I am still flying high because of a top-secret marketing event I took my 3 kids and my college intern to last week.
There were only 800 people at the event, but I snuck a few of my big takeaways out for you so that you can use them in your photography business right now.
All three of my kids were able to go this year, and we took a bonus kiddo, Sammy.
Sammy is my intern, and she has been for three years.
It was great to watch these four young people just explode with ideas, and the speakers were all tailored to families.
My mentor is just like me.
He is big into family first, so finances are important to him so you can put your family first.
It was amazing because never have my kids been to a conference where people are talking about making money so that you can do cool things in your life as a family.
I think what I loved the most was to see them realize what it’s like to be around other high-level entrepreneurs.
I think so many times, we get stuck in our rut and we don’t invest in ourselves or think bigger.
We don’t surround ourselves with people who we want to be like and who are like us, and who share our thoughts and feelings.
I always say get in the room with people who are where you want to be and whose core values align with yours.
I am just still flying high, because I got to learn and they got to learn, and we got to hang out together and have great conversations.
Here are a few of my big takeaways.
1. Stop thinking you already know it
I sat in the audience, and my mentor taught something I’ve heard him teach at least a dozen, if not multiple dozen times.
It was basic, but instead of sitting there with my arms closed, I listened, and I let it hit me on a different level.
It’s funny, because so much of the time we get stuck in the “I already know that” trap and we shut ourselves off.
You may have heard something 50 times, and the 51st time is the one that hits you in a different way and you really understand what something means.
Even though you may know it, you may not be living it, so it’s not in your core.
2. Learn like you’re 12 years old
I go to mostly conferences where there are adults and granted, this was catered to kids, but they’d say, “Who wants to win a T-shirt?”
And they’re standing up on their chairs, freaking out.
They’re raising their hand when they’d ask, “Who has a question?”
Every single kid jumped up, they’d grab the mic, and they’d forgotten their question and they would still be lifted up.
Instead of putting them down and laughing in their face, people lifted them up.
And I think as adults, we put that shell around us where we’re so worried about what other people think about us.
Let’s go back to your 12-year-old self, when you actually didn’t care what people thought and you just wanted to learn, you wanted to win things, you wanted to do things, and you were open to new things.
3. Belief is a choice
The people in this room were filled with the belief that what they are doing in the world is changing lives.
Whether they’re teaching mamas how to make money on Amazon, teaching fitness, or they’re doing marriage relationship work, it doesn’t matter what they were doing, they were modeling for their kids how to believe in something more than the person who needs it.
In this room of people, there was no talk about gas prices, recession, or how bad the state of everything is right now in their community.
They were talking to their kids about if you can run a business, you can make your own economy.
You can support your family and you never have to be dependent on a boss, job, or stuck to a city you don’t want to be in.
You can choose to believe in yourself, in your cause, and in your mission.
4. Learn to lose, and be okay with it
When I get into these programs, they’re not inexpensive.
Usually I don’t even tell my husband how much they are, because I’m afraid he’d flip a gasket, but that’s how we make the money, it comes back to us.
What I love about it is in this room of successful entrepreneurs, they’re not bragging about their successes, they’re talking about their losses, their failures, their screw-ups, how they ruined this business and restarted, and learned lessons.
When they’re talking about failures, it made me ask, “Why would we hide from our failures?”
It was almost like a “not a brag-fest”.
We understand how hard things are to go through and we want to help one another.
That’s why being around the right people in the room is so powerful.
Seeing all of these parents share about their parenting and business failures was normalizing failure.
Let’s all normalize failure.
5. Don’t think, just do
Another takeaway I had was from a student speaker, he’s in college and his brother left for school and he needed some money and didn’t have a job.
So he went into his brother’s closet and laid out all of his shoes.
There had to be 35 pairs of Nike shoes.
He had seen the new Top Gun movie where evidently Tom Cruise says, “Don’t think, just do.”
And he did that.
He put the shoes online and started making money, and now he’s built this movement.
He and his friends go to Nike stores, they’ve got stores wholesaling them and giving them closeouts.
They’re putting them online, and they have this community of people who are just waiting for that next cool shoe that they find and he’s making major money.
What do you need to quit thinking about and just start doing?
6. Cheering for others is a way to be a part of the win
One of the speakers was a husband and wife team, and she had been a cheer coach and she said that she wanted us to cheer for others.
What really struck me was when she said, “When you clap for others, you get a win too.”
That is powerful.
As adults, we see someone succeed and we get these feelings of, “Why’d that happen to them and not me?”
Or we build up head trash and we think we should quit.
I want you to start cheering when you see anybody who has success in their life.
I want you to just make it a core value.
When someone gets a win, big or small, you are going to cheer for them.
7. There’s more than enough for everyone to have more than enough
The overarching theme at this conference was abundance.
There was an abundance of everything and when you put yourself in the room, you have to show up.
If you’ve been around me at all, you’ve heard me talk about the importance of investing in yourself.
We’re all like little science projects.
We all work differently.
Our brains, our bodies, everything about it.
And I’m a fan of us learning it sooner rather than later.
I like pre-hab, the preventative things you do, which is work on yourself, and I want to pass that on to my kids.
I want them to always be learning and growing.
The answers are in education.
That’s how you get better and make the world a better place.
I hope this has inspired you to think bigger for your kids, and maybe shift your perspective to think more like a kid.
Go back to your kid-self and learn with playfulness.
Talk to yourself about how you can still learn.
My question for you today is, “Where can you take your kids where they can get poured into with positivity and inspiration that you can go with them?”
Don’t think, just do, friend.
