Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini-workshops and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do The ReWork.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi, friends, and welcome back to The ReWork. Today’s episode is going to be all about outrunning our fear, how to feel fear, but how to get out of fear as quickly as possible, because we all know fear can be debilitating. We’ve all heard the quotes about we have nothing to fear, but fear itself, that fear is bad, but I feel like sometimes fear is a little bit of a motivator, but we don’t want to be stuck in fear. So how do we not let it incapacitate us? How do we use it as a springboard? And how do we get out of that stuck place more quickly? So Kathryn Langsford from Photos By Kathryn in Vancouver, Canada joins us today to talk all about fear and getting out of it quickly. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. Back in The ReWork podcast studio, we have our favorite Kathryn Langsford from Photos By Kathryn in Vancouver, Canada.
Kathryn Langsford: Hello.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’m so happy that you’re here. Hello.
Kathryn Langsford: Thanks. I love being here.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that you’re here. One of the things that I wanted to talk about, well, what I want to talk about with you today, and I think you’re uniquely qualified to talk about this topic, is how to, as quickly as possible, get out of a fear mindset. I think we spend a lot of time talking about, thinking about all the damage fear can do, and I think that’s very widely known. If we really spend a lot of time thinking about all the negative things that fear can do, I just don’t even want to go there. I want to talk about when you fail it, when do you recognize that fear is taking you down, what are ways that you can get out of it?
Allison Tyler Jones: And the reason why I think that you’re uniquely qualified, first of all, you’ve been in business for more than 20 years. You’ve been through the 2008 crash. You’ve been through major health problems. You’ve been through deaths. You’ve been through hard kid problems. You’ve been through a lot of very, very difficult things as a primary breadwinner in your family, and you’ve had to have managed your fear many, many times over. So specifically for you, I want you to tell me, as quickly as possible, how do you manage to get out of fear?
Kathryn Langsford: I have had a lot of fear, a lot of experience with fear in my business, mostly financial. And what I’ve learned, what I do is first of all acknowledge it, instead of trying to run away from it or think my way out of it. I find the busier my head is the less productive I can be, and the less I’m able to see solutions. So the first thing I do is acknowledge it. Okay. I’m really scared about money right now, and I just accept that and not try to run away from it basically. And then the next thing I do is look for something that I can do immediately. There are some solutions or remedies to a financial problem, for example, that would take days or weeks or years. I need to look at what’s happening today. What can I do today?
Kathryn Langsford: So if the issue today is something that I can call the bank about, then I’m going to make a phone call to the bank today. If the issue today is I really need to collect money from these people and I’m too busy and I have too much stuff, then I just clear my morning and I figure out how to collect that money. Just slow things down and look at something I can do right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year. Things could drastically change for the better or for the worse. All I know about is what’s happening today. And again, what’s really important to me is that I slow down my mind.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I think that’s such a good tip because I find that when I get in fear and that hamster wheel starts up, I start forecasting, “We’re going to lose our house. We’re going to have to live in a van down by the river.” It goes to this end result that we’re not even there yet. We’ve just had a couple of slow weeks.
Kathryn Langsford: Absolutely. I go to worst case scenario in 30 seconds, and that, of course, intensifies the fear because it’s not just a couple of uncollected bills. I’m losing my house in my mind.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: So yeah, it’s important that I stay in today that I look at what’s happening today. There’s been times when it’s been so bad. I’ve had some pretty scary financial times, and there’s been times that it’s been so bad that I need to have a mantra because it keeps my mind quiet and it slows my head down because when my head is racing, I might do something stupid.
Allison Tyler Jones: Sure.
Kathryn Langsford: I might do something stupid out of panic or just reckless, right? And also, I can’t be productive. I can’t see the answers that are right in front of me when my head is whirling around a million miles an hour. So I might tell myself, “Today, everything is okay.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: Many times, that was my motto. “I just have to get through today, and today, everything’s okay.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Not losing my house today.
Kathryn Langsford: Exactly. Not losing my house today. The other thing I need to remember is that I’ve survived a hundred percent of my bad days. Like I said, there’s been bad times and I got through them. So odds are, I’m going to get through this one also. That’s really all I can do. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that today I’m sitting here, my lease is paid. I have work on the books, and that’s okay for now. So I’m not going to stress over not enough bookings in January or other things that are in the future that I can’t do anything about. I’m just going to look at what am I capable of doing today?
