My goal with every episode of this show is to make it about YOU, the listener. I want you to always walk away from each episode feeling inspired or with very clear action steps to get a specific result.

So, starting every point or sentence with Me, myself and I feels a little indulgent. But, my hope is that you see yourself in some of these points and you hear at least 2-3 things that you want to take with you into your own business!

 

10 Things I’m Leaving Behind in 2021

1. Caring what people think about me

Whenever I sit and focus too much on what people thinks about me, I’m doing it from a place of insecurity because I’m worried that people won’t like me for me. Can you relate to that?

There are things that I did and said in 2021 from the worried-version of me, but I want to be really, truly, and authentically myself in 2022. I believe that when you are who you are, you attract your people. We talk a lot in my courses about attract and repel. If you are vanilla, people aren’t attracted or repelled, you’re just neutral to them. But when you repel people, you will attract your tribe.

Are you caring too much about what people think about you when you post on social media, when you write an e-mail newsletter, when you go live of Facebook, or when you have an interaction with your client? There is a difference on being a kind and good person and caring too much about what people think about you.

My goal is to never alienate someone because we have different beliefs and to never make people feel bad about what they believe in.

But just because we might believe different things, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t show up with who I am and what I believe in and the same is true for you.

One thing that I sometimes pause and hesitate doing is sharing about my faith on this podcast or on social media, because I know that there’s maybe a lot of you who don’t have that in common with me. But the truth is it’s such a huge part of my life and who I am, it is who I am, and so it’s sometimes more awkward for me to not share what God is doing in my life than to share. It feels uncomfortable for me to not say to you, “I was praying and this is what happened to me today…” or “I’ve read this Bible verse and it made me think of…” – it’s such a natural part of me with my family and my friends that if I’m not that way to you it’s so awkward!

So that’s one small example of something that I just want to let go of.

2. Getting distracted with shiny objects in business

It’s so easy to hear about a new, great, exciting thing and feel FOMO if you don’t do it. I know some of you might feel that way about TikTok, for example! I talk to you guys often about building one bridge before you start building another.

Think about it – if you are building a bridge and you stopped halfway to go start building something else, and you’re stuck there with a half-built bridge, that doesn’t do you any good! And then you have these 2nd, 3rd, 4th half-built bridges that could be birth photography, family photography, branding photography, or a coaching or a consulting side of your business, or you want to do something that has to do with passive income.

You start building all these half-built bridges and wonder why you’re not seeing the results that you want to see in your business.

Something that I saw in myself is that I’m a multi-passionate person. And so it’s important to have discernment. They say that the average millionaire has seven revenue streams. On one hand, I want to have multiple streams of revenue, but on the other hand I want to completely build one stream to the other side of the bridge before I start the second one.

That’s where discernment comes in, “have I fully built the first bridge before I jump in to the next shiny object in my business?” Because we have two businesses, and there are so many things going on in both of those businesses, it’s easy to get FOMO and feel like I need to jump on to the next shiny object and that is something I want to leave behind in 2021 and I’m sure you do too!

Ask yourself this: in my business, what produces the most revenue and what do I enjoy doing the most? That’s the bridge that you want to finish building before you start with another bridge.

 

3. Doing things in my career that I don’t love

I shared with you guys before, I haven’t edited my own photos in a long, long time. In a recent episode, I shared that I’m not taking in new birth clients. We’re scaling back at the studio pretty significantly because over the last 18 months, I realized that where my heart and passion is serving you guys and helping you grow businesses so you could retire your husbands and quit your full-time jobs. That is where my passion is now. Being a photographer for 10 years, I loved it and  will always love photography.

Some of the things that I am scaling back on, dropping, or outsourcing:

• Culling & Editing
• Not photographing births
• Scaling back big time in the studio
• Customer service emails/correspondence

…to make room for the things I DO love like creating content for you!

Wednesday is my content creation day and I JUMP out of bed excited to sit down and CREATE. This is called your zone of genius. Now, I’m not calling myself a content creation genius ok – far from it – but it is something that helps people and it’s something I love to do.

And YOU also have a zone of genius. Something you could do for hours and hours, exhausted but still have a big smile on your face, right?

My encouragement for you going into this new year is to find more things like THAT to do and let go of the to-dos or tasks that drain your energy.

When your energy is drained, you won’t have room left for that zone of genius that’s going to elevate and help your business stand out.

4. Focusing on things that get me followers, but not money

Being in business, we all understand that we all need to make money to stay in business and make the impact that we want to make. When we’re focused on followers and not revenue, that can be a quick recipe for disaster.

Here’s some examples in our business:

• In 2021, we were focused in tracking Engagement on Instagram. I realized that Engagement doesn’t make me money. It gets people to follow me and engage with my content, but it does not directly affect my bottomline when somebody likes my Instagram post. And so instead of focusing on Engagement, we are going to focus on Awareness.
  
