Standard business advice that’s awful for self-employed Autistics and AuDHDers, number 4:
“Charge what you’re worth.”
Why this is crap
What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Your worth has nothing to do with a number. Your worth is infinite. Your worth is unique. Your worth is not calculable.
Often that’s supposed to be an encouragement to charge more, to raise your prices, to have self-confidence. However, if you’ve been getting the message your entire life that you’re not worth much, that you’re crap, that you’re annoying, too much, or too intense, and that people don’t want to be around you, or that if you be yourself, you’ll drive people away; at best this kind of advice is likely to trigger defense mechanisms like shut down, avoidance, distraction, overwhelm. At worst, it produces more trauma.
If that advice is a coded way of encouraging you to charge according to your expertise, or in-line with common rates for your industry or product, that’s somewhat more quantifiable, but it’s still pretty vague.
And frankly, if you are new at your industry, and you don’t have years of experience or expertise yet, what you’re worth, just in the context of the results that you can produce for people, may not be very much yet. And that’s okay. That’s normal. You will get better with experience.
An alternative framework
So charging what you’re worth is not a useful, reasonable, or accurate framework for deciding how much to charge.
Would you like something that has a little more basis in reality? So you can actually calculate a fair rate, with real numbers, and stop wasting energy worrying, wringing hands, and apologizing for your prices, and use that energy on more useful things in your business? A framework that doesn’t tie your rates to your self-worth or childhood trauma?
Well, that’s part of what I’ll be teaching in my course AuDHD Alchemy. We’ll cover the 7 elements of how to work for yourself as an Autistic or AuDHDer without burning yourself out. If you’d like some more info, here’s an overview, or you can go to: autismchrysalis.com/alchemy We start on May 2nd.