What are YOU worth?
Have you ever decided how much you are worth? Have you ever experienced that awkward time when someone asks you, ‘What do you charge?” and your mind vacillates between amount you’d LIKE to charge and the amount you think they might pay and then to an amount you know someone has already paid you for a similar service? Why do we do that? Why can’t we just say, “I charge $250 per hour for my time?” and be done with it? Is it feelings of fear, insecurity, not wanting to be greedy, not wanting to be successful, unworthiness, not being good enough?
Here’s another interesting thought to contemplate…why do so many people feel like they don’t get paid what they are worth but if given the opportunity to ask for what they are worth, can’t come right out and say it?
It’s that glass ceiling thing but this glass ceiling is in your mind and like anything see through, you probably can’t even see it. The other tricky thing about this glass ceiling is that it started forming inside you when you were so young that it takes a monumental shift in your awareness just to be able to see it.
OK, let’s go one step further for those of you who have a job. If you quit your job tomorrow, and someone asked you what you do for a living, what could you tell them and what would you charge them? The key here is to watch your thoughts around this one. What IS it that you do well? What IS your skillset? What is it people would pay you for? And if you’re reading this and your mind goes blank, it’s probably because you just don’t want to listen. There has to be something you’re an expert at. What is it and what’s it worth to someone.
Let me give you a real life example. There is a man I know who I started coaching almost three years ago very informally. We would spend time together, I’d share with him my thoughts about earning and making money (there is a difference, you know) as well as a lot of information I was learning from many seminars I was attending and books I was reading to educate myself. He wanted aspects of his life different and so look my words to heart. He started thinking about the idea of worth and as an experiment, he started charging people a bit more for his services. They paid him. No problem. He told me about it and was very excited as you might imagine. As he dared to charge more, he started to feel better about his work and get better at his work and as his mind about his work and his worth changed, so did his actual work and worth. He is making more than $400 an hour now at times, depending on the job, and he continues to expand and grow his business with the same dedication to his expanding worth. It’s been wonderful watching him grow and change and become the type of man who was not only able to see his worth grow but grow into his worth at the same time.
So, I will leave you this June 1, 2008 with this thought…if you want to be able to charge a certain amount for your time (whether it’s a product or service), and you can’t tell people what you’re worth, and you charge less praying that they will be pay it, aren’t you just making sure you only work for people that can pay you that amount? If you want to be paid more, you must work for people who CAN pay you more and in order to do that you have to stop working for people that can only pay you what you’re willing to do the work for. See how those things are all tied together?
So, what are you worth?
Oh, and the seminar that I went to that started me down this road? It’s called the Millionaire Mind Intensive, created by T. Harv Eker who is the author of the great financial belief system book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. For more information on how you can attend this great three day program for free, click here.