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Inside this heart-to-heart episode, we’re diving into some real-life coaching examples of current clients to help you reframe your fears into something more expansive. Along our entrepreneurial journey, we’re constantly being met with choices and decisions — none of which are guaranteed to bring us success or fulfilment. In today’s episode we’re talking through how we can take these challenges and turn them into opportunities for real change & self-growth. 

This episode will be ESPECIALLY helpful for you if you’ve been wanting to earn more money and/or raise your prices for your offerings and services. I’m diving into some real time coaching to help you dig deep and find an aligned pricing strategy and business strategy that leaves you feeling both confident AND excited. 

Inside today’s episode, we’re also talking through a REALLY important topic — how we can create more safety inside of our business, and allow ourselves to explore, create, and provide an environment conducive to long term success. If you’re ready to leverage your unique strengths and transform challenges into stepping stones for growth, this episode is for you! 

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I’m so excited to announce my newest 30 day challenge, the Confident Creative! In this challenge I will be helping you implement the strategies that will not only help you feel more confident as a creative business owner, but I’m also giving you access to the exact tools that I use to bring in more joy and money to my growing business every day. And as soon as you join, you’ll get immediate access to:

• The challenge information
• The guided PDF workbook 
• The daily journal prompts
• A beautiful daily checklist to help you track your results

There’s honestly no better time to join me than right now. So if you’re ready to gain massive clarity, unleash your inner confidence to create that life and business that you’re proud of, I’d love to have you join me!

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• Learn about ways we can work together

READ THE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hey there and welcome to the she Calls Her Shots podcast. Every week, we chat through different business building topics that will help you gain clarity around your goals, find inspiration in your journey and also help you create a life and a business that you love. My name is Krista and I’m a wedding and brand photographer and you’re a go-to, no fluff business coach. In these episodes, we talk through both the tactical strategies, habits and the mindset work that will help you take those really big leaps, and we always focus on the real talk and the behind the scenes of what it takes to create a sustainable and a thriving business, because, let’s be honest, the work isn’t always glamorous, but it’s always worth it. So, girlfriend, let’s make some moves and start calling our own shots. Hello, hello, my friend, and welcome back to the podcast.

As I’m recording this, we are midway through December 2023 and I don’t know about you, but it does feel like it has been a whirlwind of a fall season, and not just because of business or things going on in the business world, but really just in life. There’s been so much expansion and deep work happening, both in my world and inside of my client’s lives, just doing a lot of reflection and vision work into 2024, and it’s just been a whirlwind, and I’m excited about the topic that we’re going to chat through today, because we’re really going to be talking about how we can reframe our fear into something that feels more expansive, and, as I mentioned, so this has been a big, deep season for me and doing a lot of inner work, and if you’ve been a listener to the podcast for a while, you know that we talk about business strategies here and we talk about what it means to be human, because I truly believe that so much of our humanness is required to be able to run a successful business Like our. Business wouldn’t survive if we weren’t taking care of ourselves as humans, and so that’s why so many of the episodes we want to focus on the strategy right, of course, but the strategy and the marketing tactics and the things that you’re doing are just one part of the puzzle. The bigger part of the puzzle here is who are you as a person and how are you as a person, and what does that look like in how you operate on a day to day basis? How does that change the way that you spend your time?

And this time of year has been such a joy for me in particular, because, working with my clients, both inside of my group coaching program and my one to one clients, I’m really getting to witness and see the big shifts and the deep work that they’re doing and, on the other end of that, how this is radically transforming the way that they show up in their lives. And this is why I will be forever so passionate about marrying these two things together of the business part of business and the human part of business. And so the first thing I want to really dig into when we think about reframing our fear is, first of all, understanding what are our fears, and this process is something that I think we’re going to revisit over and over and over again throughout our business journey, because fear often shows up in our clients lives, in my lives, in a lot of different ways, and sometimes we’re not even aware of the fear that’s actually present. Sometimes the fear can look like something different, kind of masquerading as something else. So whenever we do a little bit of work to dig into it, we can actually kind of find the deeper root cause of what actually is the fear and how is it showing up in our lives. So part of the work that I’ve been doing with my one on one clients is digging in and figuring out.

