In Part One, we saw the expert advice entrepreneurial coach Dixie “Dynamite” Gillaspie provided in answer to her client’s concern that she struggles with charging a fee for her services because her work brings HER so much joy.
The premise then would be that, because Dixie’s client so enjoys what she does, she shouldn’t be paid for it, or at least paid too well. After all, if she’s deriving so much joy, how can she justify making a lot of money for it?
That is the second issue I alluded to at the conclusion of Part One; the belief that working at something you love should preclude you from charging a high fee, even if the value you are providing is far greater than what the client is paying for it.
Now, it would be easy to scoff and take her to task for that kind of “lack” thinking. But, I’ve got to tell you, for the first 35 years of my life, I believed that very same thing!
It was a total disconnect to me that a professional athlete, a singer, or an actor (or, a speaker) could make that much money doing something they loved. Not that I ever thought that what they did was necessarily easy, but I knew they loved it. And, that because they loved it so much, they shouldn’t make a ton of money at it. Or, at least, they shouldn’t care about making a ton of money from it.
Why did I think that? Though I cannot exactly put my finger on it, I do believe that belief was out there in the ether, and even permeated that ether. It was simply part of the cultural message we all received.
“Work is hard, it’s not enjoyable. It’s something you do Monday through Friday from 9-5, desperately waiting for the weekend and two days of…fun! Fun as in ‘play – not work.’”
As kids, we saw most of the adults in our neighborhood live like that, and watched it on the television sitcoms. Even the benevolent family patriarchs like Mr. Anderson, Mr. Douglas, Mr. Cleaver and Mr. Brady had demanding bosses and fairly unexciting jobs. The message was out there.
Earning one’s daily bread didn’t equate with having fun. It equated with work. Hard work. And, if it is equated with work, and work wasn’t fun, then how could you make a lot of money by doing something that brought you joy?
This was inadvertently drilled into our heads and we bought it lock, stock and barrel as did countless generations before us. And, it became “truth.”
And it will remain so for those not consciously aware of this extremely treacherous dichotomy.
So, don’t listen to the subliminal cultural messages. Instead, make it your goal to both love your work and profit abundantly from it.
Your thoughts?
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I’m sure many fitness professionals like myself feel the same way as Dixie because 90% of all of us chose to work in this field because we love to help people, not so much for the money like other jobs. When I go online and check out how much people are charging, some of them charge way to little for what they do or ridiculously high given their credibility and experience.
There is no set “market price” for what we do; it’s all about the value we give ourselves. I will consider my sales and marketing strategies for my business today and see what we can come up with. Thanks, Bob, for giving me my mental workout this morning. 🙂
What a wonderful explination of how our mind files are developed by what we are exposed to which of course, leads us to the decisions we make as to what we do with our time.
Having just gone thru my own “Transformation” I would like to say how much I appreciate your insights into making that transition. Yesterday I did the last Big Thing necessary to free myself from my patterns. People like you, your words of wisdom, and your referrals of important information and teachers, help to make it possible for people like me, to find our Joy.
I imagine you have an abundance of Joy in your life, as your love for what you do shines in every line you write!
Bob, I’m sure you’re not alone–so many of us suffer from “head trash” about money.
I’m the first in my family to graduate from college, and both sides of my family had an extreme poverty mindset (and a lifestyle to match). To this day, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit how much my company charges for my services on some jobs. Even though I know for a fact that the clients I work with make — and this is no exaggeration — as much as 1,000 times more from my work than they’re charged for it.
But it’s this fact that is helping me change my mindset and throw out the head trash.
Now, it’s hard to put an ROI figure on a lot of jobs. But I’m a marketing strategist and copywriter, so in my line of work it’s possible to know exactly how much a client makes from employing my services. For example, we might charge a client $3,000 to create a direct mail campaign that generates net revenues of $60,000 for them — a 20 to 1 return on investment.
Now if you ask any rational person if they’d be okay with spending $3,000 to make $60,000, of course they’re going to say yes! In fact, now that banks are paying about 1% on interest-bearing savings accounts, even a 2 to 1 ROI sounds pretty good.
So that’s how I’ve started to change my self-concept when it comes to money. I focus on how much value I’m creating for clients instead of how much I feel I’m worth. (My feelings of self-worth obviously aren’t reality-based so I’m okay with giving them less credence for now!)
Sure, it’s a bit of mental gymnastics, but I’ve found as I’ve changed my mindset that I am actually closing much more business for my company, and the effective hourly fees are a lot higher.
What’s really funny is that the more we charge for our work, the happier our clients are with it. My quality of work is at least as good today as it was two years ago, but clients take us a lot more seriously, and are a lot more appreciative, the more we charge.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, Bob!
Doing something where you can experience joy and get paid has not been one of my difficulties. I had many examples of it growing up. Most of what I have done has not been for the money or for joy directly but for some other reason and generally it’s been to figure something out. Catching the ‘a ha’ [a brief high of joy that one] and never being able to explain it to anyone who hasn’t also experienced it [frustration sometime leads to making others something they are not] lets me relate and empathize where people are stuck. I have taken on tasks that I was good to great at and a couple considered the best ever. The belief that if you are good at something you will enjoy it is not always true. My particular version of human wiring finds little joy in what I know how to do well, only frequent levels of breakdown when I take away the focus and fail to meet previous levels of perfection. There is more interest and joy in what I cannot do well at first. What takes struggle and effort and long periods of frustration and drudgery [in hiding without an audience] offers the best chance for joy to occur and the ‘a ha’ that precedes it.
Bob, great posts, great thought-provocation. You hit the nail on the head – it is a paradigm – a cultural world-view – that many of us are taught from childhood. The story goes: You must toil and suffer and sacrifice for your livelihood (no, for your life). Any joy or pleasure you feel is a sin and you should repent for it immediately. Of course there are many variations on this theme, some stricter than others, but the premise is the same: happiness for living your own values and achieving your own best accomplishment and satisfaction is forbidden – it should be for others’ sake only.
Those of us who have freed themselves from this destructive paradigm realize that life is for pursuing your best self, your greatest achievement, your utmost happiness. All the world will benefit from the sweet fruits of your labor IF it is a labor of love. A labor of unhappiness, of undervalued sacrifice, of torment about your worth will probably produce little fruit, and it will be bitter fruit at that.
People like Marcus Buckingham and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are helping create a paradigm shift and we must heed their advice: find out what your strengths are, and use them daily in your work. Find what work makes you feel a sense of ‘Flow’, and do that work as much as possible. Just imagine the level of well-being, success, and shear joy in the world if more people did that.
Thanks for the opportunity to chime in! Cheers!
Greetings my friend!
One would think; How can a person love to clean carpets and the other things we do? The fact is, if I though of myself as just a carpet cleaner I would have a very difficult time loving it! You see, I provide a number of things for my clients; I provide a solution to my clients to promote family health, I save them time by making their daily home maintenance tasks easier to perform, I save them money by protecting their investments and extending the life of those investments. During this process, I form friendships … I love having friends!
The greatest joy I get from my work though, is being able to give to my children. Not just the necessities of survival, but the development of their behavior.
This is how I love my work. This is why I love my work. I may have just talked myself into a price increase, at the very least a smaller sliding scale (LOL).
As I struggled through this response, trying to add value to the points of the topic, the purpose of this post dawned on me (another ah-ha moment provided by my friend Bob Burg): To identify my justification for the value I provide to others.
Thank you so much everyone!
Joe
WOW – thanks gang; appreciate your terrific comments. You keep reminding me how lucky I am to have people such as you reading this blog and participating in it!!