About Confidence

I realized over the last couple of moths that a lot of people are not really confident in themselves and what they’re doing. They think they’re not good enough, Their skills aren’t where they need to be, somebody else is always better than them and so on.

I thought about these things a lot, and how I used to be at the exact same point up until a few months ago. I compared myself to some of my favorite photographers and compared their work to mine. I felt bad about myself because my work didn’t look exactly like theirs. And with all these bad feelings I forgot a few things:

Number one – those photographers are all in their 30s, they’ve been in the industry actively for 10+ years. I’m 22. Yes I’ve been taking photos for almost 10 years too, but not in a business setting. So of course they know how to find clients, how to perfect their work and how to turn photography into a business. Because they’ve been doing that for a very long time!

Number two – what’s the point of creating something when it looks exactly like somebody else’s? I don’t need to do all the same poses, make-up looks and backdrops as those other photographers, because that is their work and not mine. Is it even “creative work” when I’m literally just trying to copy somebody else? No it’s not.

Number three – time. If somebody is a full time beauty photographer they obviously can dedicate all of their time to their photography work and thus have a lot more shoots and other projects. I work full time “on the side” so it simply is not possible for me to have 10 shoots a week, run a Youtube channel, do 3 workshops a week, have a Podcast and be alive too. And that’s totally ok.

So now that we know all of these things, the question is what do we do about it? Do we simply decide to stop comparing ourselves to others and not worry about anything and that solves the problem? Well, kind of.

Confidence and success is a mindset. So in a way, you really have to tell yourself:

“Starting today, I’m confident in my work. I know I’m doing really well. I know my photos are great and I know that what I’m doing is gonna pay off some day soon.”

And once you start believing what you’re telling yourself, you ARE those things. Because if you doubt your work and don’t reach out to anybody because you think you’re not good enough you won’t get anywhere.

But if you tell yourself that your work is great and you deserve to have the success you want, it will come to you. It won’t happen magically obviously, but if you believe in this you will subconciously start doing the right things to get you where you want to be.

Back to my personal example. For 2 years I didn’t have any paying jobs for my studio work. But a few months ago I decided that I deserve to have those things because my work is great and so am I. And in those few months I’ve had a big campaign shoot, then Covid happened so I was on ice for a while, but now I’m back in the studio talking to different companies almost every day setting up shoots. And I’ve gotten a lot more private clients for portrait shoots aswell. Simply because I told myself I’m good enough and subconciously did the right things.

So what are the right things you might ask yourself? For me it was actively letting the world know that I offer private shoots, and reaching out to a ton of companies who’s philosophies I liked offering them my servies.

I would have been super scared to do these things last year, but I decided that there really is absolutely no need to be scared and that I’m just gonna go for it and put myself out there.

Because you can have the absolute best work, but if you don’t tell people about it nobody’s gonna see it and if you don’t think it’s great nobody else will.