With Laura Esmond

Hi, there you are. Back on the podcast with Laura Esmond. This week is Thanksgiving and for a lot of photographers, it marks the beginning of a slower season. You're spending time with family, maybe feeling grateful, maybe also starting to think about next year. It's this weird mix of rest. Pressure, gratitude and comparison.

It's the one time of year when everything starts to slow down, just enough to give us time to think, but that space can also bring up some heavy feelings. We start to look around and wonder if we made the most of this year, or if we somehow missed the mark. This episode is a little different. I wanna walk through the five phases that show up at the end of every year and how to move through each one with intention.

Those phases are gratitude, reflection, dreaming, planning, and action. This week we start with gratitude. This time of year always brings up the big questions. Did I do enough? Was I successful enough? Can I even keep doing this? What should I do differently next year? These questions aren't always loud, but they sit in the back of your mind.

Sometimes they show up when you're scrolling Instagram and see someone else's year review. Sometimes they hit When you're looking at your calendar and wondering where that next client is coming from, we start seeing things like, I need to make more money. Or this isn't going to work. I should be further along by now.

Everyone else seems to have it figured out, and often we start comparing our year to someone else's decade. We look at photographers who are further along with the bookings or income or freedom that we want and wonder why we are not there yet. We honestly, we forget how long it took them to build what we see.

We have no idea how long it took them, how many seasons they went through, how many years they probably spent not knowing if it would work. These things take time. Businesses don't grow that quickly. This is where contentment comes in. And I don't mean settling, I don't mean giving up on your goals. I mean recognizing what's already here and working from that place.

Morgan Hausel said, true happiness is when you stop asking what else you need to be happy. When you think of it like that, you become eager to spend less time asking what's missing and more time enjoying what you already have. This doesn't mean I don't have goals, but I've noticed that when I'm always striving, I feel drained.

I'm not more motivated. Most of that time I'm, I'm actually more tired. That's not productive energy. It's anxiety and disguise, and that kind of energy leads me to make rush decisions, to panic about money or to change directions too quickly. But when I walk out of a week feeling proud of how far I've come, I work better, right?

I move faster, I think more clearly, because I'm not working from panic or shame. I'm working from peace. I, I feel clear. I, I feel enough, and that's where the best ideas and the best strategy come from. We have a proclivity to focus on what we lack and to want more, and that's not wrong. I often want more.

I often want to grow my business. In fact, that drive can be helpful, but it gets in the way when we never stop to see how far we've already come. All we do is measure what we haven't done yet. We miss the fact that we might already be living in the middle of answered prayers. There's this old Oprah interview that I absolutely love before she launched the Oprah show.

She had, she had been hired to be Oprah Winfrey. The Oprah Winfrey show. And she was being interviewed though before it actually launched and aired, and she was asked, what if it fails? And she said, that would be wonderful if I was a claim. Just imagine, by the way, Oprah Winfrey saying this, if you can just imagine, it's kind of weird to even hear her talk like this.

She goes, that would be wonderful if I was acclaimed as this talk show host who made it. But if that doesn't happen, there are other important things in my life. That's contentment. That's what it looks like to dream big, right? It would be wonderful to be this acclaimed talk show host, but to also still be grounded.

She wasn't afraid to want more, but she wasn't going to let the outcome define her worth, and that is powerful. One of my favorite quotes, my husband read this to me one time. There are a billion people in the world who, if they traded places with you, all their prayers would be answered. That doesn't mean that we don't want to grow.

It just means we grow from a different place, a healthier place, a place where we can be kind to ourselves even while we reach for more. So this week, this week, it's Thanksgiving. Just focus on gratitude and let that be enough. Let it be enough for this week. If you're not sure where to start, grab a journal.

That's what I always like to do. Or even open the notes app on your phone and answer these three questions. These are my favorite three. I actually thought these three, I'm like, what are the three though that really resonate for me personally? Number one, what moment from this year still makes me smile?

Number two, what challenge did I overcome? I'm sure there's something, it might take a little time to think of it. If you're in a really good place, that's great. But think of what is that challenge that you overcame? And number three, what do I have now that I want hope for? There is probably something, it could be a connection with a certain type of client, a certain person that you were able to connect with.

Maybe it's a new friend, maybe you spend more time with, with your girlfriends. Maybe you go on more date nights. Uh, maybe you've stopped working weekends and, and you really are taking a stand for that. Maybe you raised your prices to something that you thought would never work, and it started to click.