  Awareness is how many times is my post being shared? How many times is my post going out to somebody new to create brand awareness? So instead of monitoring Engagement, we are looking to monitoring Shares, specifically.
• TikTok again is another good example of this. It was a big focus for us in Q3, mainly as an experiment to see what could happen if I posted consistently. And we grew to about 22k followers in about 60-90 days. It was really quick and exciting! But when I really dug down what was the lead source that brought us revenue in The Beauty in Birth (and you could think about the same thing for your business), it wasn’t TikTok.
  
  We had a lot of followers and engagement on TikTok, but when it came down to people actually purchasing, those purchases did not come from TikTok. Does that mean these followers won’t purchase ever in the future? No. But the point is I was focused on followers more than bottomline revenue. So, that’s a mistake I made in 2021 that I’m going to shift moving forward to 2022.

Where in your business are you potentially focused on followers and not necessarily revenue? Followers can definitely turn to revenue. But which are you tracking, which are you looking at, and why are you doing the things you are doing?

5. Control

I do think I’m good at being intentional with a lot of things in my life. However over the last 12 months, I’ve realized that – if I let it – being intentional can be a fancy and nice way of procrastination or perfectionism.

I’m saying, “I want to be intentional with my time,” I’m trying to control every single minute of my life.

I’m saying, “I want to be intentional with my kids and I want to have date nights with them,” am I potentially also saying that I kinda want to control their life?

And so I just want to be aware of how me trying to control situations can be sneaky. So looking back at how “intentional” I was in 2021… I now see that could have potentially been a new form of trying to take back control (just giving it a new name and fancy packaging right?).

I hope that resonates with you and you can maybe see some examples of that in your life.

I don’t think being intentional is bad, I think of it as a gift and I’m very thankful for that gift. But I don’t ever want me being intentional to start turning into me trying to gain control over my life.

As you guys know, God has control over my life. I’m not the one driving the ship! 🙂

6. Relying on 1 form of traffic

 We had organic marketing channels, but I HEAVILY relied on Facebook ads in 2021, and it definitely worked!

But all I’m saying is that I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket. Because then if something happens, to where they don’t allow me to advertise anymore or the price becomes so expensive that it doesn’t make sense anymore!

7. Stop reading books just to read them or feel like I have to finish them because I started

Every single year for the last 5 years, I’ve set some sort of an intellectual book goal, because I love non-fiction books and I learn SO MUCH from them for my personal life and business! But I noticed in 2021 that it started to become a chore, where I have to finish one book before I move on to the next one, soon I just don’t want to finish it. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, I had already gotten a lot out of it and I didn’t need to read anymore – there’s so many reasons why I don’t want to finish a book.

This year I want to allow myself to purchase a book, read the chapters that I need or want to read to get information and move on, and if I start a book and I don’t like it, I can quit it. So this is the first year in probably 5 years that I didn’t set a certain number of books to read!

8. Using work as my hobby

I no longer want to have free time that I decide to start checking things off my work to-do list. I think as entrepreneurs this is a big problem, especially when you’re a mom with kids at home, and you’re just kind of squeezing in work whenever you can get it done. Work starts to turn into your hobby.

I realized that about myself over the last years, whenever I have free time I sit down to work! I think if I have a really good hobby, then I would be motivated to finish what I needed to do for work for the day, and partake in my hobby and spend time with my family.

If you have a hobby that you love, I wanna hear about it! DM me on Instagram and let me know because one of my goals in 2022 is to find a hobby!

9. Old personal finance habits

So this is a work in progress, as always, but here is what I mean…

In my 20’s, I did the Dave Ramsey thing and I realized in my late 20’s, extremes do not work well for me at any area of my life and Dave Ramsey is very, very extreme, especially for me at the time who is not in a dire financial situation. Yes, we have some debt that we want to pay off, but we’re not in a situation that we had to get out of debt and be gazelle intense and all the stuff that he talks about.

So, we put off investing for a long time and we didn’t invest as much money now I wish that we had in our 20’s. So, I want to let go of my old personal finance habits and really hone in and focus on the activities that I know are going to serve me and my family in the long term.

10. Letting my husband handle all the schooling for the kids

Not that he’s doing a bad job at all, but because I want to be more involved. I like learning with my kids, I like spending that time with them. And so this is a big priority for me in 2022, even if it’s just an hour a day! 

 

Whew! That was A LOT. I’d love to know…did you relate to any of these? Are some of these things you also want to let go of in 2022? Shoot me a DM on Instagram or share this on your stories, because I’d love to hear what you’re going to let go of this year!