Burnout
(and five ways you can prevent it)
When it comes to income, most family photographers might fall into one of two categories:
Providers: Your photography income supports your family and is financially critical for your household; or
Contributors: Your photography income is ‘fun money’ that you’re able to use for things like vacations and gifts and other “extras” for your household.
(there’s also a third category of photographers who aren’t actually earning income yet after expenses, but they are usually aspiring to get into one of the above categories as they grow!)
It might seem like these would be two very different types of family photographers — people who “need the money” and those who don’t — but in three years of mentoring others, I can tell you firsthand that both groups are talented, hard working, service-minded, wonderful humans. And I can tell you that I’ve found these two groups of photographers have one big thing in common: BURNOUT.
If you know, you know. Burnout is real.
What is Burnout?
Burnout means you just don’t want to do it anymore.
Usually it indicates you’re overworked or underpaid or both.
Usually burnout means you’ve made sacrifices such as sleep and self-care and precious family-time, and all things considered, those sacrifices were not worth making, for what little you have to show for it.
Usually it means that the people who love you most want you to quit photography because they see how tired and stressed you are and don’t understand why you would continue (at least not the way things are).
If you’ve never experienced any of the above, good for you! That means either you’ve set up your business to be burnout-proof (congrats!)... or more likely, it might mean that you just haven’t reached the point of burnout yet.
Preventing Burnout: 5 Things You Can Do
From my experience as a photographer myself, and from mentoring other family photographers for a few years now… Making a few small (but consequential) changes to your business practices and your life are all you need to get back on the other side of burnout and start enjoying being a photographer again.
Ready for them?
Raise your prices
Get the sleep that you need
Improve your systems
Set new boundaries
Take time off
Now let’s dive a little deeper.
1. Raise your prices.
Time and talent is worth something, even if your household bills are covered without your photography income. Your hard work and precious time are very valuable. Say that out loud: “My hard work and precious time is very valuable.”
If you do not position yourself in a price bracket that reflects the value of your time and talent, it is very likely that you will reach the point of resenting your clients, resenting your camera, feeling exhausted, feeling taken advantage of, and ultimately, burning out. Being priced profitably is crucial for the long term success of any business — and too many photographers are suffering from not being priced right. Are you one of thousands of family photographers who need to raise your prices, like, yesterday??
Bonus: If you know you need to raise your prices, but have no idea how to calculate it or where to even start, please join dozens of others who have turned their life and their business around simply by taking the time for this pricing class:
2. Get the sleep that you need.
Up editing until 2am four nights a week? This has to stop. I know, I used to do it often. “How late were you up last night?” was a question I would get from my husband at least three mornings a week. Until I went in for a visit with my physician to talk about post-partum-anxiety and -depression and my doctor gave me a bedtime. My DOCTOR PRESCRIBED me a BEDTIME. Like a little kid. A bedtime. Our bodies need sleep. It is easy to say “oh it works for me, I like editing in the middle of the night when it’s quiet” — for like, a couple weeks. Long term, this is no way to run a business and definitely no way to take care of yourself.
Missing out on sleep is a fast track to burnout that you can one hundred percent avoid. My personal experience is that setting the boundary that I do not work into the odd hours of the night anymore has helped my personal well-being, helped the health of my business, and improved the quality of service that I am providing my clients.
3. Improve your systems.
If your first thought is: what’s a system? This is definitely for you and I encourage you to read this post about Systems.
If you know what a system is, but aren’t implementing them in your business yet, I urge you to think about the time you could save if you had a great system in place for all of the pain points in your day-to-day operations, such as:
Scheduling Sessions
Client Communication
How you shoot a session
Image Processing
Managing your own time
Social Media
So that all you have to do is wash, rinse, repeat — for all these things. What area(s) of your business could you have a better system in place?
Bonus: If you’re looking to systematize your Client Communication, I highly recommend you get going on some email templates. If you don’t know where to start with that, you can try mine!
4. Set new boundaries.
Bedtime and not making a habit of working in the middle of the night is one boundary I already talked about…
I also talk about my own boundary of using only email to communicate details with clients in this post.
What about boundaries related to…
how accessible you have made yourself to your clients (do you respond to messages during dinner time?)
how many sessions you take in a month (do you always squeeze someone in even if you know you are already at capacity?)
how much you retouch (are you tediously fine-art editing every single image in a gallery knowing that your client is only going to ultimately print a handful of them?)
what you do and do not do (or what you charge extra for)
My guess is, if you really thought about it, you could easily identify just one area of your business and your work/life balance where you need a new healthy boundary in place to help you avoid burnout. Can you think of something?
5. Schedule time off.
Build “time off” into your calendar — and stick to it. And take it even if you don’t feel like you got everything done in time. The demands of being a business owner do not ever stop, so you have to stop sometimes. Can you promise yourself that you’ll write-in some time off for yourself this coming season?
Enjoy your business.
No matter what your financial situation is — if you’re a provider or a contributor for your household — if you’re like me and you absolutely love photographing families, you should get to enjoy photographing families professionally for a long long time — without headaches, without resentment, and without burning out.
You are worth this.
Someone needed to read this today, as we are heading into busy season. I hope it helps you!
If you need to take my pricing class, talk about best practices and systems and boundaries, or bounce some ideas off of someone who gets it, you know where to find me!