196: When You Don’t Know What Move to Make Next (Because You’re in a Funk)

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.

Alright, my friends, I am getting honest with you today. That’s what I do here on the podcast. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you know this today is no different. I shared something in my membership, the first class lounge a couple of weeks ago, and I got so many responses from people and it was so good to hear from them.

I love to hear from my members, but it made me realize that this is something that I need to talk about with a larger group of people. And so here we are on the podcast. This is vulnerable. But I have no problem being vulnerable, especially if I can help you realize that you’re not alone in case you’re feeling the same way.

I’ve been in a funky season, and this has been going on for a minute at time of air. This will have been going on for a couple of months. I have felt personally very heavy, professionally unsettled and. I hate feeling this way. I hate feeling this way. And I am not here to tell you I’m fine. That’s not what this episode is.

I’m just gonna share, uh, from my heart where I’ve been and how I’ve been working through it. So let’s get started. First things first. This is not new news to any listener unless you are brand new here. And if you are welcome, I’m so glad you’re here. Um, my daughter’s going to college. She’s a senior at time of air.

She will be graduating in just a few weeks, and it is a hard, hard season. I know many of you listeners have been in this season before, but I know many of you have littles and you can’t fathom what this season is like because to be quite honest, until I was in this season myself, I couldn’t fathom it either.

Truly. Parenthood is hard. Motherhood is hard. You’re really like drowning in the season that you’re in, and it’s hard to see what the next season can look like. And so if I’m being really honest, this is, I, I couldn’t even expect that this would be as hard as it is. The logistics of this season are absolute chaos.

It’s the college visits, the college applications, the deciding which college you’re gonna accept, and then you know, registering and then choosing roommates. And then if you’ve got a girl who wants to go through sorority rush, that’s a whole job in and of itself to get ready for. And it’s all of the grad parties to attend.

And then planning your own grad party and who’s gonna come and when is family gonna come in for graduation? And are they coming in for the party too? What are we getting our child for graduation? Oh, we need to start ordering things for their dorm room. Oh, are they gonna match with their roommate or not match with their roommate?

It’s so much, it’s so much just logistically. But then you add on the grief. The grief of your child having the audacity to leave you. And I say that jokingly, it is such an intense grief. It is something unlike I have ever felt before, and it’s painful, but you’re also really proud of them. Uh, I don’t think I’ve said it on the podcast publicly, but my daughter has committed to University of Missouri Mizzou.

It’s an SEC school, and it is nine hours away from where we live. It’s not close. And I also have the logistics in mind for that too. How often will I get to visit her? How often will she get to come home? How are we paying for all of that travel? Am I flying? Am I driving? It’s just, it’s so much. And then you think, huh?

I have other children. She’s not an only child. I have other things too, right? One of our other children is potentially going through a school change as well. We are looking at moving him to another school next year, and so there’s been logistics and meetings and applications with that as well. And I’m also in the season of perimenopause, right?

I am getting older. Just had a birthday and. My hormones are a mess. I’m exhausted more than I ever have been. I’ve been scheduling appointments to take care of myself, and that adds up too because I don’t have time for all of these appointments for blood work and this doctor, and this doctor, and this therapist, and I’ve been spending all of this season pouring my absolute best into my students.

They deserve it. They have invested in me to have an experience and I am going to deliver that experience for them. And then also pouring the best into my family because we have a lot of moving parts right now. You better believe that I’m going to give my absolute best to my daughter before she leaves, and my boys that are here that aren’t going anywhere and my husband, and I’m finding that my day-to-day self-care.

Because, you know, as the listeners of this podcast, that I’m all about self-care, the Pilates, the journaling, the lifting weights, the walking, the sleeping, the needle point, the reading, all the things. It’s not filling me up the way it normally does because I’m emptier than usual. My self-care isn’t broken.

I’m just, I’m like below empty. And so I’m pouring all this self-care into myself as I normally would, and it’s just not getting me there. It’s not getting me where I need to be. So there’s a lot at play personally, but there’s also been some business discomfort being totally honest with you, some business discomfort.

There’s been something stirring and it’s a need for a change that I couldn’t quite name yet, but I knew that something wasn’t right, something wasn’t where it was supposed to be, something. The, the way things were currently were not the way they could continue to be. Like, I couldn’t carry the structure of things anymore.

I had this kind of gnawing fear that what if I was gonna, what if I broke something, so to speak? Like I’m putting air quotes around the word broke, my businesses working, my students were seeing success. My one-to-one clients are having a great experience. My retreat, my mastermind, the podcast like things are working right.

If I made a change, would I break? What’s working? And unfortunately I have been carrying this or had been, I had been carrying this alone for weeks because quite frankly, I couldn’t find the time or space to have a conversation with somebody about any of this. You know, my husband was in the loop on the fact that I was struggling personally.

A couple of business friends were in the loop that I was having, you know, a little unsettled on the business side, but there wasn’t any real deep conversations about like, let’s get into this. Let’s figure out what’s happening. I was just carrying all of this around in a funk, in just a funky, uncomfortable, exhausted season.

I wanna talk to you about something for a second. I see this all the time in the industry. Photographers who are good at what they do, they are genuinely talented. But they still feel like they’re one slow season away from questioning everything they’ve ever done. They are still making decisions from a place of scarcity.

They’re still running their businesses in a way that quietly exhausts them. I know that feeling because I’ve lived it, and I also know what it costs to stay there longer than you have to. Root to rise is my mastermind for photographers who are done waiting for things to click on their own. It’s a high touch root program, and it’s one I’ve been running for years, which means it’s been refined, tested, and built on what actually works.

