Happy 4th of July! Did you have a great time?! The fog stayed out to sea and we enjoyed beautiful fireworks this year in San Francisco.
It’s not the first “Monday” of the month, but it sure feels like it after such a great, three day weekend! Ready for your next Business Coaching exercise! I’m Karen Buckley, official SOAR! Partner and Business Coach for the SOAR! Scholarship, and founder of The Wisdom Connection.
Today we’ll focus on two skills that can make a huge difference in your business success – income projections and self-love. (BTW – Me Ra – Thank you so much!… because you share your self-love we all feel that we can do more when we are around you!) It’s confidence building.
“Step out of fear and into love.” I’m not kidding – I woke up with this phrase in the middle of the night and wrote it down as tears filled my eyes. It’s haunted me since.
Does your heart yearn for more love? Mine does. (and I am the luckiest woman in the world with a loving family, friends and remarkable women and men I’m honored to coach!) It hurts how much I want to step out of my fears and into more love. 🙂
They say that love is letting go of fear. I want to find out: When do I stop myself in fear? How do my fears hold me back? It’s way too easy to see when I dismiss, diminish, or deplete myself from fear.
What happens when I love? It turns out – love influences everything from client satisfaction to business income. If I want more love, the best place to start is with more self-love. (I always start a change where I have the most influence and power – with myself.)
Does more self-love really equal more business success? Yes. When you step into a day of work with self-love, you project confidence in your worth and create environments where your worth is valued. You give higher quality service and financial success follows.
But, don’t emotions belong outside business? With women now the majority of the workforce and the lines between office and personal life blurring as never before, experts agree that emotional intelligence is key to success in today’s world. In fact suppressing emotions can actually have a negative impact on companies’ bottom lines.
It’s up to you to keep emotions like excitement, thankfulness, confidence, and self-assurance driving your decisions rather going down the rabbit holes of fear or self-doubt.
What stimulates lots of emotion? With almost every businesswoman I coach there is one question – What is your business income target?
When it comes to taking care of others we excel. But when it comes to what we want, we seem unable to reply quickly and confidently. How come? I started asking small business women and heard negative self-talk like:
- “I’m afraid of acting too big.”
- “I’m scared to make a fool of myself.”
- “I’m worried that I’m going to aim too high and fail.”
- “I’m so busy doing what’s expected of me I don’t know what I can do on my own!”
- “I’m afraid to stir the pot because once it starts to boil I have to finish what I’m making.” (Thanks Charisse for this one!)
Do you ever say these? If so, try the following business coaching exercise and increase your ability to set or update your income goal. This might sound silly, but inner strength often begins in body sensations. Before thinking numbers, it really works to turn on your good feelings inside.
- Remember back to something you did over the past week or two – appreciate yourself for something that showed your ability as a photographer.
- Take a couple of breaths and in the stillness at end of each exhale, fill your heart with the warmth of self-acknowledgment. Expand this feeling until it fills your body.
- Now, write down the amount of business income that is just right for you to bring in this year.
- Test that figure. Does it “ring true” or “feel good”? If not, try more or less until it does.
- Now engage your mind – write that figure down on the top of a sheet of paper. Be specific, what could you do this year to achieve that goal? How many portraits? How many weddings? Passive income? (It’s a guess based on experience so look at what you do know, then guess and learn.)
- Return to the stillness at the end of your exhale and the warmth of self-love (you may have lost it a bit while your mind kicked into gear).
- Post your income goal and the breakdown of your estimated earnings from each area of your business. It’s a way to declare to yourself that you are committed to create this much income. Even if you can’t yet imagine how you’ll do it – commitment is always the first step.
- Karen Buckley, SOAR! Business Coach
A smart businesswoman gives herself some love every day and success follows. Self-love feels good! It doesn’t feel so good when you dismiss or judge yourself or play small. Those self-critical voices hurt! Plus, they don’t put a smile on your face.
When you love your whole self for who you are, rather than hate yourself for what you are not, you’ll take care of yourself and keep your focus on what matters the most to you. Who knows, some major magic just might happen!
Want to continue the conversation of Business Coaching and Stepping Out of Fear? Keep reading below!
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Early Bird Discount Extension!
We’ve received so many emails from women who appreciate the Early Bird Discount that we’ve decided to extend it till this Saturday! If you are planning to join us this Fall for our CONFIDENCE Workshops, make sure you register this week to get the Early Bird Discount Price of $799 vs. $999. If you’d like, you can also break up the amount into payments. Click on one of the four Fall CONFIDENCE Cities for more details!
MORE BUSINESS COACHING TOOLS!
In the Feeding Your Spirit, Inspirational Secrets thread on the SOAR Forum Karen started a discussion about some bigger topics like self-worth, confidence building, love, and fear. She posted a poll. Which of these 10 fear-based comments is most like yours? Which of these love-based comments fill your head? Go check it out! Karen is such an AMAZING Business Coach, and we are SO BLESSED to have her dialoguing with women on the forum!!!!!
