167: When Business Feels Hard: A Heart-to-Heart for the Hard Seasons

 Welcome to the Shoot at Straight podcast, where honesty meets heart and real talk actually means something. I’m your host, Sabrina Gebhart, and each week we get vulnerable, practical, and just a little bit bold so you can feel seen, supported, and ready to take the next step in your photography journey.

Let’s go. Welcome back to the Shoot It Right podcast, my friends. This week’s episode is going to be like a heart to heart over coffee. Maybe you’re having coffee right now. Maybe you’re on a walk. Maybe you’re in the carpool line. I want you to kind of pretend that I’m just in your ear via Voxer. We’re having a one-to-one chat.

This isn’t meant to be a pep talk, so to speak. Today. It’s meant to be more of a permission slip. I want to acknowledge kind of a universal truth, something that I know you know, but as the coach in your ear, I want to make sure you hear. Every entrepreneur hits hard seasons. It’s true. We hit hard seasons.

We go through things where we are carrying a lot. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s professional, sometimes it’s both. And business and life is not always. Comfortable. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows. It’s not always easy and abundant. That doesn’t mean that you’re failing. Sometimes life throws us a curve ball and it is what it is.

We can’t avoid many of those things, but when you think about your business, when you think about this thing that you have built, you’ve poured your heart and soul into countless hours. You know, figuring out bumps in the road, solving problems, learning things. There are seasons that we go through in our business where it just feels like we’re not getting anywhere or we’re not seeing the progress that we want, or we’ve decided that it’s time to make a really big shift, or things are really slow and we don’t know why.

Here’s what I want you to hear today. None of this means that you’re failing it, more than likely means that you are growing or stretching Again, it’s uncomfortable. It’s really easy for us to look around on the internet, on social media, see what everybody else is doing, and even though you know it’s a highlight reel, you know it is.

I don’t need to tell you this. You know that the internet is a highlight reel of everybody else’s life. We still don’t remember that all the time. We seem to think that everybody else has it better. That everyone else has more ease or better clients or more money, or everyone else launches, things that just happen to sell out all the time, or everyone else has this balance and this freedom.

Whatever it is, it seems like everybody else, quote unquote, has it together, and sometimes we feel like it just doesn’t, everybody else is winning and we’re losing. The thing about seeing other people’s highlight reel, other people’s wins and successes is that most of the time you’re not seeing their messy middle.

You are seeing the finish line, you are seeing the sold out launch. You are seeing the, you know, dream publication. You are seeing, the award, you are seeing the revenue numbers. You’re not seeing all of the hard work and the messy middle that it took to get there. And it’s unfortunate because the middle is messy.

You cannot get to that dreamy other side without going through the mud. It is inevitable. Okay? It’s uncomfortable, and it can feel really, really hard. So today I just, I wanna share a story. I wanna talk a little bit about. I wanna let you know, remind you lovingly, gently, that the emotions that you feel when business feels hard, that exhaustion, the doubt, the frustration, the discomfort is normal.

It’s normal. I wish that I could tell you that once your business gets going, it’s awesome all the time and it’s just not, it might be awesome for a really long time and then all of a sudden something starts to shift and it gets uncomfortable again, and then you gotta go through a messy middle again to hit a transition point on the other side.

I can speak to this because I’ve walked through the season so many times in my business of the last 15 years, I have walked through so many hard seasons that looked very different. I’ve walked through seasons of burnout. When my calendar was packed, my editing queue was sky high, and I was absolutely miserable, even though I was quote unquote successful on the outside.

That is a deeply hard season. I’ve also walked through seasons of really deep financial pressure in seasons where I feared that bookings wouldn’t come and I wasn’t going to hit the revenue numbers that my family relied on. Okay? I wasn’t sure that my business was gonna get to stay open, but the clients who did book with me and did continue to show up, reminded me, lovingly, gave me some gratitude as to why I kept going.

I’ve also experienced extremely chaotic seasons, like balancing October. It is my daughter’s senior year in high school. It is also homecoming season. It is also birthday season in our house. We also have a three fall sport athletes. It’s also photographers busy season, and I’m also launching my mastermind.

