Setting Your 2025 Photography Road Map

Welcome to the Cowgirls with Cameras podcast. I'm Kim with Kim Beer Photography and Be More Business.

Cara with Fast Horse Photography.

Sorry. Oh hi, I'm Phyllis with Phyllis Burchette Photo.

Are you okay, Phyllis?

I just typed something in and I thought that Cara was laughing at me, but okay.

No.

we never laugh at you just with you. So what have you all been up to in the last five minutes?

Okay.

I have been planning for our big Horses on the Beach gathering. So yes, in last five minutes, I was just looking over. In my office, I have a bathroom. And in that bathroom has a door. What are those frames? A door frame. And then hanging on that door frame are like 50 % of the looks for Horses on the Beach. So I have like bits and pieces of looks hanging over there.

in the last five minutes.

you

So yes, that's what I've been doing is one of my Etsy orders is late and it hasn't arrived yet. And we desperately need this like ruffled shirt. So that's what I was doing the last five minutes. And that's honestly what I've been doing all week too. So yeah. Yeah. But the shirt should be here. It should be here in time.

Is that for Chris Kirsten? I'm excited.

super bummed. I made the big hard decision not to go and this is going to cause me massive amounts of FOMO over that week. But it will be fine. It will be fine. I will be fine. I will be fine. Yes, Art of the Cowgirl is not far off. It is not far off.

Yeah, it'll be okay. We'll miss you, but it'll be okay. We'll see you like a month later at Art of the Cowgirl.

I'm gonna miss you. Yeah.

And with the way our weather is looking, I probably would not be able to make it to an airport anyway. It is like miserably cold and we have more snow coming. We already have snow, although not as much as the weather app seems to think that we have. I don't know who is doing their measuring in Ballard, Missouri, but whoever they are can't read a can't read a ruler, but they're standing in a drift. Something is something is awry because it's not nearly what they

They're standing in a drift.

said, but it is still a.

They used chat GPT to tell them what the weather was going to be.

It is a significant amount of snow and ice, however. And last night, so I blanket my old men horses because I worry about them. And because they're all in their late 20s, early 30s. And to me, it seems cold out there. I take extra care of them. And they all are in my barn where I do my equine gestalt work. So this time of year, it's a wreck in there.

And but last night we went out to check on them after midnight. And after I was done with my gaming and I had my little headlamp on and Nick went with me and everywhere you look the snow was just sparkling in the headlamp and it was very pretty. It was a very magical and then the ice on all of the trees has made it a winter wonderland outside an evil one that you will fall and bust your ass on but it's beautiful.

Aww. Very pretty, I bet.

look at from the far. So that's been what I've been up to over the last few days is just dealing with the storm and with all of the fallout of ice and snow and having livestock in that in that type of weather.

Yeah, kind of a I'm at a little bit. I even hate to mention cold weather here in Georgia after Kim reminded me that.

hers was like nine degrees. When I woke up this morning, it was like 58 degrees and it is already 30 degrees now. That was, and it's three o'clock in the afternoon. So we saw our high temperature this morning at 8 a.m. So, and it's supposed to get increasingly worse through the week and then we may have some wintry mix by Friday and Saturday. But, I know.

It's dropping. Wow.

my word, Georgia may just shut down.

You got a horse lined up to photograph in that wintery mix?

Well, we never get anything much on this side of Atlanta. So if they get any, it'll be probably the west side and north. North Georgia could actually be really pretty in the snow. But yeah, and then the only other thing I'm doing is getting ready for horses on the beach. I've already got a bunch of stuff piled up in my truck. Yeah. We're going to need.

as I text you, we're going to need the hats. We're going to need the wild rags. Where's that fur coat?

Good.

Here we are.

And so last week's episode gave you some great exciting things I think to think about around that. But action, mean, sorry, vision or, or goals without action just doesn't get you anywhere. And so you've got to take the action. You've got to get on the journey, get on the road and hopefully it won't be covered in ice like ours are right now. But anyway, okay. So what I want to talk with you about is.

how to start the process of actually executing on the goals you dreamed up the last time around. And Kira is going to break this down further, but I'm going to talk to you about some big picture things that I think are super important. And one of those things is coming to terms with who you are and your temperament. So,

one of the most freeing things of my entire life was understanding that the way that I approach work, goals, success, check marks is different than probably what we would consider the norm. And when I tried to force myself into what like all of the planners say, what all of the accountability coaches say, what what some of the books say,

I fail because I don't approach things in the same manner. I do it differently. And once I started learning, different isn't wrong. So that's probably the biggest takeaway I had from that is different isn't wrong. It just simply is another approach. And when I worked with the approaches to achieving my goals that worked for me, it's great. I personally do not do good with accountability calls.

