In a moment of weakness, I was drawn into an article which proposed that coaches should raise their rates. I thought that the author might have some challenging reason for why coaches’ rates are out of sync with the perceived value.
Alas, the reasoning behind this was:
- You should believe you’re worth it!!!!!!
Yeah, I was disappointed.
Sorry, folks, you can believe in yourself all day, but when it comes to getting paid, it’s the perception of your customers that matters. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling products to people, or pulling down a salary, or even asking for handouts on the street.
The fact is that if you’re going to be rewarded with more money, THEY need to believe that it’s worth it.
Now, it is true that believing in yourself is useful, because that helps you deliver more value, to communicate that value more confidently, and to ask to be compensated fairly for it.
But, sadly, I put this in the same camp as The Attraction Principle, which some to be simply that “if you believe hard enough, the universe will give you whatever you want.”
Sadly, it doesn’t seem that I live in that universe. It would appear that people mostly get rewarded for doing useful things, with great latitude regarding what “useful” might mean.
But maybe I’m too much of a realist.