It’s a lot to carry and honestly, there are days where I feel like I am at capacity. This is a chaotic season, and it’s hard. Chaos is hard, especially for those of you who really thrive on routines and rhythms. But for today’s episode, I wanted to share a teeny bit about what is bigger. That is hard for me right now, and honestly, it’s been the entire second half of this year.

A lot in my business and in my world is shifting. My brand is changing. I am going through a massive platform migration of two different platforms. That’s just absolutely so time consuming, so many details, so many fine tuning things. I am refining offers. I am removing offers. I am building new things. I’m taking some really massive pivots.

It’s been a lot that I’m carrying and I am 1000% in the messy middle. In some ways, I have a lot of clarity about what I’m doing, why I’m making changes, and in other ways it feels like the water is still real murky. It’s very uncomfortable and there’s a lot of unknown, but intuitively I know what I’m doing is right.

Like I’m walking in a dark room, like I’m walking through my house late at night. The lights are off. I know where I’m going. Right? I’m trusting that I’m not gonna crash into something because I’ve been in this space before, but I really don’t know. You know, that’s probably not the best example, but that’s what it feels like.

Intuitively. I know that the changes I’m making are right and that it’s time. But it feels really uncomfortable because again, there’s so much unknown. I am trying to stay focused on gratitude and excitement. I’m excited of what’s coming on the other side, even though I don’t a hundred percent know what it is.

I’m excited because I’ve been through seasons of change and discomfort before, and I know that trusting my intuition pays off. I’m also allowing myself to feel and acknowledge that things aren’t easy right now, and it’s okay. I’m in a season of balancing a lot of change. I am in a season of having to physically make a lot of those changes.

I am in a season of unknown and uncertainty and it’s super uncomfortable and that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be comfortable. It doesn’t have to be easy all the time. I know that on the other side of this is really great stuff, I know that on the other side of this is going to be more clarity than I’ve probably ever had in my business.

I know that on the other side of this is really exciting things, big things, I don’t know what they are. But I’m going through the murky middle to get there. I’m willing to go through the hard stuff to build the other half to get to the other side. Are you ready to uplevel your photography business with more ease, profit and clarity?

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It’s really hard to keep going, okay, when it feels like this, when it feels messy and chaotic and challenging and uncertain. And maybe you felt like this before and, and maybe you haven’t. But I just, I want to normalize this process and this experience, and so I wanna kind of talk through just really quickly what to do when things feel this way, and then give you a little bit of encouragement in case you’re currently in the same position that I am.

So when things feel hard, when business feels hard, when you’re in a hard season, what can you do? These are really, really simple. This is nothing that you have not heard of before. Again, this is me coaching you in your ear. Okay? This is meant to just be me supporting you. For those of you listening that are feeling like this, number one, pause.

Just pause. Give yourself permission to take a step back, even if it’s an afternoon, do what you need to do, not on your list, but in your body. Being able to step away from the to-do and the tasks and the pressure that we put on ourselves to get through the things in seasons of hard and unknown and deep work.

This is such a gift to be able to say, you know what? I’m at capacity for today. I, I need to just walk away from my desk an hour early and go for a walk. Or, you know what? I need to reschedule that meeting. Or, you know what? I was gonna have this, you know, I was gonna write a bunch of emails today and do some copy and whatever.

Actually, what I need to do is I need to do some journaling and I’m gonna go, you know, get a pedicure or whatever. Allow yourself to pause when you need it, because it’s a lot, it’s a lot. You know, I’ve, I, I can’t even keep track of how many times I’ve said this on the podcast before, but we carry so much.

Motherhood and being a wife, running a household extracurriculars. You know, if you go to church or you’re volunteering or community groups, like we do a lot, even if we did not have our business at all, we carry a lot. The listeners of this podcast are doers. We are women who serve other people and care for other people, and we love deeply and we are changing the world.

And then you throw in your business. It’s a lot, and it feels even heavier when you’re in these hard seasons. When you’re in these seasons of change or burnout, or you’re carrying something heavier than normal, maybe, maybe business is going great, but you’re moving or you’re renovating, or you’re caring for a parent who’s recently, you know, ill or whatever.

Seasons can be hard. For whatever reason, allow yourself the permission to step back and take the pause when you need it. Even when you don’t have time for it, especially when you don’t have time for it. The second thing to do when business feels hard is to simplify. This is where you gotta get real tough.

