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.
Oh, you guys, I am rusty, rusty, rusty. Let's see if I can shake this off. Let's see if I can pull this out. hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Posers podcast, my beautiful posers. I am just coming back after two weeks in Italy. Feels like more like two [00:01:00] months. It feels like I have cobwebs in my brain.
It feels like I have 400 unread emails in my inbox, even though I don't, because I tried to stay on top of that as much as I could. But it feels like I have so many open-ended tasks that have to happen right this second. I just attempted my very first photo shoot after being back today, and I felt like my brain was moving through literal sludge.
It felt like I was thinking at the speed of molasses. Don't tell my client that. no, my client was really great, and they actually just kept on saying, like, how phenomenal the photo shoot felt and that it didn't even actually feel like a photo shoot. So I know I did fine. I know that autopilot took over in some kind of way.
but yeah, I'm recording this episode with a little bit of vacation depression, not gonna lie, and, [00:02:00] uh, some remnants of jet lag that actually hit way harder than I was expecting because I feel like I'm pretty good at handling international travel and that for the most part, I kinda trick the system, and I can get a handle on the jet lag part of all of it.
But this time, I really couldn't, and it took me days to sort of, like, re-enter my world again. So if this episode feels, like, a little bit looser than usual, that's why, because this is basically my re-entry episode. This is as if I'm on Interstellar, and I've actually been gone for hundreds of years, and I just didn't know it.
Or at least that's what, uh, my brain feels like. So before I get into today's episode, I just wanna ramble for, like, a quick second about motherhood. I know that this is not that kind of podcast, but [00:03:00] also, you know what? It's my podcast and I'll ramble if I want to.
So the thing about motherhood, if you think that traveling with toddlers is hard and that life will get easier whenever your kids are older, let me just tell you that you're wrong. You're just wrong. Okay? I was in Italy with four boys, plus my nephew and my husband. I was the only girl. And I'm pretty used to life with boys, obviously, because I have my three who live with me full time, and that is my world all the time.
But adding my stepson and my nephew to our usual crew, it was like adding two was like adding 20. I've never heard so much conversation about penises in a two-week span before this Honestly, the last few [00:04:00] dinners that we had, I had to actually say, "Let's see if we can make it through dinner without one of you talking about how small the other one's penis is," okay?
There was I'm not exaggerating. I had to literally ask to not talk about their dicks, okay?
There was also, a lot of flatulence happening. There was a lot of just very open conversations about their bowel movements, a lot of punching, a lot of flicking, a lot of dunking, a lot of flexing. Oh my God, a lot of flexing. But there was also so much laughter because the thing that I wanna rant about, about motherhood is that, this is part of it that doesn't really get talked about a lot, is how cool it is to have relationships and [00:05:00] conversations with your kids as they figure out life.
And honestly, on this trip too, it was the four of them have all come upon an age where they're all very interested in girls, but none of them really know how to approach girls at all. So, was a lot of nights of them practicing walking around the little small towns in Italy and, uh, practicing on, like, approaching a girl or giving a girl a compliment, and then they'd all, like, run back to the huddle and be like, "Oh my God, I did it.
I did it." It was hysterical, okay? But they're all in that phase of sort of, like, figuring out life, figuring out girls, but two weeks, Italy, my husband, my boys, way too much pasta, probably about four gelatos a day. And I'm not going to pretend that I [00:06:00] didn't cry a little bit on the plane ride home, because I did. little bit because I was sad to leave, but because something really, like, happens to you when you spend two weeks somewhere that big and somewhere that beautiful with the most important people in your life.
It just, it rearranges something in you. It reminds you that your time is fleeting, and that you only have one shot at this. And especially if you're a mom, those 18 years that you're promised, they go by so fucking fast that it, like, slaps you in the face. Whenever you look at your oldest one on the coast of Italy and you think, "Holy shit, you're moving out in six weeks.
Like, I got 18 years and all I have left is six weeks," that's partly, [00:07:00] like, what I wanna talk about today. Because even though it's coming from a place that is obviously, like, so deeply personal, I think it's actually one of the most useful business lessons I've stumbled into in a really long time. So I posted something while I was over there.
