Boost Your Visibility | Grow Your Business with Brenda Eckhardt
Resource for creative entrepreneurs seeking to grow their product or service-based businesses while prioritizing family and well-being. Hosted by Brenda Eckhardt, a successful photographer and brand strategist, this podcast offers the latest strategies and how-to's to increase online visibility, work smarter, avoid burnout, and find inspiration for both professional and personal growth.
Boost Your Visibility | Grow Your Business with Brenda Eckhardt
Balancing Ambition with Contentment: Strategies for the Smart Entrepreneur
Are you feeling overwhelmed while navigating your entrepreneurial journey? Do you find it difficult to balance your growth with personal well-being? As an entrepreneur, understand the struggle of balancing ambition with contentment. Join me as we explore surefire strategies to maintain this balance, avoid self-sabotage and keep moving forward.
Prepare to be empowered as we dive into the significance of self-reflection and setting intentional goals. We'll chat about identifying your current season in life and business, and how this understanding can spur growth. We share insights on establishing routines for success, boosting visibility and connecting with others for motivation. The discussion will inspire you to create guilt-free space for yourself and maintain momentum in achieving your goals. Whether a seasoned high performer or a budding newbie, this episode is your catalyst for working smarter, evading burnout, and maintaining positivity.
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Boost your Visibility is for you, the creative entrepreneur who has a product or service-based business that you need to grow while keeping your family and your well-being top priority. I'm your host, brenda Eckhart, photographer and brand strategist. Boost your Visibility empowers you with the latest strategies to help you get more traffic on search and social. But this isn't your typical business podcast. There won't be pressure to do more, more, more or hustle, hustle, hustle. Instead, I'm giving you strategies and systems to help you work smarter so you can avoid burnout and be more present in your everyday life. Here you'll find motivation, inspiration and all that you need to keep your work and your life moving in a positive direction. Let's get started. Welcome to Episode 2 of Boost your Visibility. I have a question for you. Have you ever heard the saying you have to slow things down in order to speed them up? That's the theme of today's episode. I would like to talk to you about your visibility, and I don't mean online or in the outside world. I mean, are you giving yourself the time and space to be visible to yourself? That sounds like a woo-woo rhetorical question, but it is important to put the first things first, which is you, and to give yourself the time and space and breathing room to really figure out what it is that you would like to have more of in your life and for the people around you, the people that you love the most. So the questions that you would answer for yourself in order to move from there are what season are you in? I'm bringing these questions to you because and I'm backing up a little bit I find that business owners and managers marketers find resistance when they don't have the answers to these questions and they're not giving themselves the space to think this through. And this needs to be the foundation of where you go next. And this might just be a check-in If you're at an advanced level, you're a higher performer already. We all need to go through this every few years, if not every year, just kind of a self-check-in of where am I and where do I want to be. So what season are you in? Do you have young kids that you are just super busy and you are working hard every day to try and get all the things done and just be present for them? If that's the case, give yourself grace. That is the season that you're in and there is no more important place to be. You can always grow something later. You can grow it slowly, piece by piece, a little bit. After the kids go to bed, some computer work, for example, for myself. I did not process images from my photography business until my kids were talked in bed and I knew they were sleeping. I spent two hours processing and then the next morning early morning I would be out photographing. My husband would be home with the kids. I'd come back when they got up in the morning. Then I was in mom mode and I gave them the time and attention they needed when they went to school. The same thing. It worked around our life and my motherhood, and that is perfectly OK. And you know what? The business grew at the pace that I set for it and it was very intentional.
Speaker 1:And I think intention is often missing when we're working, growing or just have a dream that we're thinking about. We need to give it breathing room and space to really figure out what steps we're going to take to get there. Or is it time to use the old farmers saying, let your field go fallow. Maybe you've been in such a go mode that you're just emotionally and mentally exhausted. Maybe your team is not in the best place right now and you need to just give yourself more space every day to just think, go for a walk, ride a bike. It sounds very remedial, very elementary and I'm sorry, but that is what works is just giving yourself the space.
Speaker 1:For me, I think of it as being a teenager. I don't know if you have a teenager at home, we're just fresh out of that stage, thank the Lord. But when my son had his hood up, if you have a 13 to 17-year-old boy, you know when they have their hood up and their earbuds in, it's don't talk to me time. We know, just don't talk to them. We didn't talk to them when he took his earbuds out or he had his hood down. We knew, ok, good mood, it's safe, we're not going to have the growly reaction. It's important to read the room, read the teenagers, read yourself of where you're at, and sometimes you do just need to have quiet time and more space and peace, and that might actually be your ultimate life goal in your work, and that's OK.
