With Laura Esmond

Oh my goodness. We live in a constant state of hustle, don't we? And get the kids to school, swing through the grocery store, edit the session, answer the emails. Keep up with social media and blogging, and hustle, hustle, hustle. And as. Portrait photographers, sometimes it feels like the only way to keep up is to go faster.

Something I've been really leaning into though is actually slowing down, like forcing it because otherwise I will not do it. I get so addicted to the work that I'm doing and what I'm noticing is that when I slow down, I actually speed up. So today I wanted to share four places. I have noticed this the most in both my life and in business, where pressing pause helps me move faster with more peace.

I'm better focused I'm, and I'm getting better results, and I'm getting to tie in a little science about what's happening inside our bodies when we do, because. I actually did a lot of research for this episode because something, some of it just feels intuitive to me, but I'm a questioner. I like to know why something works when I know why.

Personally, I'm far more likely to actually follow the tips, and I didn't want these four things to just land and go nowhere for you. So I did the research the other day. I was really lit up by this idea. of, wow, when I slow down, I'm actually, I'm so much more focused when I get back to work.

I tried to record this in my car thinking I have all the information. This is how it's working for me. And it was actually a pretty decent podcast. It was like 15 minutes, but it lacked That level of intellect that I'm like this deserves more attention. It is that important to me, and I really want you, I want this to really resonate for you.

Okay, so let's dive in. This is my actual research version of the podcast. Four times photographers should slow down so that you can speed up your business and your life. Point number one, slowing down in life. So your energy and focus speed up. Just yesterday I had a one hour window after getting a bunch of work done and needing to leave to pick up my daughter.

So I had this one hour little period where I didn't really have something scheduled. And I felt my body, you know, like nudging me to do something productive. I actually have a portrait event that I need to launch, and this would've been the perfect time to get some of those pieces pulled together. And, but I had been working nonstop on my computer for like four or five hours and feeling frantic, like I was feeling frenetic energy in my body.

So I said to myself, no. Maybe you need to just take a minute to yourself. And I looked outside and I could see storm clouds coming, and I love nothing more than a storm. Oh, I love them. So I walked out to this gazebo that we have right off our patio, and I actually grabbed a blanket, tucked myself in. And I didn't plan.

I didn't bring my journal. I didn't make a grocery list. I didn't even pull up my phone and read, 'cause I just read on an app on my phone, which I don't know, maybe that's a terrible practice. But I do, I literally just sat there and watched the trees. These, we've got these really old trees on the edge of our yard kind of far away.

And I mean, they were probably like a hundred years old. They're so tall and they were just swaying. And the wind picked up and the rain started and I just sat, and then I said a little gratitude prayer. And then I just went back to watching the trees sway in the wind. I could feel in this moment, my brain shifting.

Out of panic and into clarity. You know, I'll get these like little downloads about business, about a client, about next step, but the coolest part is that they arrive. They just arrive without me chasing them. I. Let me liken this for you to, to like, have you ever gone out for a run or a quiet drive or, I know you'll relate to this for sure.

You close your eyes to go to sleep and suddenly your brain is like firing on all cylinders and you have all these thoughts. I have really come to believe that if we take those meditative moments throughout the day and allow our thoughts to find us by just creating quiet space. We will not only find our brain to be pretty darn interesting, we will also sleep better.

It actually impacts your sleep instead of waiting for that moment, right when you're trying to fall asleep, where you go, oh my gosh, now I'm getting all these thoughts. If we take a moment out of our day and just quiet down and turn off the phone and don't bring the journal even, and just. Be quiet.

You'll find that that moment happens during the day when it's far more beneficial. So after 30 minutes of doing absolutely nothing, I came inside and I felt this great balance of energy, but also calm and focus. I sat down on my computer and I worked on that event calmly. it didn't have the frenetic en energy anymore that was gone And actually I was able to move pretty quickly through these little things that I had to get done, and then I left to pick up my daughter feeling excited to just spend some time with her. You know, here's a little tidbit in, in the research that I found in this. Even a 10 minute walk. Or a quick moment, you pause and do some breath work.

We'll lift your mood and sharpen your mental state so you don't need an hour or even the 30 minutes that I took, just a 10 minute walk. Just a 10 minute pause will be hugely beneficial. Here's another way that this has shown up for me recently in my friendships. Maybe use this as your sign to call that friend.

You know the one where every time you leave them, every time you walk away, you feel lighter, you feel better. It's like your whole system recalibrates,But it's that person that we keep putting off. When you're staring down a deep editing queue or booking requests or dms or groceries and practice and busy season, and you think, I literally don't have time for coffee, but every time I make that one hour breakfast or coffee happen, I walk away smiling and I sit down to work with my.