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and I think with our creative brains, that can work. It’s a double-edged sword. It can work for us. It can cut against us. It makes us creative in all the work that we do and our solutions and all of those sorts of things. It also makes us really creative in catastrophizing all the possible things that could happen. So we have to shut that part of it down. Just read recently on James Clear. I love his Instagram feed. He’s the guy that wrote Atomic Habits, and he recently posted this thing that said, “Different meanings can be assigned to the same events. So different meanings can be assigned to the same events. Look for evidence of how the world is encouraging you, and you will find it. Look for evidence of how the world is burdening you, and you will find it. Choose an explanation that empowers you.”
Allison Tyler Jones: And I just love that. And I have actually one of his quotes on my lock screen that says, “What is the most useful and empowering story I can tell myself about what is happening and what I need to do next?” So it’s that looking for evidence. We’re going to look for evidence of the story that we want to tell. So if we want it to be bad, we’re going to find the evidence for the bad. If we want it to be good, we’re going to find the evidence for the good. And what is the most useful and empowering story that we can tell ourselves about what’s happening and what we need to do next? So I love what you just said. You’re a perfect example of that.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s like, okay, quit looking at all the negative and all the bad things that can happen, and what can I do right this minute? And so then you get a couple thousand dollars in, and then somehow, you don’t feel so to the wall, and you have a little bit of money in the bank, and you can clear your mind and you can see, so then you can think about expansive marketing. Who can I reach out to? Rather than like, okay, I’ve got to shut my utilities down, or I’ve got to get another studio, or rather than things that you’re cutting off, you’re thinking in an expansive way rather than in a shrinking, contracting way.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. And again, when my head is hamster wheeling around about fearful content, I can’t think of those solutions.
Allison Tyler Jones: Sure.
Kathryn Langsford: I miss things that are right in front of my face. So when I slow down, sometimes what I’ll do is something very obvious like go through my database and see if anybody owes me money. And quite often, someone does. It’s something I kind of forgot about, or last week it wasn’t due yet, but now it is due. So that can come up, or I may also be reminded, I frequently like to just look at my list of client names, and then I’m reminded of things. For example, “Oh, yeah, that woman was building a house last year and she said that when her house was done, she wanted to do something.” So I may, if my mind is clear and calm, I can see those opportunities and remember those things. And when my mind isn’t clear or calm, I might be flailing around doing reckless things that aren’t good for me.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. Like come in for 65 mini sessions in one day.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah, exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: Crazy things. Okay. Another thing that you have said in past conversations is that… So you just said a minute ago that you survived a hundred percent of your bad days is I think it is helpful sometimes to go back, look back historically and realize like, “Okay, I’ve been through hard things before and I survived them, and it wasn’t a fluke. It’s not a fluke. I work hard. I’m talented. I love my clients. I’m putting good in the world, and I’ve survived hard things.” And then you kind of go back and look at some of those things that you’ve survived. Is that helpful to you?
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah, it totally is because I see it differently when I look back and when I sit and reflect, I remember how scared I was and how much time I spent catastrophizing and worrying that the worst was going to happen, and then it didn’t happen.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: And I’ve learned. I don’t let myself sit in fear the way I did it. Fear is a red flag for me now. When it comes up and it starts affecting the way I’m thinking and behaving, that’s a big red flag. I know that it’s not going to have any positive results, and I know that I need to do what I’ve learned to get out of that. And again, that’s to slow myself down. Stay in today. All I need to do is get through today. I don’t need to worry right now about what happens tomorrow. And tomorrow I may have a new opportunity that I don’t know anything about. So all I need to do is get through today and look at what is right in front of me.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. That’s so good for so many, not just business, but also just life.
Kathryn Langsford: Oh, yeah. That’s my whole life. That’s totally my whole life. You know, on a personal level, I’ve been through a lot of things, and that helped me during those periods too. I don’t need to worry about what’s going to happen in the future. All I can do is look at what’s happening today and today is manageable.
Allison Tyler Jones: What about, let’s go to fear of when you feel fear that you know you need to make a change in your business. For example, maybe raise your prices, maybe change the way that you’re working, and you’re really afraid you’re going to lose clients over it, or people aren’t going to like it, but you know you absolutely have to make this change. How do you, we’ve heard before, feel the fear and do it anyway? How do you do that?