As we are looking into the new year, as we’re setting new goals for them inside of their business, it’s getting to that root cause of what exactly is holding you back, like what are the bigger things that feel like they need to get broken down and unveiled and kind of remove the mask from them so that way we can actually move past them and work past them and move forward. And a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is asking these questions around how can we get to this root cause? So, for example, some of the work that I’ve been doing with them, specifically with a few of my clients, is around our money, our mindset, our finances, how we price our offers, how we think about money, how we think about ourselves as being worthy of making a certain amount of money, which that’s a whole other topic that we could have a whole podcast episode about. But we’re really starting to unravel and get behind to these beliefs that we have about money and getting to the root cause of why we feel like we can’t raise our prices. So that’s one thing that I’ve been working through.

Another thing with another client that we’ve been working through. That’s related to this is figuring out how there was a disconnect between what this client wanted to be charging and what they were actually charging. And what we often don’t realize as service providers is that it’s really tricky to price our services because the figuring out the actual cost of our time is hard for a lot of us, and especially for women. We tend to undercharge, we tend to not charge the amount that we should be charging and kind of undervaluing our time. That’s just, I feel, like a systemic common thing that I found especially in the service industry wedding photographers, planners, any pros that I’ve worked with, or just any coaches, service providers, course creators, etc. We’re kind of all the time not charging what we probably should be charging and when we’re not charging the amount that makes us happy, that really makes us feel fulfilled. There tends to be a big disconnect.

That happens here because we often end up self-sabotaging our money and the amount that we can make, because, for example I’m just going to give you an example of this to kind of explain. So, for example, as a photographer, let’s say a photographer is charging an amount that they’re not super happy with, but it just feels like you know what they should be charging. They don’t really love their price. They kind of want to raise it, but they’re just so comfortable in this pricing zone that this is what they’re charging. But they’re struggling with the self-worth behind. Can I actually justify charging more? And part of this problem is this justification process.

We think that there needs to be some big thing that happens in our life that justifies us to be able to raise our prices, when really there’s a million reasons why we could want to raise our prices. One we could just want to charge closer to what we want to be charging. Right, like we could just raise our prices because we want to raise our prices and we’re allowed to do that. There’s also just if you want to take on less work and so you’re raising your prices. There’s also just general inflation costs, right. Costs of living your living situation might change. Maybe the person who was helping to support your family monetarily isn’t doing that anymore and so you just logistically need to be charging more, right? There’s a million reasons why you might want to raise your prices, but one thing that holds people up that I found is realizing that you’re allowed to raise your prices just because you want to raise your prices. There doesn’t need to be some big life event, necessarily. You could have historically undercharged and now you’re just wanting to get a little bit closer to where you want to be, and so that’s.

Overcoming that gap or that fear, is something that I’ve been working with a lot of clients to do. The other thing that I often see happening here is let’s you know, using this same example of a photographer that is raising prices themselves, pricing themselves at a certain price, but isn’t necessarily happy with that specific price point that they’re at. Something that we might not be as aware of is sometimes, when we are unhappy at our current price point for whatever reason, maybe we just want to be charging more, but we’re too afraid to raise our prices. That tends to be what I see often with my clients. We actually start sabotaging the money that we can make because now, all of a sudden, there’s a disconnect. You can think about it as I want to be charging a certain amount. I’m not making an amount that I want to be making when I perform these services, right, when I offer these sessions, when I shoot these weddings, and so subconsciously our brain almost is going to purposely not promote those things. Right?

We’re feeling resistance to talking about our services. We’re resisting talking about these things, and even if we are talking about it, the energy that we’re talking about it with people can sense that there’s something off. I feel like you can get a feel of exactly what I mean, right? If I were to come on here and talk to you about buying something of mine and I’m like, hey, I have this thing. Here’s what it’ll do for you. I think it’ll be really great for you. Here’s why you should buy. You can sense the energy behind it. There’s some hesitation here and sometimes we don’t recognize our own. We can’t see the forest for the trees, right? Is that how that saying goes? I’m so bad at those word things. We have a hard time noticing that there might be a disconnect in what we’re promoting and how we’re promoting it. But other people can sense it.

