Ever have judgment over how you look in photos?
Welcome to the club my dears - you are just like 99.98% of the rest of women who are sizing themselves up in photos to determine if the are "good" photos or delete worthy...
but what really makes a "good" photo and how can you stop the judgment so you don't get stuck in the brambly bushes of life (aka icky self-judgment and body shame).
Come listen & find out. This episode will make you laugh and cry - just a few tears of joy!
On this episode you will learn:
Follow me on Instagram @katweissner and check out my website at www.klwcoaching.com
By listening to this podcast you agree to the following Disclaimer: https://klwcoaching.com/disclaimer/
The Wildly Confident Podcast, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of KLW Coaching, LLC, all rights reserved.
Ever have judgment over how you look in photos?
Welcome to the club my dears - you are just like 99.98% of the rest of women who are sizing themselves up in photos to determine if the are "good" photos or delete worthy...
but what really makes a "good" photo and how can you stop the judgment so you don't get stuck in the brambly bushes of life (aka icky self-judgment and body shame).
Come listen & find out. This episode will make you laugh and cry - just a few tears of joy!
On this episode you will learn:
Follow me on Instagram @katweissner and check out my website at www.klwcoaching.com
By listening to this podcast you agree to the following Disclaimer: https://klwcoaching.com/disclaimer/
The Wildly Confident Podcast, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of KLW Coaching, LLC, all rights reserved.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back today. We are going to be discussing how to take better photos, better videos. For those of you who sometimes look through your photo squirrel S scroll<laugh> or just like, you know, look at, uh, other people's Instagram accounts or other people's photos. And you think like, oh, if you're in your own account, like, I don't really like that photo of me. I don't wanna post it. Or I don't like that photo that was just taken. I'm gonna delete it. Or if you look at other people's photos and you're like, oh my gosh, I love their photos. How do they look so good? This podcast is going to be for you to help you with some of the photo drama going on in your head. Okay. And first I wanna say like total compassion for you. I still get stuck sometimes in a little bit of photo drama, but very rarely. I kind of feel like I've come to the other side of this and that's why I wanna share it with you. And I've also done this work with a few clients. And, um, I know, you know, I experience other people's photo drama, you know, from time to time, like, we'll be all taking photos with friends or a family, and they'll like, take like 10 photos and, or, you know, number of photos. And sometimes none of the photos are good enough for that person. Right? They're gonna have negative thoughts about themselves and how they look in the photo. Have you, have you guys ever done that before?<laugh> so first I wanna say just like have a lot of compassion because this culture we live in is, is very obsessed. Especially with the way that women look in appearance. We have been, um, you know, it's, it's woven into culture to some extent that, you know, you need to look a certain way to be admired, um, to have power, right. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to look nice, right? Like I always say everything's on a spectrum. Y'all like, you know, if you're wanting to look a certain way out of love for yourself out of empowerment for yourself, out of having fun for yourself, right. That's gonna feel really good. Okay. So putting on makeup, um, getting dressed up, maybe wearing high heels, any of his stuff, like super fun. If it's coming from a place of empowerment, right? Cuz it's gonna bring your energy higher. You're gonna have, you're not gonna be like tired from doing it. You're gonna consistently do it. Right. So there's nothing wrong with, um, following what I call like society's typical, like checklist for looking what they would say. Like looking better, even though I'm gonna go on and tell you right now, there's no such thing. Okay.<laugh> like society has its checklist and you are absolutely welcome to follow it from a place of empowerment. And obviously you're welcome to follow it regardless. But you know, if you're following it from a place of disempowerment, like in a place where you're judging, you're shaming yourself, you already know that doesn't feel good. Right? You already know that you look at those photos of yourself and you're like, oh, I need to lose weight or look at my double chin there. Or like my skin looks bad. Like you have all these negative thoughts about yourself and it doesn't feel very good. It doesn't right. Some people avoid taking photos. There's all of, I I've heard so many different things. Photos are such a tool, a teacher for us to help us get more into self love anyway. So the, the topic for this podcast is how to take better photos. And so little spoiler alert right now. There, there are some like maybe I guess, circumstances where you can make your photos better. There are maybe some like legitimate factual based things like, um, maybe having better lighting, right? So like the photo might be better because someone can see you more in the photo. Um, but other people might say that like a darker photo is better. Right? You guys, whether or not a photo is good is all in your head. Okay. You get to decide if a photo is good or not. I know<laugh>, there's like legitimately, no, just completely objective way of making a photo quote, unquote, better where everyone's