Uh, it was just, like, a little caption on a video of me in Venice, one of those things that I typed in about, like, 90 seconds and I sent it over to my social media team and I asked for it to get pushed out. And it's kind of been, like, rattling around in my brain ever since. So I wanna just really quickly, like, read that caption to you.
It said that, "The vacation isn't really just the point. The vacation is actually the receipt. If you give an ordinary amount of effort, then you're going to live an ordinary life. But if you want the kind of life where you can wander through Italy for weeks, you can rent the most beautiful villa that [00:08:00] you wanna rent, you can watch your boys jump into the sea, you can order the extra bottle of wine, say yes to the boat day, you actually have to experience it first.
Because once you do It will ruin you in the best possible way because you'll never go back after that, and you will work your ass off to keep that life. And I stand by every single word of that. But a lot of the flight home, I was kind of chewing on why it's true, and I don't mean obviously, like Oh yeah, girl, treat yourself.
You deserve it." Not in that kind of way. I was really chewing on why. Like, what is the mechanism? Because clearly, with two master's degrees in psychology, I can't just watch my kid do a back flip into the sea without turning it into some kind of case study, all right? So I saw, uh, this idea floating around online a while [00:09:00] back, and I can't remember whose reel I was watching or where I saw it or whatever, but it's really stuck with me for a long time.
And the idea is this: it's that if you want your life to change, you can't just sit around kind of visualizing it or manifesting it. You have to actually put yourself inside of it. Like, physically put yourself inside of that life that you want in smaller doses, but you have to do it intentionally, on purpose.
So don't just mean, like, manifesting or putting something up on a vision board. I mean actually going out and experiencing the thing that you want to have all the time. So like, if you want to eat at Michelin star restaurants on the regular, then you don't just pin it to a vision board. You actually need to book a seat at the bar [00:10:00] of, like, a really nice restaurant that you want to be eating at, even if it's just for a glass of wine.
If you want to drive a certain car, you need to schedule the test drive. If a, a three-week trip to Italy is the dream but it's not quite your reality yet, then do things that will make you feel like you're actually part of it. Like, hire an Italian chef to cook you a a gourmet meal at home. Eat it outside under string lights.
Let yourself feel what that life would taste like in very, like, bite-sized versions. Pun intended, obviously. But- You know me. You know that I'm going to give you some research on this. So it turns out that there's actually a concept that's called future self-continuity. It's the work of a psychologist [00:11:00] named, Hal Hershfield, and the basic idea is that the more vividly and emotionally connected you feel to your future self, the better decisions that you're going to make for that version of you today.
So most of us treat our future self as if they're a stranger, right? Some, like, hypothetical woman who will, you know, deal with whatever bullshit you dish out for her. She'll deal with that later, right? That, the, the idea of yourself in the future is basically a stranger to you. That's why we can, like, self-sabotage so easily, or we can skip the workout, or, you know, stay small in our businesses because we're not going to sacrifice and work hard for a stranger, for a version of ourselves that we can't even imagine or that we don't even [00:12:00] know.
But the second that your future self stops being a stranger, the second that your current self starts to get a little teaser of what your future self feels like, then you start making completely different choices today. This research literally found that whenever people spend time vividly imagining their future selves and actually feeling what it feels like to be their future selves, they made better long-term decisions almost immediately afterwards.
Not because they tried harder to be disciplined, but because the future person that they were, like, protecting suddenly felt real. And that's what Italy does to me every single time that I go. On the last night, we ate a $3,000 meal at a restaurant that has been named in the top 10 lists of around [00:13:00] the world.
Okay? So having that experience, it just made me want it more. Not in the, like, greedy, can never have enough kind of way, even though I don't think that that way is bad either, but it's not necessarily... Like, it doesn't live inside of me in that way. But in the way that, like, you're sitting inside of a fucking grotto that is inside of a cliff that is glowing at sunset on the coast of Italy, and you're drinking delicious wine and eating delicious food and laughing the night away with your family.
Like, I just want more of that. The way that makes me, like, want to be able to say, "Yes, book the trip. Yes, let's go see that." And in future years, I wanna be able to say, "Yes, bring your wife. Yes, bring my grand babies." A life that feels easy and filled with incredible moments and incredible memories. These [00:14:00] experiences make the life that I say that I want stop feeling as if it's like a Pinterest board and start feeling more like it's Last Tuesday, 'cause it was.
