Posers Podcast #2 Final Audio
===
PPI: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Poser's podcast, the place where we skip the fluff, say the quiet parts out loud and dig into what really matters. This is where photography, psychology, and business collide. I'm Jodi, your host, and I'm bringing you my raw takes, hard wins, and a whole lot of unfiltered honesty about what it takes to build a photography business that actually connects and makes money.
So ladies, grab your headphones and get your tits up and your ears open because We are going to build something really incredible together.
Intro
---
Hello, and welcome back, beautiful posers. Okay, I just need to tell you that we had the last episode, and that is all that I have put out into the world so far in regards to this podcast, and I have barely uttered a few words, and the way it has me [00:01:00] feeling so naked, it has me feeling like I am naked all over the internet and not in the way that you would think that one would want to be naked all over the internet.
Okay. I don't want to be naked all over the internet. My husband would hate me for even like. insinuating that I possibly want to be naked all over the internet, but I mean naked in regards to feeling more vulnerable. I wish that it was a naked that felt like a really, like, hot girl naked moment, but it feels a lot more like wintertime, scaly skin, pale, bloated, and Puffy kind of naked and that level of vulnerability is just kind of sending me and I know that it's probably just gonna get worse from here because I am so much of an open book that I know If something crosses my mind, I'm going to say it.
I'm going to blurt it out There is no part of me that can be managed in that kind of way. [00:02:00] So It feels a little bit like giving myself a microphone is maybe one of the biggest mistakes that I'll ever make in my business, but it's also maybe one of the best things that I'm going to do for my business.
Real Housewives
---
I feel a little bit like I am a season one housewife.
If you follow anything of the housewife franchises, you know that a season one housewife is like so ready to come in and be the drama and have the storyline and, you know, stir shit up and do all of that just so that they get. Asked back for season two. That's a little bit what I feel like right now.
I'm very raw, very unrefined. Little sidebar. If you follow me on Instagram, then you know that I am a connoisseur of reality TV.
I am legitimately, like, the sommelier of reality TV. I am just lapping up every single episode that they can pour out for me. And at some Some point I really do feel [00:03:00] like I will let you in on that side of my world. I will show you how much of a bedrotting human I can really be. But I also feel like in these first episodes, it's almost like we're on a first date.
We're at the very beginning stages of our relationship. I'm still, like, wearing cute panties and getting waxed before we meet each other, just on the off chance that, like, maybe we get to second base.
What am I talking about? But yeah, I feel like we're still getting to know each other. I'm still, like, Wanting to put my best foot forward. So let us get to the point that we're like in sweats, ordering, takeout, binging for old episodes of I don't know, summer house or something like that. Summer house is my favorite.
And then we'll get into the really good gossip of what's actually going on in my head. Especially because right now, you guys, we're just wrapped up on the Real Housewives of New York season, and I have [00:04:00] so much to say, but, okay, I stuck a little toe into the idea of showing you who I am, but I really, I don't know that our relationship is ready just yet.
We need to keep on dating a little bit more. What am I talking about? Who knows? Let me get back to the notes of what we're actually supposed to be on topic with today.
Episode
---
As I mentioned, I say almost anything and everything that goes on in my brain. And I've been that way since I was a little girl.
So How do I explain to you who I was as a child? I was feral. That's the right word. Honestly, I feel bad for my mother. I am her fourth baby. I am the baby out of four kids. And she probably gave birth to me and then was like, Mm, nope. No, let's she's not cooked. She's not done all the way put her back in.
She needs a little bit more refining of [00:05:00] the edges. I wasn't the girl who sat around reading books or like memorizing lines to every new kid on the block song. I was. I was wild. I was untamed. I was dirty. Like, I was so dirty. I was constantly covered in dirt and obnoxious and loud and all of the things.
I was the girl who was building forts, I was squeezing the guts out of inchworms, I vividly remember on multiple occasions laying in the dirt in like blistering summer heat inside of a random fort that I had made out of these like, uh, two by four wood planks that my dad would have like laying behind a shed and I would perform surgery.
To save dying lizards inside of my fort and this was not just one time you guys this happened a lot like what was I? The lizards would inevitably [00:06:00] die because who was I to be literally dr. Deathing these lizards They would die and then I would hold these crazy funerals for them like Feral is the exact word that describes me.
