How to Awaken Your Confidence with Photography; My Interview with Nashville Voyager
How does photography awaken your confidence? What are the obstacles entrepreneurs face while launching and maintaining a business? And how do you discover your worth to increase your abundance? These are some of the exciting subjects I delve into in my interview with Nashville Voyager.
Earlier this month, Nashville Voyager, a local agency that promotes creatives and small businesses, featured my business Judith Hill Photography.
During this creatively like-minded interview, I shared my purpose for honoring and celebrating the lives I am grateful to capture. I also shared personal challenges I had to overcome, why I became a photographer, how I discovered my self-confidence and many more entrepreneurial and artistic goodies.
If you are an artist, entrepreneur, or both, I’d love to share a few highlights from our interview to empower you to awaken your confidence with photography and reach success.
Harnessing your innate power
What is my purpose in life? Finding the answer to this question is often a life’s mission for many, especially in a fast-paced society that is pulling us in multiple directions at once. But the meaning of life is to find meaning in life; the purpose of life is to find purpose. I didn’t find my purpose immediately. It took doing the internal work to find mine and like most of us we don’t do that work until something happens and for me it was being in an unhealthy relationship for a long time. I also had a different career for a longtime and when you are at the same job for a while, the joy and ebb and flow.
Before I held my first camera at 29 years old, I felt unseen. Through the surrender of photography and all its freedom of creative expression, I not only saw the world from a different perspective, but I discovered myself. The moment I began to capture others, in their innately beautiful form, a journey of self-discovery began unfolding.
Photography bridged the connection between what I thought I lost in myself and what I could help others find. This art form is more than capturing images. It is a series of vulnerable moments that teaches us to value ourselves as we are beyond the lenses of societal judgment and inner criticism. It mirrors the confidence and beauty we all possess and reveals the truth that we are more capable than we realize.
It’s not the photos that I fall in love with, but the evolving grace and raw power behind the lenses. When I provide the entire experience on a shoot (hair, makeup, and multiple outfit changes), I witness a magical unfolding of a woman’s inner confidence and radiance coming alive. They learn to fall in love with themselves and rediscover how special they are. Photography is a gift that captures the beauty and harnesses the innate confidence we all have.
After I witnessed photography guide each client on their path of rediscovery, I knew it was my purpose to help countless other women feel seen, heard, and valued. Their trust and vulnerability in my talents allowed me to trust, value, and love myself. I no longer needed to seek fulfillment or love externally; I realized I had it within myself all along.
To harness your purpose, connect to yourself, discover what values drive you, and search inward. That is where your find purpose. Everything you need is within yourself.
Discover your worth
While building my photography business, I experienced a continuum of challenges and moments where I doubted myself. But when I shined the light internally, I realized discovering my worth and value hold the key to my success, both personally and professionally.
I know firsthand that as an artist entrepreneur, pricing and knowing when to raise your services is not a comfortable situation.
It often resurfaces our insecurities, limiting beliefs, and fears and causes us to question whether or not we deserve a life of abundance. And to make matters worse, if you feel you are not good enough, your prices will reflect that internal struggle.
To succeed, you need to complete the inner work to reveal why you may undervalue your expertise, why you determine your self-worth by your achievements, and why you set excessive goals in a limited timeline.
This work is a critical component to discovering your worth and pricing your services accordingly. We need to look inwards to discover our worth, appreciate our value, and charge what we deserve. We all possess extraordinary skills that the world deserves, but we need to love ourselves before we create a reality of abundance that matches our worth.
Connect to your inner resilience
To not short-change our services and prevent our sneaky subconscious from sabotaging our success, we need to address our mindset around money.
Your worth and value cultivate external reflections in your business. If you fear failure or rejection, your prices will reflect those limiting and subconscious beliefs.
By connecting to the service you provide to others and by connecting to the art you create, you can build your resilience and learn to value your talents.
In your journey of self-worth, discover and address how you feel about receiving and spending money.