It was last Tuesday, and I can actually remember the smell of it, okay? Now, a little quick nod to the vision board conversation and the manifestation conversation and all of that, because I know a lot of you probably have a vision board. I know a lot of you are probably, like, very deep in the manifestation game, and here's what research actually says about those, too.
It says that purely staring at images or just thinking of images of a dream life can actually occasionally backfire, because your brain gets that little hit of dopamine, that little hit of satisfaction just from imagining the win. And that can kind of quietly, like, I don't know, zap the urgency [00:15:00] to get it.
Vision boards work best... I'm not saying they don't work. They do. But they work best when they're paired with something real, like an action or a taste of the thing that you want, or even an obstacle that you've already, like, thought through. It's pairing it with the idea of, like, what you're wanting to create, which is obviously the whole entire point, right?
all of this to say that, like, manifesting and vision boards, they aren't magic. Like, nobody is building a multi six-figure business because they journaled about it enough. Manifesting and vision boards, it's, they're simply starter fluid, and it gets things going, but it's, it has to lead to something.
It has to lead to the effort. It can't just be a substitute for it. But I also wanna be very clear about what I'm talking about here, because I don't want anybody emailing me from [00:16:00] some fancy, like, beach vacation that they can't afford and blaming me for their empty bank account. This is not permission to just go out there in these streets and be financially reckless.
I am not telling you to charge a trip to Italy on your credit card that you cannot pay off. That is not what this is. This is about doses of that reality that you can afford. To test drive your dream car is absolutely free. The beautiful seat at the bar for a glass of wine is 50 bucks, not 500 bucks. The Italian dinner at home under string lights, that costs a few hundred, not a few thousand.
So, I want you taking, like, small, real, affordable tastes of the life that you want. That's what I'm talking about here. that's the missing piece for so many of us, too, is we separate the dreaming from the doing as if they're two different projects, and they're not. The dreaming is supposed to fund the [00:17:00] doing.
That's, like, the whole entire job of the dream, right? But there's this other side of it. There's this side that, like, nobody really tells you about. Like, when you're doing all of this and when you're manifesting, when you're sort of, like, tasting the bigger life, or even, like, me talking about, you know, coming back from Italy, is that the comedown is real.
And you come home, and your inbox is full, or even, like, you have the chef and he, and he cooks that Italian dinner, or you go out to the restaurant and you have that delicious glass of wine inside of a restaurant that you want to be, like, part of your normal life. You get out of the test drive of the Porsche Cayenne.
I want a Porsche Cayenne so freaking bad right now. I keep talking about it all over the place. But you get out of that Porsche Cayenne, and you have to step back into your normal everyday car, right? The comedown [00:18:00] from that is real, and the scale of what you have to build feels bigger than it did before you left, or before you did the test drive, or before you did all of those things, because now you actually know what you're building it for and how big you want it to be.
And the very natural, very human instinct in that moment is to actually, like, constrict and to pull back, because the old parts of you will still come up. The old scared part of your brain that thinks that smaller feels safer, that will resurface. And so whenever you're in those situations, you have to force the new standard.
You have to win the fight against, like, the bandwidth tax. So let me get off of my, like, Italy example here in order to explain this [00:19:00] one. whenever my ex-husband left, I was obviously alone in my tiny little divorce house with very little money and, like, the shakiest foundation that I ever stood on in my whole entire life.
And every responsible instinct in me said to constrict, said to cut everything, said to get as small and as careful as possible until the ground, like, felt solid again. And I even re- I even remember back then, I remember ordering, like, grooming tools from Amazon for my dog because in my mindset then, I literally was like, I should just be grooming.
I should learn how to groom my dog, okay? I should be grooming him myself instead of spending $100 at the groomers every six weeks." But We all know that wasn't gonna last because it just wasn't me. One look in the mirror and I was like, "Bitch, you are not gonna [00:20:00] be out here trimming your dog's butt hair," okay?
So instead, I spent $2,000 that I did not have any business spending on an online course about marketing because I knew, like I knew in my bones, that being a broke single mom who couldn't afford a groomer to clean my dog's butt just wasn't a standard that I was going to let myself settle into. So I had to force the standard.
