A Reflection
Let’s be honest, 2020 has been a bit of a shit show for all.
Photo by Jack Mohr
The year is wrapping up and silly season is about to begin, I think before I start to go grey it’s the perfect opportunity to reflect and relaunch my blog and brand Thoughts Collected.
The last time I wrote one of these was almost a year ago and my goodness has life changed in 12 months. For those of you playing along at home, I started a new job at a real estate agency in Canberra as their Marketing assistant (aka photographer) about 12 months ago, which has been a great experience. It’s the first job where I’ve been a full time in house photographer and I’ve learnt a lot about real estate sales, marketing and the real estate industry as a whole.
Obviously, COVID-19 has been a global issue in 2020 (and most likely years to come), affected most industries - but real estate in Canberra has kept going and it’s been fantastic.
Like many, I worked from home for a couple of months during the middle of the pandemic, which for sure was an interesting experience, especially as a photographer. Without going into the details I still did the standard amount of shoots per week, and just did processing and office work from home, whilst using Google Hangouts for video conferencing other colleagues.
On the flipside, COVID has indeed affected my business as a whole, businesses are shut down, if not they don’t have the additional funds to spend on marketing services (like mine), which is understandable. I consider myself lucky as I have a full-time job and I know a lot of small businesses like my own have closed down permanently - especially those photographers that work in the wedding industry. Hopefully, those businesses can relaunch when more weddings start to roll in over the next 12 months.
For me business has taken a hit, I didn’t hit any projected goals, which has been disappointing but at the same time, it’s 100% understandable - thanks to the circumstances.
I’ve also been struggling with the motivation to push for more clients/more work. This has been something I have been struggling with for well over 12 months. I would love to point fingers as to why this is happening, from what I’ve gathered is that I’m working full time as a photographer so I can’t find the motivation to hustle, to work and use my tools outside of my full-time job. I signed up for this job because I wanted more work-life balance and that’s what I’m getting, it’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to work on the weekend because in my last position I was running open homes on a Saturday. Now I’m photographing 20+ properties per week so the last thing I want to do is photograph events on a weekend. Maybe my interests have changed, life changes - it happens.
On a personal note, 2020 has been pretty fantastic in my personal life, I’ve been kicking goals. I moved out with my partner, we’re about to adopt a kitten. Life is great. Everything has moved pretty quickly but one of my biggest goals for the past few years is to be exactly where I currently am and I couldn’t be happier.
I posted photos on the 11th of March from the National Zoo and Aquarium, my next post for 2020 was Friday the 6th of November, I think that alone sums up the lack of motivation I’m experiencing (also thanks to COVID). Anyway, enough of me complaining about how slack I’ve been.
Despite all of what I’ve written, I think now is the perfect time to push forward, move over this hump, reset, get some more perspective and set some goals for 2021.
It’s safe to assume that your year has been something much like mine, possibly better, possibly worse, regardless it’s time to look up and hit the reset button. We can’t see into the future unless you have a DMC DeLorean that travels through time, so we have to assume 2021 will be a hell of a lot better than 2020. The time to act is now.
Start by writing some dot points of things you want to achieve in 2021, personally I like to set out two lists, one is personal goals and the other is business/work goals. I do them by quarters, so in the first quarter of the year, I would set some basic goals that are easy to achieve. By the end of the first quarter, you would’ve ticked off most of these goals, which is fantastic for your motivation then you can power through the rest of the year as the first 3 months you’ve kicked absolute ass!
Accountability is absolutely crucial for this to work. You can’t write down these goals on a piece of paper that you’re going to throw away in 2 weeks or use as scrap paper to write your meal plans in a couple of weeks. Go out, buy a notebook from Officeworks and write them in that. I prefer to live a paper-free life (avoid paper cuts you know) so I do mine digitally on Trello (but that's another story), whatever. It doesn’t matter how you do it - just write it down somewhere you won’t lose them and you can see the list every single day. You must keep seeing the list as it will help your brain subconsciously focus on it so you become more driven to continue to progress.
As some of you know, last year I started writing little pieces like this on social media/writing and reading platforms; Medium. Honestly, it's a great platform for writing and reading all kinds of articles about just about anything, it's worth paying the monthly fee to support writers. Now let’s talk about the changes I’m going to make. So I’ve just ranted and raved about how I love Medium, but I’m going to move my blog off Medium to my website, or at least that’s where it’ll be first accessible from and then at some point I will upload them to Medium. I’ve done this for a few reasons, first and foremost I want more traction on my website and it’ll help improve my SEO - so win-win. I aim to write two articles a month, whether that be an update like this or something else - that’s the plan anyway. We’ll see if I stick to it. As apart of this, I want to start a newsletter or something along those lines late next year so people who subscribe will be the first to know as well as getting special offers on new products I’ll be launching.
I think it’s about time to wrap this up but I just wanted to say thank you for sticking with me, it truly does mean a lot even when I go awol. I’m hoping to relaunch and do a lot more with this and hopefully, it becomes something bigger than I can even imagine right now. Be sure to check out all my socials as I post different content on each of them.
I’m looking forward to the future to see what it brings. Have a safe and merry Christmas/new year.
Until next year.
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