How do we establish our worth?
The latest episode of The Side Woo with Sarah McCrum of Love Money, Money Loves You
As freelancers and artists, we are faced more often than our corporate counterparts with the question, what are we worth? And who decides? Rather than negotiating a salary once a year at review time, or every few years when you think about getting a job, we have to consider our monetary value in relationship to a complicated web of people, places and things on the regular.
Under consideration are factors like age, location, personality, looks, and social connections. Having worked as a recruiter I know these factors make a big difference in what people are willing to pay for labor - regardless of raw experience and know-how. But also under consideration is how much the employer cares about what they are hiring you to do.
Just this morning I had to have a tough conversation with a client defending my work on my sidehustle as a bookkeeper. I’m realizing that clients want to pay a bookkeeper as much as they want to re-tar their driveway or go to the dentist for a teeth cleaning. It’s not a sexy expense, and you technically can do it yourself.
This subtext is the same whenever a piece of art goes on show and doesn’t sell. The audience does not feel your work is worth the value you and the gallery are putting on it and so they keep moving. Does this mean your work is bad? Not at all. You just haven’t found your audience. And also it may not exist for the price you are offering.
Where do we draw the line between generosity and underselling? And how do we establish worth internally so that it can be reflected in everything we do- regardless of payment?
Especially in art, prices are subjective and often vary wildly in the early years before your market is established. It’s hard not to take things personally when people balk at your rates, especially when your work takes up so much of your time and can feel like a direct reflection of your value as a person. It’s also interesting to think about curbing your prices for your art so they don’t go up too quickly and threaten the longevity of your career. When do you know to go for it and when should you pull back?
This idea, that people and their feels, are behind the energy of the market and essentially money, looms large in Economics 101. What Adam Smith originally called the invisible hand of the market is about as close as we get to humanizing money in capitalism. His original idea of the wealthy distributing their unused harvest to the poor, has transformed into a more contemporary perspective on the way the self-interest can fuel an economy and benefit society as a whole without governmental regulations in a trickle-down fashion.
We do a lot to dehumanize this process and take for granted that the mechanics behind this invisible hand and the market include you, me, and everyone we know. I think about this a lot with the housing market as an example- which was bad back in Adam Smith’s day too when he wrote about “the proud and unfeeling landlord …without a thought for the wants of his brethren.” We all know that rents and housing prices in California are insane. But who made them that way? People.
While there are many proud and unfeeling VC firms and real estate investors that are probably the biggest culprits in inflating the real estate market, the other factor is the people you know and love who are just doing what they were taught. Your aging mom, your grandparents, and your fun uncle are all just trying to sell their property for the most money they can - meanwhile perpetuating the problem of a constantly rising housing market to the seeming detrimental effect of many unhoused and housing insecure people.
If I am wrong about this, someone please tell me. I’m not an economist (obviously), just an enraged renter whose student loans kept me from being able to make moves as a property owner. It seems now in late-stage capitalism this principle of personal interest benefitting the greater good follows a law of diminishing returns, if it ever worked to begin with. It’s hard to know how to move forward with a feeling of abundance and goodwill, especially as my drive to my studio every day involves going past tent cities where people live in constructed wood homes underneath the 10 freeway.
Plus as an overeducated woman in her 40s, I am forced to consider how to fairly charge my fellow humans for my services without feeling like I am cutting myself a raw deal or pricing myself out of a job. The same goes for partnering with galleries and working out sales splits before and after the production and shipment of work. (There was a long thread about this subject on a WhatsApp group that I would like to go into in another post.)
A book that I listened to recently helped shift my perspective about the potential that money and exchange can offer was written by my latest guest on The Side Woo, Sarah McCrum. Sarah is an author, energy worker, and life coach who wrote a book about money. More accurately, she wrote a book as money that she channeled over the course of a few months.
The book is called Love Money, Money Loves You and it’s written in the voice of money telling us, the dear people of this planet, that money does in fact love us and it wants us to enjoy life more.
This can feel like a wild proposition for many reasons. One is the idea that money can talk back to us. If you have ever done an automatic writing session, simliar toLetters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert, you have had the experience of channeling an energy or a higher power to get insight on a problem. That is the basic premise of what Sarah did.
Two, if you are like me, raised with a work ethic where fun is an afterthought in the pursuit of an income the idea that money wants you to enjoy things more sounds alien. I grew up thinking fun is the thing you have on your weekends when you are so tired to do anything but “relax” in front of the TV.
Three, that money is not bad and not even neutral, but that it is love is still inconceivable to me at this point. My brain can’t quite get around this concept, having spent many artsy years in my youth demonizing money, then a decade of lean years being resentful of money and the lack that I was experiencing.
In our interview Sarah said even just thinking about this concept is enough to shift your perspective:
The most interesting thing to explore about this, and the most challenging and surprising thing is to ask yourself, what if it's really true that money is actually an energy of love? What if it's not all these things that we've been taught, and what difference will it make to understand that?
Something changes in you when you start to contemplate that kind of question, even if you can't answer it. Just being curious about it changes your energy and you will start to find information or answers that confirm that.
Rather than constantly confirming that money is a corrupting force and it's the cause of all the problems- it's human beings who cause the problems. It's not money, but let's really understand what money is and then we can have a relationship with it that actually works for us.
What I have found whenever I try to focus on resources as abundant and human-based is that exchange can look a lot of different ways. Maybe you charge someone less but then meet a bunch of new people who hire you for things, more than making up the difference in cash lost. Or maybe you gift someone a free painting but then the next day you get a sale out of nowhere on a drawing. There are no guarantees but also being generous is a more fun way to experience the world.
Where do we draw the line between generosity and underselling? And how do we establish worth internally so that it can be reflected in everything we do- regardless of payment?
I genuinely asking. If you have had luck with this as an artist and/or a freelancer I would love your tips and tricks.
It's a coinky dink to find another creative who side hustles as a bookkeeper...which is was I did for over a decade. Here's what I learned: When I would discount my rate to new businesses/startups, they never appreciated it. Instead of it coming across as it was meant to (helpful generosity), it showed I lowered my worth somehow. So I stopped doing that. I explained that this was my rate, I worked fast and was trustworthy. If they wanted to pay less, they might get less. And while my mother always used money to control, I've always seen it as a form of love and power (power, in the sense of being able to help and maybe change things for someone). Can't wait to listen to the Woo, Sarah. Hope all is well with you. And we need to put something on the calendar. xo
Great read. I toggle the line between generosity & self worth as a coach who was previously a Buddhist monastic. At the monastery I lived off of the generosity of others and saw that it was possible to live in reciprocity beyond transaction. But I’ve found trying to implement a model of reciprocity not rooted in 1:1 logic based capitalistic transaction is risky and can put my nervous system into deep dysregulation which lowers my capacity to be of service. I have to feel into in each context I’m in these days but I appreciate your reflections here.