Intro: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Posers 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 Jody, 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.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of the Posers Podcast. My beautiful posers. Uh, if you hear a little bit of a rasp in the back of my throat, it is because I am sick. It is no surprise that I am feeling sick now because, uh, I knew that it would happen. And I even told my team, I was like, you know what?
I am pushing so hard this [00:01:00] fall that I know that the minute that. I finally allow myself to relax that my body is going to crash out and that I'm going to. Be as sick as a little dog. And here I am. We have popped off for a little Christmas ski holiday. We do this every single year. We come up to the Flagstaff area in Arizona and we do a couple of days of skiing, a few days in a cabin.
And it's one of the traditions that, uh, me and my husband and our five teenagers have loved doing for I think the last, like seven or eight years now. Honestly, the whole. Entirety of me and my husband dating and then getting engaged and then getting married. That whole entire time span has had this tradition.
So we absolutely love it. Um. You would actually laugh if this audio is not as great as it could be. I have to apologize for that because [00:02:00] I am sitting in my car or I'm sitting in our like rental car. We have to, our family is so big that we have to rent. Uh, large SUV in order to get up here to the mountains with all of our ski clothes and, uh, everybody's suitcases and all of that, and have the seven of us all in one place.
So I'm sitting out in the rental car in the driveway because, the kids are just madness. Inside there is football blaring on the tv. There is the buckshot video game up in the loft being played. There is a pool table that is entertaining a couple of them, and there's also the dogs inside. So I am sitting out in the car recording with my iPhone and my microphone and everything that I brought with me, but I just can't guarantee that the audio is, as good as it normally should be. So what is crazy about the [00:03:00] fact that I'm in Flagstaff right now is that it means it's the end of the year and how is 2025 like already coming to an end? Because. It has felt like a bullet train. And you know how sometimes years just kind of drag by a little bit. They feel like they can like go on and on and on forever.
Or at least some parts of the year feels like they drag a little bit slower than the rest of the parts of the year. This whole entire year has felt like an absolute speed train. Which kind of surprises me a little bit because. I thought that I would dread the fall season a little, knowing that I was gonna be overbooked, knowing that I was having or I had booked myself.
It's not like somebody else did it to me. I did it to myself. I booked like six full shoots across every single weekend. I thought that I would dread that, and I thought that it would sort of crawl by at a snail's pace, but. It really didn't. And everything was a little bit more like if you blink, you [00:04:00] miss it.
Sort of like vibes. It just, it has blown by. So I wanna talk about wrapping up the year because before we step into 2026, we all need to just kind of hit a pause button. Um, Where we're not planning, we're not strategizing, we're not goal setting, we're just. Pausing not only to rest, but also to pause, to reflect and ask ourselves some really important questions before moving on into the next year, because our next chapter depends entirely on how honest we're willing to be about this one.
And that honesty sometimes can just get reserved for therapy session or wine nights with our girlfriends or voice notes that we never actually end up sending. But I think that these kind of questions that we're gonna be asking ourselves in this episode, like we should be asking the people that we love, these same questions, we should be asking our friends, our partners, our families, [00:05:00] and ourselves, because everyone grows.
More when we ask ourselves these sort of reflective questions and everyone grows whenever someone is brave enough to go first. So this is me going first. I'm wrapping up this year having grossed over half a million dollars in revenue. Hold on. I feel like I need to say that again a little bit slower.
I grossed over half a million dollars in revenue this year, and I feel like my nervous system still hasn't caught up to that quite yet. Uh, it's a number that I've never hit before and. I want you to hear this part of it too, because this is where things get a little bit weird in our money mindset, and no one really talks about the side as much.
Most of that money came in Q4, which sounds like, oh, [00:06:00] sexy and impressive. You had this killer season and you made all this money something that I should be popping champagne about, but. What it actually felt like was a little bit more of a mind fuck. And I really found myself struggling during this time period whenever I was making a lot more money to keep myself open to the idea and not sort of like shutting down into this like, scarcity mode of like, kinda like a squirrel with nuts.
Like whenever they've gotta prepare for the winter. Is that the right, do they. Prepare for the winter, I feel like. Yeah. They gather all their nuts and they like put them into their little like hole in the tree so they have enough food to eat during the winter. Right. Yeah. That's what it kind of felt like.
Because when most of your revenue hits in the last quarter of the year, it doesn't feel like abundance. Even though it sounds like abundance. It feels like kind of like trying to [00:07:00] grasp like handfuls of sand, right? That all of the sand really actually ends up sliding through your fingers and you can only hold onto that one like tight bit that really stays in your palm.
It felt like this because of course, you know, I set the $200,000 challenge publicly, but privately I knew that I was gunning for half a million, so I went hard. I went really fucking hard and everything started to feel a little bit graspy like. That I needed to say yes to everything in order to prove something to someone or to myself, which is so obviously tied up in like self-worth trauma that I still need to be working through.
But then there was also this other like mind that came up was I knew that I was gonna have a higher tax bill. I knew that I needed to prepare for that, and I did, and I was smart about it. And I made sure that I had the money in my [00:08:00] business checking to know that I was going to owe more in taxes.
