Are you ready to unlock the hidden potential in every moment behind the camera? Pat Miller is joined by best-selling author, acclaimed keynote speaker, and personal development coach Brant Menswar, who reveals how photographers can transform fleeting memories into powerful drivers of personal and professional growth.

Episode Highlights 🎤💡:

(03:45) - Finding Purpose After Tragedy

(09:30) - The BUMP Framework: Belonging, Understanding, Meaning, Purpose

(15:44) - How Photographers Can Capture Purpose on Purpose

Connect with Pat Miller ⬇

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Connect with Brant Menswar ⬇

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I'm Pat Miller and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. On today's show, we're going to talk about those times in your life that mattered. The moments when you look back and think, I remember that day, I remember that moment. We all have those times, and sometimes they're moments that catapulted us to great success, and sometimes there are moments that changed and ruined everything. How could we get better at recognizing those moments, owning those moments, and turning those moments into momentum for our life? Well, we're going to talk about that today with former Imaging USA speaker and keynote speaker Brant Menswar. Brant's coming back to say howdy to his PPA friends like you. And we're going to talk about what this concept is all about and how we can get better at recognizing when one of these moments is happening right now so we can own it and we can use it for momentum in the future. He's also got a pretty interesting idea on how photographers are uniquely positioned to take on this theory. You're gonna enjoy this conversation. Brant is standing by. We'll talk to him next. Brant, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

I'm doing great, Pat, thanks so much. It's good to be back with the PPA family.

Man, to have you back with PPA is a real treat. If someone hasn't met you yet, tell us who you are and what you do.

So I am a former rock star, as I like to say, semi-retired turned public speaker, keynote speaker and author. And I spend most of my days now going from one conference to the next talking to people about everything from their personal values to creating momentum in their life to maintaining hope around the things they want to accomplish.

And we're saying it's great to have you back with PPA because you've been with us at least, and we're looking forward to catching up with you. So tell us what's been going on since we saw you last.

Wow. Life has changed quite a bit since the last Imaging USA that we did together a few years ago. You know, just to sort of address this straight up front, since the last time, unfortunately, I lost my son Theo as we talked about in some of the previous sessions that we've done together and his battle with cancer. Unfortunately, cancer and COVID were a little too of a combination for him. So, in February 21st, we lost Theo. But you know, I've been trying to, in full transparency, just rebuild my life since that loss. It's something that's devastating, as you can imagine, and you're not quite prepared how to deal with it. And life twists and turns, and so you start to figure out how do you pull yourself out of this hole that you are in and move yourself forward? And so that's what life has looked like for me for last couple of years anyways, but in a good place now. Life looks very different. Got remarried last year, so lots of positive things after a really difficult time.

As a father, I can't imagine. And my heart goes out to you after suffering that devastating loss. Did it come to you naturally to take all of this pain and turn it into or channel it at least into helping others? Did that come to you naturally? Or did someone like, suggest something that made you go, wait a minute, I can use this to help others?

Yeah, it's a great question. What I would say is I feel like I've always been someone who wants to put others people's needs above my own. Right? That's just my default, sometimes to a fault. But, you know, after Theo passed, I just sort of removed myself from society for a good 18 months. Right? Just I didn't know how to cope is ultimately what it was. And so, you know, I made questionable decisions. I just sort of, I gave up. You know, one of the things I talk about a lot now is this idea of hope, and hope being a combination of desires, expectation, and action. And for me, I felt like I had hope stripped from my life when Theo passed. And so when that's the case, it makes it really hard to stay committed to anything in your life. And so it took one of my really dear friends in my inner circle. It took him calling me up one day after sort of 18 months of disappearing and people being concerned of not hearing from me or seeing me. And you know, what he said to me, Pat, was, he goes, look, I know you've been through something horrible, but I need to say this to you. He said, "I want you to know what I believe. I believe that when you die, you really die twice. The first is when you take your last breath, but the second is when your name is spoken for the last time. So my question to you is, what are you doing to make sure Theo's second life outlives his first? Because the wallowing is not going to get that done." And while it was tough to hear, I don't think I took it very well when he said it. The truth was he was right. And I needed to start focusing on second-life effort what does that look like? What does that feel like? How can I keep Theo's legacy going? And the answer to that is what we just talked about. It's by helping people, helping others understand what their non-negotiable values are, helping them understand how momentum works. When things happen in life, how do you get out of the hole you're in, back towards the goals that you want and the type of life and designing that life that you really want for yourself? And so, I will say that it comes naturally, but sometimes when life happens, even if it's natural, it's still really hard to pull it off.

Do you remember the moment when you were devastated, frustrated with your friend, thinking that that wasn't something you could take on to when you thought, wait a minute, maybe he has a point here. I can take my natural skills as an entertainer and a communicator and help others? Was there a moment where it dawned on you or when you thought, I can take this and change people's lives?