In December, then we move into the next two phases, reflection and dreaming. Reflection is about getting honest about what worked and what didn't without judgment. It's not about rehashing every misstep or obsessing, uh, obsessing over what you didn't do. It's, this is just about learning. Looking back, kind of curiously instead of critically, and you'll start to notice some patterns.

What gave you energy? What are the things in your business that actually fueled you? And then by comparison, what drained you, what you loved, and then what did you keep putting off? You'll begin to see where your time and focus and money actually went, and then with that clarity, you can start dreaming. Of what you want to do for the next year.

Dreaming is when we begin to imagine what could be next, not what you think you should do. This is why I always like to start with that reflection. I don't want you worried about what you think you should do, what worked last year, what didn't answer those questions first. Then from that perspective, start dreaming about what you want to do next.

What do you actually want to do? What lights you up? What kind of work feels life giving? What kind of clients you want to serve, what kind of days you want to wake up to? What kind of life you want that can, your business can support. This is the time for ideas to start flowing, but there's no rush.

December is a great time to explore, to play with these ideas, to stay open and curious without immediately trying to turn everything into a plan. Okay. This is just the sort of drawing all of this out of you first. And here's something important. This reflection and dreaming phase isn't just about business.

In fact, some of the most meaningful progress starts when you reflect on your personal life too, because your business doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not just in this tiny little cave. It's woven into your home. It's woven into your energy, your rhythms, your responsibilities with your kids as a wife. All of those things.

And every year looks a little different as a mom. Some years are more chaotic and some are a little slower. Your kids grow, their interests shift. Their schedules change, and if you have little ones, each year brings new levels of independence, which actually reminds me. When, I remember when Reese was in preschool, uh, we had her in a Montessori program and her teacher recommended that we lower her clothes so she could get dressed in the morning.

Uh, we had just had Owen, she was probably a little older. Owen was maybe six or months old, and we just needed her to be a bit more productive on her own in the morning, which mind you, she was somewhere between 18 months and two years at this point. Okay. It was a lot to ask, but this Montessori program said she'll do it.

You know, put her little bowls in a drawer so she could grab her own cereal. And I remember thinking, wait, that's a thing. It, it was the first time I realized I'm not raising a little kid forever. I'm raising a future adult. And if I give her more responsibility and not only empowers her, it also frees me up.

Doing those small things over time has created more space and ease in our home. And yeah, she made an enormous mess with her ice cream or her ice cream with her cereal in the morning, but it was worth it because eventually she learned how to get all the cereal into the bowl and even how to get to milk and do it, and, and it freed up my time so.

It's a good reminder that progress at home and progress in your business can go hand in hand. Your children are going to continue evolving and everything starts to flow and evolve with it. So as you're dreaming about your year at work. Take time to dream about your home too. What's going to change this year?

What support or structure do you need in place to feel balanced? What new skills might your kids develop that give you more freedom? And on the flip side, what new activities or needs will require more of your time? Maybe your children are gonna start a new activity, uh, start soccer, and now you've gotta make sure that you have time to get them to practice to and from.

What do you, what do you need from your daily rhythm? What is that going to look like? Not just for your business, but for your whole life, so that then you can design your business around that. Then in January, that's when you start planning. That's when we take those dreams, everything, all the reflection and all the dreaming, and start to turn them into something real, something doable, and that's where we ask these questions.

What does this goal look like month by month? What income supports it? What does my marketing need to look like? What kind of systems will help me make this happen? It's, it's one thing to say for your business. For instance, I wanna book 80 portraits this year, or I wanna hit a hundred thousand dollars in revenue.

It's much harder to sit down and ask, well, where are those clients going to come from and what's my system to get them? It's easy to define what you want. It's another thing entirely to define how it will happen. And this is where I want to help. If you want support in that process, especially the planning part,

I want to invite you to the Peace and Profit Bootcamp. We'll walk through what worked this year, what didn't, and how to build a real plan for 20 26, 1 that actually fits your life and your goals, and we'll walk through that together. You can sign up, there's a link in the show notes. It's laura esmond.com/bootcamp, but for now, for this week.

Just focus on the phase. We're in gratitude. There will be time for everything else. You don't need to feel behind to want more. You can want more because what you have is already so good. Happy Thanksgiving. I will see you in the next podcast.