Charging For Your Services & Earning What You're Worth

My first company failed because I’d get panic attacks when I had to invoice people, so I worked for free.

After admitting failure; I decided to be a responsible adult, call it quits and try my hand at formal employment.

Unfortunately for me, I realized too late, that I had no clue how to negotiate my salary, so I ended up getting paid less money than I wanted.

Even though learned about negotiation during my MBA program in business school; I had no clue how to negotiate for a salary or anything in the real world.

How do you convince someone that you’re worth X amount and not Y?

Why do people pay others X and someone else Y for the same kind of work?

I used to ask myself these questions all the time.

Of course, now that I do the work I do, I know that what we get paid has a lot to do with the system (patriarchy, racism etc), our mindset and our deep understanding of the value that we bring to clients or to a job.

We can’t change the system of patriarchy and racism overnight, but we can change ourselves.

People are constantly responding to our vibration, our body language, the way we treat ourselves and how we show up for ourselves.

It doesn’t matter how great we are at negotiating or “faking it till you make it”, if we don’t feel comfortable with the amount that we’re charging or the salary we’re requesting, people won’t pay us that amount.

If you don’t believe that your work or your service is worth X amount; something in your voice, body language or your response will give that away and people will be able to sense it and it will feel false.

Why should people trust you with that amount of money when you don’t even trust yourself with it?

Charging what you’re worth has nothing to do with convincing people of your value.

It’s about our self perception, what we think about the money we’re requesting and how that figure feels to us and how it sits in our bodies.

What you’re worth is priceless, so forget charging your worth, charge for the results that people will get

It’s impossible to put a value on you, as a human being, and the knowledge that you bring to any table but we’ve been taught to charge our worth, which is what trips many people up.

Deep down, our souls know that we’re priceless, our souls know that our lives and our experiences are unique and completely priceless.

We can’t put a value on that, but the more we insist on trying, the more we conflate our salaries and the pricing of our products and services with our intrinsic value.

So when someone rejects our prices or our salary request, we see it as a personal rejection and start to think - “maybe I’m not good enough” and start to doubt ourselves.

We take it personally and use our work as a tool to prove our worth and sense of self.

We use our earnings , the money in our bank accounts, the big job titles and the positive feedback we get from others as a way to soothe ourselves and validate ourselves.

The danger with this is that criticism can floor us and can destroy us and get us to question our very sense of self.

It’s also why we’re so scared to share our prices or salary expectations with others.

The truth is: people pay for results, so we should be teaching ourselves to price based on the results that people can get from working with us.

If you can show someone how paying you R5000/US$500 per hour can save them or make them R10,000/US$1,000 an hour down the line, then your pricing makes sense and you’ll find clients who’d be willing to pay for that.

This doesn’t just apply to entrepreneurs, it also applies to employees negotiating for salaries or raises - go into the negotiation with the numbers (after all you’re talking money) - show your employer how much money you’ve made them or saved them just by hiring you or how much you can make them or save them, once they hire you.

Work with facts, talk about your track record so they can see you know what you’re talking about.

The mistake we make is believing that pricing lower equals higher sales or more employment offers

When I first launched the Creating Money Magic course, and there are some students that will attest to this, I priced it at R1,000/ US$97 and gave a lifetime access to people at that price.

And if you know how amazing the course is, you know that’s a crazy price, but even at that price, there were people who’d complain about how expensive it was.

I registered less students charging R1,000/ US$97 for the course, than I do now charging 20 times that.

Why?

I went through an internal evolution - when I first launched the course I believed that no one would buy it at that super low price, so in the end I started creating that reality.

Whenever I spoke about the price, I was very apologetic because I had this deep belief that no one could afford a course at that price and that I wasn’t cool enough for people to want to learn from me.

Luckily, I started practicing what I teach; I started doing a lot of work on my issues of “not being good enough” (lesson 19 of the Money Magic course) and worked with my spirit of money (lesson 0 of the Money Magic course).

My spirit of money advised me to increase the price and to spend a few minutes a day reflecting on the value people would get from doing the course, which led me to start increasing the value and adding more lessons and exercises to the course.

I focused on the results I wanted people to get and how I wanted them to feel about money.

I became crystal clear on what people would get from the course, how their finances would change from doing the course and the traumas they needed to focus on healing in order to have those shifts, which also gave me clarity on the lessons and the meditations I was recording.

I created lessons with very clear objectives.

And something interesting happened - I felt a shift within me because I started to see the true value of the course (note: I saw the value of my work, not MY value as a human being).

And when I showed up to talk about the course and shared the new price of the course, I was unapologetic and very clear about the results that people could expect if they did the work and also shared the content and the value of the content in the course.

And people responded to that.

I explain a lot more about this in the video below. Click play to learn more:

What insights and aha moments are you having about pricing and salaries after reading this?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.