Listen or Subscribe
We all know “comparison is the thief of joy” but that doesn’t stop us from falling into the comparison trap. Today’s guest, Cassie Heilbron, encourages stopping the comparison trap and loving your style as a food blogger. What does that mean? It means embracing the way you work. It means appreciating your style as a food photographer, blogger, and social influencer. It means finding a way to admire how others do it, while at the same time learning to love the way you do your own work. It’s a powerful tool we all need in our basket of skills.
More about Cassie
Cassie preferred eating out to eating in most days. However, she felt drawn to cook more at home and found herself watching Ina and others on the Food Network. She also found herself following food bloggers and found herself growing more and more passionate about home cooking. This is a process that took years to transpire, but eventually Cassie decided to start her own food blog.
She wanted to share about her cooking journey to encourage others to do the same. Cassie started her blog with the knowledge that it could become a full-time career for her, but she felt it would be a long ways off. Life circumstances changed that and she found herself at a turning point. Should she look for another job or jump in the deep-end as a full-time food blogger.
Cassie took the plunge!
Food Photography Style
Cassie describes how at first she was looking at all the styles of other food bloggers. But eventually she learned one resonated the most with her: to focus on the dish at hand. She didn’t want a lot of props and styling, she preferred a simple style. And that has seemed to resonate well with her audience too!
The point here is that you can spend your whole career focused on how other people do it — dark photography, light photography, and everything in between. But finding a style that works for you is key.
Finding Support
Cassie describes how she joined Facebook groups for food bloggers and how those were really helpful. She also reached out one-on-one to specific food bloggers to ask them questions. This was particularly helpful when it came to rebranding her blog.
It’s a big step, rebranding, and Cassie found the generous encouragement from other bloggers to be very helpful.
If you’re going to reach out to other bloggers, Cassie encourages asking specific questions. If you reach out with general questions like, “how can I grow my traffic?” you may not get answers. But asking a specific question is more likely to get results. An example would be this: “I saw where you went through a rebrand and I’m in the process of doing that myself and I was wondering if you could give me some tips.”
Loving Your Style
Whether it’s how you shoot, how you blog, how you write, or how you share on social, everyone has a way of doing it. It’s easy to feel drawn to the way other people do it, but it can be a destructive path to be on if you don’t also appreciate where you’re at in your journey.
If you like other people’s work to the detriment of your own, that is not helpful. It’s always keeping other people on a perch higher than you. It’s demeaning. But finding a way of loving your style while also admiring others, makes all the difference!
Show Notes
Here are some of the references made it today’s episode about Loving Your Style with Cassie Heilbron:
- Connect with Cassie on his site Cook it Real Good
- Say thanks to our guest today with a shout-out: Cassie Heilbron on Instagram
- Marly mentions an article in The Atlantic on How The Pandemic Will End by Ed Yong
- Related Post: Cassie shares about Sarah Cook who has also gone through a blog rebrand
- Related Post: Listen in as Ali Ebright Talks About the Dangers of Comparison
- Connect with Chopped Academy online: Instagram | Twitter
- Connect with your host, Marly McMillen: Namely Marly | Instagram | Twitter
- Today’s post production, music, graphic art & sound design by Shawn Beelman
- Subscribe below to be the first to hear about future Chopped Podcast episodes and get some awesome tips on food blogging. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!
Subscribe to the Show & Feedback
Thanks so much for listening to today’s podcast. I hope you found it informative and helpful to the work you do every day. Make sure you don’t miss out on any of the Chopped Podcast episodes by heading on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe to the Chopped Podcast. While you’re there, provide a review and rating is a great way to help other podcast listeners find it too!