Dear Val,
I recently set out on my own as a photographer after shooting a few weddings for friends and doing some family portrait sessions over the last year or two. I was able to save up enough to quit my job and do more photography work so I built a website and started putting packages together. The thing is, people ask me all the time for free photos. They don’t come right out and ask directly but they’ll share something that sounds like they’re asking me to work for free.
People are afraid to ask questions, mostly because we’re often made to feel like we should know the answer already. What’s up with that? It’s virtually impossible to know everything (or Google wouldn’t exist) so I love it when people ask questions. In fact, people ask me a lot of questions.
The first in a series oh-so-creatively named “Dear Val”, I’m answering the questions I get in my inbox from overwhelmed business owners just like you.
Dear Val,
The question I keep turning over in my mind is when to create my first product. I’d like to create an eBook to establish myself as an authority in my niche (or so they tell me) and also possibly to drive traffic by giving it away for free or cheap on Kindle. But I’m not 100% on what it should be about or when I should create it.
Drama is everywhere, right? As someone who used to love being involved in other people’s businesses in a major way, it’s very easy for me to get wrapped up in a bunch of drama that simply isn’t mine to own.
AND, as a yogi, I know that doing so causes more harm than good and the whole point of what I do (what I LOVE doing) is to create less drama, less stress, and more love for the beautiful business owners and humans all around me. So, how to stay in the drama free zone and still be committed to the greater good? A Polish idiom, of course.
Brene Brown has this rule involving a 1-inch square piece of paper. In her book Rising Strong, she outlines the method like this:
Take a 1-inch x 1-inch square of paper and make a list of people whose opinions matter to you – those people who love you, not in spite of, but because of your vulnerabilities and imperfections. If you need more paper, you need to edit.
And this 1-inch square method got me thinking that it’s pretty applicable to the way we run our business too. Try this on:
I don’t mean to spoil things here, but there are a few ways many of us are doing it wrong when it comes to business online. We…
…yell TOO BUSY! every time someone writes us an email that’s longer than 2 sentences and then delay responding for daaaaaaays.
…wrap ourselves up in how others are doing it (SHE HAS THIS WHOLE LAUNCH THING DOWN PAT).
…join every Facebook Group under the sun and then never introduce ourselves in a solid 78% of them.
…prioritize things like obsessively checking our inboxes, refreshing our Twitter feed, or finding that perfect custom photo filter that doesn’t quite look like it’s filtered at all, thankyouverymuch.
We essentially forget to be what we were born to be. Entrepreneurs? No.