Like having somebody who asks me to check mark off everything I've done and give progress reports to be honest with you, it triggers childhood trauma that I have mostly dealt with, but now is just to the part where it really makes me angry and not at myself, at other people. So I don't do well in that situation and understanding in myself that

for yourself, like what works for you. And if you don't know the answer to that question, if you don't know how to answer it, get curious about finding out. Take temperament tests. Look at, and I recommend take them all. Take the Kirsi Bates, take the Myers-Briggs, take the disc, take the Enneagram, take whatever ones that you can have. Look at your astrological chart if you're into that.

Throw down some tarot cards. mean whatever works for you boo Do it start to really explore who you are and how you show up to things and Because as soon as you start to modify How you do how you achieve your goals to work for you? You'll be much more successful to me also

understanding the vision and we talked a lot about this last week. So I'm not two weeks ago, I'm not going to talk about it a lot. But if you don't know where you're going, it's really hard to know when you get there. So you do need to have an idea of where you're going. The biggest thing for a lot of people out there and I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast are women and women tend to create their visions for other people. Please do not do that. And

I wished someone would have imparted this information to me as a much younger woman. So if you're particularly a woman under 30 listening to this, it doesn't need to be about other people. It needs to be about you. When you create a vision for you, all of the sudden, the visions of everyone around you bloom. So it's okay for you to choose things that are good for you. And when it comes to your photography,

A lot of us, for a lot of us, our photography is very personal. It may be a business, but it's also personal. So choose projects that are for you as part of your goal, as well as for other people. And make sure that is a focus for you. Two final little pieces of information or two bits of wisdom that I have from all of these gray hairs on my head that you guys now can see in video, hopefully.

one is dream bigger than you think is possible. Please do not put a limit. Don't, don't put a limiter on what your dreams can be. Don't let that voice inside your head that says that that's wonderful. And maybe somebody else could do that, but you need to pull it back a little bit. Don't do that dream big. And I, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, if you shoot for the moon and you miss at least land among the stars. So

a take that attitude a lot. And then the final piece is, is don't hold yourself accountable to a dream that no longer works for you. So, you know, try it on, walk with it. And I'm a big proponent of the thing that if you don't brand yourself or show up as the person you are, show up as the person you want to be, show up as the person in your vision, like it's already done deal. And you know what, if that

feels like lousy or it's not something that you want to do. Hey, it didn't get carved in some stone somewhere and says you have to do it. You can change it. Erase it. You know, it's funny. I do crocheting and I learned a new term recently. It's called frogging. So whenever your crochet project goes bad and you do some stupid like miss a stitch, you can frog. You pull it apart.

until it is unraveled back to that stitch and then you start over again. So and sometimes you frog the entire thing and start over from scratch. It's totally okay. You can frog your vision. That's a new term.

I know it's my turn to talk, the UPS guy just came and this is what it sounds like when that happens. So we'll just leave this here for just a moment. Yes, one is low pitch and one is high pitch. they really harmonize.

You have a chorus going on in your house.

you

the singing of the dogs.

How is Frankie doing by the way? Good, good.

She's doing great since her surgery. Thank you for asking. She's got about five weeks left of physical therapy and she's doing amazing. So you'll get to see her in a couple weeks. So we'll get to see her. So my part of talking about goals is talking a little bit about the step-by-step. And I like that I get to talk about this because a couple of things. First of all, I am someone who struggles with big goals. If I've got a...

Big idea, something that I really want to accomplish for the year. A lot of times I can become paralyzed to move forward if I don't have stepping stones in place and I can't see a clear path to get there. Another thing that I'm going to mention here is that I failed spectacularly at my goals last year. I had a long list, more than three as Kim recommends. I had a big long list.

And then some things in my world just kind of shifted. And like Kim said, I needed to make some changes to my vision for that, for the year. And I really had to, I had to take a step back and some things had to go to the bottom of the list. And so when I sat down to work on my goals for this year, I laid out those goals and I really decided for me that this year was going to be a year of refinement.

And maybe that's my word. don't know. I didn't come up with a word last year, but a refinement. And so that's kind of where I was going with that. But for me, going back to the stepping stones, as someone who really struggles to complete larger goals, if I can't see a clear path, I need to look at those big goals and I need to break those goals into like three or four, what I would call big major steps in order to start.

