184: Redefining Success

 Welcome to Shoot It Straight. The podcast for women building businesses and lives they actually want. I’m Sabrina Ebhart, and around here we believe in clarity over hustle, alignment over burnout, and giving yourself permission to want more, more ease, more beauty, more income, more space to live. So if you are ready to grow without losing yourself in the process, you’re in the right place.

Welcome back to the Shoot at Straight Podcast my friends. I at time of recording, just got back from the Root to Rise alumni retreat in Palm Springs. This is the third annual alumni retreat that I have hosted. It’s, it’s now a thing. We do it every January. Uh, the first year it was in Charleston, then we did it in Palm Springs, and then we did it in Palm Springs again.

I think Palm Springs is the, now the, the permanent location of the alumni retreat. I mean, you just can’t beat Palm Springs weather in January, especially for all the women who live in the Northeast and up north. Anyways, this retreat is open for enrollment to all Route Rise alumni. So what this looks like is every July I send an email to anyone who’s ever been in the program and you know, invite them to join this weekend.

And it’s pretty cool because women from different runs of the program join and decide to come to the alumni retreat. And so you get to see women that haven’t crossed paths before meeting. And the one similarity they have is that they have all gone through this program. So I know them deeply, but they don’t necessarily know each other.

It’s always a really, really beautiful group of women. I’ve, I think I’ve said this before on the podcast, but that’s, that’s who I bring into my circle. Everyone that comes is, is a beautiful women with beautiful hearts. It’s such a fun weekend. It is different than the regular Roots Rise retreat. We are not, we’re not photographing sessions, we’re not doing portfolio reviews.

Um, so those things are different. The other thing that makes it different is we do a lot more fun. It’s very much a girls’ weekend. So the structure of these alumni retreats, there’s some things that are similar. You know, we have a a chef dinner on Welcome night. We do some sort of mind or body work while we’re there.

And we have working time, but it’s kind of like a working weekend where I give everyone an assignment and then everybody splits up around the house and outdoors and they, they’re working on their own thing. So it’s this beautiful blend of, we work in the mornings and we play in the afternoon, in the evenings.

And so you’re getting that work time in to have some focused time on your business and your goals, but you’re also getting community building. And these weekends are just absolutely so much fun. So I just got back from the third alumni retreat in Palm Springs and. The opening night is always a really beautiful dinner prepared by a private chef, and our Palm Springs chef is amazing.

Shout out Justin, and that those opening night vibes are really welcoming, joyful energy, right? So again, I already know everyone there, but they don’t already know each other. So there’s introductions and getting to know women. We sit around and have cocktails and a beautiful charcuterie spread. And it’s mingling and mixing and unwinding from travel days and kind of settling in to the weekend energy.

And then we have this beautiful dinner and it’s always set, you know, at a lovely table with, with beautiful linens and flowers and candles. And like I said, we have a chef that is just waiting on us and taking care of us with delicious food. And this dinner was, was no different than the others. It was just, um, it’s a magical way to start a retreat weekend.

So opening night in Palm Springs after dinner was over and the conversations had started to kind of slow down a little bit, I asked everyone to go around the table and share their wins from 2025. I did tell them that we would be doing this ahead of time, so everyone had a list prepared and ready to share.

The list of things that these 11 women shared was absolutely inspiring and so powerful, and it reiterated how unique, quote unquote, success is to each person and why it’s so important to me to teach on this topic inside of my mastermind. So I wanna kind of paint the picture. We’re sitting around the table.

Candlelight flowers. We’ve got empty plates of food, champagne glasses. Dinner is winding down. Women from different seasons of life, different ages, different stages of their business from all over the country are sitting around this table. We are celebrating. If you wanna make more money in your business, but you are exhausted and don’t want to burn yourself out while you do it, I made something just for you.

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You can grab it now at sabrina gehart.com/business-reset, or check the show notes for the link. We go around and again, each woman has their list because I told them to have it ahead of time, so they’re pulling out the notes in their phone and they’re reading this list, and every answer and every story that each woman shared was so different than the one before.

Very few of them were about money. The vast majority of them shared that their successes and wins from the year before were about life. There wasn’t one single version of success in the room that was a cookie cutter of the other. That felt so inspiring and almost radical because after all, when you get a bunch of business owners together in a room, you would think that talking about wins and successes would be revenue.

You would think that everything was about revenue and numbers, and yet because it was a group of seasoned business owners, women who deeply know that money isn’t everything. It’s not the only thing that we should chase. The conversation that we shared that night supported a much different picture of what success can be besides just money.