Speaker 1:Again, when I am working and coaching business owners, what I find is they're meeting resistance when they don't know that, when they haven't identified that. So are you in a season where you need to let your field go fallow. That could be for a month, it could be for six months, it could be just one week of no new business, and we'll get to that later. I'm actually going to make a note so that I don't forget to come back to that. So once you've figured that out like, do I have the space and the capacity to grow this dream or build this business, or focus on my social media or focus on growing my email list? Or if I don't, that's OK, let's put it on the calendar to revisit.
Speaker 1:The next question you'll want to ask is do you want contentment or do you want to grow? Do you want to build? I think a lot of people think that they want to grow their business, they want to build their business, they want you know more, more, more. But really what they want is peace and contentment and a comfortable life. And if you're at that stage, it's important to identify that and maybe even verbalize that for yourself, write it down. Whatever your way of having you know affirmations are, because it's not fair to the people around you If you present in a way that you're growing a business and you have a team or you have help and you are mentally checked out. Because you want peace, you need that space.
Speaker 1:You haven't given yourself the breathing room to figure out what it is that you really really want. That is a budding of heads that will continue and will be a theme, and when you don't figure that out, what ends up coming in are limiting beliefs. Well, it's just that you know we're, you know, down to employees. Or I'm waiting for my kids to graduate from high school and then I'll start. Or you know I don't want to put myself on video, I'm waiting to lose that last 10 pounds.
Speaker 1:I believe that limiting beliefs come from you not being clear about what it is that you, what stage you're in and what you want for your goals. Like what you want for yourself, are you in a place of wanting to grow or do you just want a peaceful, content life and that is so. Okay if that's what you want, and you need to identify that and know that you're kind of in maintain and coast mode, and then that is where you just build systems to automate and life will get easier and more peaceful and you will have that space for vacations, weekends at the cabin, whatever life it is that you define as peaceful and comfortable. You can build that and have that done If you're looking to grow and expand your business. That's also important to voice to your team or to have you know, as a note in the back of your mind, that you're in that mode, because again, it's not fair to yourself or anyone else if you haven't said you know, you haven't used the word I'm growing this thing, because again the limiting beliefs will come.
Speaker 1:If you haven't said I'm growing this or, for me, you know what I want to reach more people. It's time I've had my, my moment in the sun. Locally I've had a great, wonderful, full photography business, a full coaching business, a full marketing business. Locally. I have a lot of helpful talents that I can expand and help even more people. So I am doing a podcast, repurposing it for YouTube reels, blah, blah, blah. I have a whole success path that I've built around the fact that I am now in grow mode. If I didn't identify that, I would never have even started this.
Speaker 1:So identifying where it is that you are and where you want to be really will help you to get clear on where you're going to meet your goals. Otherwise, again, it's just like the limiting beliefs creep in, no matter which way, if you're not clear, you don't have that clarity. You haven't given yourself the space, the breathing room and the time. So how do we do? That is the question. For me, and for pretty much everybody I've worked with, it is redefining your day and having a few rituals or habits that help you to set the tone for what your successful day is going to be. For me, that's getting up, it's stretching very intentionally, going for a walk, coming back, often going to Starbucks bad habit but that drive, I'm telling you, is my Zen zone. That is where I think I may listen to my favorite podcast.
Speaker 1:I start to make my to-do list in my head of what it is that I want to do for the day. What do I want to accomplish or what do I want to start. And then when I come back usually about 10 o'clock in the morning, from 10 to 4, I am as productive as someone who is working from 7 am to 7 pm. I guarantee it hands down because I'm clear, I know exactly what I need to do and in what order I need to do it, because I have my goals, I know what season I'm in, I know what intention I have and I have a plan. So be fair to yourself and giving yourself that space for clarity so that you know where you are. You don't have to be someone that is the grower, the entrepreneur, the person that is the visionary. If you're someone who likes to be the implementer and maybe work under someone that has the dreams and the goals and aspirations and you help that to come to life, that's great. It's fair to you to identify that so that you're not accidentally plugged into the wrong zone of genius.
Speaker 1:It's important to really figure out where you are in that spectrum of grow versus contentment or grow versus. I want to help this to grow. So a great way to go about this is just changing your routine, trying to stick to it every day and then oftentimes changing your environment. Again, like I said, my drives are where I really can think clearly and the negativity of the news or the phone call or the email or whatever and it's not all negative, it's just it's the bogging down that all goes away for me when I drive or when I walk. For you it might be taking a shower, it might be reading a book and just kind of disconnecting. Whatever it is that you can do, the ultimate goal is to give yourself visibility for yourself.