Ask yourself questions, how do I feel about failure? Do I often second guess my pricing because I am afraid to fail? Do I often fear rejection? How is my fear of rejection showing up in my business?
Whether you experience low self-worth, discovering what is holding you back will not only allow you to clear up any discomfort surrounding your pricing, but it will allow you to recognize and appreciate your inner resilience.
Develop a schedule for success
Small businesses and freelancers need to learn to maximize their available time by adopting productive habits, including time management. Optimizing your productivity levels and learning to value your time will help you overcome possible setbacks and repel forward.
As a creative, I get easily distracted. Email distracts me. Social Media distracts me. Heck, hunger distracts me. So, I had to learn how to manage and value my time wisely. Time is the only resource that in not renewable. Time is your true currency, so managing it wisely is to your benefit and to avoid burnout, we need to outsource, time block, and focus on our zone of genius.
Since I opened my business, I focused my efforts on managing the stress associated with accomplishing goals. In an achievement-fueled society, we become discouraged if we don't achieve our goals in an accelerated manner. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by the bigger picture, your timeline, or your expectations, focus on your thoughts, practice positive habits, and change your energy to help others.
When you focus your efforts internally and create an environment that provides a mutual service to the world and yourself, your actions will reflect this change and produce powerful results.
Lean on your community for support
Shifting your mindset is easier to maintain with the help of a strong support system. Having a supportive community provides a helping hand through hardships, motivates you to grow, and has your best interests at heart.
When you connect to a team of individuals who experience similar pain points to yourself, it makes you feel less alone and creates more humility. It teaches you we are all interconnected and experience moments where we fear failure, self-doubt, and question our position in life.
Thankfully, from a business standpoint, there are also several support networks you can join in any field.
To empower my confidence and self-worth amid the hardships, I joined a women's entrepreneurship community and an international photography community where both communities focus on a unification of elevating one another to succeed.
If you require a supportive dose of friendship and business support, please check out BrainTrust and Sue Bryce Education. We all deserve and need a supportive network who applaud and root one another to excel.
Embrace the beauty of aging
As I embrace the next chapter of my life and career, I want to celebrate the beauty of women. I recently turned 40, and instead of allowing society to punish me for getting older, I decided to embrace my age. At 40, I am more confident and feel more beautiful than I did in my twenties. Each woman deserves to feel this surge of self-appreciation at any age.
In an age of filters and social media highlight reels, I want to pause the self-comparison and celebrate who we are today. I want to start a conversation about the beauty of aging and alter the world’s perception surrounding youth and beauty standards. It’s time we peel back unfair expectations and discover our innate power, grace, and confidence. We are beautiful at every age, and we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged.
In my 40 over 40 project, I am searching for 40 women who are at least 39-65+ to empower, elevate, and celebrate in a contemporary portrait session.
The development of this project will end early next year with a celebratory achievement of a book and party. To join the conversation or to be photographed, please learn how you can embrace your authentic beauty at any age.
Let’s awaken your confidence
Self-love empowers you with the mental resilience to persevere, conquer obstacles, and accomplish the vision you have for yourself. When you learn to love yourself, it creates a ripple effect that positively impacts every dimension of your life.
Through the lenses of my camera, I capture and witness the unfolding of this ripple effect in my clients. Each session, I graciously observe women reconnecting to themselves. Their photos are a reminder of the extraordinary beauty and confidence they reawakened.
If you’ve ever felt unimportant or not enough, engaging in a day of self-care is your right.
Rediscovering and acknowledging how beautiful you are, internally and externally, is a powerful experience that we can all awaken. It’s a moment of pure, unfiltered joy and happiness to fall back in love with yourself and appreciate yourself for exactly who you are.
Allow the team at Judith Hill Photography to give you a life-changing session to embrace your individuality for a life of self-love, appreciation, and confidence.
If you’re interested in continuing this conversation, booking a photo shoot, or learning more about your photoshoot options, please let me know using the link below.
We are centered around providing an amazing service.
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