Issue #016 — On charging your worth without the bravado

Friend,

I want to write about charging your worth, and why I have come to dislike that phrase.

It sounds empowering. It is supposed to. The first ten times I heard it, in early-career workshops, it landed. Charge your worth. Yes. Stand in your value. Ask for the number. Yes. Then I tried to do it, and I noticed something.

The phrase quietly assumes that worth is a thing you can know. That there is a true number, somewhere, attached to you, and your job is to summon the courage to say it. The whole problem becomes interior. Personal. A psychological gap to be closed.

But the number is not interior. The number is a market. The market is shaped by your skill, your evidence, your buyer's budget, the alternatives, the moment, the room you are in. You do not charge your worth. You charge a price that the situation will pay, calibrated by what you have learned the situation will pay last time. You are not failing the empowerment exercise. You are doing economics, with a body that has feelings about it.

The reframe that helped me: stop asking what am I worth? Start asking what is this engagement worth, and what fraction of that should land with me? The answer is rarely small, and it does not require you to feel like a different kind of person.

This sounds dry, and it is, in the way that working solutions often are. The empowerment language wraps a calibration problem in a confidence problem, and if you do the confidence work without the calibration work, you end up either over-charging your way out of the market or staying small and feeling like the failure is yours alone. The actual fix is to learn what the market in your specific corner pays, talk to three peers who will tell you their numbers, and price into that range with steadiness rather than swagger.

The bravery is not in the number. The bravery is in saying the number without the apology hanging off the end of it. My rate is X. Period. No if that works for you. No but I am flexible. No I know that is a lot. Just the sentence, and then the silence.

Practise the silence. The silence is the whole thing.

Yours,
Enova