#006 Achieving Goals from Future Focus not Past Focus

Transform Your Photography Business: The Power of Goal-Setting and Mindset

In this episode, we emphasize the importance of setting deliberate and well-thought-out goals to transform your photography business. We explain how shifting your mindset from past failures to future possibilities can create a fresh start and new beginnings. We also discuss the importance of making decisive, future-focused decisions and employing the scientific method to systematically test and refine your strategies.

As always, we share personal anecdotes about our own experiences, such as burning the boat and moving us and our business to France, (to illustrate our points).

The episode concludes with an exercise aimed at visualizing future success and writing a letter from your future self to guide your present actions.

Exercise: Letter from your Future Self

00:00 Introduction: A Fresh Start for Your Business

00:28 Meet Keith and Melissa: Your Guides to Success

00:45 The Power of Setting Goals

01:10 Making Decisive Decisions

02:04 Future-Focused Planning

02:32 Overcoming Past Failures

04:50 Applying the Scientific Method

07:50 Think Big and Take Action

08:38 Personal Anecdote: Our Move to France

10:34 Conclusion and Next Steps

11:30 Final Thoughts and Farewell

11:39 Support Us: Follow, Share, and Review

Watch this Podcast Episode on our YouTube Channel
Check out our Travel Photography Workshops
Want to learn more about Street Photography?

Transcript

Episode 6: Future Focused

[00:00:00] Thinking of all the possibilities there are for you for your business this creates a fresh start a new beginning. There's nothing you can't do unless of course you bring all this old baggage with you as you create this goal for your business Most people, most photography business owners just rinse and repeat, trying the same things over and over. They can't figure out why their business is stuck. They just get the same results over and over and they keep looking to their past to see what's possible.

Welcome. We're Keith and Melissa, photography business owners for more than 25 years. And our mission is to help you find the success you want. And we know firsthand the role that mindset plays in figuring it all out. Now, today's episode. 

Welcome back. I'm Keith . Melissa, today's discussion is how having a goal can change the trajectory of your business. I have found that over the course of working in our business and others over the years, that the surest way to get unstuck or to achieve what you want [00:01:00] in or for your business is to make decisions. Don't spend too much time wavering on what you want to do or what you should do. Be decisive and decide. Let's say for example that you want to transition to full time photographer. You have a job and you want to replace the income from that job with the income from your photography business. The first decision you're going to make is how much money do you need to make in your photography business to be able to securely make this transition. Sub in anything you want for your business. As an example, it could be working with more of the right clients or charging more for your services. Make that first decision. What do you want? But here's the catch. You must not only be deliberate with this decision, but you must also recognize how powerful a real decision can be. Not a half assed decision made in the moment, but a well thought out and planned decision. One that you decide how things will be. This isn't about throwing an idea up and hoping things fall into place.

You aren't going to give other people the power for [00:02:00] this decision. You are going to own it, plan for it, and set goals for it. This is a decision that we are going to make that is future focused and not past focused. we are not going to rely on past results to determine the outcome of this decision. writing down goals is going to help you work from your future business owner self or from the photographer that is already working with their ideal clients that love them and everything they do or you are the photographer that is already charging 10, 000 for wedding photography. Why is this important? Because when you make a real decision about your business and you look to the past for guidance, you aren't going to find it Because you haven't done this before. Our brain loves to look to the past to decide our future. Guess what happens when we're past focus? We beat ourselves up for things that haven't worked out in the past. Remember the time I tried X, Y, or Z and it didn't work out? That is the evidence that comes up when we have made an important decision We beat ourselves up for things that haven't worked out in [00:03:00] the past. Maybe you define yourself as someone not good with money because you haven't saved in the past Or maybe you think that you can't possibly run a profitable photography business because the last three years of your business have sucked By shifting from past focus to thinking of all the possibilities there are for you For your business this creates a fresh start a new beginning There's nothing you can't do unless of course you bring all this old baggage with you As you create this goal for your business Most people, most photography business owners just rinse and repeat, trying the same things over and over. Maybe the business improves by 5 percent a year, maybe they raise their prices a bit, maybe their product offerings change slightly, but it's usually more of the same and they can't figure out why their business is stuck. They just get the same results over and over and they keep looking to their past to see what's possible. They don't stop for a minute to dream big to think of a massive outcome they want and are 1000 percent capable of [00:04:00] achieving. One way to break out of this rut is to make that decision create that lofty goal, that massive outcome you would like for yourself and for your business. What is the result you would like for your business? Write it down an exact number, an exact outcome.

You want a type of client be very specific. A lot of people don't like to create goals for themselves because they think they will not achieve them, that they will be failures or disappointed by the results. When you make the decision ahead of time of the result you want and how you're going to feel working towards it, what actions you're going to take to get there, and don't for a second look to the past for any advice on how to do this, Believing in yourself, not thinking that you aren't worthy or capable of doing this, au contraire, you will be taking actions towards the future, towards this goal, and if you don't reach it, so what? Do you know how you will grow in the process? I've heard of the scientific method, yikes, like a million years ago in high school, but I think it's really appropriate to use it here to show you how you can keep taking action [00:05:00] till you get the result you want. First, make that decision, choose the goal. Who, what, where, when, and why. What do you need to do? Grab the pen, the paper, and write down all the actions you need to take to get the result you want. Of course you don't know them all right now, but just start writing.

