Share Your Expertise...
I never truly understood the joy and fulfillment that educating others would bring…
...until I started doing it myself, :)
Over the past couple months, I’ve been developing the educational component of my business that’s geared towards coaching photographers on how to create an authentic, powerful and referable, online presence.
Ironically, I am developing my brand in the exact same way that my speaker, coach and author clients do it - and, I have to say, it’s been a humbling, exciting and amazing process overall.
But, I didn’t always view this transformation through such rose-colored glasses.
At first, I was super hesitant to go down this rabbit hole - and by hesitant, I mean completely and totally against it - and I created a laundry list of self-defeating thoughts as to why I couldn’t:
Who the hell cares what I have to say?
Who am I to think that I could educate other photographers when I’m still learning?
Photographers don’t know who I am, they’ll never buy into it…etc.
Basically, I had to get past a weighty bout of imposter syndrome where I felt I didn’t deserve to feel like or present myself as an expert.
And then, you start to talk to people who inspire you to change your perspective and opinion about yourself. They acknowledge that your immense amount of experience and insight is not only valuable, but, it motivates them to get off their asses and get to work on their own businesses.
Really? Me? My expertise helps people? It really does move the needle for others to get in action?
Wow, this is pretty fuckin’ cool - I need to do more of this, :)
A little validation goes a long way, folks.
Speaking of validation, I had a wonderful dose of it the other day when I was on the phone with a photographer who is looking to niche her business and take her online visibility to the next level.
She has been following me for about a year, and, although I knew of her solely based on her engagement of my posts, I didn’t know much about her at all.
She reached out to chat with me, and from the moment we started talking, she was quoting various ideas and concepts that I’ve been sharing through my social and blog posts, and talked about how those ideas have been inspiring her for quite some time.
She did her homework, and it was awesome to hear that this work resonated with her, :)
Her interest in my particular strategy built around branded lifestyle portraits was probably why our originally scheduled, 20-minute consultation call became a 2-hour Sermon On The Mount where we talked at length about a variety of topics related to this particular niche.
While I thought we were just chit chatting about idea generation, building a photography brand that is memorable and referral, how to eliminate competition and be recognized as the authority in your given photo space, she saw this conversation in a much different light.
The image above of her notepad littered with ideas was taken at the conclusion of our call.
Turns out our little chit chat manifested itself as 8 pages of magical notes!
How awesome is that?
At the conclusion of the call, she commented on how overwhelmed, yet energized she was about this process, and that she’s going to take some time to marinate over all of these ideas and figure out her next steps.
After the call, I was buzzing with excitement myself, because our conversation was able to inspire someone into action based on providing them with some simple guidelines that have worked for me.
The high that I got after this conversation rivals the one I feel every time I’m behind a camera - and I never thought I would be able to experience anything as gratifying as that on a professional level.
Ever.
Experiences like this that truly key me into what motivates my speaker, coach and author clients to do what they do - it’s a humbling, magical, and transformative experience, and it makes life much more awesome to live when you can experience them.
Rather than finding excuses to doubt myself and not pursue this educational path based on a bunch of head garbage that truly doesn’t serve me, I am now more empowered and emboldened to be the expert that enlightens photographers to present themselves as the artist badasses they are more than ever.
And I can’t wait to see the results, :)
PS - For those of you who aren’t in the know, I mail out these blogs 3x a week, and lemme tell you, they’re a real party, so, if you’d like to get in on this, sign up for it here and I’ll throw in a free gift for you, because I care, :)