Maybe that's your word.

really kind defining what that path is gonna look like for me. Then I have to take it a step further and I have to take all those big major steps for that big goal and I have to break them down into even more like three or four manageable smaller little baby steps. And if there's even more steps underneath each one of those, that's okay. And sometimes I will...

list out all those little teensy-tinesy baby steps underneath that. Because if you're someone like me who likes to check things off a list and feel that sense of accomplishment, like you can actually see the progression towards a goal, this is one way you can really do that. Because you can see that you're making those steps to complete things, even though you're not bouncing along on the great big massive steps. You actually have to schedule when you're gonna work on your goals too.

It can't just be you put them up on the wall or you put them a minor in a spreadsheet document. You can't just put them in that spreadsheet document and then never look at it again. And I have fallen into that before. I have the big ideas. I put them on the sheet and then I don't look at it again until it's like accountability day when I have to tell somebody how I'm doing with my goals. So this works really well when you want to break them down. I have to schedule though when I'm going to work on my goals.

And then also when I expect to be finished with each of those little baby steps. So that big ass wall calendar that I have, I might put on there that I'm gonna do these little tiny to-dos on that day. And that could be something as simple as I'm gonna research something or I'm going to identify the resources that I need. It could be something super simple, that's, it's scheduled, it's calendared and I can mark it off the list.

And then I'm just gonna come back, because we talked about this a lot on our last episode, but the last little piece here is you've got to check in on your goals to make sure that you're actually working on them. And I, like I said, I failed at that last year. I really struggled with it. And, you know, there were some that I really, really struggled with. And a lot of that is because I made the intention, I set that intention out there, I put the goal out there, but I didn't do this work on some of those big ones to like really break it down.

So I'm off to a good start this year. I've done that work. I spent a lot of time last week doing that. So for me, you know, I was laughing about, were talking about sharing goals this year, and I will say there were a couple of the goals that I set for myself last year that are on this year's list, because I wasn't able to get to them last year. They were rollovers, but this year I have a plan. So I have them broken out and I have a plan. So that's all I want to add to that.

Yeah.

Right. And then it's another place to be a failure if you didn't do it. Yeah.

My question would be, did you make any progress towards the goals that are showing up for this year? Even if it's a minute amount of progress. I sit with these entrepreneurs who come and they're in the business planning stages and planning businesses is one of my favorite things in the world to do. But I also understand that what's going to come after that is three to five years of a hell of a lot of work.

And you don't make milestones always on the date that you put down on a piece of paper. The universe does not understand that. The universe is like, OK, you have to get internally to the point that you can reach that goal. And that doesn't always happen on a calendar date. It doesn't always happen according to somebody's timeline either.

also think there's something to be said for, you know, and I think you mentioned a little bit up here, but creating goals that you think you should have versus goals that you really want to work on or that you really need or that is really, are really right for you. Because if there's a goal out there that I think I should have and I put it on my list, but I don't really feel it, like it's something I should be doing or that I'm not really sold on it yet. It's a real struggle for me to get started on it. You know?

Yeah, gotta ask who is this for? Is it for me or is it for somebody else? And businesses, my word, we are such bad habits about creating business goals that have nothing to do with us.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we're looking outside of ourselves all the time and outside of our businesses, you know, to what other people are doing and where we feel, think, this pressure to, you know, to stack up. And if this company that's in, you know, the same line of work that I am is doing this, maybe I should be doing it. my gosh. You know, and that's where you start. I think that's where you start to get in trouble.

I think what you just said though about about patting yourself up on the back for whatever progress no matter how small it is that you have made is so important because that's one thing I'm bad about not doing so I but I really think it is important to to celebrate successes even if they're small even if they don't meet the end goal yet they're working on it you know so that's really important

Yeah. Yeah.

OK, I guess it's my turn. I think it's funny that y'all gave me accountability.

Go Phyllis!

Well, there's reasons we do these things.

Sometimes there's a method to the madness.

Yes, because I...

Tell us what you learned. Tell us.

Finding an accountability partner, setting objectives, meetings, and making your goals public. Wow. That is also not me.

All good, thanks.

Okay, so first off, let's talk about finding an accountability partner. So since we're all photographers, I assume that's who we're talking to as photographers.