Obviously you make more, you're gonna owe more, right? But I pay a quarterly estimated tax every quarter, and. I knew that what I was paying in for estimated taxes was based on what I had made last year, and I knew that I had blown last year outta the water. So. I knew I was gonna have this high tax bill, but I had no idea how high it was actually going to be, and tomorrow getting deducted out of my bank account tomorrow is $80,000.
A tax bill, eight zero $80,000 has to go to the IRS tomorrow, and nothing humbles you quite faster than watching your bank account grow. Beyond six figures in liquid [00:09:00] cash and then like the very next day, plummet right back down like a balloon deflating right in front of your eyes.
So yes, I had my best year financially. But I made a lot of mistakes along the way too, and it didn't feel as gravy train as you would think that it would feel. But I made some pretty big mistakes. Okay, here's the first one. I shot way too far into December. I told myself that I could do it.
I told myself that it would be fine. I told myself that I would push through of course, but the problem is, is that what I didn't think about was the kind of impact that it would have on the actual. Business because I couldn't see past myself. I didn't foresee that my editing team was going to like stop taking work because I've never worked into [00:10:00] December before.
So I've never had that conversation with my editing team. So whenever I was still taking on work and then my editing team was like, oh, all right, we can't take it on anymore if it, if we're gonna get through our pile by this date that we wanna stop working. So I didn't foresee that happening. And then I also didn't foresee that album designs would get as backed up as they did, and I just kept on taking bookings.
I didn't think about the fact that the systems that I had built, the systems that I had in place would collapse around me come Thanksgiving, and I'd basically be a team of one trying to get it all done. So. Remember back in August whenever I had to replace my VA really quickly. Whenever I did that, I knew that I was just putting a bandaid on a bigger problem.
My VA used to do album design for me and I just thought like, oh, it's fine. Like [00:11:00] I can, I. Honestly, I can design an album in 10 minutes flat. Like it is not a big deal for me to design an album. And I didn't think it was gonna be a big deal for me to put that back on my plate just for this season. So I hired a VA in her place, but I only hired a VA for just the admin work and.
My God, that was a huge mistake because this is where Morgan Freeman voice needs to come in and be like, she could not, in fact, keep up with designs at that level of volume. And I wish that I could just say like, oh, I magically came up with some solution and I hired somebody really fast, or, you know, I had this person in my back pocket and I could do that.
No. None of that happened in order to get the work done. What had to happen is I had to take late nights away from my family. I had to pull. I never pulled an all-nighter because I just can't anymore at my age. But I was working until one o'clock, two o'clock in [00:12:00] the morning and I wasn't getting sleep and I wasn't taking care of myself, and it knocked my life completely out of balance, and it almost killed me in the last three weeks of the year.
I was drowning, obviously, but you know, me at least like in my head was I thinking, well, it's a good thing I'm making a shit ton of money because otherwise this wouldn't feel like it was worth it. And yes, I did say that, but there was also some other mistakes that I like made during the year that kind of kicked me in the butt a little bit too.
Is that. I took on clients that were waving, like last year. They were kinda waving these little orange flags at me, these warning signs that I shouldn't book them again. And instead of listening to myself and knowing that I shouldn't allow those bookings, I just sort of told myself like, oh, it'll be fine.
They've shot with me for a year now. I'll train them even more this year and they'll fall in [00:13:00] line. But. Those orange flags turned into full blown red flags this year, and I knew that they would, and I was kicking myself when it was happening, and now I'm in the position of having to fire clients and that sucks.
But I did all of this because I took on the $200,000 challenge and I took on too much in pursuit of it. Because, I mean, here's the, the crazy part about it is I didn't just hit the $200,000, I blew past it, and I almost hit $250,000, but that's exactly how scarcity shows up cloaked. In abundance, you think that you're making these like bold, hungry, revenue focused decisions, but really it's a little bit of like trader behavior.
Don't think, I'm not gonna throw trader behavior in here right now because traders literally comes back. It premieres what, January 8th or something like that. I'm acting as if I don't know the date. I know the date traders is coming back, so I gotta throw in a [00:14:00] little trader behavior. It feels like you're grasping at everything because you don't trust that what you're already doing is enough.
And I was going to hit that number regardless. I didn't have to take on extra shoots after Thanksgiving because I had already run the numbers. I had already gone through. We've already talked about it. The levers that had to get pulled in order to know that I was gonna hit the $200,000, I had already gone through all of that.
If I had trusted myself, if I had trusted my systems, if I had trusted what I have built, then I would've still hit that huge goal without having any problems, without adding so much more onto my plate. But instead. I said yes to way too much, and my nervous system and my sleep schedule paid the price for it.
So before we talk about 2026, I just wanna sort of like sit here with you because you [00:15:00] don't get to set resolutions until you purge what didn't serve you. So we can't go into January getting all dreamy and hopeful just yet. All right. This episode is not about adding anything onto our plate, it's about elimination.
