or remembered as a person that provides a really high touch and incredible client experience. Or perhaps you want to be known as the person who showed up every day and uses your social media as a way of providing real value to your followers. Maybe you want to be seen as the person who was present around their family and their clients and had boundaries around their work hours that allowed them to truly live in each moment. At the end of the day, these are the things that truly matter to you, these values and these things that you, that you find the way that you want to be remembered in the way that you want people to see you.
What do you value as a person?
And I know I’ve been talking a lot about not valuing money or not focusing on valuing money and maybe making money is one of your core values. And that is totally okay for me in my business. I don’t mean to say that, you know, making money was not a core value. I mean, of course I wanted to be able to support myself. But what I realized was I didn’t take any time to go any deeper and figure out who I wanted to become or how I wanted to show up as a person.
But let’s say you do this exercise. And one of your core values is that you want to make money likely there’s a deeper reason why you want to make money. You know, it could be, I mean, there are a million examples, but it could be, you know, maybe you want to make a lot of money so that you can eventually pass it on to your children and your grandkids, or maybe you want to regularly donate to charities and nonprofits that mean a lot to you.
These values and these underlying reasons why we’re achieving our goal really help to shape how we show up in our business every day and help to shape and form the person that we want to be.
Spend a couple minutes and just ask yourself these two questions:
Number one, how do I want people to remember me at the end of my life? What words do I want people to use when they’re describing me and to based on that, how can I show up in my business every day in order to live out those words and those values.
So after we’ve asked ourselves those two questions and we’ve clarified, you know, the, the values we have and the type of person that we want to show up as we then need to take those values and start applying them to our goals and ultimately our daily tasks that we’re working on in order to achieve our goals.
Maybe one of your values is to make a lot of money
So we’ll keep it the same example, just for simplicity sake. Let’s say you’re launching a business. And one of your longterm goals is to make money after doing that first, you realize though that money doesn’t come up or net worth, isn’t actually one of your values.
Let’s say your values are actually more in line with creating an amazing client experience that makes other people feel valued and inspired. So maybe from that exercise, you realize that you want to start spending more time working those values into your business, doing things like creating a high touch experience and sharing helpful tips and knowledge on your social media accounts or sending check-in notes and emails to clients, even after they’ve booked you or already received your service.
This idea means you’ll not only find so much more fulfillment by working on these things that are aligned with your values, but you’ll likely end up bringing in even more clients and finding more success. Your clients will become so in love with the experience that you’ve created, that they can’t help but share it with everyone that they know.
Aligning your work with your values will bring you so much more organic success
So in that example, you know, knowing that, you know, the actions that you’re going to take that line up with your values are based on creating a great experience. It just makes so much more sense to work on those types of things. And those types of actions then say, you know, investing in new marketing ads or, you know, going to big, expensive photography, expos, or spending money on things that really don’t provide that connection that you’re hoping to get with your clients.
And I know this sounds so simple, but it often does gets overlooked. So for example, for me, I got really caught up in chasing success while I was growing my business. I often found myself looking at other people in my industry and just doing the same things that they were doing, because I felt like if I did those same things, it would make me successful.
And in turn I’d be happy. For example, if you had asked me what my big goal was year ago, I would have told you, and I almost hate it. Yes, but it’s the truth. My goal was to get to a point in my business where I was making six figures. And I mean, in reality, like who doesn’t want to make a lot of money, you know, it aligned with my original goal that I made day one when I started my photography business, you know, making six figures would allow me to live a good life, right?
Was chasing the money really making me happy?!
I had listened to countless podcasts of other creatives and entrepreneurs, and they talked about their experience of hitting the six figure Mark. And so all of a sudden, I just felt like that should be my goal, because if I was making six figures, I’d be running a successful business and I’d be able to just live the life that I’ve always dreamed of.
So there I was chasing after this massive money goal, figuring out how to raise my prices in order to hit this goal and thinking of ways to sell really high ticket items and services and all these things that would eventually, hopefully lead me to hitting that goal. Yet I felt so unfulfilled and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I was focusing on ways that I could grow my business. You know, I believed that I was worth the amount of money that I was going to be raising my prices, but something felt disconnected. All of a sudden it hit me one day, that I was chasing someone else’s dreams. I was chasing someone else’s priorities because when I pulled the curtain back and I thought about my longterm values, none of them included making a lot of money. And not that I don’t want to make money to be able to support my family or not that I don’t want to be able to donate to charities.
Just because something is important, doesn’t mean you need to prioritize it
Of course, those things are very important to me, but the things that are most important to me above money is being able to make an impact on other people’s lives. And so honestly, that was one of the biggest light bulb moments that I’ve had in my business, because I was so busy chasing this big goal. That sounded like it was the right thing for me to be chasing that I hadn’t stopped to really figure out whether it was the right goal for me and in my business.
And have you ever felt this too? I know this is such a common thing for entrepreneurs because growing a business is hard. Sometimes we feel like we’re being pulled in a million different directions. And we just want to look at how someone else is building a successful business and just know that if we do those same things, that we’ll also find success, right?
Fear and taking risk is such a real thing when you’re starting a business.
But if you keep going down that path too long, you start to lose sight of your own dreams and the things that you actually desire in your own life. So one of the things that I like to do now, when I feel like maybe my alignment is starting to fall off, I like to sit down and track the things that I work on in my business.
And then at end of the week, give myself just a quick audit. And I just look at how many of those tasks that I was working on were in line with my underlying values. So I mentioned earlier, you know, one of my values is making an impact on the lives of others. So I will take a look at the tasks that I’ve done for the week. And I will ask myself for each task that I did was this task bringing me closer or further away from my core values.
Focus your time and energy on things that’ll help you grow into the person that you want to become.
And this is a pretty deep topic. Like I feel like I’ve only touched the surface level of this concept, but I truly think we could chat about this one-on-one for hours if we ever got the chance. But as a quick recap, my, my challenge for you today is to ask yourself these three questions.
Number one, how do I want people to remember me at the end of my life? And what words do I want them to use in order to describe me, number two, based on those words and those values, how can I show up in my business and in my life every day in order to live out those values and three, what tasks and projects can I start working on today? What can I do right now that will help bring me closer to the person that I want to be, and that I want to be remembered as, and remember, those tasks can be small.
Like even just the smallest thing, then, you know, a quick note to a client or a quick email to check in with somebody or a little like $10 gift that you buy. These things don’t have to be big — they just have to be aligned up with your values. As always, I am so grateful that we get to go on this journey together. And I hope that, you know, today that I am so proud of you and the person that you’re becoming. Until next time…
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I’m Krista, your own personal cheerleader & business bestie.
As your coach, I’m here to help you turn your wildest dreams into reality. Imagine waking up everyday feeling inspired, joyful, confident, and as if you were actively pursuing your life’s purpose — living a life where you not only feel excited about your business, but you feel optimistic about your life and your goals. A life where you are thriving, your clients love working with you, and you’re on track to hit your goals for the year…. let’s work together to help you ditch the overwhelm and create a thriving, profitable business!
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