So obviously, a great accountability partner would be another photographer. Of course, they're going to be ideal for technical feedback, creative critiques, shared motivation. I know for me, I need more of an accountability partner for my business. So Denise Alvarez with Storm Lily Marketing is a big accountability partner for me because we meet once a week, a month, sorry, once a month.

And she keeps me on track. I've added doing a monthly blog post to my list of goals. just different things that she really keeps me on track for. And I do need probably another accountability partner in the whole scheme of things. I probably could really benefit from that. But we're going to start small. And Denise is my personal.

accountability partner. need a personal accountability partner is what I really need. And Karen, we had talked about doing that, but we never did. about our personal health goals and that kind of thing. But anyway, it could be a friend or family, which would be friends that might provide emotional support and help you stay on track with your deadlines. Or it could be an online community, just finding like-minded individuals and photography.

forums or social media groups or online courses that can help you with your goals and to stay on track and that kind of thing. You can find these people by reaching out and contacting potential partners via direct message and email or in person. You can schedule meet and greets. think I know a lot of our photographers from like Cottonwood and have done that. They've done they've got a great accountability group.

where they discuss their goals, just everything they want to do. And I think it doesn't even have to just be business or, and in their case, some of them aren't doing it as a business. They're just doing as a really enthusiastic hobbyist. they're talking about, they still have great goals about things they want to accomplish in their photography. so talking about your objectives or let

Yeah.

I think one really important thing is to set very clear objectives. of course, Kim talked about the smart goal framework net last week went to your goal setting. You can use that smart objectives like specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. think she called it something different, but they're all the same. examples to, I think categorizing your goals is something you should do too. And I think you said to only do three goals though, total, Kim?

But is that?

Yeah, any more than three, you can't get it done. Like

Okay, so when you say any more than three, like, does that mean you have three business goals, three personal goals and three or are they going to be one business goal, one personal goal and one? Okay.

In any given time, so this is, Covey, Franklin Covey, I think is the one who, who did this. I would have to say that that's probably where it comes from in my brain. It may not be the origination of it, but the studies do show that anytime you try to concentrate on more than three things, you have a really hard time doing that. Think about going to the grocery store. Like, do you ever go to the grocery store and you can think of the three things that you need to buy?

But if there's five things, you always forget one, right? So the way that we're kind of set up is that we can balance three things. But when you get more than three things, it gets really hard to remember them.

Yeah.

And so those three things, but like Cara said, they can be three big goals and then they're going to have a lot of sub steps. So if you wanted to make one business goal, one personal goal, one, I don't know, spiritual goal.

That would be a great thing to do. You would have three that way, and then you'd have smaller steps. So let's say your business goal is to add more clients to your photography business, then you can break that down and say, I want to have this many, quantify it, and then that's where you build your smart plan.

Well, yeah, it's like, for instance, categorize your goals by your area of life. So if you have technical, like, but be specific about it. Don't just say, want to get, I want to be, I want to be a better photographer. Maybe say, I want to master manual mode by, by a specific date, by practicing a specific technique or something every week. You know, maybe you have creative goals, like you want to

Good, yeah.

develop a personal photography project, exploring a particular theme that you're interested in by an end date, resulting in x number of images that you can put into your portfolio. And then business might be build an email list of such and such number of subscribers by a specific date through, you know.

consistent content creation and engagement also. And I liked, I don't know where I found this one, but I think this is really cool that they call it the four P's of goal setting, which for me would be really good, but staying positive, personal, possible. There's your word, Kim, possible and prioritized. Yeah. Yes. So I kind of like that. So, yeah.

I saw it.

Yeah, like you can actually do it. You can actually do it.

I like the idea of the positive piece of this. This is one place that I think a lot of people like, particularly with health goals struggle, they'll say I want to lose x number of pounds in a year rather than saying I want to achieve a healthy goal weight. So it's that in the health industry that when you work with a health coach, they'll a lot of times want you to reframe your goal into something positive. So if you're when you're looking at your

Yeah.

goals for your photography, make sure that you are making sure that those are positive, right? That you're keeping them on a moving towards a positive track rather than a reduction track. It has to do with NLP. And again, this all comes back to, in my opinion, it comes back to a lot of our subconscious and all of the ways that our collective conscious and culture work.

in that the way we perceive words, matters and what we say matters and what we write down and how we say it matters. And you need to be careful with that. You need to be cognizant of the fact that you're creating this for yourself. And it does need to be positive because we don't want to reduce in typical. We don't want to reduce our impact in any given area.

