189: When the Business You Love Starts to Feel Like Too Much

Welcome to Shoot It Straight. The podcast for women building businesses and lives they actually want. I’m Sabrina Gehart, 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 It Straight podcast, my friends. Today I wanna talk about feeling heavy. If your business feels heavier than it used to, there’s a really good chance that it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. It’s not because you’ve made a mistake. It’s not because you’re not good at your business or a part of your business.

It’s because the way that you’re carrying your business needs to change. And this is something that I see all the time with photographers and the creative business owners that I work with. Nothing is technically broken, so to speak. The business might even be going really well. You’re booking clients, you’re bringing in income, you’re showing up online, and yet everything feels like it takes more energy than it used to.

Tasks that once felt exciting, suddenly feel draining. Decisions feel harder than they should, and sometimes you find yourself wondering why something that you built with so much love and passion now feels so heavy and like a drain. So in today’s episode, I want to talk about why this happens because in my experience that heaviness is not usually a sign that your business is failing.

It’s usually a signal that something about how you’re operating inside of your business needs to evolve. I’ve experienced this in my own business. I’ve watched so many women go through the exact same phase in their business growth, and the good news is that when you understand what’s actually creating this heaviness, it becomes a lot easier to change it.

So first I wanna quickly explain what I mean when I say that your business feels heavy, just in case you heard that and you’re like, I don’t know. Does it, when I say that your business feels heavy, here are some examples that could look like you are procrastinating, things that you used to enjoy. You are overthinking everything you are feeling really behind, even when things are technically going pretty well.

You have this deep exhaustion that sleep and rest and time off doesn’t actually fix, and you’re constantly thinking about the business, right? There’s, there’s a constant rumination of, am I doing this right? Should I do it, be doing this next, what about this? I didn’t do this. I need to do this, right? It’s just like a constant running loop.

Those are some examples of what it can look like if your business is feeling heavy. So now that I ran through those really quickly, I wanna give you some reasons, some reasons why your business might feel heavy right now. You may resonate with one of these, and you may also resonate with more than one.

Okay? So let’s run through them. Reason number one, you are carrying too much alone. So many photographers and creative entrepreneurs built their businesses alone with just them. They are the marketer, the editor, the creator, the customer service department, the scheduler, the social media manager, the CEO, the accountant that works until it doesn’t.

That’s okay when you are scrappy and when you are starting out, but it is not a long term solution for a successful business. What used to feel empowering and exciting now feels exhausting because. You are doing it alone and you’ve been doing it alone for a really long time. When we first start our business, it feels exciting ’cause we’re learning new things and we’re like getting it off the ground and we’re, you know, bootstrapping things and we’re getting our hands dirty and we’re doing the thing, we’re making it happen.

But after a certain point, carrying all of that alone is just, it’s too much for one person. One of the biggest shifts I see women make as they grow is realizing that they were never meant to carry it all alone. How can you fix this? Obviously, I talk about these things all the time on the podcast, outsourcing, getting actual help in your business, offloading some tasks that you should not be doing, and hear me when I say this.

This is not new news. If you’ve been listening to shoot it straight. The only thing that you have to be doing in your business is the creative part. As a creative entrepreneur, as a photographer, if you are an artist, you are doing the creation of the art. If you’re a photographer, you are taking the photos.

If you are a writer, you are writing the thing. Beyond that, you can outsource every other part of your business. Another thing that will help is systems. Systems take things off your plate without actually having to outsource them. Because things are automated, things are systematized. You are not carrying the mental load of, do I need to do this?

Do I need to do this? Have I done this? Did I send that thing to this person? Right? Systems help support you with that. Another way that you can stop carrying things alone is work with a mentor or a coach. Having a leader to ask questions, to bounce things off of, to share when you are feeling this way, and get feedback to help you move forward and make decisions, makes everything feel so much lighter because you have someone in your corner.

And then the last thing is finding a community. If you do not have business besties, if you do not have people who understand what it’s like to be a creative entrepreneur, the specific nuances of running a business and also having a life, being married, having kids, and also having this business baby, right?

Having clients, being passionate about something outside of their family. If you do not have those women in your life, it’s time to find them. Whether you go out and do that by setting up meetups in your community, joining an online community, putting yourself in rooms by going to conferences and retreats.