I would run alongside moving trains, I would jump on, I would beat up boys after school if they said that they had crushes on me, my brother, oh my god, my poor mother, my brother and I. We would climb up on this huge center block wall that was around this big, like, Catholic monastery that was by our house.
We lived out in the country and so there was this property that had this huge monastery and it was beautiful. The gardens were insane now that I think about it as an adult. But we would jump up onto this, uh, huge center block wall. We would scale it, not jump on it. And we would sit up there. And we would wait for the nuns to come out, and when the nuns did [00:07:00] come out, we would get into these long, drawn out conversations, we would claim we didn't believe in God, we would say all these things, we would throw cuss words, oh my God, that's embarrassing to say we would say all this stuff, and then the nuns, we were a little bit scared of them sometimes too, because they would start like chasing us off the property and like telling us to get off the wall and whatever, but, Oh, this is a little bit more embarrassing than I thought.
I was that kid. I played football with the boys. I played softball with the girls. I never took shit from anyone. So how I grew up into this overly feminine creative human who literally like. Lives, eats, and breathes inside of the world of interior design and photography and making things stunning around me.
, it's, it's an anomaly. It is beyond me. I lived in a trailer during the first few years of my life and then we [00:08:00] moved into , like kind of like this rundown house that was back behind my grandpa's shop for a few years and then we moved into my grandmother's really like this big old farmhouse that she had.
I think I was around eight whenever we moved in there, but we lived with her until my parents, my parents were very, very young whenever they had us. I was their fourth baby and my parents were 22 whenever they had me, which I cannot even. fathom at this point in my life because I'm 43 and I can barely manage raising children, but my parents were really young So we lived with my grandmother until they got like a little bit more of their their like financial footing underneath them And then my grandmother moved out down the street.
Okay, but all this to say how Does this like dirt poor mangy girl from New Mexico end up creating a multi six figure business that's based solely on making things pretty is wild. But I [00:09:00] honestly and truly believe that scrappy little girl inside of me, even though you don't see her anymore on the outside, she's still there, and really and truly, she's the reason that I have built my business to what it is today.
So, when I first started building my business, I would hear from other educators, All the time to think about three words that I wanted to represent my brand. Now, keep in mind, this is 2008, 2009, 2010, right? And I was just devouring everything that I could about building a photography business. And even back then, intuitively, like I kind of hated this exercise because And back then the term branding really only meant like, what does your website look like?
What are your, the colors of your website going to be? What are the fonts that you're going to use? Like it didn't really talk about branding the way that we talk about branding now and how [00:10:00] foundational it is to your business. So back then I really hated. The exercise, cause it always felt so superficial to me.
It felt like, I don't know, it felt like I was choosing the toppings that I wanted on like an ice cream sundae. And it felt like those toppings were just like, what was going to make the ice cream sundae, like look like it would taste good, look like it would be enticing, but intuitively I kind of knew that.
It wasn't those things that they were talking about with branding that was going to make my business last. It was the ice cream. The ice cream is what was going to last in the whole, like, ice cream sundae analogy, right? But, I mean, if we know now, or if we knew then what we know now, we know that that is still branding.
The ice cream, like, everything, the foundation to everything that you're putting into your business, it is the branding. back then though, So instead of choosing those three words that were going to represent my brand, I knew [00:11:00] that I wanted to have more like foundational words. I knew that I wanted to weave this idea of how I was going to make my clients feel throughout all of their touch points in my business.
And I decided on three words that would really be integral to the how. of running my business when those branding words that they were talking about defining, that really felt like the what, and I wanted to focus on the integrity of what would lie inside of my business. So I've always had since way back then, these three guiding words that I felt like I've always made decisions by.
These guiding words being authority, grace, and audacity. Those were the three things that always stood out to me. And I knew I wanted to lead inside of my business with grace for myself and grace for my clients and grace for my work and grace for what I was building and what I knew I wanted to be creating.
And that I knew that in order to do [00:12:00] that, I needed to have the Within my industry, I knew that I needed to be a place of of authority for my clients to see and for my clients to trust me to be sort of like choreographing their wedding days and choreographing their photo shoots and creating for them in that kind of way.
So grace and authority were two really big pillars within my business. The biggest word is audacity, and that's the one that I want to talk to you about today. Having the audacity to make really bold, really hard decisions that take gumption and grit. Grace and authority have very much so been something that I lead by, but audacity is really the one pillar that has led to growth.
in my business. So I started my business in 2008 and I have the lamest of all lame stories and I feel [00:13:00] like so many photographers have this same exact story so I'm so sorry if it offends you that I say that it is basic and it is lame but that's really only because I live in this place where I'm like, like I said before, I'm like, in love with the theatrics.