Now do your research. How are you going to do this? Create your hypothesis. right now you have limited evidence for the result you want. But this is a starting point to test your hypothesis.

If you do this, Then what happens? and you keep repeating till you get the results you want. You're going to keep trying things till you figure it out. And don't stop and I don't know. Yeah. So this is where I can kind come in here . My thank for you. so not just to be a little smiling, nodding head. But, uh, back prior to photography, science, was my thing. And, yeah, I was going to be a doctor. One of the things with speaking specifically about the scientific method, one thing that's very, [00:06:00] very applicable, and both with science and business and anything else, when you make these changes, Don't make them all at once.

Make one, do one thing at a time. Cause if you, have too many variables and something changes, you don't know which variable caused that change. So if you change like four things and nothing works, you don't know if say one of those things might've been spectacularly promising, but the other things were already right.

So you change the thing that needed changing, but you also then change other things you didn't know about. So just change one thing. If that doesn't work, reset it back, then change something else and just keep doing these changes until you get You can think of it as um, making a Hoehn's glass of water, [00:07:00] And these other steps that you're following.

You have to pay attention, but don't, don't change too many things because then you just have no idea which thing was wrong or which thing was right. the main point of bringing up the scientific method is because nothing is solved like the phone wasn't invented in a day.

I mean, you literally have to. Try something once, try something again, change the barrier, keep the constant, like see what's working and what's not until you do start creating the results you want. And that can be applied towards any part of the photo, your photography business. So again, it's just a matter of actually it's a, it's a valuable lesson for life.

Like there's all sorts of things that the scientific method is good for. That's true. And when you start creating the actions that you're going to take towards this goal, think big, like think different, think extraordinary. If you think you need to write one blog post a month to [00:08:00] help your SEO for your business, write one blog post a day and see if you get extraordinary results faster. If you want to see results, start right away. What is that old expression? Like go big or go home. How do you need to be feeling to evolve yourself like this? Excited, determined, disciplined, unstoppable, But whatever you do, don't use this decision, this goal to beat yourself up. We are stretching. We are getting out of our comfort zones. We are leaning into our future self. Just be kind to yourself because there may be setbacks. There's definitely gonna be setbacks. There will be failures along the way, but that's okay because that's how we grow and that's how we achieve big results for ourselves. most recently we completely changed the trajectory of our business. I always like to throw in a personal anecdote because we can preach, but we'd like to show you that, you know, we put our money where our mouth is too. And that, um, well, now it's like, Two and a half years ago, like we decided to pack our bags and move to France and just set it all on fire and uh, see what [00:09:00] happens. we burned, we burned the boat in Phoenix and we recreated. Our photography business is here in France. Why did we do that? I mean, I get it from some people, but I think we're crazy to walk away from everything, but it was something that we had, it's something we wanted to do.

I, again, the wife just, uh, wife is about, and you should have fun with it. And at a certain point when everything becomes, uh, the same. Again, if you like the same, more power to you, but we like change, like to explore things, do things differently. We've done a number of things that, uh, that have gone well, but Once they reach a certain point, it becomes more interesting to move on. So that's just us. It doesn't have to be you. Right. we, we enjoy a challenge. So we like to challenge ourselves and Hey, why not recreate her photography businesses in France?

So everything that we're talking about is stuff that we've done ourselves. Putting these big outcomes, these big goals and doing the scientific, method [00:10:00] with ourselves and seeing that how it works. If it doesn't work, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, figure out what's not working. But the surest way to get the results you want is to show up every day and to try something to, to try something real, not, not just.

And the surest way to not get the results you want is to not try at all or to wait till tomorrow because you're just so close to being perfect. And it was the old saying, it's better to start than to be perfect. Exactly. And that's a subject for another day because perfectionism gets in the way of a lot of things. So there will be an exercise in the show notes and the last episode we talked about fact versus story and now we're going to create more facts in our business with by having these goals we're definitely going to start creating more tangible facts more concrete truths and so in the show notes will be an exercise about writing the story of your future business we'll think from the future about what our business what we want it to look like so write a letter from your future self Who's right where you want [00:11:00] to be has the business that they want working with the clients, whatever your goal is, and whatever the outcomes are that you want for your business and have them give you some advice, basically, you're writing a letter back to yourself now, and what would they tell you to start doing?

And what else might they say? And so envision yourself in the future, running your successful business, and then you're writing back to yourself about what you need to do to get there. Yeah. And I think it's enlightening. It's a very enlightening exercise. Cool. Sounds fun. Well, we should do it too.

Well, anyway, thank you again. And as always, it's a pleasure to have you join us. And, uh, thanks. See you next time. See you soon. Bye bye.

It would mean the world to us if you'd give us a follow, share this episode with someone, or be so kind as to leave us a review. Thank you.