Versus, if I had something that I was selling and I was like, oh my gosh, here’s this thing. It’s brand new. This is all the amazing things it can do for you. This is why you need it. This is why it’s going to change your life. This is the benefits you’re going to get from it. Right, if I was coming from that energy. Of course you are going to be so much more likely to buy when I have that kind of energy. And I’m not talking about like introverted versus extroverted, like energetic versus like non-energetic, like that’s not what I’m talking about. This isn’t a personality type thing. This is just the gusto that you have in talking about your offer because it stems from your excitement about your offer.

And going back to the original point here is, if you don’t feel excited about your price point, if you even feel a little bit like I should raise my prices or I’m not making enough, for every time I book a wedding, there’s like there’s an excitement that I booked it, but then like there’s dread because I have to do all of this work and I’m not making enough money that I want to be making. Right Like when our kind of brains go through this cycle after making a sale, you’re going to eventually get to a point where your brain is kind of like I don’t, like I know I’m promoting this thing but I don’t really want people to buy into it, and so I. One of the things I’ve been helping my clients with is let’s number one, become aware of that disconnect, right Like I think that can be the hardest part for people sometimes is just being aware that there might be a resistance or a disconnect happening, and then let’s fix the problem. Like, what is it? Is it that you need to be raising your prices? Is it that you’re over delivering or you’re giving away too much for your current price point? Is it that you’re just offered no longer feels exciting and we need to just like add or remove or tweak some of the things that are inside of it? Is there another offer that you’ve been wanting to do or provide to people that you just have been too afraid, right, like really getting with them in the weeds to figure out, like, what is the thing here and how can we fix it? And what I want to encourage you to think about in this idea of reframing our fears into something that feels more expansive is is there something that’s happening behind the scenes in my offers when it comes to pricing in some capacity? Right, it could be any of those examples that I just mentioned. Is there something happening here where my fear is taking over and actually sabotaging some of my ways that I am marketing myself? And again, I think the awareness piece can be really difficult here. So it might be helpful to grab a friend, grab a fellow business owner like you know, talk about your offers, like explain to them what makes you excited about it, what your hesitations are, and then you’ll really confident about what you feel less confident about, like have a really candid conversation with them to figure out is there resistance here, is there something that I’m letting fear kind of grab a hold of without even recognizing it, and what can I do to reframe that, tweak it, change it? You know whatever you need to do to make it more expansive so that you can then talk about your offers from a place of joy and excitement and people can feel the energy behind that. Because, honestly, this is part of the deeper work that I spend a lot of time with with my clients.

As a coach, my biggest kind of opportunity to help my clients grow is, of course, accountability. I think for all of my clients who have come to me. I was actually just looking at the data recently and I thought it was really interesting because a lot of my clients mentioned wanting accountability. Because I think for a lot of us we have really big goals, like we have really big ideas for our business. We’re not really.

Goal setting is not the problem. Like, sometimes goal setting can actually feel a little overwhelming because we have so many things that we want to do that all of a sudden we feel overwhelmed, we don’t know where to start. Like we don’t know how to prioritize it. We feel like we start things and then we stop and then we’re like over here chasing this thing and then creating this new idea. The goal setting for my clients isn’t necessarily always the problem. The harder part is the accountability.

But what I love getting to do with my clients is like yes, let’s work on the accountability piece and let’s also get into the nitty gritty details of what is stopping you from being able to be accountable. What is in the way of completing this goal? What is it that’s actually blocking you? Because a lot of the times, like I said, there’s this awareness piece that we just can’t see as people. Like, as we are chasing our goals, we’re very tunnel visioned into the thing that we’re growing, the thing that we want to see happen, and, as a coach, being able to provide this other perspective, helping you dive into the things that you might not even be able to see, and then using that data and that information to make your offer stronger, to make it feel more aligned and this is why I could go on and on about alignment and sustainability and I know those are buzzwords that you probably see everywhere and you probably like crystal. What does that even mean? And I get it. I get it because I see these words everywhere too.

But this is the deep work that I’m doing with my clients, because the real, real truth is that I could give you marketing strategies. I’ve been a business for 12 plus years, growing multiple different types of businesses a photography business, a coaching business, a podcast, a membership. Like your girl has been in business for a hot minute. Like I can give you strategies. I have invested I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into educational programs, like I’ve been here right. Like we’ve done the thing, we got the t-shirt, we got the metal right, all the things and I know firsthand like strategies are important, but they are only as important as you are confident and clear about your offers, your path, what works for you, what feels good, what doesn’t feel good, like if we don’t know those things the offers and strategies they they’re not going to work.