gonna agree to it. It is just a thought in your head. That is why some people like me can take, I don't know, tons of photos. And I think they're all great. Or, you know, they're just, they just exist. Right. They're neutral. Right. I don't have to love them. I don't have to hate them. They're neutral. I'm gonna share with you some of my tools around photo. So if you are a little obsessed with getting the best photo of yourself, so you can look a certain way, so you can feel good about yourself. I'm gonna be talking to you about how you can just like love or let's just say, be neutral about all your photos. Don't make yourself feel bad about the photos you took and you know, learn how to identify maybe the ones that you love and the reasons you love them. Right. I think because we think there's like literally an objective, good photo definition. Like I think people really believe it. There's such a thing as a good photo. And again, this comes back to like your manual.<laugh> like, you're gonna have a list on what that is. And every person actually has a slightly different list on what makes a good photo. And, but we think that that there's like this like rule about what makes good photos in the world, like in our own heads and that we need to follow those rules. And for O for other people to think we have a good photo, except there's no such rule book, guys, it's all made up in your head and it's made up of different beliefs you've collected throughout your life. Okay. I might have a photo that I love that someone else is going to think is crap that I look bad in it or whatever. Right. It's because we all have our own lens and our own way of seeing the world. So the first thing I just have to remind you guys, there's no such thing as a quote unquote, good picture. That everyone's gonna agree on a good photo. Okay. You have to get out of that mindset that, that exists and step into your power again, of what makes a good photo for you. So what I'm gonna be sharing with you is how we figure out. And this is the practice I do with clients on this. How do we figure out what makes a good photo for you? If we were to make a list of all the things that you love about photos, of all the things that, um, you love about the photos you have, right? We're gonna learn a lot about your brain and we're also gonna learn how to repeat good photos for you in the future. Okay. And I'm also gonna give you a really cool tool on how to deal with photos. You don't like photos, you're judging yourself in, you're getting caught up in like photo drama. That's such a thing. Photo drama. Yeah. I've seen it with clients. I've seen it just in the world around me. People are, you know, rightfully so. We have been fed to this stuff since we were children, that our appearance matters. How we look matters. You need to look like this, but there is no like rule hard rule about how you need to look really how we think we need to look is just a, uh, collection of different beliefs we've received from our family from culture. Okay. And so, because of that and because we all have different families, all of our little rules about how we're supposed to look good in photos is different for each person. I know<laugh>, it's like breaking your brain. Right. I know this to be true because I've worked with people on this, uh, issue and I've talked to people about it. Um, you know, I've talked to people about what they think makes a good photo anyway. So I'm gonna give you like the coolest, one of the coolest tools that I do with clients. Cause I think it, like I say, like it breaks their brain, like in a good way. You guys like in a way that you're like, whoa, so I know this might seem like kind of small, but please, please, please do this. Because I really think this is a great expansive tool to help you open yourself up to more self love and to stop getting outta photo judgment for yourself and just, you know, not to get stuck in that sticky trap of like, well, it should look like this, or I look like this or I don't look good here. Or I look fat here. Like I've, you know, have a funny face on like funny look on my face. I'm not smiling. I don't like my teeth. Like any of the things you tell yourself about why you don't like your photos, you know, like, seriously, just take a moment and go through your phone<laugh> and find photos you don't like of yourself and literally journal about what's going on in your head. Right? Why don't you like those photos? That's gonna tell you a lot about your rules. What are your rules about what photos are worth keeping and which ones are not worth keeping. Okay. So that's one of the practices I'd like you to do. You don't need to do it right now, or you can pause the podcast and do it. Right. But this is gonna basically like dump out all the things that all your rules about your photos. And it's really fun if you do this with a friend or someone else and have them do it at the same time, and then you guys can share your rules with each other because you guys they're gonna be different. There might be a few things that are the same, but you will be like, oh boy, this is just in my head. It's not a hard like fact or rule in life. It's not like gravity guys, you know? So, uh, please, please step out of your own limiting beliefs here around photos. That's the first thing I'm gonna tell you to do the second tool I'm gonna give you. That's so helpful around photos that has helped my clients so much is that photos are 50 50. Okay. If you listen to my last podcast on having more joy, I talked about the 50, 50 of life and how there's like a 50% negative things, 50% positive. And so I like to apply that concept to photos. And this is how we don't get like stuck in self