Firing in the right direction. So recently a friend, I have been sporadically texting back and forth. I've been going back and forth with her honestly since the beginning of the summer. I finally texted her one night, just last week. It was like nine 30. Wasn't even sure that she was still taking texts at that time of night, but I texted her and said, I quit.

I do nothing but work and I really want some time with you. Are you available tomorrow? And thankfully she said, yes, perfect. I am available. Let's meet for coffee. Can you meet kind of early? And I said, yes, I'll make it work. So we met at 8:00 AM for coffee. My husband thankfully was able to take the kids to school and we only met for an hour and then we both went on to work and it was the absolute.

Best. We texted later that day about how, first of all, how ridiculous it was that it was taking us months to finally arrange a meetup, but how we were both running on this little high at work. We just felt better being there and we were working better. Now why does this happen? So I decided to do a little research about this, and here's what I found.

When we connect with people that we trust and people we love. Our bodies release oxytocin. So the actual chemical reaction in the body helps us to ease stress and we calm our nervous system and, and we're laughing usually when we get together with, with our friends. And that triggers an endorphin release, which boosts bonding and elevates mood.

So even 10 minutes, think back on like, you know, the, the funny parts in movies where there's like the, the water cooler talk. People just standing around the water cooler talking, it's the same thing. 10 minutes of time just with a friend has shown to sharpen cognitive performance. So in hour with a friend isn't a detour, it's brain fuel.

Without that break, you might have had to shove yourself through editing and emailing all day long. But with that little friend break, starting your day off. With that, you show up feeling positive and joyful. That moment of intentionally slowing down will actually speed you up in the long run. So maybe today, send the text, schedule the coffee.

Yes, your brain is going to protest. I'm sure it will. I know minded. It'll yell at you. I don't have the time. Have you seen your editing queue? Especially in busy season. Give yourself that hour. Let that energy flow through your system, that new oxygen, new chemistry, that oxytocin, and let that go straight to your brain.

then come back to the editing cue. You'll have more joy in your body and to steady your mind, you might find that you just glide through your edits faster than you would've, than if you had stayed in your grind mode. And then there's also working out, I have found this to be beneficial here as well, but not in the way that you might think.

So I used to be in a really good habit of waking up well before the kids to to just be, I've talked about this a lot. I like to have coffee and do a workout, but lately call it the summer hangover. I have had a much harder time. Waking up that early, early enough to get the workout in. I'm still waking up early enough to have a cup of coffee with my husband and enjoy some downtime, but the workout out the window.

So I'll take the kids to school with every intention of coming home and squeezing it in because it's, it's still a priority, sort of. But here's what happened. I get home after drop off. It's like 9:00 AM. And I go into panic mode that if I take any more time out of my day, I'm never going to finish the work.

It's all in my head. I have, I often haven't eaten, so I'm hungry. I haven't filled my water bottle and I'm not in my workout clothes. And I literally say to myself, if I start now, I won't sit down to work until 10 30 and that's just too late, so I'll skip it. Over the past two weeks though, a couple of weeks, I've been doing my best to ignore the panic.

I've been trying to remind myself that that is just in my head. It's not real. I'm still not waking up early though, like my pre summer habit going to be honest, I've been really enjoying sleeping in, but I've just decided, you know what? I'm going to do the workout and just see what happens, and guess what I found?

I do have time. And that workout pays me back. Even like a short workout can change your internal chemistry. You get the endorphin high, which lowers stress hormones, as we all know. You get those more, you know, feel good signaling in the brain and better executive functioning after you finish a workout.

But this is something I had never heard of before. I've never heard this. Have you ever heard of BDNF? It stands for brain derived. Neuro traffic factor is hard to say. What that does is it gets boosted, which supports learning and cognition, the exact thing you need to call quickly and decisively to color grade consistently and to thoughtfully respond to inquiries.

I found that fascinating, but let's take a step back to my comment about how I was running in this state of always feeling like I never have enough time. This is such a lie. I tell myself all the time, that keeps me in a state of panic. I always feel like I don't have enough time. Have you heard of Parkinson's law?

This law says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. For example. If you give yourself one hour to design, let's say you want a brand new client guide and you give yourself one hour or maybe one morning, you'll probably get it done in that timeframe. But if you give yourself a week for the same task, you'll find ways to stretch it out.

You'll overthink the font. You're reorganizing images, you're tweaking small things. Photographers experience this all the time, whether it's editing a gallery or designing an album, or even responding to emails If you allow unlimited time. The task eats it all up,

but if you set a clear, shorter container of time, you usually finish within that boundary. So when I stop arguing with myself and just move my body even 20 or 30 minutes, I come back sharper. The rest of my workday speeds up, and I find I will accomplish quite a bit in that shorter amount of time because Parkinson's law.