Kathryn Langsford: I do that one phone call at a time. At the very beginning of my business, for some reason, I had no business training and no photography training for that matter. But anyway, at the very beginning, I raised my prices one phone call at a time. So I knew that for whatever reason, I had calculated that I needed to get to X dollars as my session fee, and I was well below that. So every time someone called, I would quote them as high as I could possibly dare quote them. And then if they were fine with that, I’d go a little higher with the next person. So that’s how I did it 25 years ago.
Allison Tyler Jones: Interesting.
Kathryn Langsford: But now what I do, until I got to my desired, what I did was I kept quoting higher and higher until people just started saying, “No, no, no, no.” And then I backed it off a bit. That was my big technical method back.
Allison Tyler Jones: That was your business plan?
Kathryn Langsford: That was in 2000. Yeah, 1999. But now what I do is sort of the same thing. I calculate, like we all do, calculate my prices based on where I need to be, profit margin, et cetera, and then I just dip a toe in the water, start quoting people those prices and see what happens. I’ve had a lot of experience where people don’t even blink. It’s just they don’t even notice. I’ve had other experiences where people repeatedly say, “Whoa, that’s a lot. That seems like a lot.” And then I know maybe I need to back it off a little just for this financial period, and then maybe try again in six months, because sometimes it’s connected to the financial current climate. So yeah, that’s how I do that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Interesting. I love that. Yeah. You’re definitely more intuitive on that than I am. For me, I felt like I had to… There was a time where I realized that, oh, I am not priced and I can’t actually have a sustainable business at these prices. And so I had to go through and raise everything, but still, it was absolutely one client at a time, but I would leave them that way for a while until I was like, okay, now I feel like that’s good, but now these prices have gone up, that price has gone up and I have more experience and we’re in a different space or whatever. And for whatever business reason or mental reason or value reason, I felt like the prices needed to up, then I would do that at that time. But that’s interesting. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way. I just think that that’s an interesting way to do it. You could do it either way.
Kathryn Langsford: Well, essentially, we’re doing the same thing. What’s the difference?
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, I wouldn’t go… I just think it’s pretty freewheeling and cool that you could be like, “Okay, then the next person that called, then I tell them this and the next one.”
Kathryn Langsford: Oh, at the beginning.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. At the beginning, I didn’t have any spreadsheets back then. It’s just not…
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re not in the spreadsheet era.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. And I just figured, okay, when they start saying no, that means it’s too much.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. That’s right.
Kathryn Langsford: I built my business based on instinct. I had no training. There was definitely times where that bit me in the ass. Excuse my language.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. And I had powered from those space.
Allison Tyler Jones: Assuming that you have to work weekends… Assuming you had to work weekends, there’s a lot of assumptions that we make, right?
Kathryn Langsford: Or just throwing a lot of money at something that was a total waste of money and didn’t do any good, or just so many mistakes. I didn’t know what I was doing. My whole model was to throw things at the wall and see if they stuck. I just did not know, but I learned as time went on. But that was one example of how I would try something out.
Allison Tyler Jones: But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Kathryn Langsford: I kept doing it until people say no.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. But the thing that I like about that, even if you don’t do it that way, okay, let’s just say, but the lesson of that to me is that for people that are afraid, fill in the blank of the change you need to make in your business that you’re afraid of here, whatever that is, whether it’s raising prices or changing shoot and burn to a product, selling in person, going to installations, whatever change it is, quit shooting weddings and go to only portraits, whatever it is that you’re thinking about changing in your business. So many people are waiting for this perfect plan to descend from heaven in a scroll that’s going to tell them, “Okay, first you do this and then you do this, and then you do this.” and it all works out perfectly and nobody ever questions you, and nobody ever gives you any pushback. And it’s like it doesn’t exist and it never will be. You’re always going to get pushback from somebody.
Kathryn Langsford: And you’re always going to mess up. You’re always going to make mistakes.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally.
Kathryn Langsford: You’ve got to be kind of thick-skinned in order to get through, especially the first few years. I still make mistakes now, absolutely.
Allison Tyler Jones: Of course.