I don’t care how you find it, it’s time to find those people so that you’ll stop feeling like you’re so alone in all of this. Okay? Reason number two, that your business may feel heavy is that you have found success, but you have no structure. Many, many, many of the women I work with, they grow really fast and they don’t have time, or they didn’t have the intention to implement structure through their quick growth, right?

They all of a sudden start getting lots of inquiries. They start photographing lots of SEC sessions or having lots of clients. They are making a lot more money very quickly, but behind the scenes, they don’t have systems. They don’t have a marketing rhythm. They don’t have any boundaries. They have no clear business model.

So suddenly you had this dream, you built this business, and all of a sudden it exploded. Okay? The business that you built has grown, but you never had any kind of structure to catch up with where you are. So everything feels chaotic. Everything feels chaotic on paper. It’s great. Again, you are working with a lot of people.

A lot of people are paying you. Things are rocking and rolling, but behind the scenes it is an absolute chaotic mess and you, you know, circling back to reason number one, are probably carrying that chaos by yourself. This is a great problem to have. You have the success. You’ve gotten to that point. A lot of businesses would dream of getting to that point, but it’s time to slow it down a little bit so that you can backpedal and put the systems in place to support you.

Otherwise, you are going to crash and burn. This is going to be a, an explosion where your business just gets shut down and you turn it off one day. Okay? And I know you don’t want that to happen. We have to have systems and structure in our business to support the growth. Like I said, oftentimes when you have that explosive growth, it means pushing pause so that you have time to build the systems.

’cause you’re never gonna hear me say that systems are easy. They’re not. They’re easy. Once they’re running, they’re not easy to get set up, okay? They takes time to get a CRM set up. It takes time to figure out what your marketing rhythm is. It takes time and bravery to learn boundaries with clients. It takes time to figure out your business model if you never even never really did that from the beginning.

Explosive growth often means pushing pause so that you can go back to the beginning and put some of the foundational things in place that you missed. Are you ready to uplevel your photography business with more ease, profit and clarity? Root to Rise is my five month mastermind for female photographers who want to refine their systems.

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So get on the wait list now at sabrina gehart.com/mastermind-waitlist.

Reason number three that your business may be feeling heavy is that you are constantly making decisions. This is a really sneaky one. Entrepreneurs experience decision fatigue constantly. Uh, some examples, what should I post? What should I charge? Should I run a sale? Should I change my editing? Should I offer minis?

Should I update my website? The list goes on and on. It is a constant running list of decisions, decisions, decisions. When you are constantly guessing, running through this list of decisions, constantly, every decision is energy. This heaviness that the decision fatigue is giving you is because you have a lack of clarity, not because you have a lack of ability.

Okay? Not because you are not capable of doing hard things or making changes. It’s because you don’t have any clarity. It’s because you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t have clarity on what your goals are and what’s actually gonna get you there. You don’t have clarity on what you actually want this thing to do.

You’re running your business in the day-to-day moment and not with a big picture plan. Fixing this is relatively easy. You need a big picture plan. Again, this is taking some time to pull back from the day to day and say, okay, I’m gonna give myself this week to to back it up a notch. I need to look at my year.

I need to look at my five-year goals. I need to look at what the heck I want to do with this business, where I wanna take it, what kind of clients I wanna work with, what kind of work I wanna be producing, where I wanna take things so that you can make all of your decisions and filter them through the lens of clarity, right?

Because when you don’t know those big picture things, you are running your business day to day and it’s constant decision fatigue. Should I do this? Should I do this? What will happen if I do this? What will happen if I do that? Clarity clears all of that up so that you know what you should post. You know what you should charge.

You know when you’re running a sale, you know if you should offer manys. You know if your website needs changing or not, right? Those things are easy. There’s no decisions. You just know what needs to happen because you have the clarity of a big picture plan in your business. Reason number four that you might be feeling heaviness in your business is that you are consuming more than you’re implementing.

You are consuming more than you’re implementing. The women I work with love to learn. They are perpetual learners. They are forever learning. That is great if you can also implement if you are just perpetually consuming. This is actually a really negative thing that is extremely overwhelming. You are constantly listening to podcasts.

You are buying all the courses, you are watching all of the free trainings. You are downloading all of the freebies. You are saving all of the posts that are very educational and giving you tips. You are doing all of this consumption, but you are not stopping to integrate at some point. More information actually makes you feel worse.