Speaker 1:So the last piece that I want to touch on in this regard is are you self sabotaging? When you get to the point of starting, do you find all the reasons that you can't continue, is it? You know, I want to lose that last 10 pounds. I am waiting for it to feel right. I'm reading, waiting for that right coach or that perfect moment. I actually see this with the teenage. Well, the 17 to 25 year old age group. Right now, working with high school seniors the other part of my business Wow, I am not putting everybody in this category, that's that age but I will tell you that many are getting very stuck because they're waiting for the perfect scenario, the perfect idea, the perfect job or career. This college doesn't feel quite right, but I can't put my finger on it. If you have someone in that age group, you probably know what I'm talking about and they might even benefit from listening to this episode.
Speaker 1:Because once you're clear with where you are and where you want to be, you decide to put in the work or to be uncomfortable and not let those limiting beliefs or that self sabotaging happen. And it happens when you're at an introductory level of life and career, and it happens a lot. When you're going into a new season, a new stage, you're leveling up hugely If you're finding that you had a lot of success and you were doing really well and something happened in life, whether you got stuck or, let's say, you lost a family member or the health crisis or whatever, and you just lost your routine, your motivation, your mojo, whatever the case, those limiting beliefs creep in real fast and you start to self-sabotage. When you get to a certain point you're just starting and you're starting to see some good things happen and you decide well, maybe I'm not quite ready. Well, maybe it isn't the season or the time right now. Those things come in because you haven't identified all the other things that we just talked about.
Speaker 1:So I hope that you use this episode to just give yourself some time to think where am I now and where do I wanna be? What season am I in? Is it possible? Maybe it's not the season for you right now, or maybe it's the absolute perfect time and you need to get past all of those limiting beliefs and not let the self-sabotaging happen. And I want to maybe define a little bit about the self-sabotaging, because I don't think it's as those words sound, so aggressive, and like self-sabotaging, like, let's say, it's weight loss and you're going to the cupboard and just stuffing all the food in your mouth. I actually don't think self-sabotage looks like that most of the time.
Speaker 1:I think self-sabotage is little microaggressions against ourselves, just little things that we do to not make it possible. And it could be. Let's use the example of having your daily routine, getting up in the morning. Let's say for you it's going outside and grounding in the grass. Well, you got up and decided today is not that day, you're not interested, and you're gonna just sit down at your computer, open up your phone and start looking through everything.
Speaker 1:That's a microaggression or self-sabotage that takes you away from your goal. It's not huge, it's not big and scary and ultimately, is it a big deal? No, is it something that takes you off course? 100%, which is why, personally, I call them little microaggressions against yourself. Because you're not following through on your daily routine, you're not following through on your goals, you're not giving yourself the time and visibility that you need to be able to fill your own cup and be the best you can be for everybody else. One huge, huge piece.
Speaker 1:That is probably a podcast for another day is what other people think, and this is a good note for me to end on, because I want you to think about this. A great example is Queen Elizabeth. Look at who she was and all she stood for in her life, all that she represented with her country, and she passed away earlier this year. When is the last time you thought about her or the fact that she passed probably a week after, maybe when it was still in the news? What you think will be judged or important to other people, or torn apart or not good enough or whatever. It is not enough. People forget about it in a day. If they made a judgment, let them let them make their judgment. As Mel Robbins says, let them Look it up. If you haven't seen her TikTok or Instagram reel about it, let them think what they wanna think.
Speaker 1:You continue to work towards your goals because you know what. If you're clear, you know exactly where you are, where you wanna be, what season you're in, you get your routine in place. You give yourself that time, space, breathing room and visibility. No one's gonna get in the way of your goals. Their opinions don't matter and this sounds terrible, but I guarantee I'm not that important. You're not that important to a random person on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or whatever thread.
Speaker 1:Keep moving forward with what it is that you wanna build. Keep moving forward with your goals. Let the rest just be what it is, and keep moving forward. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. If you wanna connect on another level, meet with me on Instagram. Just follow me there and you'll see my everyday. You'll see inspiration and motivation that I post. I look forward to staying connected with you. If you saw this episode, please put it in your stories or tag me and let me know if this was helpful for you. I'd love to hear from you if this brought you any more clarity. So please follow this podcast, make a comment and let me know what you think, and I will see you on the next episode of Boost your Visibility.