The tactics and the methods of doing something, like they are one piece of the puzzle, but so often we feel like we’re missing something. Right, like, raise your hand with me. I’m raising my hand right now. Right, how many times have we said to ourselves on any given basis, like, if I just knew it would make my business better, or if I was just better at Z, it would just like make it would help me get our clients? Like, so often we think there’s something wrong with us, we think we’re missing something, we think that there’s like something that’s just not here, that needs to be here in order To make our lives easier.

But the real work, the real things that make the shifts and cause the transformations that lead you to where you want to go, is understanding that there’s actually nothing missing and there’s actually so much inside of you that is just has been left unexplored that we haven’t like dove into to figure out. Like how to bring your strengths, your gifts, like the things that you might see as flaws, and actually use them to your advantage in your business. Like, what a mind blowing reframe right and this is what I love doing with my clients. Like this is the work, this is the passion, this is the heart behind it. So, like I was saying, right, a lot of my clients come to me saying they want accountability, but really what they’re getting is accountability, but they’re also getting clarity. We’re learning how to like prioritize the things that need to be prioritized and letting go of the things that we can let go of. We’re learning how to to reframe the things that feel like they’re blocking us. We learn how to dig into the things that are blocking us our fears are limiting beliefs and actually question is this true or is there a more Expansive place that we can create from? I can just talk about this all day. This is my passion and this is what I love getting to do, and so my encouragement for you.

Today. I want to leave you with this one quote that I said inside of my group coaching program a couple of weeks ago, and it made a really big impact on them and I just felt like it was important to share here in this conversation, and that is it is really difficult to do hard things, challenging things, when we don’t feel safe. It is hard to do challenging things when we, as people, don’t feel safe. If I could like summarize, I think in this moment anyway, the thing that feels the most true to me. This is what feels true to me as a business owner. It is really really hard for us to make decisions on how to grow our business, what to focus on, how to move forward when we don’t feel safe.

Sometimes it feels like there is no safety in. When are the clients going to come in? How do I know if this is going to work? It feels challenging to be vulnerable on Instagram. It’s hard to show up as my most authentic self when I don’t have a guarantee that people will like me or that I will be accepted or that my opinion will be accepted by other people Like we.

I mean I could just sit with this, with you, and we can have a whole conversation. I’ve got my wine right here as I’m recording this tonight like this can be a whole conversation and coming from this angle of having our fear right, having this fear living here and being able to reframe it into something more expansive, I want to leave you with this question is how can you allow yourself to feel more safe right now? And this doesn’t have to be like a physical safety thing. It’s like, of course, I hope that you are in a physical, safe place, right, like actual physical, in your body. I hope that you are in a safe place, but what I mean here more is the emotional safety, right, like the emotional, the mental, this kind of safety space. How can you create more safety?

And for some of you that might mean finding a community where you feel like you are seen, you aren’t understood. There are other people who are going through the same kinds of things that you’re going through, right, and they’re not going to be the exact same things, because we are all on our own unique journeys. But if that’s the case, I would love to invite you into Amplify. Let me tell you, the women that are inside of Amplify are rock star, goal setting women who are also not afraid to do the work, to see the transformation and the change. These are my women that are like buckle up, let’s go. I’m ready to do big things and I’m ready to start implementing the things in my life that will help me grow, transform and see change, and in a group, community space, right. So if that is you, I would love to invite you into Amplify. We can have a conversation about it to see if it’s the right fit for you.

Maybe safety for you right now is just starting to love and accept more of who you are. A lot of times it’s hard for us to show up in spaces wondering if people are going to like us when deep down, we’re not even sure if we like all of the parts of ourselves yet. And I could cry at that because I have been there. Ooh, I got to be careful, I got to like rain it in. I know that feeling to not love every single thing about yourself, and I know how much that can get in the way of being able to show up as your most authentic self and that can feel really unsafe. And so today, maybe creating more safety for you means just starting to love one thing about yourself that you previously gave yourself a hard time about. How can you change that one thing into something that is a gift for you Right Like?