I bought the thing that I couldn't afford, which meant that I had no choice but to become the person who could afford it. There was no slate, like slow, safe, gradual path back. I built the on-ramp to my new life by removing the off-ramp. So I [00:21:00] actually felt this also whenever I came back from Italy. I actually was just telling my husband earlier today whenever we were at lunch together, I was like, "What I spent on the trip to Italy could have paid for like two years' worth of tuition for my son in college."
And I really felt like whenever I came back, I was like, "Okay, my bank account has dwindled obviously, and it's midsummer. There's not a lot of shoots that are happening right now. I'm gearing up towards my fall, so it's not as if money is just like coming in quickly the way that it does during other months."
And so my first inclination was exactly the same, to constrict, to pare back. Is that what it's called? Pare back? Pare back? Pare? Uh-
I don't know. I'm not going to even try to look this up right now. Basically, like pull back on [00:22:00] my finances, right? But that's not what you should be doing. You should be, I should be right now, which is me like clocking myself and saying, "Remember that dinner in Italy. Remember that life that you know that you want.
Remember those trips. Remember wanting to be able to do this for grandchildren." I just got a taste of that life, and now I have to step back into this life that I have right now, and I need to force a new standard so that I do not go backwards and I keep on building towards the life that I know that I want to have in my future years.
So there's actually a TED Talk by a behavior researcher named Kim Foster that gets at this exact point, and her whole argument is that lasting change is never really about willpower or [00:23:00] habits. It's about your identity. So you don't like inch your way into a new standard of living by budgeting your way there, like, I don't know what, every like $100 at a time.
You decide who you are first, and then you build a life that has no choice but to catch up to her. So it's about identity, which if you haven't noticed, is basically my whole entire personality. With big trips. I jump very, like, blindly into big remodel projects. The pool that I just put in that's now giving me a little bit of, like, financial discomfort.
So then it sets into my brain that the idea of forcing this standard, instead of sitting in this financial discomfort over the pool, I'll just set a goal, and I'll make sure that I'm gonna make a extra $120,000 quickly [00:24:00] so that I can just pay it off instead of letting it linger. Okay? My husband will tell you that I do not know how to stay stagnant, and he's right.
And honestly, I've made peace with that because every single time that I have bitten off more than I could chew, I have found a way to chew it. And that's not recklessness whenever I trust myself. Okay? It's not financially irresponsible whenever I know that I have a track record of forcing the standard on purpose and continuing to move towards the bigger, like, standards in life that I know that I wanna have.
So here's how these two ideas work together. You first expose yourself to the life that you want in small, affordable doses so that your future self stops being a stranger. And then you force the [00:25:00] standard the second that reality tries to talk you out of it. So you don't renegotiate down to what feels safe.
You have to hold yourself there. You keep the standard. You remove your own exit, like, your own safety hatch, right? What's that thing called whenever a pilot, whenever the airplane is crashing and they can, like, eject themselves? Like, the eject button, right? Is that, I think that's what it's called. That you remove the eject button, and you let the, the discomfort do exactly what it's supposed to do, which is make you figure out how to solve that problem, how to make the life that you want happen.
So here's the biggest takeaway. Stop treating the life that you want like it's a far-off reward for effort that you haven't even given yet. So Go get a small, real, [00:26:00] affordable taste of whatever life you want this week, whether that's one dinner or one test drive or one seat at a bar. And honestly, like, let it fuck with you a little bit.
Okay? In fact, bitch-slap the side of you that keeps on making you simmer back down and get small every time that you say that you're really gonna do it that time. Like, let it fuck with you so much that it, like, bitch-slaps that side right out of you. All right? Force your standards until your dreams actually become your reality, and then set even bigger standards.
Remove your own exit. Let it light the fire that it's supposed to light. All right? The vacation, the car, the meals, whatever it is is your standard that you wanna have, that is the receipt. So the vacation that I just went on, it is the receipt for the last few years of going so fucking hard towards the standards that I [00:27:00] want.
But for me, I've never in my life been more motivated to come back here to my desk and work just so that we can do it all over again in some other country next year, because I never want to stop having this life. That's all I've got for you. That's all for today. Bye for now, posers.
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.