So here's a tiny practice that you can try today. Choose one, okay? Just one thing. A 10 minute walk a. 10 minutes of slow breathing or prayer or meditation or go to coffee with a friend this week. But I want you to notice after here's where the work comes in, are you still able to get the work done? Is your tone with clients warmer or even with your family warmer?

How are you showing up for your family? Are you feeling rested while at the same time, productive? Then the last thing here that I've learned recently is to name that wind, so your brain remembers it. This is why it's important to reflect on it. Tell yourself, when I slowed down, I actually sped up.

I was still able to go to coffee with my friend and be productive. It all got done.

Okay, let's move on to point number two. Point number two is slowing down with your clients.

The first one is having ordering meetings with my clients. I know, I know not everybody wants to do IPS. It's kind of got a weird wrap, but honestly, this is why I love it so much. I have had periods of time in the past 20 years where I chose to send galleries and just let clients to set on their own.

It just, it. Felt really efficient for me, especially maybe in that time of life that you know, whatever stage of life I was with my family, but here's what actually happened and why I would always end up switching back first. Some of my clients actually felt overwhelmed on their end, and I don't want them to feel overwhelmed.

Another thing is, remember that Parkinson's law theory about how work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Same applies here for our clients, though they have more time, so they take. All of it, and they just wrestle with indecision. I would even put an expiration date on the gallery with lots of email reminders, but inevitably the gallery would expire and I would have to reset it.

Now we have sometimes weeks of indecision for my client, which puts my cashflow in jeopardy. I'm still waiting to get paid on that work. But when I say to my client, let's just schedule a 30 to 45 minute ordering meeting, I'll help you choose what fits your needs and your budget, because I'll be honest, I honestly, truly, honestly, I do not care if my clients are buying all digitals or a small set of digitals or a full wall collection that's going to fill up their entire home.

The point of this meeting is service. When we slow down together for that short window, I mean. You guys, 30 to 45 minutes is like nothing. Everything speeds up. That quick meeting erases days or weeks of figuring out what to order. We decide all the details. They pay the invoice, which helps the cash flow in my business stay on track.

I produce the products and deliver within a few weeks. And honestly, not only the time that it saves, This aligns with how I want to serve as a portrait photographer. My clients aren't just another gallery in an inbox. They're people who want to feel seen and supported while making choices, especially for wall art where scale and framing and pairing the images, it's just hard for them to visualize by themselves.

So when we give our clients 30 to 45 minutes with us, we save them hours of confusion later, and We save ourselves potentially weeks of back and forth. That short, intentional slowdown is one of the fastest things that I do in my business. The other impactful moment of slowing down with my clients is a quick phone call to get on the same page before the session with repeat clients.

This mostly takes place over text. I mean, honestly, they are already clear on my process and styling and how I work, so meeting over the phone is less needed. But my new clients, I can serve them better. When I take slow down and take the 20 minutes to ask questions about their family. What they hope to get is an end product, learn about past portrait experiences.

And I know I could do this on a, a guide, you know, a questionnaire that they could fill out. But there's something about that, that human connection to me that just changes the entire conversation. And now I can show up to them and to the session, understanding their family and their needs. Better, which impacts the work I produce for them and helps them to just feel heard and seen by me, which is a huge value point of my business.

Okay, let's move on now to point number three. Slow down to learn so that future tasks take a lot less energy. I get it. I really do hear you. I only want to do the fun things too, the things that make me feel smart and creative. I only want to create beautiful work and edit things and get them on social media so I can get that validation.

I love all of those pieces and I love sharing, everything with my, with my clients. I love sharing galleries. I love sitting down with them. I love all of those pieces. They are feel good, and I really want to ignore the annoying parts of the business that make my head hurt. I don't want to watch YouTube tutorials about how to automate the segments in an email workflow or how to set up a mini chat automation, which by the way, almost had me quitting my job at one point a couple of years ago, but.

When I slow down long enough to learn something new in my business, I actually start to do things quicker and easier. Let's take, for instance, understanding your camera. Even maybe it's time well spent to watch that long, endless video about the different custom functions that will help you take better photos during a session.

I see a lot of programs that keep photographers stuck, uh, flow desks, email automations, setting up a complicated CRM like HoneyBook, or 17 hats, or understanding the basics of Facebook or Google Ads. Okay, so here's the science piece that I researched.

When we learn something new, we are literally building new neural pathways. We know our brains are plastic now, right? They expand and grow, which is why we hate it. It's like teaching your brain algebra functions. It's like stretching into, uh, like the split, which you haven't done in 20 years. It's new. And it's uncomfortable, but eventually that proverbial light bulb goes off and it all clicks.