Yeah.

we may want to embrace it differently, but we want to keep mindful of positive and personal is so important because it's got to matter to you, not to everyone else, to you.

Excellent. Cool. Anything else anybody wants to add?

One thing I did want to add, I'm curious because I know, Carrie, you play around with AI a lot. Have you ever dumped one of your goals into like a chat, GPT or Claude and said, help me break this down into steps?

huh.

No, no, but I will try that with one of my goals that I have coming up. That would be fun to, that'd be a fun activity.

Well, I just think about a lot of people, like they have this notion about what they want. Like they've got the further part. But for people like me, who don't naturally break things down into step by step, we're not that kind of detail orientation. I'm wondering if AI, and I haven't tried this myself, but I'm wondering if AI could it be a benefit to say, here, here are some ideas on steps you might take to get to that goal. Like if you wanted to add

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would refine that question and add in like, are some things that I'm already doing, you know, and refine that question because I think what it could be really useful for is idea generation around that for sure.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's pulling on all of that knowledge that's out there in the world and being able to pull that in. Phyllis, do you ever play with the AI tools?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I used Gemini some and I just, as a matter of fact, that's funny that I just went and put down what you just said. I want to achieve a healthy goal weight and asked it to break it down for me and it really gave you some important good steps to do that. mm-hmm.

Absolutely. AI is a good partner in a lot of stuff. And I think that the way we are going to end up using this tool is way different from what our fears are. at least that's, I'm crossing my fingers.

fun.

I'm gonna look up, because I guarantee there's some really good, especially right now, goal step prompts that are probably out there. I'll see if I can find a good one that we can share with the community, because that would be a great thing we could pop on social for folks.

Yeah, how did steps you need to take to move from auto mode to manual mode on your camera. It would be an interesting little experiment. We'll play with that, y'all. We'll play with that.

love it. I love it. love it. Kim.

You could do a bingo card with that.

There you go. There you go.

I could do the bingo card with that. Meanwhile, if you would like to come explore some of your goals with us at an event, we would love to have you. If you're one of those folks that's really interested in moving away from auto and program over into the big we would love to have you at an event and we are a safe and I hope enjoyable place for you to explore your creative photography. So look to our

Yeah, Kim, can you tell folks real quick, since this is new for us to have video on YouTube, can you tell people where they can find if they if they're listening and they want to watch the show, where can they do that at?

Sure. Yeah, come to youtube.com forward slash Kimberly Beer and that will land you on my channel and I will have a playlist set up there. And of course with this episode, you're only going to have two but bookmark it, subscribe, whatever you need to do and it will you'll you'll be able to find those. Also, we will put the link to the video in the show notes.

for the audio episode. if you are listening to this on the standard audio programming, please know we're not doing anything fancy at this point with the video. It's more or less you just show up to see us. mean, there's like no, yeah, there's no visual. Yeah. There's no huge visual thing. And we're all still concerned that we're doing something stupid with our faces or.

You can see us giving eyes at each other, know, thumbs up and thumbs down if someone messes up, that kind of thing.

touching things we're not supposed to or looking off into the distance.

I haven't changed anything. I'm still drinking my caffeine and putting chapstick on apparently. I caught myself doing all of that during the video. So it's very awkward. You wanna see me being awkward? Here I am. Yeah, I'm trying to be better about that. I'm really trying. I will also make sure that for folks that are listening and wanna see the video that I'll also link it into our social pages, which if you wanna follow us online or join us online, we are at Cowgirls with Cameras on Instagram and Facebook.

Well, least you're not slurping like you have been known to in the past.

Yeah, probably about the time this comes out is about the time we'll all know that. that may not age well. But we'll have to see.

Yeah, that may just be a dream.

Yeah.

It sounds like it's going to be around.

My guess is that it's going to be around. So anyway.

Well, who knows? It's gonna be interesting to find out.

I mean, I did make the jump, so it better not take it away. Not very much. A very small jump.

Ooh, Phyllis made a jump. Phyllis made a jump. A very small jump.

I did see you had been posting. Good job, Phyllis.

I didn't leave any. Yeah, there you go. I hope that's...

Just in time for him to shut us down, Phyllis shows up. She's like, I'm new here, what's going on? And then it's like someone takes the giant light switch and cranks it off. You killed it, Phyllis. Way to show up and ruin it. It's over. All the fun we were having is over.

goodness. All right, you guys have a great rest of your day. Thank you all for hanging out. Bye.

All right, see you later.

Bye.