Serve With Love
One of the things I want to start talking about more and addressing more in this podcast is mindset. Things like having confidence in yourself, developing an abundance mindset, and even today’s topic — love.
SEPTEMBER 2019 — An amazing couple taps me to photograph their engagement session and, before even seeing the results of those images, they hire me to photograph their destination wedding in The Bahamas.
NOVEMBER 2019 — Due to a family health matter, the destination wedding is cancelled and a vineyard wedding is scheduled for May. But...
MARCH 2020 — The COVID-19 pandemic is declared, Ontario goes into lockdown, the wedding industry is completely upended, and the vineyard wedding is rescheduled for August. But, in
JUNE 2020 — The vineyard wedding is cancelled and tentative holds are put in place for both October 2020 and May 2021, but also a new wedding is scheduled for…
AUGUST 2020 — A small, outdoor ceremony at a family cottage on Georgian Bay, where I was one of only 10 people present. What I now refer to as their first marriage.
Now, it’s...
OCTOBER 2020 — Tomorrow is the original vineyard wedding — not the original wedding because the original wedding was supposed to be a destination beach wedding in the Bahamas — but the original non-destination, non-beach, vineyard wedding, which I refer to as their second marriage. It’s yet another scaled-down, intimate occasion where myself and my second shooter are two of the only 27 people attending.
Tomorrow, in the middle of the pandemic, we’re going to photograph a vineyard wedding for an amazing young couple that has had to schedule, plan, and organize their wedding at least four times. When I spoke to them early on in the pandemic, before they even knew if they were going to have to cancel the wedding in May, I reassured them I knew what they were dealing with and that I was dealing with similar but different issues. I reassured them I would prioritize their tentative dates over potential new bookings and told them I wanted to be the least stressful part of their wedding planning issue.
You may not be a wedding photographer, but very likely something similar has happened to you during this pandemic. Cancelled weddings, cancelled headshots, cancelled family sessions, cancelled newborn sessions, cancelled shoots all around are what a lot of photographers have had to contend with this year. I knew all of my clients would be dealing with similar situations, and they were, all of those weddings have been rescheduled, as well. But when I spoke to everyone, I had one expression in the back of my mind, which I’m pretty sure I got from a cookbook: “Serve with Love.”
Serve With Love.
It’s one of those phrases that is always at the front of my mind, along with “colleagues, not competition”, which I’ve spoken about before, “seek understanding,” which I’ll talk about in future episodes, and “medium Reese Blizzard with extra Reese,” which is always relevant.
Serve With Love has become a driving philosophy in my life.
There’s a great book I read by Tim Sanders called Love Is The Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. It talks about sharing your knowledge, sharing your experience, and sharing your compassion. This is what your clients need from you.
This is true for both commercial and personal photography. Whether your clients are businesses or families, your contact is a real person. A person with work stress, with life stress, with family stress. A person with real emotions, and real objectives. A person who needs you to tell their story in a visual way.
When you serve your clients with love, you serve them with empathy, and empathy allows you to be the Gandalf to their Frodo. People need to be the hero of their own story but they also need an expert to guide them along the way, someone who understands their goals and their needs and can deliver exactly the tools they need to accomplish that: your amazing work.
Share your knowledge with them. If you are able to deliver what they need, let them know why you are and how you will go about doing it. Share your experience with them. Let your clients know that you’ve done this before. Give them examples. Show them you are not going to fail them, and you know exactly how to handle uncertain circumstances. Share your compassion with them. Let them know you’re a person just like them. Repeat back to them what they’ve requested and provide them with ideas of how you’ll deliver it. Show them you understand them.
Be honest and operate from integrity. If you’re not the right person for the job, tell them that. Honesty builds trust. Trust builds reputation. And reputation builds your brand.
Now go, serve with love.