I was actually just having, on this topic, a conversation with a client today, and one of the things that she was talking through was just about feeling like she’s very critical of herself and wants to. She cares a lot about what other people think of her is kind of the gist of our conversation, and one of the things that we were able to get to was one of the ways in which that shows up. She saw it as a negative thing, right, like trying to control being on time, like trying to control a lot of things that she couldn’t control I’m being a little hand wavy here because I don’t want to give away a lot of information right, like I really trust and love my clients and so trying to be as vague as possible by getting the point across, so, basically wanting to control the things that she couldn’t control, we were able to reframe that into what I hear is you have a lot of values that are really important to you, right? And one of these values is like carrying a lot about making sure that other people feel loved and cared for. Right, like we were able to take something that she felt was a negative and actually see it as a value and a gift. So I want to encourage you with that today.

What’s something that you have maybe not loved or feels like it’s a negative part of you, and how can you find the value behind that? Like, what is the deep seated value that you actually hold? Where you showing up in that way is just you trying to uphold that value and maybe finding safety right is allowing yourself to finally recognize and claim and own what it is that you want, because another thing that can feel really challenging and can make us feel unsafe is when, deep down, we really, really want the big things for ourselves. We want the success, we want the business that we’re proud of. We want the business that other people look at and say, wow, like you built that. But then, on the surface, we’re afraid of the attention, we’re afraid of what people are going to think as we’re building it. We’re afraid of how their opinion of us might change as they see us claiming what it is that we’re doing and stepping into this next level. And so my encouragement for you, if that’s the case, is how can you more boldly claim what it is that you want? How can you, today, love and accept and be so excited about who it is that you’re becoming and let yourself fully be on board with that transformation and that change that’s happening?

And as we are diving into 2024, I just I want to make this invitation Heading into the new year. I have four one-on-one spots available, four, four clients. I have space to be able to take on, and I mentioned a lot of this. Right, like this is the work that we do. We do so much of diving into helping you own and claim what it is that you want. Get clarity around, what exactly is stopping you from getting there? And then creating a safe space for you to try things out to you know, like actually allow yourself to play as you grow, and creating that safety so that you feel supported to take the leaps to do the challenging things, to do the things that otherwise might feel overwhelmingly hard to try and do them on your own.

And so I would love to invite you if that is you, if you’ve been listening for a while and you’ve been like questioning, like, ah, you know, I feel like this is for me, but I’m also terrified. I want you to know that you are in the right place. Every single time I have invested in a coaching program, I have felt absolutely terrified, like it is a normal feeling, because here’s the honest truth. If it feels terrifying, right, if you’re like, oh my gosh, like I can’t believe that I’m about to do this, likely, what I’ve seen for myself and what I can imagine is happening inside, right of you and in your heart is you’re finally claiming, you’re finally claiming your gifts. You’re finally claiming what you are capable of. You’re finally claiming this is, for me, like there’s. I don’t want to play small anymore. I don’t want to feel held back by these same excuses or these same cycles that keep holding me back, and so I have four one-on-one spots opening up in the new year, and, if this is you, I would love for you to visit.

Hey, christa Marie, there should be. My website is currently launching. We’re in transition. It’ll be launching in the new year, but there is a form. There’s a link when you go to HeyChristaMariecom. There’s a link to fill out a coaching application, and if you don’t see that there, then just send me an email, christa, at.

Hey, christa Marie, and let’s schedule a phone call, because what I know about you listening in, is that you were made for this. You were born to do hard things. You are capable of so much more than I imagine you are giving yourself credit for, and I am so honored to work with all of my clients and to watch the shifts and the transformations that happen, and so I just want to invite you. If this is you, let’s have a conversation and let’s talk about how, going into 2024, the vision we want to hold the clarity we want to gain, the action we want to take, so that six months from now, you can look back and say I did that. I’m meaning you, not me, right, like anyway, all of that to say thank you so much for being here. I just value you so much, so much more than you can know. Thank you so much for your support.

As the podcast has gone on this year, we’ve got one more podcast episode coming out next week before we dive into 2024 together, and I just thank you so much for always being here, for always showing up, for joining in on these real, real conversations, and I will see you next week in our next episode. One last thing before you go I’d absolutely love it if you left a review on Apple Podcasts, or if you’ve already left a review, I’d love for you to share this episode with your business bestie. I love getting to shout out my listeners on the show, and the more listeners that we have, the more that I can help others create a thriving and sustainable business too. Thank you so much again for being a part of this community, and I can’t wait to hear your takeaways from today’s episode.