Kathryn Langsford: But at the beginning, I was just running on instinct and sometimes getting it right and sometimes getting it horribly wrong. And I had lots of sleepless nights or nauseous stomach, just so upset about these mistakes that I had made. But I really had that cliche saying of “Every mistake is an opportunity to learn.”
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s true enough.
Kathryn Langsford: That’s true. It is true. And I had to see it that way, or I would’ve been completely flattened in terms of feeling like a failure, and this isn’t for me. But for some reason, at that early stage, I had the ability to see, I just am making mistakes because I don’t know how to do this. I just have to keep trying until I learn. And back then, there was maybe one online Facebook forum where you could ask questions to other photographers. Pretty much that was it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, yeah. I love photography.com.
Kathryn Langsford: Oh, I love photography.com. Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s how we met.
Kathryn Langsford: There was nothing else. There was outdated books written in the 60s, or there really was not a lot of resources. So first of all, I felt completely isolated and alone, and second of all, I had nothing to draw from in terms of how to do this. So I just really needed to keep trying things that I thought would work based on my own sensibilities and see if it worked.
Allison Tyler Jones: And I think sometimes people, photographers who’ve been in business for a while and have had some measure of success, we get a little bit comfortable and then we get where we don’t want to take a risk. So we kind of lose that scrappy. And so I think if you always have that at your core and recognize like, look, you’re very rarely going to do something that’s going to lose you all of your clients.
Kathryn Langsford: Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: Very rarely. That doesn’t involve the police. So some pricing change that you can retract or some policy that maybe not everybody loves or whatever, there’s ways to pull that back if you have to, but you don’t know until you try. And so sometimes we can let our fear of discomfort keep us from doing what we need to do to make our business grow, to expand, and to get to that next level that we’re trying to do.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. We got to be okay with making mistakes and with failing.
Allison Tyler Jones: And not looking like we got it all together and are totally perfect in every way.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah, absolutely.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. What else? Anything else, you have any tips for getting out of fear? We’ve talked about money, we’ve talked about making changes in your business. Any other fears that you’ve had about your business? I mean, really, I think it all pretty much comes down to money because why we’re in business, hopefully.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. There’s always the creative, but I don’t even know what to say about that. Sometimes I just feel like I’m no good.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, totally. Yeah. All you have to do is let’s update the website and then you’re just sitting there, like “I hate it. In every shot, I suck.”
Kathryn Langsford: I hate all my photos. How am I supposed to update it when I hate everything I’ve ever shot?
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. I remember in one of Annie Leibovitz’s books, she goes, “Yeah, I feel like in the last year, I probably have one image that I liked.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, we’re in good company then.”
Kathryn Langsford: If it goes that way, then we’re okay.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, then we’re good. I love that. I love that. Okay, so summarize then, to get out of fear, let’s go back and look to…
Kathryn Langsford: To get out of fear, ground yourself in what’s happening in the immediate future, what’s happening in today?
Allison Tyler Jones: Today. Okay.
Kathryn Langsford: Take 24-hour segments at a time.
Allison Tyler Jones: You also said just accept that you are in fear.
Kathryn Langsford: Accept that you’re afraid.
Allison Tyler Jones: Recognize it.
Kathryn Langsford: Instead of trying to run away from it and deny it, avoid it. You’re frantically trying to come up with solutions that are just out of panic. Just admit, I’m afraid right now. I’m feeling really scared. I’m really afraid about not having enough money or not being able to make this payment I need to make or not making as much as they made last year. Whatever the fear is, admit it, and then look for some immediate actions that you can take, which could be very simple. They could be really not a big deal.
Allison Tyler Jones: Not a huge marketing campaign.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. Not a marketing campaign, not a sudden knee-jerk marketing campaign. I recommend against those. And then just remember, you’ve survived maybe worse before, but even if it’s not worse, you’ve survived everything hard that’s happened to you before, and you’re going to survive this also, and you really don’t know what’s going to happen. So even if you’re not able to pay X bill that you’re worried about, you don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of that. It could go any number of ways, and we can’t control the future. We just need to look at today.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. Such a good reminder and so many good takeaways there. You’re the best and a good example to me in all of those areas.
Kathryn Langsford: You’re the best.
Allison Tyler Jones: Thank you so much.
Kathryn Langsford: Bye.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram @do.the.rework.
