About This Episode
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, where I dig into what it really means to pursue success without the burnout.
In this episode, I’m shifting gears as we move from exploring the inner experiences of overachievement to the outer realities of money and value. I’ll be revealing why your income often says more about the beliefs you hold about money, worth, and what you truly feel you deserve, than about your actual skills or effort. Together, we’ll look beyond just practical strategies, and uncover how deeply rooted mindsets may be quietly shaping your financial outcomes.
It’s time to question old assumptions, make the invisible visible, and start to transform the way you relate to money because, for overachievers, real change always begins with the beliefs you hold.
Key Themes
- Psychology shapes financial outcomes
- Invisible beliefs influence pricing behaviour
- Overachievers undervalue their true worth
- Self-worth and income are linked
- Money mindset versus mechanics distinction
If You Prefer Video
Transcript
This is the Overachievers podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If you work hard, deliver real results, and still find that your income doesn’t reflect the value you create, this episode is going to explain why. And the answer probably isn’t what you expect. Foreign. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the mindset master, and this is where we explore what it really means to succeed sustainably and on terms that work.
In the last episode, we closed out the first phase of the series, 12 episodes exploring the psychological patterns of overachievement, the traps, the pressures, the identity questions, and the relationship between ambition and worth. If you’re new to the podcast, welcome. Great to have you here. Each episode is designed to work on its own, so you’re in absolutely the right place. And if the ideas today resonate, the earlier episodes will be there waiting for you to catch up with them. In this episode, we’re beginning our second phase, and as a result, the focus shifts slightly. We’re moving from the internal landscape of overachievement to something more external, more commercial. Over the next 12 episodes, we’re going to explore money, value, and the psychology that sits underneath how overachievers relate to both.
And we’re starting with something that surprises a lot of people when they first encounter it. The idea that your financial outcomes, what you earn, what you charge, what you allow yourself to receive, are shaped far more by your psychology than by your skills, your effort, or even the market that you’re in. Most people, when they think about why their income isn’t where they want it to be, they look in the obvious places. They think about their marketing, their pricing strategy, their sales process, the visibility, even the state of the economy. Now, these things do matter. Absolutely. They are worth examining. But for overachievers specifically, they’re rarely the primary issue.
The primary issue tends to sit somewhere quieter, somewhere most people don’t think to look. It sits in the beliefs that we hold about money itself. It sits in the belief about what we deserve to earn, about what it means to charge for our work, about what kind of person makes real money and whether that person is someone like us. These beliefs, they’re rarely conscious, and that’s what makes them so influential. You can have a perfectly logical pricing structure and still find yourself consistently undercharging. You can understand intellectually that your work creates significant value and still feel uncomfortable asking to be paid accordingly. You can know that other People in your field charge a lot more, and you can still feel that doing the same would somehow be wrong or arrogant or premature. That gap, the gap between what you know and what you do, is where psychology lives, and that is where the real work is.
So let me describe a pattern that comes up repeatedly. Someone builds a real capability. They develop an expertise through years of work study. Client expertise, and the results they produce for people are genuine, sometimes even very significant. But their pricing doesn’t reflect any of that. It reflects something else entirely. Usually some combination of what feels safe to ask for, what they think clients will accept, and a quiet internal sense that charging more requires them to be further along than they currently are. Sound familiar? I worked with someone, let’s call her Anna.
I worked with Anna, who ran a specialist coaching practice. Highly qualified, a strong track record. Clients who regularly told her that working with her had changed things for them in very meaningful ways. But Anna charged less than people with a fraction of her experience. And when I asked her why, her first answer was practical. The market. She said her clients couldn’t afford more. When we looked at that assumption a little bit more carefully, it started to unravel.
She hadn’t actually tested it, she had assumed it. And the assumption turned out to have almost nothing to do with her clients budgets and everything to do with her own discomfort around money. She’d grown up in a household where money was tight. Talking about money felt vulgar, where charging well for your work felt uncomfortably close to greedy. Those early impressions had never been examined. They’d just become the invisible architecture around which every financial situation she’d made as an adult, every financial decision she’d made as an adult was made. Her skills were exceptional. Her beliefs about what she deserved to be paid for them were not.