I'm in love with the drama of reality TV. I wish so bad that I had this moment. I want my mother to have like given birth to me and that I came out of the womb being like, like, that I'm just this prodigy and this baby, a camera. Could you imagine? Or I wish that I had like, I don't know, this was back in like 2004.
I wish that I had had this like, you know, this secret Tumblr account in 2005 and it was just this gorgeous, uh, curation of all of these wonderful images that I had taken and I wish that some, Big name Hollywood somebody [00:14:00] someone or other had like discovered this tumblr and I just skyrocketed This is me.
This is my brain. I wish that I had this crazy story where I'm like, oh my god You know photography has always been meant for me. But no I have a very lame story Where I gave birth to my son in 2007, we took him to go do newborn photos and we hired this photographer. We paid her 250, which 250 at the time for a photo shoot, I was like, Oh my God, we have spent so much money on this.
I cannot believe we're doing this. This is such a huge investment, but we have to do these newborn photos, right? And we showed up and the photographer was running this little studio literally off of her kitchen table. And of course, me being me, I kind of like looked around the room and I took note of like an off camera [00:15:00] flash that she had and, you know, the setup on the table and whatever.
And I was like, I could do this. I could do this. So we left that photo shoot and I told my then husband, I was like, you know what? I could do that. Like, if I purchased a nice camera, I could very easily learn how to use it, and we would never have to spend that 250 again. That 250 could go somewhere else because I could learn how to use this camera, I could take his one year, his two year, his three year photos, whatever.
I like to joke now, knowing that that marriage has since ended, I like to joke that it's the only promise that I kept inside of that marriage, which, it's really not true. But I like to use humor to make light of Things that have been traumatic in my past, but anyways I think that my story actually, like me being a photographer probably actually started a little bit earlier than that.
I used to literally [00:16:00] style photo shoots for me and my friends in I think middle school and I was always carrying around this little 35 millimeter pink. It was fuchsia pink, not baby pink. I need to make that that, I don't know, distinction here. I don't know why because I would actually like light pink more than I would like fuchsia pink, but no, my camera was fuchsia pink and I would carry that around.
All through those years also, my grandmother was really big into taking photos and she would always be showing me what I thought then were very boring photos of the sky and flowers and things like that that she loved but even though I may have this very basic story to how everything got started in regards to when I picked up a camera and why I was interested in even starting photography to begin with.
What I did in the beginning stages of actually starting a business was very much so audacious. Now, Audacity, it seems to be [00:17:00] this word that has such like a negative connotation to it, right? Like to say that somebody has the audacity to do things, it's always met with like a like clutching of the pearls, like the audacity, right?
But to be audacious simply means that you have a willingness to take bold risks. You have a willingness to do something different, to be something different, to step outside of the box, to not give up. Like, I don't know, not go with the grain, to be outside of the norm. And what I did at the beginning of my business and what I still do to this day is trust myself that I have the audacity to trust my intuition, to jump whenever things feel scary and to hold on to that scrappy little girl who literally wanted to like, You know, fuck up the world whenever she was little.
So in 2007 I bought a professional camera and from that moment I knew that I was going to build [00:18:00] something. I already had an LLC formed by early 2008. Because I just knew that I had the potential to be starting something really great. I screwed around with practicing, of course, on my son, practicing on my friend's kids, practicing on all of those things.
But what I really salivated for was wedding photography. And I would scour photography blogs until my eyes bled. And it was like, It's like 2 o'clock in the morning, my new baby was waking up for like middle of the night feedings and I was still sitting in front of the computer. I craved and consumed content from the leaders in the wedding photography community.
I studied composition, I studied posing, I forced my friends into Like fake engagement photo shoots so that I could practice. So whenever 2010 hit, I had a shot at booking my very first wedding and when I had that shot, when it was presented to me, I will tell you, I swung for the fucking fences.
I [00:19:00] was brand new. I had zero portfolio except all of these fake styled shoots that I had been designing and photographing. And yet I still set my price for this very first wedding at the top of my market. Keep in mind, whenever I tell you this number, it was 2010 and I was just starting out and wedding photography had not taken off the way that it is now.
