Set Your Worth, Or Other People Will
Why you are in charge of deciding your value–not other people
We all have negative self-talk.
These thoughts come at the wrong time and say we aren’t good enough. Often right as we’re facing a challenge or assessing our self-worth.
Negative thoughts like these follow us through our lives, making bad things worse. They steal our strength when we need it the most. Oddly enough, those thoughts are trying to protect us. They are programmed into our minds to keep us from getting lost in a wave of unchecked enthusiasm which could have disastrous results.
Imagine if you visited the Grand Canyon and thought, “Hey, it’d be fun to jump across to the other side,” and there was no negative voice suggesting you “could and should not do that because you aren’t a human grasshopper.”
Negative self-talk can be handy in moments like those. But it doesn’t go away when it isn’t saving us from plummeting to the bottom of a canyon. And that means that through every small moment in the day, it’s still in there, offering up its bummer energy, making us second-guess ourselves in moments when we should not.
When I started a music production company over a decade ago, I felt like every client I did work for was doing me a favor. I truly felt lucky to have their business because my self-image was that I was somehow “getting away” with running my own business instead of running it because I was talented. Because of that, my prices were always lower than the industry standard. Musicians loved this because they could come to me and get good work at a good price, so it did help me stay in business. Or, I should say, limp along in business.
Eventually, I started doing composition commissions. This is where someone would reach out to me, ask me to make music custom for them, and pay a reasonable fee. One thing to note is that pricing in creativity is completely based on perception. That’s why a first-year art student might sell a painting for $50, while Andy Warhol’s Shot Marilyn sold last year for $195 million. Both are art. But the public perception of value is what creates the price.
As I started getting more commission requests, I edged my prices up just a little–and felt guilty. Because I was creating a specialized form of meditation/concentration music called binaural beats, which had received much positive public press, people started offering to pay me more than I charged when they initially reached out to me.
One day, a guy emailed me about a personal commission. His Google avatar was him sitting on a Ferrari. He offered me about twice what I normally charged to create custom music for him. For a moment, I wondered if it would be ethical to take more money for a service than the number I had randomly come up with in my head. Then I had a realization. He wasn’t overvaluing my work. I had been undervaluing myself all along–simply because I didn’t believe I was worth more.
Then something hit me, and everything changed:
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