220: Busy By Choice: Your Definition of Success This Fall

 Welcome to Shoot It Straight, the podcast for women building businesses and lives they actually want. I’m Sabrina Gebhardt, 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’re 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. I have been having a conversation over and over again in a little different words here and there, but this conversation has been happening with students and past students, and when I hear something over and over again, that is generally a sign that it’s time to bring it over to the podcast, so that’s what I’m doing today.

However, the thing is that this thought is not going to apply to all of you, but you may wish that it does. So I want you to commit to listening. This is going to be a short and sweet episode. Just hear me out, even if you’re like, “I don’t, I don’t think this quite applies to me,” just, just hear me out, okay?

It’s October. It’s October. You can look around and probably every photographer you know is drowning in mini sessions. They are editing all night long. They are super overwhelmed. They are in the thick of it. Inquiries are still pouring in. They don’t know where to put people. Sure, they’re making a lot of money, but, like, this is the thick of it, right?

This is busy season for family photographers. Meanwhile, you, the handful of listeners that I’m talking to, it’s Tuesday, and maybe you’ve got today off. Maybe you’re caught up on your editing. Maybe you don’t have sessions this weekend. And instead of feeling great about that space and that freedom, there’s this little voice in the back of your head that’s saying, “Something’s broken.”

An alarm is going off saying, “What is wrong with my business?” Like, it, it’s going down the tubes. Everything is failing. That’s it. My business is, is over, right? Nothing is wrong with your business, and I- I’m gonna prove that to you today. That’s what this episode is about. Your lighter calendar is not a flashing alarm.

It is not a warning light. It’s a receipt of the work that you’ve done. I am recording this so that it drops in October when you need to hear it the most, okay? This is the time when the panic hits. Again, these conversations have been happening in real time. This is when the panic hits. This episode, who I am speaking to, this is for the photographer who has raised her rates, who has set very firm business boundaries, who has cut the fluff, who has pulled back on all the different session types that she has to offer.

She’s done the work to create a business that is sustainable for the long run, and because of that work, you’re now staring at white space on your calendar in October and November. You built it, but you’re feeling scared It’s uncomfortable. These are my students. These– There’s only a few hundred of you listening.

The vast majority of you listening probably feel the absolute opposite to what I am going to say, but I want you to listen anyways, okay? My students have done this work, and I need to remind them, and I’m gonna get into this further, but I want to remind you, you’re not less busy because your business isn’t going well.

You are less busy by choice, and that is actually a huge measure of success. Again, this is a pattern that I’m hearing over and over again from women that I have coached and am currently coaching. One client is heading into fall. She’s got really firm new boundaries put into place, but she’s still spiraling.

She’s still spiraling because there’s this little nagging voice in h-her head, in the back of her mind that’s saying her business is dying when there’s actually evidence. She can look at her calendar, at her revenue, and see that every month has beaten the month before, that this year is up significantly over last year, even with all the free time built into her calendar.

Another client feels or is saying that this year feels lower than last year. This fe– This year feels lighter. But she was saying that before she looked at any revenue numbers. She was just saying it based on calendar availability and how much free time she had. I then gave her the homework to, “Wait, wait, wait a minute.

Before you say that this year feels lower than last year, let’s do our due diligence and look at your numbers.” And what actually happens is she’s not down over last year at all. It just feels like it because she’s got more time on her calendar. I’ve had some version of this conversation many times, more than just those two examples, okay?

And every single time, I have to remind these women of the same thing. We have been trained to view success wrong. I have so much free time that I’m actually killing it is actually the succ- the success marker that we should be following, not how many sessions we have on our calendar, not how late we have to stay up editing, not how long our editing queue is.

It’s not quantity that matters. That’s, that’s our success marker. But in the fall, when we are normally our busiest and everyone around us is at our busiest, it is really, really easy to feel like we are failing when we’re not as busy as everyone else. But the truth is that you are actually more successful because you have chosen this path So historically for photographers, year after year after year of being in business, a full calendar meant I’m making money.

A full calendar meant I’m super popular. A full calendar meant my business is doing great because look how many sessions I have. Look how many mini sessions I’m shooting. Look how many waitlist days I had to open, whatever, right? We trained ourselves to make this equation full equals safe, full equals success.

Open means failing. Free time means not successful. And so we think if I don’t have sessions on my calendar, my business must be failing. It’s like this trigger that is trained. And when we’ve been in business year after year after year, this is just a mental game. It’s habitual. Every year you go into busy season and you like know, okay, it’s time to put on my big girl pants.

It’s about to get crazy for the next few months. I’m gonna hate this, but I’m gonna buckle up and make money and be successful. And you do it. And that’s the way it feels. You have absolutely no free time. You have to miss out on all your kids’ sports. You inevitably get sick. There’s a weather reschedule and you have a mental breakdown because there’s no place to put them.

You are never caught up on editing galleries. You can’t do anything fun socially. It’s just an absolute disaster. And that’s what feels normal. And so once you have done this work and you have this free time, it’s, it’s our body’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is, what is this? What do you mean I have a weekend off?

