How To Get Paid When You Don’t Know Your Worth

Getting paid when you don’t know your worth does a few things at large, but here are two things top of mind that it does for culture: 1. It persists an abusive conditioned state and 2. It produces a culture of a weakened or subduing creative class unable to know the steps to defend their contribution. In both instances, when acceptance isn’t met the creative’s spark or energy could get gobbled up and taken for a ride by those attracted to the art.

This is a very real problem for more and more young business owners, independent contractors, freelancers, and creatives than we care to talk about. It’s a very hard reality when putting up your best work, skills, time or network to the test. Even worse is when uncertainty or miscommunication occurs to not have a contract in place securing the exchange of any level of the work that’s actually being done.

Not being paid just is not right. But on the other hand, sometimes we just might not have learned how to defend our craft, structure legal documents around that craft and translate it into a transaction.

Being a free thinker, a do gooder, a big picture strategist, i never realized just how severely my preconditioned psyche to learning more on my own to build self-reliance and resilience was counter balanced by how I learned to out my oxygen mask, so to speak, on second to everyone else in the world. That comes from years of being bullied, rejected by my environments, and ridiculed for who I am and who I have always been.

That psychological make up can make or break a person and in my case it made me strong around every edge of discovering new things fully. But when I started to interact in a world where I didn’t deal with some real communication failures, self love and worth, loving kindness to the self and there for to others, my equation around interactions started mimicking those abuse situations from my youth. Being accepted, being loved, being part of the group. That turned into being alienated, ganged up upon, self esteem issues, not feeling success, or even not knowing that success looked like in group environments or within systems (systematic order).