You’re Not Charging What You’re Worth (And That’s a Good Thing)
We’ve now covered how to say your price and hold the silence so your client has time to make their own decision about how to proceed, rather than filling that silence with your own money stories.
You also now know that confidence in your price comes from evidence about what the market will pay for your services and what your own clients have experienced from your services.
If you’ve followed all the steps in those two pieces, you’ve done the homework. So why is “charging what you’re worth” still feeling pretty loaded?
It’s the first thing someone tells you when you decide to launch your own business: charge what you’re worth.
And. Yes. Of course.
But these four words have wreaked so much havoc. Created so much consternation. So much hesitation. So much not going for it. So much not making enough to make ends meet. So much not wanting to tell anyone how much it costs to work with you. So much “selling makes me feel icky.”
Here’s why: you are never, ever, charging for your worth as a human being. You are charging for the results your unique blend of insight, wisdom and experience brings to your clients and customers.
I’ll say it again: you are not pricing the value of who you are as a human being. There is no price for that. It isn’t what we’re selling.
You are instead charging for results, guidance, wisdom, insight, a process that is entirely yours, a way of seeing and leading that only you possess.
Simple, right? I am not charging for my worth as a human, I am charging for the results. You can say it over and over again. You can make it your mantra. And yet - knowing this intellectually and actually separating the two are very different things.
When we conflate our worthiness with the value of our work, pricing becomes psychologically loaded. If someone says no, we can think “I’m not worth it.” If someone wants to negotiate, we can think “They don’t value me.” If you increase your prices, a little devilish imp is sitting on your shoulder whispering “Who do you think you are?” And - the real kicker - if someone hears your price and happily pays in full without hesitation, we can think “Maybe I should have charged more.”
Price the work. Not yourself.
Why does pricing activate identity? Why do we immediately conflate price with our worth? Psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe have studied something called contingent self-worth: the tendency for our self-worth to rise and fall based on success or failure in domains where we’ve staked our sense of worth.*
In one study of students applying to graduate school, people whose self-worth was more strongly tied to academic competence experienced larger increases in self-esteem when they were accepted — and larger drops when they were rejected.*
The research isn’t about entrepreneurs or pricing. But the mechanism is useful here. When you’ve staked some part of your worth on your work, a business transaction can stop feeling like a business transaction. It can start to feel like a referendum on us.
So what actually happens when price becomes a proxy for worth?
A $5,000 yes can make you feel more valuable. A $5,000 no can make you feel less valuable. So maybe you increase your ask to $7,500 to prove something to yourself. Or you reduce it to $2,500 because you don’t want to risk finding out that no one will pay more. Or you over-deliver once a client pays because now you have to continually prove you’re worth what they paid.
In all of these scenarios, the price remains the price. It’s how you feel about the reaction to your price that complicates things.
This is why we add nonsense things like “free bundle of my five video courses no one ever buys anymore but look, it’s included!” and 74-page PDFs that no client wants but that somehow make you feel it will be easier for them to value you if you keep giving away everything you know before you’ve even begun working together.
The unnecessary bonuses, over-explaining, discounting, endless access (Voxer forever, anyone?), inability to hold boundaries — much of this isn’t about pricing at all. It’s more about: If this client pays me the price I’ve asked, I now have to continually prove that I deserved it.
This is why “charge what you’re worth” is terrible advice.
It takes something that is already emotionally loaded — asking another person to exchange money for your work — and suggests that the number they agree to pay is somehow evidence of your value. It isn’t.
A prospective client can decide that your $20,000 service isn’t right for them and you have not somehow become $20,000 less valuable. A different client can decide your $20,000 service is exactly right for them right now…this hasn’t made you magically $20,000 more valuable than you were before you shared your price with them.
The transaction contains information about the market, the offer, the buyer, the timing, the problem and the perceived value of the solution. It does not contain a valuation of you.
Once we stop asking a price to tell us what we’re worth, pricing becomes what it should be…very practical. We are pricing the work, not you. The good news: the work has very clear elements to evaluate and, you guessed it, to price.
So how do you price your work without getting inextricably tied up in your worthiness? Get ever so clear on the value of your work by looking at what your work delivers to your clients.