You know, I think my first moment was to say, go blank yourself if I'm being completely honest. But, you know, soon after that, what I will say is the realization that I had was that when you're in a moment that you are overwhelmed and you don't have it in you to think about what life's going to look like next week, next month, next year. What I found myself doing is leaning into survival mode. You know, the one blessing of survival mode is that it forces you to focus on the moment you're in because that's all you have. And so I started to focus on the moment I was in. And could I create enough momentum in that moment to catapult myself over some of the challenges that I was facing at that time. Part of that was out of laziness. I didn't really want to work that hard at that point. I just didn't have the motivation. Part of it was strategic, knowing that if I could do that, then not only could I avoid some of the stuff I didn't want to deal with, but I could actually create enough momentum to get me back on track and on a path back towards where I felt like I was doing really well in 2019, where I got named one of the top 10 motivational speakers in the country. I had a best selling book come out. All the things that the trajectory of my life was heading up where I wanted it to go. These moments that I found myself focusing on, I realized that if I did A good enough job in. In being present in them and using those moments to catapult myself forward, that I could get back to where I was and perhaps even past what I had experienced in 2019.

So you're helping people own the moment, connecting it to the momentum that happens when they do. I feel like Captain Obvious, but I had never connected moment and momentum, and you're doing that now. So, can you give us an overview of how those two things are connected and when we're owning the moment? As you just demonstrated for us, you began to own the reality you were in, and all of the sudden, this momentum came. So if you were sharing it to us on stage, how would you explain how those two things are connected?

Yeah, well, it's literally in the word, right? And so we. As I was thinking through and seeing the success that I was having by focusing on what I was at the time, I was calling it moment momentum. I started to talk to other friends about it and explain what I was doing and how it was working. I started to even use it in my social media of when I felt like I could get back in front of people's faces again. Could I use the moment to reach more people, to connect with more people? And in my research around how this works and how momentum works, what we discovered is that there's really four pillars that happen to create momentum, and they're belonging, understanding, meaning, and purpose. BUMP is the phrase. Right?

That's great.

And so if you can bump a moment forward, you can create momentum. And that's how I started to focus on rebuilding my life, was every moment I was in are the people that need to be in the moment, in the moment, do they belong there? Sometimes the answer is there are people missing that need to be there. Sometimes the answer is there are people there that shouldn't be there. Right? And so the belonging question was first. Then it was a clear understanding of what was trying to be accomplished in the moment. Not next week, next month, next year. What are we trying to accomplish in the moment we are in? And then making sure everybody understood the meaning, the why behind why we're getting together. Why now? Is this important? And then finally, purpose was about next steps. What has to happen next for us to achieve the purpose we're trying to do. So I started to use that in every moment I had. And then even, again, social media, I started to go, I wonder if I could put those four things into a video. And so I started to do that. And what I found was my views went from, you know, 4,000 to 400,000. Because what we realized is that when you put belonging, understanding, meaning, and purpose into a moment, you create emotion. And it's emotion that makes things go viral. It's emotion that connects people together. It's emotion that drives us forward and controls our behavior. And so, when we started to focus on the emotion is when we really started to see the results we want.

With that description, someone's watching this saying, okay, I need to learn more. And the most immediate way to do it is to read the new book. Congratulations on it. Tell us about it.

Yeah, it was a journey. So it's called Designing Momentum, and it literally lays out the framework that I use to sort of pull myself out of a ditch, backed by a bunch of science that, you know, I'm a behavioral science nerd. And so for me, when something works, I need to know why. And so, as I started to stumble upon success after the loss of Theo, I started to get into why it was actually working and what was the science behind it. And so that's what this book is. It starts with changing our mindset to what I call a WITWAW mindset. W-I-T-W-A-W. And that stands for what if there was a way? The thing that I sort of really hit me first as I was trying to find my footing and rebuild my life is that my favorite quote of all time is from Houdini, and it says, "What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes." And why that hits me so hard is that this is the greatest delusionist of all time telling you how he got you to believe what he wanted you to believe when you looked at the things he was doing. And so I started to apply that to my life. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes. And so the stuff that I would say to myself, I had to phrase it in a way that my mind wanted to try to believe and prove that it was true. You see, our brains have this incredible desire for certainty, but they don't care if we're certainly right or certainly wrong. They just want to be certain. And so what I started to do is if I asked myself, what if there was a way, whatever challenge I was facing? I was immediately getting my brain to look for potential solutions, rather than my brain defaulting to probable failure. Because if that's where you go, I promise your brain's going to try to confirm that. And so when you ask, what if there was a way, it's just this little hack that gets your brain to start searching for potential solutions, which keeps you on the trajectory that you want to go. So the book starts by teaching you that mindset shift, and then it works into this BUMP framework. How do you insert belonging, understanding, meaning, and purpose into your moments? And it finally ends up with, you know, the big sort of aha we had in the research of the book when we talk to people about pivotal moments in their life, is that most of them didn't recognize the moment when they were in it. It was only after, upon reflection, could they go back and go, that was it they could put their finger on it. So we sort of realized not all moments are created equal. And there is something that we like to call ogre moments. And ogre moments are moments filled with an

"overwhelming gut reaction of emotion." That's your OGRE. Every viral video you've ever seen, every viral photograph you've ever seen has gone viral because it's an ogre moment. It has an overwhelming gut reaction of emotion within it. And it's that emotion that drives us to want to share it.