And that’s the gap. And it’s far more common than most people realise. So here’s something worth thinking about. When you consider charging more for your work or asking to be paid what you know your results are worth, what is the first feeling that arises? Not the thought, the feeling. Is it comfortable? Or is there some part of you that tightens? Something that immediately generates a reason why now is not the right time or why your particular situation is different? That feeling is information. It’s pointing at something worth understanding. Because the thought that immediately follows, the justification, the rationalisation, the reason why it couldn’t possibly work. That, my friend, is belief in action.
It’s protecting itself. Here’s the distinction I would like you to draw from this episode. There’s money mechanics, and there’s Money Mindset Money mechanics is the practical elements. Pricing structures, payment terms, sales conventions, business models. They’re all learnable, they’re all teachable, and there is no shortage of advice about how to get them right. Money mindset, on the other hand, is different. It’s the collection of beliefs, associations, emotional responses that determine how you actually behave around money, regardless of what you know about mechanics. And here’s why this matters for overachievers.
Specifically, overachievers tend to be good at mechanics. They research, they learn, they implement. When there’s a practical problem, they find a practical solution. But money mindset isn’t a practical problem. It doesn’t respond to more information or better strategy. It responds to examination, to honest inquiry into where the beliefs came from and whether they are still serving you today. Most people never do that examination, not because they’re not capable of it, but because the beliefs are invisible. They feel like reality rather than perspective, like simple facts about the world rather than interpretations that were formed in specific circumstances and haven’t been updated since.
The mechanic who knows their worth but charges half of the worth doesn’t have a pricing problem. They have a belief problem. And more information about pricing isn’t going to solve that belief problem. But there’s something worth naming here that connects back to everything we explored in the first phase. The beliefs Overachievers hold back. Money are rarely just about money. They’re connected to the same identity patterns that we have been discussing their sense of worth, the relationship with deservingness, the question of whether it’s acceptable to want more, to ask for more, to receive more. For many overachievers, there is a quiet internal rule that goes something like this.
I need to have done more, achieved more, proved more, before I’m entitled to be paid more. It’s the earned validation pattern all over again, this time applied to income. And just as with self worth, the threshold for enough tends to move. No matter how much experience accumulates. The sense of having fully earned the right to charge remains just out of reach. It’s not a money problem. It’s an identity problem that shows up in the numbers. Which is why the most important work in this phase isn’t learning better pricing tactics.
It’s understanding what’s actually driving the financial decisions that you are already making, often without even realising you’re making them. So where does this start to shift? Well, as with everything we’ve explored in this series, it starts with noticing. Noticing the moments when a financial decision feels loaded, where pricing a proposal or quoting a fee or having a conversation about money generates a response that seems bigger than the situation warrants. And then asking with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, where does this come from? Whose voice is this? What was I taught, explicitly or implicitly about money? About charging? About what people like me are entitled to earn? Those questions don’t produce instant answers, but they begin to make the invisible visible, and once you can see a belief clearly, you’re in a position to examine whether it’s actually true, rather than simply continuing to act upon it as though it were true. In the next episode, we’re going to go deeper into one of the most specific and consistent patterns I see in overachievers around money the tendency to undervalue themselves. Not occasionally, but systematically, and often in ways that are directly connected to how they measure value through effort rather than impact. That’s coming up in episode 14, why Overachievers Undervalue Themselves. I think it’ll feel like a direct continuation of what we started today.
That’s coming up in the next episode. For today, though, here’s something I’d like you to think about over the course of the next week. Think about what you currently charge or what you currently earn for the work that you do, and then ask yourself honestly, does that number reflect the value that you create, or does it reflect what you believe you’re allowed to ask for? Does that value, does that number the amount you currently charge or earn? Does that number reflect the value which you create, or does it reflect what you believe you’re allowed to ask for? Those are two very different things, and the gap between your answers, if there is one, is worth understanding. If all of this is landing for you, hey, do follow the podcast, Give us a Like a comment, a Share subscribe, give us a review on your favourite platform and stay with us through phase two. The episodes in this phase build on each other and we are only just getting started. Hey, head to KeithBN link/TOP to find this episode. You’ll find the show notes there along with everything else from today, including the Overachievers quiz if you want to understand which patterns are most active for you right now. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Mindset Master, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
Catch you next time.