You gotta give yourself that tough love. If you’ve got a coach, this is where you just cut to the chase and say, I’m struggling. I need you to hold me accountable to these things. Drop the shoulds. Focus only on what is absolutely necessary in moving the needle. So I should go to this meeting. I should volunteer for this thing.

I should host this play date because my friend hosted it last week. I should. I should. I should. You don’t have time or bandwidth capacity for any shoulds in a hard season. I know that you want to. I know that you enjoy them in hard seasons. It is about cutting the fat and giving yourself as much ease and bandwidth as possible.

Even though we love the shoulds and we enjoy the shoulds, we need the bandwidth more. So focus only on what’s moving the needle. Take care of your clients, take care of the immediate needs right in front of you. If you are carrying heavy things of change or projects or whatever, focus on those things. All of the shoulds get set down in these seasons.

Number three, ask for support. A coach, a friend, an accountability partner, outsource. If you’ve never done it, and when I say outsource, if you’re new to the podcast, I mean in business and at home. And at home, if you have never allowed yourself support at home, it’s time. You know, rewind three minutes to where I just talked about all the things we’re carrying.

It’s time. Outsourcing probably means paying someone, but it doesn’t always mean paying someone. So if you are in a financially heavy season, you can outsource things without paying trade with friends. Ask for support from family members, get support from your spouse. I promise you they could support you more than they already are.

Look around and see who can help you take things off your plate in business and at home. And then I want you to remember, this is a perspective shift. This hard season is temporary. Whatever it is that you’re carrying, that’s making it hard, is temporary. Just focus on what’s on the other side, and if you’re like me currently and you’re not entirely sure what’s on the other side, trust your intuition.

You are in this position for a reason. It just hasn’t been revealed yet, and that’s okay. You can trust your intuition. Trust the process. Get through the messy middle, and it’ll be a surprise on the other side. A beautiful, glorious, well worth the weight and the struggle, surprise on the other side. So I wanna leave you with a little bit of encouragement.

Again, my friend. I’m in your ear, you and me. I’ve been there. I can empathize with you so deeply. I’ve made it through and you’re going to make it through too. We are strong women. We do stuff. We do more than the average person. We do way more than the average person, okay? We do hard stuff every day. You can and will make it to the other side.

Trust yourself. Trust the process. You will get through the messy middle. I promise hard seasons. They shape us. They help us listen to our intuition even more next time. They give us that deeper clarity in what matters and what’s important and what we’re doing and where we’re going. It also gives us that deeper alignment with those things.

Don’t let this put you in a perpetual Debbie Downer season. Focus on the good, focus on the gratitude. Focus on what is coming on the other side. And then the last thing I wanna leave you with is I feel like I have to say this. You know, if you’ve been a long time listener of the podcast, do not allow yourself to be in a perpetually hard season if this is what you have found.

That you, it’s just hard after hard after hard. You feel like you’re never getting to the other side. You feel like it’s, you’re perpetually in the messy middle because you’re just, you can’t figure things out. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re struggling, you don’t have support, whatever that may be. I want you to DM me on Instagram and start a conversation if that’s you.

If you feel like you are in a perpetual hard season, I wanna talk with you. I really do. So send me a DM on Instagram at Sabrina Ghar Photography and let’s talk. And I’m gonna coach you through this because I really do want to help. I don’t want you to feel like you’re in a perpetually hard season. It’s probably time to adjust your calendar so that you allow for more seasons of rest in between the things that you’re building, more recovery time.

But maybe that’s not the case. So if you feel like let’s, you send me a DM and I wanna chat. My friend, if you feel like you’re in the middle of a hard season right now, you’re not alone. It does not mean you’re failing. It means you’re human. It means you’re growing. It means exciting things are coming.

Trust the process, and at time of recording. This, uh, route to rise my mastermind for 2026 is GaN for enrollment. This is the perfect container for support and growth and taking big leaps in your life and business. And if you wanna learn more, you can check out the link in the show notes and I’d love to chat.

That’s it for today, my friends. We’ll see you next time. 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@sabrinagehart.com slash podcast. Come find me and connect over on the gram at Sabrina Gehart 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.