We're talking with photographers and photographers are capturing moments every minute of every day. They have a unique opportunity for themselves, but also for their clients. How might all of this theory turn into practice so our sessions and the results for our clients are better?

So I said something several years ago at Imaging USA that I meant it, I still mean it today. I know it didn't go over very well with everybody because it sort of challenged their entire life, which is this: the first thing you have to understand is as a photographer, if you do not know what your four or five or six non-negotiable values are, you really have never taken an original photograph in your life on purpose. The only original photographs you have ever taken have been by accident or luck. Because when you don't know what matters most, you can't act with deliberate intention, which means you can't do anything on purpose. Purpose comes from these non-negotiable values. And so if I am a photographer and I am trying to take a picture, I'm not just trying to take a picture; I'm trying to insert the things that I truly care about and build bridges from those to what my client cares about. So if that's a person that I'm trying to bridge, so that people look at this and go, "Oh, I know who took that photo." The reason that Ansel Adams is so popular is that you, you have to look for two seconds to go, "Oh, I know who took that," because I can tell what he cares about. Because it's in every photograph he takes. It's present in all of them, not by accident, but on purpose. And I think that that's the first thing. You've got to figure out your values so that you can start to own whatever it is that you care about, and people recognize that. It becomes your calling card. Your hallmark is right there for people to go, "Gosh, every single photo that person takes is filled with empathy, no matter what the subject matter is." Well, that's fantastic. That's how we start to get to know who you are and why people will seek you out because they're looking for a particular feeling, value, theme, whatever it is they're trying to generate, they will see that in what you do and they will hire you. Do that. That's number one. Number two, once you know what matters most to you, you can act with deliberate intention and you can begin to own these moments that you're taking pictures of. In those moments, do you have belonging, understanding, meaning, and purpose, or are you just clicking the camera? If you're just hoping to capture magic, you'll capture it eventually. But it's one out of a thousand. One out of ten thousand. You know, I laugh, my niece just had her senior pictures taken and, and my sister in law said the photographer took 1500 photos. Wow. I was like, Holy Moses. 1500 photos. I'm going to say this. Do you need 1500 photos to capture magic? If you do, I would guess you haven't figured out what matters most to you and you weren't intentionally trying to capture belonging, understanding, meaning, and purpose. That's all I'll say.

Let's stay connected to you moving forward. Tell us about the newsletter and the podcast.

So, we have a new newsletter that's on our 22nd edition. It comes out every week. It's free. It's called Better this Week. It really is a five-minute read every week because I have the attention span of a gnat. So I want you to get something quick and useful and then move on with your day. It gives you three tips a week. One to get better at work, one to get better at home, and one to get better at life. If you can do those three things, you can create the momentum in your life to achieve anything you want to achieve. So I would love it if you would join that. You can get there from my website, brantmenswar.com and the podcast. The podcast is called Just a Moment, and it features guests who talk about two pivotal moments in their lives. What's the moment that they owned and that moment sort of catapulted them forward in their career to the success they have today. And then, what's the moment they wish they could revisit and approach differently? So we have everybody from Ali Levine, who is one of the 20 people who have ever accomplished the Adventure Grand Slam, having climbed the seven highest peaks in the world and snowshoed across the North and South Pole. We have Ryan Dusick, the Drummer from Maroon 5. We have Will Trubridge, a world-record free diver who had a moment with a giant whale that is enough to make the hair on your arm stand up.There are so many incredible guests talking about these incredibly powerful moments. I think it's worth a listen. It's less than 30 minutes. We sort of built it around the commute time of people going some place. So I would love it if you'd have a listen to that as well.

It's an inspiring message, and thanks for joining us again and reconnecting with us so we can keep up with you and continue to learn with you. Brant, thanks for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Thanks Pat.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Professional Photographer Podcast. Do you see now what Brant is talking about? How your moments with the camera can turn into momentum for you and your clients. Did you like that idea? Well, tell us in the comments. Let's use the comment section as a discussion about this episode so we can hear what you loved about it. Also, bonus points if you like and subscribe to the show. One other thing, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographers of America, you're kind of missing it. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment, insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's perfect for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and profitable way. Here's the deal, at PPA, you belong here. Discover more about membership at ppa.com. That's PPA.com I'm Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community, publisher of the Small Business Summary newsletter and your host for the show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you right here next week. Take care.