Ready to start some changes in your life and business? Karen’s newest report on leading through change is ready for you to download on the Wisdom Connection home page.
And, Karen’s launched her own blog. (It’s brand new!) Check it out!! (YEAH KAREN!)
Thanks so much for that advice. It was just what I needed, right now! I sometimes get stuck in a place where self-doubt comes creeping in and sometimes I forget to slam the door in it’s face!! Thank you and Me Ra and check out my new venture: http://www.LaPetiteBoudoir.com
Cheryl, Yay! I’m glad this was just what you needed. Clearly you’ve already stepped out of fear and into love a whole bunch of times and I’m sure you’ll just keep doing it!
I can hear the door slamming already!
Karen
I recently discovered Me Ra Koh’s work in a Photography magazine. What caught my eye was a beautiful picture of a mother and her baby. And I thought, that is exactly what I want to do. She’s doing what I want to do, having no idea of how true that would be! From one image, I felt that and there it is, the power of an image to transform, transcend and connect! But I am writing to thank you and share a little bit of my story and how this post has helped me!
I have always been incredibly drawn to photography and on more than one occassion dated photographers, thinking in some invisible way,by some kind of invisible universal osmosis I would learn from them, or they would want to share this beautiful thing, photography with me. I share this, in spite of how silly it makes me sound, because one it’s true but more importantly it speaks to how for years, I gave my power away to others. I was hoping that someone would give me what I wanted to give myself. In the end, the osmosis never happened, nor were they inclined to teach. Eventually I decided that if no one would teach me, I would do it myself-and by doing that, I gave myself what I wanted and I gave myself my power back.
I think a part of holding back, or waiting for someone else to ‘show’ me was because I didn’t want to be ‘bad’ at this thing that I saw as incredibly powerful and beautiful-photography. So I started buying books, bought a camera and started taking pictures I was interested in.
While taking classes to meet core requirements for a graduate program in Art Therapy, I decided to take some photography classes. Even though these photography classes didn’t count toward my art therapy requirements, I took them for me. Usually these classes would put me at 21 credits or whatever, crazy school load, in addition to working forty hours a week, but I just had to take them. It fed my soul.
I recently returned from a trip from India and Nepal. I decided to take this trip before I started my doctorate in Psychology, with a focus on Art Therapy. Unfortunately or fortunately, I have to work while in graduate school. So I came back thinking, what will I do for work in graduate school. I’ve been a waitress for years and I know I can do that. But whenever I asked myself the question, ‘What can I do?’, the only thing that came was photography. In fact, since returning from my epic journey into the East, all I can do is think about photography. How much I love it and how can I do it all the time?
What do I love about it? I could go on and on but the heart and soul is … for me it is an opportunity to give something beautiful. To give something simple. A photography is a gift of presence. Photography is unlike any other medium because it captures the present moment like nothing else can. It is that present-ness, that here-ness, that now-ness that is here and gone and will never be here again, that I love so much about photography. This simple beauty for me is TRUTH.
SO …. I have decided to “invest in my whims” (as one good friend of mine says) and try and get a photography business started. TO DO WHAT I LOVE. So I have spent the last three weeks, trying to get something started, like creating a website, writing a business plan, buying business cards, teaching myself Indesign and Photoshop (ay carraumba, that has been a headache), designing flyers, etc.
But in the middle of it, what has come up is this fear. This great fear of … ‘who do i think I am to do this?’, ‘what if i fail?’, ‘what if i can’t do take the pictures?’, ‘i am a child and i know nothing about the world of business. how stupid i am in my boldness.’ Even to write this hurts me. It’s like how can and why do I talk to myself like this?
So … all this fear has been coming up for me around this. And I try to let it go and just say, I am doing what I love. If it fails, okay, who cares. If I succeed, okay, who cares. But if I have tried with love to do what fills my heart and soul with, then there can be no regrets. So THANK YOU FOR THIS POST! It is so kind and wise. It reminds me, how to treat myself. It helps me to remember to be kind to myself and love. because love is a force that flows will pour forth, outward and onward to all things, including the images I take.
I also wanted to mention, that I hope, my sincere hope, for my pursuit in Art Therapy is to help people use photography as a therapeutic modality, that is, to heal. To use photography as a way to tell their story, to convey their truth through the honesty and directness of photography. To use photography as a way of speaking of love and loss and all the things in between. So this website, Me Ra Koh’s love and passion, your words of wisdom has been a great inspiration to me! I don’t know how to contact Me Ra personally but I would love to be able to thank her in some form, for the gift of her love for others and creating more beauty in the world!
Many, many thanks!
Amaris Espinosa
“Where there is Love, there is Life.”
And Cheryl, I love your work! It’s really beautiful! I just moved to Seattle for graduate school! It’s very exciting and it wonderful to see that Washington is full of live, art and beautiful photography!