judgment, right? If, if we are resisting or trying to figure out, right, why we're feeling negative, we get stuck in that Brandley, Bush of judgment, the Brandley Bush of crap, right? And that is not a place where we're gonna be moving into any joy. We're not gonna be finding answers there typically besides ones that are just like mean to ourselves. So you have to drop the judgment and the fastest tool I found to help people, uh, drop judgment is just for people to say, this is just part, this photo is part of the 50, 50, right? I'm not asking that you love all your photos. You guys, I'm just asking that you don't get caught in the self judgment spin. And you're not sitting there being like, I don't like this. Cause I don't like my double chin. I don't like this because I don't like my smile. I don't like this because I look fat. Like I don't, that's the Brandley Bush of pain. That is the poop, the dog poop of pain that you have gotten stuck in. It sends negative emotions throughout your body. And it basically says, it's not, it gives you like this like thing, like, oh, I have to look a certain way in order to be lovable. Like there's something wrong with me, right. That I don't want you in that energy. Right. I mean, you can be in if you want to. Right. You have you, you're an autonomous person, but like you probably don't wanna be in it yourself. It doesn't really feel good. Um, and so, and it can stop you actually from wanting to take photos, it can stop you from wanting, like if you have a business, like for wanting to post photos, right. Instead of just being like, look, photos are 50 50, no problem. That's one of those ones. That's the Braley Bush delete Braley Bush, skip whatever. No problem. I'm gonna move towards the ones that bring me joy. So the second tool I'm gonna share with you, right? And isn't this one fun just like drop it, drop it. You don't have to make the photo mean anything about you. You don't have to run the photo through your little manual of like how you're supposed to look and be in life in order to love yourself. Okay. We, we found out by the first tool, like your list, right? And that list, you, you also recognize from doing this to a friend or, um, someone in your family or just someone you trust, right? That, that list is not hard rules. It's not gravity. It's not something that, that needs to be that you can choose<laugh> to change it. Right? That's the power you have. As soon as you realize you have a choice about it. And it's not like a hard rule, that's freeing you guys. Right. Then you can start doing mindset, work around it and you can start changing your beliefs. Okay. And if you're interested in starting to change your beliefs around what you think your photo rules should be. Uh, I have a great podcast on, uh, some of the mindset work I do. I think it's like episode nine or 10, but yeah, go back and look for it. If you're interested in, uh, hearing about, uh, some of my mindset practices I do to help people change their beliefs. But just even recognizing that it's a choice and that you don't have to choose to believe that is like half the journey. Like you're gonna feel so much better. Anyway. So back to how we get to rewrite the script about what we love about photos, and here is the next practice I'm gonna give you. I know this, this episode is so powerful. I just love, love, love, helping women get more confident around the way they look. So they love taking photos. They enjoy it. They're just like, yes, I'm a supermodel in my life.<laugh> I'm gonna have fun with this. You know, when you feel like it, right. Maybe don't feel like taking a photo right then don't right. But don't to see why you don't feel like it. Sometimes you just don't feel like it cuz you don't feel like it. Right? Like, but, but if it's coming from a place of self judgment, if it's coming from a place that like, you know, have compassion there, you guys have compassion for yourself. You know? I can't imagine a woman who hasn't felt negative about herself, looking at photos at some point in her life. And that's, that's something that's, you're not, we're not born that way. You guys it's socialization. So we just, when we acknowledge and we're aware that we're in this dynamic, right? That's when we can really take our power back and have compassion for ourselves. So don't judge yourself, have compassion, have compassion and recognize. They're gonna be sometimes photos. We don't like no problem. That's the 50, 50. That's the dog poop that sometimes we step in or the brand, I call it like the brand blue Bush of life. And we step away from the Braley Bush. We don't make it mean anything about us. We just know that sometimes there's gonna be negative. You know, things we don't like there's sometimes gonna be things we don't like. Or even like, it doesn't mean you don't even have to like the photos. They can just be neutral. Right. It's just like neutral. It's not a photo I love. It's just neutral. We just delete it. No problem. Or we just keep it there and we don't make it mean anything about us. So here's like the crowning practice tool of this podcast that I love. Love, love, love, love. Um, I want you guys to go through your photos and I want you to heart all of your favorite photos. Okay. This is so powerful. This is how we're gonna start rewriting this script and understanding why we even like photos to begin with. I think we're so often like making photos about other people, like what are other people gonna think about our photos? And we don't ever ask ourselves, like, what do we want in our photos? What do we wanna think about our photos? And a way that's like nurturing to us and is respectful in alignment with the life we're living here on earth. And