Five places to look when you’re pricing the work instead of pricing yourself:
Market - What does this type of work cost? What other options does your prospective client have? We covered this in Confidence in Your Price Comes from Evidence and the key takeaway is: you can price yourself above the market or below the market but you’ve got to know what the market is to do so. Do your research.
Expertise - What knowledge, experience, judgment, training or intellectual property are you bringing? You’re not charging because you seem impressive, it is about examining your actual expertise and how that expertise benefits your clients in the exact work they’re hiring you to do. This is why I tend to discourage entrepreneurs from pricing “hours” of your time. Your specific expertise may mean you get a client farther faster. You should not be penalized for your expertise that helps solve a problem in one session rather than twelve. Factor your expertise into your pricing. And remember: expertise often looks like simplicity from the outside because someone with deep experience can see patterns, elimination noise and get to the important things faster. Charge for this.
Demand - Are people seeking out these services? Are you at capacity? Is there more demand than availability? Your price is allowed to respond to economic realities without becoming a moral statement. This is where doing the research from essay two in this series helps. And yes, you can change your pricing when demand consistently exceeds your available capacity. If a client wants in and there’s very little room in your schedule, you can charge more for that time just as a printer charges more for a quicker turnaround and FedEx charges more for two-day shipping.
Scope - What are you actually delivering? Preparation, access, responsibility, preparation, duration, risk management, a process — and often the ability to make something complex considerably simpler for your client. For example, when you hire me for my Business Intensive, you’re not simply paying for five hours of Callie. You’re paying for my preparation and strategic review before we meet, five focused hours together, and a structured process I’ve developed over hundreds of client engagements for examining the whole business rather than simply addressing the problem you initially think you have. Part of what you’re paying for is my ability to take a complex business with a lot of moving pieces and help you see much more clearly what actually matters. A health coach moves their clients through a very specific, often board-certified, scope that is adhered to with every client. A breath work teacher moves clients through a very specific, safe, guided session. This is your scope and it’s very useful to outline this with your clients when you are discussing price and on all your marketing materials that describe your services.
Outcomes - What problem does this solve? What becomes possible on the other side of working with you? What is the economic or meaningful value of solving it? You see this a lot with all sorts of service professionals: “I have helped my clients achieve _______________.” You must always be very careful to not overstate what can be credibly attributed to your work, but if you have clear outcomes, this can help enormously with you feeling solid about your pricing and your potential clients feeling really solid about saying yes. As someone who works with clients on their businesses, I have a lot of very concrete examples of revenue increasing in specific ways, operational costs decreasing in very specific ways, a new launch or partnership delivering on specific goals, etc. Take note of these and share them, they are powerful indicators of how valuable it is to work with you.
You’re now at the end of my three-part series on pricing. We’ve explored how to separate your story from the buyer’s decision (their silence belongs to them so stop inventing their thoughts and managing their reaction), how to separate confidence from wishful thinking (do the research, gather the evidence, know why your price is what it is), and in this essay, how to separate the work from the value of the person doing it (a yes isn’t a validation of you, a no isn’t a rejection of you.)
I wrote this series because so many of my own clients struggle in these areas. Every approach shared in this series reflects some of the most common questions I get whenever I speak to a room of service entrepreneurs, whether they are health coaches or breath work teachers, fractional CEOs, business consultants or therapists.
I have seen how worrying about what to charge and how to feel comfortable charging it has kept them from making a proper living from their work. Has prevented them from going all-in on their business. I have seen how it has led to them over-delivering and becoming burned out. I have seen what it does to an entrepreneur’s sense of self to not know quite how to do this part — the part that allows work you love to actually support the life you’re trying to build.
Getting comfortable with pricing isn’t about becoming the kind of person who can confidently announce a large number without blinking. It’s about separating things we’ve accidentally tangled together from years of stories and learned behaviors and patterns we don’t even realize we’re living out of.
Your money story is yours.
The value of the work belongs to the work.
The price is informed by evidence.
And the decision belongs to the buyer.
Do your homework. Price the work. Explain what you do.
Say the price. Hold the silence. Let your client decide.
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*Crocker J, Wolfe CT. Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 2001 July 108(3):593-623