What do you mean I’m caught up with my editing? What do you mean I only did one day of mini sessions instead of 11? Our body panics because it is different and different is bad. This is just a mental game. It’s that trained trigger. It’s a mental game that we have to overcome. So the first time, that first year of making those changes, it’s a, it’s a mental game for that whole year, right?

The seasonality of the ups and downs of being in business, but especially in the fall. We have to retrain ourselves, retrain the years or decades of being in business and what was normal and what was right and what was good. We have to retrain those things. What happened is, again, you’ve raised your prices, probably significantly.

You don’t have to shoot as many sessions to make the same amount of money. Incredible. You’ve cut down on the session types that you have, so you don’t have as many offers. Okay, great. I love that. You said no to a weekend event or doing a shoot as a favor, or the people who are like, “Can you squeeze us in at the last minute?”

There’s all kinds of things that have led to a lighter calendar for you. That, again, is the receipt for the decisions that you made on purpose. You didn’t lose sessions. You didn’t get fewer inquiries. You didn’t have fewer people saying yes because your prices were too high. You declined those things.

You were in the driver’s seat. You were proactive, not reactive. These were intentional moves that you made when you were level-headed thinking about your business, thinking about, “How can I make changes? I want something better for myself.” You made those changes on purpose, and now you’re reaping the rewards of those changes.

But it doesn’t feel like rewards. It feels scary because it’s different and new and it doesn’t feel safe. There are three things that I see most common when people are panicking or nervous about their business, okay? Three things that people do, and I, I want to just go ahead and say I’m gonna name them and I’m gonna tell you not to do them.

Number one, throwing up discounted minis to fill the gaps. You’ve got time on your calendar, it is natural to say, “Oh my gosh, I have a whole weekend in October open. I should obviously open up mini sessions and book a whole bunch of people there and make a whole bunch more money.” When you do that, you are literally undoing all of the work in one fell swoop because you’re gonna go from having a beautiful fall weekend with your family to sleep in and rest and go to soccer games and do whatever it is you wanna do.

You’re gonna undo that by having to work with a whole bunch of clients and all the stuff that goes with that, the invoicing, the communicating, the session prep, the answering questions back and forth. But then you’re also gonna have all the editing on the back end. You’re gonna go from having a delightfully light calendar to being overwhelmed in one fell swoop.

Do not do that 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. Route To Rise is my mastermind for photographers who are done waiting for things to click on their own. It’s a high touch group 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. Wait list 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. SabrinaGebhardt.comback/mastermind-waitlist. The link will be in the show notes. Back to the episode. Second thing I see people do when they panic about having too much free time is saying yes to work that they’ve already retired. So again, if you have narrowed down the types of things that you are offering, somebody reaches out and says, “Hey, can I squeeze a headshot in this month?”

You don’t do those anymore. But you’re nervous because you have, quote unquote, “too much time on your calendar,” so you decide, “Yes. Yes, I will do that headshot for you.” Now you are reopening the gate that you closed. You are reopening the door that you said, “I’m not doing that anymore.” Why, why are we going back and, and changing smart decisions that we already made?

Then the third thing I see is deciding that your business is, quote unquote, “failing” based on a feeling instead of a number. Okay? This is making an uneducated decision. This is saying, “Things feel too quiet. Things feel too calm. Things feel too easy, too light,” whatever. “Things must be failing, so therefore I need to offer a discount, create another offering, fill people into spots that were previously unavailable,” whatever.

They do the panic things, okay? Panicking isn’t the problem, and, and while I do want you to not panic and I’m hoping to talk you out of that, acting on the panic is the problem. Deciding that my feeling is true, there is a problem, therefore I need to act on this problem. That’s where the problem comes.

What I would rather happen is you to feel the panic and then take a minute to look at your numbers. Are… Is your business actually failing? To go back to the decisions that you wrote in your journal or on a workbook or with your coach or whatever on before and talk through them. Am I where I intentionally wanted to be, or have I ended up somewhere that is actually a problem?

Talk yourself off of the ledge before you just do some panic action that’s gonna undo all the work that you’ve done So similarly to that, before we do anything, I want you to actually look at the data. Before you decide on anything, look at what matters. Look at the facts, right? Look at your revenue, not your session count.

Fewer sessions was always the goal. You’ve been complaining for years that you have too many sessions on your plate. We finally got you there. So why are you assuming that things are wrong because you have fewer sessions when you’ve always wanted to have fewer sessions? Make it make sense. Look at your revenue, not your session count.

Also, don’t just go off of your memory of the past year. “I remember it being this way last year.” No, go dig up the data. Go dig up the data. Look at your calendar from last year. Look at your revenue from last year. I am– Definitely, feelings matter. If you’ve listened to this podcast for a minute or you have coached with me, you know that I go off of gut feelings, heart feelings.

Yes, that matters. But when we are making decisions, we are getting into the data. We’re not just going off of, “I think I remember it being this way.” No, no, no, g- we’re gonna dig up the data, okay? I also want you to just remember, and you know this, but I’m just reminding you in this situation, consider the timing of when people are booking things.