Now, something that was once a bottleneck in your business is opened up and you're saving hours of time. So here's your mini assignment I want you to pick one bottleneck. Maybe it's email sequences or A CRM automations or understanding the basics of a Google ad and give it some dedicated time to really learn it.

Moving on to our final point, slowing down to plan. Whenever I slow down, so much happens in my head. I already kind of touched on this before and it happens without forcing it. I just get so many ideas. The time of year my brain fires the most is during the holidays, actually between around December 27, seventh or so, as Christmas winds down in our house in around January 7th.

Around the time when the kids go back to school, we are just moving at a slower pace. We are having long mornings and movies and we're skiing and I'm cooking and I'm just with the family and going for walks and reading. And generally also, by the way, consuming less content. and in that mental space, I get pings.

Not forced, just given like these little gifts entirely because I've slowed down and I wanna honor that time, right? I wanna stay in it, you know, and just be with my kids. Here's what I do with all of these ideas. Instead of rushing into productivity, I honor the rest, but also capture the ideas that pop up without.

You know, like pulling myself back into work mode. I use one dedicated space. Personally, I like to use the notes app on my phone

Sometimes I record audio. Did you know that you can actually record audio into a notes app? And sometimes I just type things up if it's short and I don't need to brainstorm it. I have learned to jot down just enough detail so I don't look at it later and think, what in the world was I talking about?

Like one time I wrote down fashionable bananas. No joke. That's what I wrote down and I was like, what? My best guess was that it was a typo, but honestly, who knows? That was just lost in the wind. But there is a part two for this one for my house. Early January has this sort of natural rhythm.

It has happened every year. My husband and I celebrate our wedding anniversary on January 7th. We're coming up on 20 years actually. So I typically don't go back to work or even start thinking about work until around the 10th the kids go back to school.

everything's put away in the house. And I look at the annual view, I look at the entire year as a whole, and I reverse engineer what I need to start working on now, but it starts with that bigger plan, sort of a bird's eye of the whole year. And I ask myself things like what worked last year that I wanna lean into?

Were there goals last year that I never made time for? Is this the year for that goal? I mark obvious seasons, you know, and like sketch out the big rocks, different promos, petite session events, partnerships. Personal projects also, uh, are there any big decisions to consider like hiring help?

So now I have a printed calendar where I've jotted down all these ideas that serves as a visual for the year. And by the way, it's not just work. I bring this calendar to Scott and we dream up our year. You know, we kind of jot down what plans are we already committed to, is there anything he really wants to do?

Maybe a trip he wants. To go on like a guy's trip every year he does a helicopter trip, a skiing ski, a heli, hella skiing trip. Is that what it's called? Or is there something that I really want to do? Maybe a girls trip. Then I also block off the kids holidays, trips and even decide if there's a day a week I wanna dedicate just to the house and family work.

Then I file away the calendar, except for the first few months. I start to look at those first few months and I say, okay, is there a project that I want to do in the beginning of this year? Maybe it's recommitting to blogging. Or planning out all of my social media content for the next three months, or maybe I want to host a client appreciation event or a mini session event.

I take that project and I plant it into a month where I'm going to work that plan out. Then I start planning out how to make it happen, right? Each of those tasks. Then go into a week, and that's when I open up Asana and I start plugging in my actual to-do list. So this is a slowdown that removes weeks of scrambling.

And scrambling is what actually slows us down. And here's the kicker. If you step into planning from a calm state, after prayer, meditation, after a walk, after coffee with a friend, you're more likely to tap into, creative problem solving and really strong decision making during this planning session.

Physiologically, you have lowered your cholesterol, you have created a steadier mood, you have clearer thinking. So this all comes full circle to even plan properly, which in and of itself is an act of pressing pause. You might benefit from a personal slowdown of exercising or quiet time or coffee with a friend beforehand.

Slowing down isn't doing less. It's creating space for God to speak, for your body, to reset, for your brain, to get downloads, for your mind, to choose the next right thing instead of the next loud thing that stole your attention. So if you feel like you are constantly having to run, run, run. You don't, you are allowed to pause.

Even in a busy season, you're allowed to breathe. You're allowed to call a friend and take a walk and even just sit quietly with your clients to learn more about them. And in that pause, you might just find the momentum you've been chasing. If this has encouraged you, I'm going to be inviting in a new group of Get Rooted students in January where we slow down together to review all the different strategies in your business from pricing to marketing and building your business from a place of purpose and joy.

if you feel this speaking to you and what you need to have a fulfilling year, I want to first invite you to join my free kickoff for the year, The Peace and Profit Bootcamp where we spend three days resetting our mindset, unblocking, and finding purpose because no strategy will work without an empowered mindset.

You can sign up for this at lauraesmond.com/bootcamp. I hope to see you there.