And I booked my very first wedding, which was a destination wedding in Lake Tahoe, nonetheless. And I booked it at 3, 000 when 2, 500 was the average for my market. So I popped off to Lake Tahoe, I shot the wedding, I did a great job, the client was really happy, and immediately I came home and the very next wedding that I booked was at 4, 000.
And I never looked back from that. I was charging almost double. of what the average in my market was, but I didn't [00:20:00] do this just because I was cocky, or just because I thought like, I'm so good at what I do. I'm such an incredible photographer. Like I did not think of it that way. I just knew that my work was good.
I knew that my work had value. And I refused to, I refused to play small by jumping in at the like, I don't know, jumping in in the shallow end where everybody told me that I should have been jumping in. I knew that what I was doing was going to be really great and so I refused to play small. Just because that was what the industry told me that I was supposed to do.
And I will tell you that having the audacity to do that, it really paid off. Because it immediately put me into the ballgame. I was never thought of by my industry and my market and other vendors that were working here. I was never thought of [00:21:00] as a newbie. And I immediately gained that other pillar in my business, that authority.
pillar, and my business continued to grow. My prices continued to rise, uh, my work got better. I honed my posing method. I created incredible experiences for my clients while they were on the photoshoots with me. My clients loved me. They loved how I made them feel.
And more than anything, more importantly, they loved their images. So throughout this entire process of building my business, I chose to beat to my own drum and I have time and time again chosen to make really bold, really audacious decisions within my business. I've always posed differently. I moved differently.
I created a business steeped in my understanding of persuasion and influence and psychology because that's what my basis is and that's what set me apart. I had this audacity to keep growing and keep building [00:22:00] and keep doing things my way. So now you can see that I really wanted to start this podcast here because this idea of moving audaciously through your business.
is so imperative and so important and the decisions that you make that set yourself apart from others in your industry. Those will literally be the key factors that actually attract your dream clients to you. I am 17 years into this business and I still wholeheartedly am that untamed girl inside of me.
Audacity isn't just like for getting your business started or for getting it off the ground. It's something that you have to choose every single day. And I've built a community around that. My business. This community has watched me build. It has watched me crumble inside of my divorce, and then it has watched me rise out of that mess even stronger.
I've built a herd of clients who [00:23:00] ride so hard for me and everything that I create because they feel so invested in watching not only me, but where the business will go next also. And I couldn't have done any of that if I blended into the masses. So you have to have the audacity to charge what you're worth.
You have to have the audacity to stand firm when someone tells you that you're asking for too much. And you have to have the audacity to walk away from the people who are trying to pull you back into their comfort zone. And here's the thing, you have to realize too, that what you're choosing not to do.
That's a choice too. If you're not charging enough, you're choosing to undervalue yourself. If you're playing small, you're choosing comfort. If you're waiting for permission, then you're choosing to put your dreams on the back burner. And after hearing what I have to say, it seems so natural that I would be like, okay, I want you to go [00:24:00] off.
I want you to create these three words. I want you to, you know, have these three words that you're going to live by in your business and you're going to do these things. That's a lie. I don't want you to do that. What I actually want you to do, I want to ask you to join me. I want to ask you to join me in welcoming some really audacious behavior into your world.
And this step into audacity, it doesn't have to be huge, right? It doesn't have to be That you're like stepping on somebody's neck to do something audacious, or that you're jumping so far out of your creative zone that you're just going to, you know, skyrocket your prices into like figures that nobody had ever seen before.
I don't want you to do anything like that. That's more risky than it is audacious, but in whatever form you can, I want you to choose to have a little bit more audacity than you had yesterday. I want you to [00:25:00] ask for what you want. I want for you to demand what you know that you're worth. And most importantly, I want you to never apologize for who you know you are inside, into that little bitty scrappy girl that's inside of you too.
I want you to know that inside of there, there is an absolute powerhouse waiting to come out. And I just want you to take everything that I've said today, and to be honest, I want you to go fuck some shit up. Alright, so until next time, posers, bye for now.
PPO: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Poser's Podcast. If you loved it, please subscribe, rate, and review, because honestly, algorithms are needier than all of our ex boyfriends combined. And ladies, I need all the help I can get. If you've got thoughts, questions, love letters, even hate mail, please send them my way.
I actually read every single one of them. So until next time, stay bold, stay messy, and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up, ears [00:26:00] open, and go build something incredible. Bye for now, friends.