Every year is similar, but also a little bit different. Things change with weather, okay? If you’re listening to this in real time, we have had such a heat wave across the country, it doesn’t even feel like fall barely anywhere yet. That makes a big difference, ‘kay, in delayed bookings. School calendars fluctuate slightly year to year.

The news cycle definitely fluctuates. My goodness, when you’re in a, an election year, buckle up. There are things that make a little bit of a difference that you can’t always predict. Consider these things before we do anything out of panic, okay? Then, and this is– I’ve had to remind clients of this, stop checking Over, over and over and over again.

Y- you’re, you’re obsessing. You are spiraling. You are considering too much. Take a step back and breathe. I always say this, I hate to give the example of dieting, but it’s an example that everybody understands. If you are locking in on your exercise and your food, and you get on the scale every single day, that is the fastest way to give up and to feel like you’re failing because especially in a woman’s body, it’s gonna go up and down in a 30-day cycle.

It is going to. We gain water weight ahead of our period. We… Whatever. There’s too, there’s too many fluctuations that have nothing to do with what you’re doing. You cannot check things every day. You will drive yourself crazy. Pull back. Stop checking all the time. I would love for you to check once a month.

Once a month when you can see big picture on top of big picture, okay? We’re not gonna obsess I want to leave you with a, a few thoughts on how you can change this fear, this, this unease you have about how, how free your calendar feels right now, how light it feels, how this could be normal when it doesn’t feel safe in your body.

Okay? First of all, I want you to rewrite how you are tracking success this fall. It is not about how many days you work. It is not about how many mini sessions you have. It is not about how behind you are. We are not using any of those hustle culture measurements to measure success. Did you get to have your weekends free?

Did you get to go to that football game, the pumpkin patch? Were you at the dinner table with your family? Did you get to sleep in on a Saturday? Those are the things that matter to you. Those are the things that when we worked hard to create this freedom in your fall calendar that were discussed, you need to circle back to those.

What is important in your life? We cannot continue to look around at everybody else and see the frenzy that everyone else is in and think that we’re failing because we’re not in the frenzy. You are actually more successful because you are not in the frenzy. You’ve done the frenzy. Been there, done that, and now you’ve moved past it.

That is a huge measure of success. I also want you to flip it and look at this ease and this freedom from the place of gratitude. You get to have a weekend off in October when everybody else around you is frantically shooting sessions or finishing up editing. You get to have your Fridays off. You haven’t had to edit after bedtime once this whole fall.

Whatever it is that is tripping you up about the freedom you’re having right now, I want you to flip it and look at it from the perspective of gratitude. How incredible that I chose to have a Saturday off in October. How incredible that I don’t edit in the evenings anymore at all, even in busy season, because I’ve given myself that freedom.

Flip to a perspective of gratitude. And I want you to remember that your lighter calendar, this ease that you have, the simplicity you have, the freedom that you have, it is all by choice. You built this intentionally. It will eventually feel safe. Again, you gotta get through a whole year of this before your body’s gonna have a new normal, but trust me, it’s going to feel so good.

You won’t be in this place of fear forever. I know it, it feels like it right now, but you won’t. You just have to remember that these were choices you made intentionally. You are– This was proactive. This is not reactive. This is not a failing. This is a decision, and you are successful because of it. You are further along than the people around you that have that frantic ener-energy.

You are further along than the people that have 100 mini sessions and are editing all day, every day. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve chosen to be beyond that. You’ve chosen to create a business of sustainability where you get to have a life, even in the fall, and have a successful business, because you can have both If you listened to this episode and you were like, “I don’t even understand.

She’s not speaking to me,” that sounds like a great problem to have. How could anybody be listening thinking that freedom in October was a bad thing? This is what I work on in Root to Rise. This is what I work on with my coaching clients. It is helping women move their business from that hustle and overwhelm and burnout, and some of it’s because they don’t know things that they don’t know.

Some of it’s because they’re overbooking themselves. There’s a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of foundational stuff that we work on. But in Root to Rise, it’s let’s fix all those things so that you can get to this place where in the fall you are still making excellent money and your business is doing really well, but you have more freedom than you’ve ever had.

And it will feel uncomfortable the first time. It happens every single year. It will feel uncomfortable the first time. It will be so tempting to fall back into old habits, but you will get to the other side. And those are the women that I’m talking to today, the women who have gotten to the other side, but it feels uncomfortable to them.

And if you’re thinking, “I wish I could be there. I wish that I could get to that point where I’m having to work through the panic of having too much free time in the fall,” then I would love to encourage you to get on the wait list for Root to Rise. It will be opening in just a few weeks for the 2027 cohort, and this is the room where we get women together and we do this work, and it’s an incredible program.

2027 will be the ninth time that we’ve run this program. It is fine-tuned, and it is magical. You can get on the wait list. The link is in the show notes, or it is sabrinagebhart.com/mastermind-waitlist. Would love to have you get on the list. And if this episode resonated with you, I love to hear from listeners, so send me a DM over on Instagram at xo.sabrinagebhart.

And that’s it for this week, 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 sabrinagebhart.com/podcast. Come find me and connect over on the Gram at xo.sabrinagebhart. And if you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you’d hit that subscribe button and leave me a review.

Until next time, my friends.