so when I have clients do this, when I have done it myself, you know, I send them home with this homework. And I, I say like, please heart your top 10 favorite photos in your, um, in your phone or maybe just in your life and all of people's favorite photos. Okay. Here's the spoiler alert people. And if you don't wanna hear the answer is, um, you know, cover your ears<laugh> but all of people's favorite photos are photos of them with people. They love photos of them doing things. They love photos of them just in their highest, most joyful, most loving energy. So this is my little takeaway from photos. The best photos have to do when we are gonna hi. Like come from when we're in a high vibration, when we're feeling lots of love, lots of joy, we're just in this like really expansive mode, right? Those are the photos we care about. Those are the ones we wanna keep, right? This is the, this is where I think the 50 50 is really helpful too. Right? 50% of the time, we're just maybe taking photos of us. Maybe like sitting someplace or like, I don't know where we're not like maybe in like a high vibration mood, we're just not feeling. Maybe we're feeling like neutral or tired for the day. And so our light isn't necessarily shining through the photo as strong as it might be. If we were with like our favorite people doing our favorite things. And we're just really lit up. Like, that's what I think makes, you know, in my brain, this is my rule book on photos now. Right. We get to write own rule books. So have fun with this. But I photos are for me, they're to they're to document beautiful experiences in my life. And I like taking photos. Right. But some of my photos are gonna be photos that are just like, they don't have the emotional pop in them that I want my light isn't shining super bright and that's totally fine. Life is 50 50. We're not always gonna be shining bright. You guys like the goal in life is not to always shine bright all the time. Right? Like the goal in life is
Speaker 2:O I have thoughts about it. But I think the goal in life is just to love yourself and love other people, you know, with good boundaries, always like, you know, don't let other people use you or take advantage of you or stuff on your boundaries. But, um, goal in life is to make the world a better place. Right? Goal in life is to connect with people on a, on a deep level, right? In a respectful, deep level. There's so many different things you can come up with a goal for life. But the goal for life is definitely not probably to like have amazing photos that, um, you get like a million likes on Instagram on like that. I don't think anyone would say, well, maybe someone would, and that's totally cool if that lights that person up and gives them joy. But I think, you know, so much of the, like the photos and like in my, my manual on photos, right. And what I realized when I did this practice with going through my own photos and the things I loved, it literally brought me to tears and it's brought my clients to tears. And I'm expecting you to have some tears, probably two doing this right. Tears of joy that the photos are here to document beautiful moments. And we can just appreciate them, right? Those photos and beautiful moments. I promise you if you compare them to your rule book, right? The one that we did in the beginning, they're not gonna completely match up. And it doesn't matter. You still love the photo. You love the light coming off the photo, you love the joy. You love the connection, right? That's what photo's purpose is. Purpose is like the photo, a photo's purpose is a memory to remind us of beautiful times in our life. And life is full of joy and pain. So not all of your photos are gonna be full. Those photos that are just those super joyful moments. But I think it's really nice to have photos, to remind us of joy. It's a touchstone into the things we love in life. And so for me, I don't make my photos like whatever that don't have those joy moments in them mean anything negative. I just let'em go. They're neutral. And I always remind myself when I'm taking photos too, that like, it doesn't really matter if I'm following that old rule book, what matters? You know, why, why I'm doing this and what makes a good photo is the people I'm with the energy we're experiencing the Mo this moment in time, right? This magical moment, which might never happen again. W we won't just like this, right? That we're capturing this beautiful moment. And it's the energy between people, even between the, this place you're at, right? The energy between the earth and you, right. The energy just inside of you because of the emotions you're feeling, that's the beauty in a photo. And those are the photos we love. And if photos are for me, that's the stuff I wanna have in life. Right. That's the stuff. So I hope you enjoyed these practices, please, please, please think about this
Speaker 1:Next time you're taking photos, right? How is my energy, right? If your energy's feeling low, if you're not really like, you're just having like a, a low day. It's no problem. You're probably not gonna like, hold onto that photo for the rest of your life. And it's just whatever, it's just part of life. It's like breathing air. Sometimes we take a photo. Sometimes we eat food. Sometimes we go for a walk. Like none of those things have to mean negative things about us. We can just say that's just part of the day, but you'll notice when you're looking at photos, you absolutely love, right. It has nothing to do with the way you look in the photo. It has everything to do with the moment everything to do with the energy and just bask in how beautiful that is. So anyway, lots of love everyone. I will talk to you soon. Bye.