Pay What It’s Worth: You Don’t Need to Set a Price on Value is on the cusp of being published by Integral Publishers, and I’m happy to be blowing the dust off my keyboard and getting back into things.
I’ll continue to write there regularly, so please come by. I love sharing my words and world with you.
xoxo,
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I’m so intrigued by what I’m witnessing. With time, I’m learning of more and more business experimenting with not setting prices. Their individual approaches to doing so are wholly unique, with nuances tailored to meet their specific business needs. What is shared by each however, is their need to identify and communicate what exactly they are asking for their customer to do, if their customer is not paying a set price.
How exactly does the exchange work?
What are my needs as the seller and what role does the customer play in meeting them?
What does the buyer need and what role do I play in meeting them?
What is truly being exchanged and valued between us?
While their answers may change with experience, in order to sell now, these businesses need to determine what they are asking for their buyer to do, and how to communicate it clearly. For as the buyer, before I commit to make a purchase, I need to understand what I am giving in order to receive what you are selling. I need to understand my end of our agreement.
Whether I set prices or not as a business owner, I need to have clarity around the question, “What am I asking for in my business exchanges?” It fortifies my integrity (and my customer’s) to establish norms, accountability and disclosure around my system for giving and receiving with them. The closer I get to knowing what I need AND what I’ve been asking for, AND how they may differ, the closer I am to creating my most value-adding and harmonious business exchanges.
In every relationship, business or not, in order for it to be healthy and mutually beneficial, I need to be responsible to my needs by identifying and communicating them. It is of deep service to my Self and to the person I am in relationship with to do the work to recognize my needs and to share them compassionately. For in growing my own awareness, I create space for the other person’s needs to be recognized too — by them and by me. Only when both of our needs are recognized and fulfilled is our relationship a healthy and sustainable one. And one where we can both trust and grow wealthy in our exchange of giving and receiving.
In your own business, do you know what you’re asking for? Are you receiving what you need? If you find there’s a space in-between, please take note of it. The more you learn about and explore this space of lack, the closer you’ll be to whole-ing it. It’s from this place of responsibility (to your own needs and your customers) that you can and will grow harmoniously together.
I’ve always wanted to — and knew I needed to — WRITE a BOOK.
If I knew anything about myself, I KNEW this. And this KNOWING was so powerful that it became incredibly painful.
Resistance
But I didn’t know how, so I tried to escape from IT. The pressure of IT. For a while.
With time and practice, it became not so much the WRITING that weighed, but THE (unwritten) BOOK itself. As did my resistance to ALL THE MEANING I had now placed on IT.
Nothing meant more than creating THE BOOK I always dreamed of, and so under this heavy weight IT sat stagnant.
IT meant too much to move, the fear of not getting IT right or not getting THERE at all hovered. The seriousness of the endeavour weighed. I NEEDED to do this.
Acceptance
Five year ago I started writing THE BOOK I dreamed of creating, and today I am ready to share it with you.
It’s taken lots of work on myself, and spending the last year writing the start of a fiction series, to reach THIS place where I am ready, willing, and able to write and share my BOOK that meant so much.
I can now see and trust that this BOOK that means so much, is one of many inside me. I now know I am able to do IT.
And IT doesn’t mean as much as I made it out to. And yet IT means so much more.
I feel ready now to step fully into who I am. To feel FREE to collect and share my words and thoughts with you. And to KNOW it means something when I do, but this meaning isn’t there to scare me, only motivate.
I learned about the concept of Pay What It’s Worth pricing as a result of an email from a reader, Jay Cowan. He recommended I check out the book called Secrets of the Wealthy Mind, as it discussed the concept of Innerpreneurs.
At the time (2009), there was only one book I knew that mentioned and identified Innerpreneurs as a group, and so I was fascinated.
Jay also mentioned that the author, Phillip Dignan, had “an interesting way of selling it”, referring to pricing system he used to sell the book — he let his customers decide what they paid for it.
It was the first time I had ever heard of someone doing such a crazy thing, and I was intrigued.
I read Secrets of the Wealthy Mind in one day, and it blew my mind. Dignan’s perspective on economic theory and pricing systems turned something on in me, and it helped expanded my mind to see that I’d been following a lot of economic rules that I didn’t believe in.
It supported me in seeing there were alternative models for pricing that would honour my values, ensure the integrity of my client relationships, and create greater possibilities for my own wealth creation.
An Exploration of Worth
During my time exploring Pay What It’s Worth pricing it has come to mean:
Allowing my customers to determine the true value they place on what they have received.
Not limiting my wealth potential by setting boundaries on the value placed on my service to others.
Doing my best on behalf of my client, and trusting that my client with do their best on behalf of me.
Creating business relationships built on integrity and trust.
Accepting that my clients can value my work more, and less, than I do.
Challenging faulty economic assumptions. Economic theory is based on the assumption of scarcity – why is that?
Unmarketing. Not everybody is comfortable with the responsibility of consciously placing a monetary value on the service they are receiving. And they aren’t the right clients for me.
An opportunity to increase my awareness on how I, and others in my world, give and receive money.
An exploration of my self-worth, and true earning potential.