Not a theory, not what worked for someone else. What is working for photographers in real businesses at real stages of growth? The women inside route to rise aren’t just growing their revenue. They’re changing how they think, how they make decisions, how they show up. That’s the work and that’s what makes the results stick.

The next cohort isn’t open yet, but the wait list is, and that’s where you wanna be. Waitlist members get first access more details. The chance to have a conversation with me before the doors open to anyone else, and a discount at enrollment. If you’ve been circling this and wondering if it’s for you, that’s your answer.

Get on the list, sabrina gehart.com/mastermind-waitlist. The link will be in the show notes back to the episode, and then on my very busiest call, day of the month. Okay. The first Tuesday of the month is always chaos for me. It’s like the perfect storm where a whole bunch of calls line up, right? Monthly calls that always happen on the first Tuesday, stacked with some mastermind calls and one-to-one calls and all these things.

I had a very, very busy call day back to back, to back, to back. It’s like I woke up and I realized I couldn’t wait anymore to work through this stuff. Like it had to happen today. I was at a bursting point, if you will, so I had Pilates really early that morning and went to my, my Tuesday 6:00 AM Pilates class.

I came home from that and as I was getting ready to drive one of my carpools, I vox her to a friend and she’s a business genius and I adore her and she knows my business and me. I just boxed her and I said, you know, kindly like, I gotta get some stuff. I gotta, I need your help picking through this. Like, I need you to mirror back to me what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing, what am I missing?

And I was too close to it, and I wanted her valuable opinion. And then I texted a close friend of mine and I said, I am really struggling to find a new therapist. I need your help. I, I trust you immensely. Please give me a recommendation. Then I had a call with, uh, a business coach and somebody I had worked with before who knows my business and my offers, and I vented to her literal word, vomit all of the problems that I was having, so to speak.

And they weren’t, they weren’t problems. Nothing was broken, but the things that were uncomfortable. All of the ideas I had swirling and my fears about the ideas, and then also why I thought they could work potentially. It was literally like word vomit soup. And then in addition to that, I happened to have a call scheduled with my content strategist that day, and we’ve been working together for a couple of years.

And so she deeply knows my business as well, and I was just venting to her and word vomiting to her. It wasn’t one single conversation that turned things around. It was all of them almost at once. As I was speaking to this, these women all on the same day, I could feel the knot start loosening, and then a huge light bulb moment went off for me and it was like, it was like I couldn’t even have this thought.

Until the knot had started to loosen because I was so in the thick of it, I went from, what if I break it to what if it gets a hundred times better? And I can’t even tell you how immensely exciting that felt. That was an excitement that I hadn’t felt in a hot minute because I’d been so in the thick of heaviness.

And funk and that little spark, that mindset shift that not loosening totally changed the trajectory of things. Am I still in a very hard season? Yeah. Yeah, I am. I have not gotten to the other side of sending my daughter off to school. And let’s be frank here, even when she is off to school, it’s still gonna be real hard.

I haven’t implemented all of the changes that I’m going to make in my business, but I’m damn excited about them and I’m super confident in the direction that they’re going. I was waiting for a quote unquote slow day or the right opportunity to speak to someone or get some guidance, and that was not coming.

That was never coming. The breakthrough happened on my busiest day because I finally opened the dang door. There wasn’t a perfect window. I just finally said, enough is enough. And I opened the door and I plowed my way through it, and I reached out to the people that I knew could support me through that.

So in case you’re feeling the same way. Like many of my members in first class lounge responded to me when I shared this story in case you are feeling the same way in case you are in a similar season. Whether it’s because you have a child going off to college or your business feels funky or something else heavy is happening, your marriage, your mental health, an ailing parent, a sick child, whatever that may be, I want you to hear me say this.

You will not burden someone by needing their support. You will not burden someone by needing their support. We try and power through so much, and this is coming from me, someone who generally doesn’t do that. I love support. I have all of the people on my team, so many things outsourced. So many women that I am lucky enough to call business friends.

But for whatever reason, I was stuck in this funk in this season and I wasn’t relying on my resources, but that’s coming from me. Who generally does rely on other people very easily, and here’s what I know about you, the listener, and many of the women I work with, many of you do not do the same thing, so you already prefer to carry things on your own.

You don’t wanna outsource, you don’t wanna ask for help. You don’t want to burden someone. I’m telling you right now, you are not going to burden them by needing to talk to somebody, to hash something out with somebody, to brainstorm some things or just share what you’re feeling. The second thing I want you to hear is that you do have the time.

You do have the time. You just have to decide that it can’t wait any longer. You do have the time to hash it out with someone. You do have the time to schedule the appointment with a therapist. You do have the time to move something else around or shift something or schedule a call with someone so that you can get it out of your brain and into the wide open.

Share it with someone. Get feedback thoughts, right? Have the conversation. So my friend, if you are in a foggy season, and if you are craving a room full of women who get it, maybe you don’t have business friends, and if you don’t, I’m so sorry and I’m desperate for you to find them truly. But if you’re in any kind of funky, foggy season and you want that kind of space, you want the space to ask the hard questions and share the hard things and get feedback and be surrounded by women who are cheering you on.

My mastermind route to Rise is going to open soon, and I want you to get on the wait list and we’re gonna leave it at that. The wait list is sabrina gehart.com/mastermind-waitlist, and I hope you’ll get on it. That’s it for today, my friends. We’ll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Shoot It 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.