So I wanna give you some clear examples. I’m not gonna share anybody’s names, but here are just a few. A few of the things shared around the table that night. Each woman shared like 10 plus things. Okay? So this is literally a tiny little sampling of what was shared. Here are some of the wins that we heard.

That they carved out time for a creative weekend for themselves in the middle of a busy season that they hired a house manager, that they’d learned something new, that they lost weight, that they took an exciting dream vacation. They grew their email list. They saved a huge chunk of money. Someone said that she completed a kitchen renovation that she paid for in cash.

Another said that she worked very few days in the summer and spent most of the time with her kids and traveling. Several said that they brought on new team members to support their business. A couple said that they expanded their education businesses. Many of them said that they were proud to say that they said no to sessions and things when they were already at capacity.

A couple of them mentioned that they did not get burned out. Uh, one of them mentioned that she had a profitable year with her studio that she built. Several said that they saw a therapist regularly. One of them bought a vacation home. A couple of them started brand new businesses, completely different from their existing businesses.

And then yes, several of them threw in at the end. Something related to revenue wins. These women had wildly successful years, even though most of what they viewed as success weren’t related to money or even their business. This doesn’t mean that they were shrinking their goals. It means they were honoring what actually mattered to them.

And when I think about 2025, for me, I feel the exact same way. 2025 was not my strongest year on paper. Financially I was down over 2024. I worked with less clients. I was doing deep work in my business to and and my business identity, honestly, for much of the year, and it was things that you don’t see happening on the outside.

It was not a big flashy year. It was not quote unquote successful on paper, but it was rich in so many other things. There was a lot of refinement. I cleared space for what mattered and became hyper-focused on where I’m going. There was a lot of alignment. I, I was realigning things in a lot of ways. I was able to do this because I had the time and the space in my calendar.

Realignment can’t happen when you are absolutely swamped and your business is, is if it’s going full speed ahead and you are swamped, you, you cannot see clearly to realign. You have to be willing to slow down, and I did that. There was also a lot of integration in 2025, and you’ve heard me talk about this.

I did a massive system migration and a massive rebrand, and I spent so much of the year deep in my business actually integrating changes. And the other thing was 2025 was so full of beauty for me. That was my word of the year, and I really let it guide me. I did so many beautiful things. I focused on beautiful moments and opportunities, and they really made my year feel joyful and beautiful.

So my friends hear me when I say this. A year can look quiet and still be deeply successful. I wanna leave you with this thought to close out today’s episode. I want you to know what matters to you, like really matters to you. I’m sure that you wanna make money, and I’m also sure that that’s not the only thing that you want.

I think so often, especially for business owners, success gets monetized too much. Women saying that they wanna have four and five figure months on the regular and six figures or more every year, or raising their prices to chase a monetary goal. But what if you could chase the things that really matter and the money followed?

When we focus all of our goals, time and energy around monetary goals, it disconnects women from their values, from the things that make up the moments of our lives. What about family and relationships and creativity and joy? There’s so much more than just money. When you’re willing to focus on those things and redefine success, you are taking a stand as a leader when you do that.

When you are willing to stand up and say, I care about things other than money. I am changing my definition of success to be unique to me. You are now a leader in both your business and your life. You’re saying that other things matter, and you’re allowing yourself to focus on making those things happen.

It doesn’t mean you’re abandoning your business or your clients. Again, last year, my word of the year was beauty and all of my goals were personal. I didn’t set a single business goal for 2025. That did not mean that I didn’t work a ton on my business. I absolutely did, and it didn’t mean that I stopped making money.

I actually made significantly more money than my bookkeeper and I had projected given my goals. It just meant that my definition of success last year wasn’t about money at all. It was about what mattered to me most in that season, and most of those things weren’t measurable. If you’re only willing to set goals and measure what’s visible and obvious like money, you’re missing so many things that can truly transform your life.

I’m going to close with the same question that I prompt my root to rise. Students, when we talk about goal setting, if you had the most successful year of your life, everything was green, lights, yeses, incredible opportunities, and positivity, everything went your way. What will your life look like one year from today?

I encourage you to really, really think on this and let that vision drive your goals and your definition of success, not just making up some arbitrary financial goal that you think you should set because your peers and the people on the internet told you to. That’s it for today, my friends. We’ll see you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the Shoot at Straight podcast. You can find all the full show notes and details from today’s episode at. Sabrina gebhart.com/podcast. Come find me and connect over on the gram at Sabrina Gebhart Photography. If you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you hit that subscribe button and leave me a review.

Until next time, my friends shoot it straight.