’cause now you’ve got 500 ideas and no clear direction. You have 500 ideas and no time to implement. You have 500 ideas and you’re not sure which ones are for you and which ones are not. There is a point where overconsumption becomes overwhelming and it’s too much. If that’s you, I would highly encourage you to cut your consumption down or maybe put yourself on a consumption pause altogether.

Integrate. Don’t buy another course until you’ve integrated the course that you’ve learned. Don’t sign up for another free training until you have watched and implemented what you learned in that free training. Don’t save any more posts just to add mental noise until you have done something that you learned in that post.

Stop listening to the podcasts until you have done something with the podcast that you’re listening to. The overconsumption is overwhelming, and that doesn’t even. I’m not even talking about just the overconsumption of media in general. Right, because that’s That’s a thing, right? That’s a thing. We are on social media, we are on tv.

We are just, we’re consuming, consuming, consuming. I’m just talking about the educational consumption right now. I’m just talking about the sneaky stuff that seems like it’s good for us. All these educational things. I mean, it’s great to learn. It’s great to wanna better yourself. It’s great to want to do things better and learn faster ways and try new stuff.

I, I’m, I’m all for education. Obviously, I’m a huge proponent for it when you can take the time to implement. But when you are consuming to the point of paralyzation, that is when your business can start to feel heavy. The last reason I wanna give you is that your business outgrew the version of you who built it.

So most of the time what I see is that when a woman decides to start her business, she’s in that excited new energy phase, right? She’s feeling scrappy, she’s feeling experimental. She’s willing to just figure it out. She knows it’s gonna be a little bit messy and not immediately successful, but she’s ready.

She’s like, I don’t care. I’m doing this. It’s gonna be incredible. I’m gonna figure things out. I’m gonna learn things. I’m gonna do things. It’s gonna be great. What happens is you see success, things start to work, and we settle in to, again, circling back to the first reason, doing things alone, carrying it all by yourself, having no systems.

We’re, we’re seeing the, the success, maybe it’s been a couple of years, things are rocking and rolling. We feel like, okay, we got this off the ground, we’re doing the thing. But here you are a couple years later, you’re actually not that same woman anymore. You have now grown up. You are in a position where you need boundaries.

You need a plan, a big picture plan. You need support. You need leadership skills. Sometimes the heaviness that you feel is simply a sign that you need to evolve, that you are not still that scrappy brand new business owner. You are ready for more ease, for more space, for a team, for a bigger plan.

Something has shifted and you’re still carrying this business that you originally built, and it’s time for something to change. So my friend, feeling heavy doesn’t mean that you’re failing. I want you to hear that feeling heavy doesn’t mean that you’re failing. It doesn’t mean that your business is failing.

It often means that you are at a threshold of some sort. You are at a threshold of expansion of leadership. Of growth, of support, of change, something has shifted in your life, your business, your dreams, or all of the above, and it’s time to get realigned. One of the things that I’ve seen over and over again with women inside my world is that this heaviness starts to lift when they stop trying to figure it out all alone.

When you have someone in your corner, whether it’s a coach or a community. You have someone to share your perspective and to get a fresh perspective with you. Have someone to help you find clarity that you have been missing. You are able to have hard conversations with people who understand what you’re talking about and understand the heaviness that you’re feeling, and you have somebody that can see what you can’t see, because often we are way too close to our business to see something that is seemingly obvious to everyone else.

Sometimes what feels like a huge problem is actually just a small shift, but you can’t see it because you’re inside of this. I can speak to this personally. This has happened to me so many times with business besties and also my coaches, they point something out that seems so dang obvious, and it’s the smallest shift, but I could not see it because I was so close.

So if your business feels heavy right now, I want you to pause before assuming something’s wrong. And I want you to ask yourself some really simple questions. Am I carrying too much? Am I lacking structure? Am I making every single decision alone? Am I trying to grow without support? Because your business doesn’t have to feel this heavy and often the shift that changes everything.

That takes you out of this heaviness space is often so much closer than you think. That’s it for today, my friends. If this episode resonated with you, I would love to hear from you. Come send me a DM on Instagram at XO dot Sabrina Gehart, and I’d love to chat. That’s it for today. 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.