So I wanna ask you like who or what drained your energy in 2025? Before we can add anything new, we have to remove what already drains our time, our energy, and our attention. So ask yourself. What slowed me down this year? What made me tired for no reason. What made my life more complicated than it had to be?
And for me, these are things that are gonna be a little bit more personal in nature, and not so much like on my business too, but I wanna talk about. All of that, because what slowed you down this year? What made you tired for no [00:16:00] reason? What made your life more complicated? That has to do with your personal life too?
So for me, it's really easy to look back and know that there was these red flags that were happening in my business, but I also knew that a ton of my brain energy was focusing around the fact that I've gained a lot of weight and that my body feels gross right now. My husband moved to my city and. We laid around a lot.
We, I won't get into detail there, but we laid around like ordering a lot of DoorDash and like basking in a bit of a honeymoon phase that we've never really been able to have and. My brain has like hyper focus now, especially in the last four months or so about how gross my body feels right now. And I've caught my thoughts kind of like skipping off into sabotage land far more than I really wanna publicly admit, but.
Because I was in my busiest season and because I [00:17:00] pushed myself too hard, then I wasn't in a place where I could recognize four months ago like, oh, hey, you're not feeling good inside of your body. Let's do something about it. I continued to put myself on the back burner because everything that I was doing inside of the business was front runner for me.
Also after that honeymoon phase really started to wear off real life set in a little bit for me and my husband, and I'm not gonna lie about that. A lot of focus went to figuring out how me and him are going to balance our marriage and our home life. And we ended up arguing a lot like in November, especially, right as I was in my busiest time, also like.
Me making a lot more money in my business than I ever have. That brought up a lot for him and I, it brought up a lot of insecurities in both of us that we didn't know that we even had, and it showed us some cracks that have to be [00:18:00] fixed. We had a. Honestly, two of the biggest arguments that we've ever had during the month of November, and I'm not telling you this to get too personal or to tell you things about my marriage that should stay private.
I'm just saying that recognizing what is weighing on your mind, what is taking your mental energy away, not only inside of your business, but outside of your business too, is something that you have to be aware of if you want to bring more success. In, and most people never do this. They just like hope that next year like magically feels better, or they sprint into the new year with this energy of like, oh, new year, new me, this mantra.
But. It's gonna be a lot more of New Year. Same me If you don't take the time to reflect and eliminate, you have to delete and make room for growth because if you ever want to hit a goal, you have to remove the things that have stopped you from getting [00:19:00] there in the past. You cannot build a new life on top of one that's already burning you out.
Clarity comes from subtraction. Not addition. And whenever we get into January, we're not gonna be adding 15 new goals or a 27 step morning routine. We're gonna add in one thing, one super clear goal that we can align all of our behaviors around to work towards. That's it. One goal that becomes the priority.
Everything else is just noise. We build our environment around that one thing. So. I honestly want you to take this as an assignment. I want you to take 10 minutes, grab a note and write this sentence at the top of it, what made last year harder than it needed to be, and then list everything with no filter, no logic, no judgment, just.
Honesty, that [00:20:00] list will tell you so much because it'll tell you exactly what needs to go from 2025 and exactly what deserves your focus in 2026. Now, obviously I am not removing my husband in 2026, although. Ask me that back in November whenever we were arguing, and I might have said yes to that. But me and my husband will get our butts into our therapist a lot more, and we will work on solving the issues that are coming up so that it's not taking up so much of my brain energy that's going to pull me away from what I'm trying to build inside of my business.
And I'm obviously not going to magically lose 30 pounds in January either, but. I will put a plan in place to calm my brain and to get my body back to a place where I can stop perseverating about how [00:21:00] gross I feel inside of my body right now. I also will purge the clients who waved those red flags at me this year, and I will get a new assistant, fully trained to get my systems back in working order.
And then when I know that I've removed what didn't work or what wasn't working, then I'll be ready to begin a new year. And this isn't about like becoming someone completely new. It's just about purging the sneaky little things that kind of rear their ugly head that never belonged in your year. To begin with, but somehow managed to sort of wiggle their way in.
I am starting to feel the back of my throat burn a little bit, so I'm going to wrap this up. I wanna wish you the mest of Christmases, if that's a holiday that you choose to celebrate. This has been such an [00:22:00] incredible year. I know that we just barely started this podcast back in March, but it feels as though we've done a full year together and.
It feels very genuine and very true that the intro to the podcast, the last line of it says, you know, something along the lines of like, get your tits up and your ears open and let's build something really incredible together. I can't begin to tell you like how cool it is for somebody to send me a DM and say, Hey, I listen to this podcast and this is what I'm putting in place, or, thank you so much for saying this thing, because I'd never really thought about it that way.
And for me also to share so vulnerably, hear about not just tips or tricks, but the real and genuine behind the scenes of what I'm building inside of my business. And hopefully that as I talk about what I'm building for mine, that's inspiring what you're building for yours. [00:23:00] And I can't help but to sort of wrap up this episode with a shit fuck ton of gratitude for everything that we have built together this year.
So yeah, that's it for today. Happy holidays and as always, bye for now friends.
Outro: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Posers 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, stapled, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
