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
- Undervaluation among overachievers
- Effort versus value in pricing
- Impact-based financial worth
- Internal permission to charge more
- Rethinking beliefs around money
If You Prefer Video
Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If you’ve ever looked at what you charge for your work and quietly suspected it isn’t enough, but couldn’t quite bring yourself to change it, this episode is going to explain exactly why that happens. 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 for overachievers, and this is where we will explore what it really means to succeed without it costing you more than it should. In the last episode, we looked at the hidden psychology of money. We explored the idea that financial outcomes are shaped far more by unconscious beliefs than they are by skills or effort or market conditions. And we drew a distinction between money mechanics, you know, the practical stuff, and money mindset, which is the belief system underlying all of that.
In this episode, we go straight to one of the most consistent patterns I see in overachievers when it comes to money, and that is the tendency to undervalue themselves. Not occasionally, not in moments of self doubt, but systematically as a default way of operating, and often without fully realising that they’re doing it. This is worth understanding because it’s one of the patterns that most directly limits commercial growth, and it has almost nothing to do with the quality of work being done. Here’s what undervaluation actually looks like in practice. It’s the consultant who has been doing exceptional work for years, but whose fees have barely moved. It’s the coach who charges less than they know they should because they’re not sure they’re quite ready to justify the higher number. Or it’s a service provider who discounts before the client even asks for it, just to smooth out the conversation. On the surface, these look like different situations, but they do share a common root.
They all reflect a particular way of measuring value. Most overachievers, when we think about what we’re worth, think in terms of effort, how hard we’ve worked, how long something took, how much we put in. And that is a natural way to think. It’s how most of us were taught to think about work from a very early age. You get paid for your time, you get rewarded for your effort. The harder you work, the more you deserve. But that framework has a significant flaw when it comes to expertise, because the value of expertise isn’t the effort that it takes to deliver it, it’s in the impact that it creates for the person. Receiving those are two completely different measures, and confusing them is one of the most expensive habits an overachiever can have.
Let me give you a concrete example of how this plays out. I worked with a consultant, I’m going to call him David, and he specialised in a fairly niche area of business, operations. He was genuinely good. His clients saw real improvements after working with him, and in several cases they saw significant ones. You know, the kind of improvements, improvements that translated directly into measurable financial gains for their businesses. But David charged by the day, and his day rate, whilst not embarrassingly low, was well below what his results justified. When I asked him how he’d arrived at his fees, his answer was very telling. He’d looked at what others in his broad field were charging, taken a figure somewhere in the middle and gone with that.
He hadn’t thought about outcomes. He hadn’t thought about the value his clients received. He hadn’t thought about his time. He compared it to other people’s time and priced accordingly. He wasn’t thinking about outcomes and value. I asked him to estimate the financial impact his work created for one of his clients in the previous year. He thought about it carefully and he came up with a number. And this was many times his annual revenue from that client he’d been charging for his hours.
He should have been thinking about their results. That gap between the effort measure and the impact measure, that gap was costing him significantly, not because he was doing anything wrong, but because he was using the wrong ruler. Here’s something to think about. Think about a piece of work that you’ve done recently. It could be a project, a service, a result you helped create for someone. Now think about the value of that outcome to the person who received it, not the hours you put in. The actual difference. It made the problem, it solved the results, it created the cost.
It saved the opportunities that it opened. Think about all of that and then once you’ve thought about all of that, think about what you look about what? Look at what you charged and then look at the gap between the two. And it is worth asking yourself which of those two numbers the value created and the amount you charged, which of those 2 value those two numbers more accurately reflects what the work was actually worth? Here is the distinction that’s at the heart of this episode. Effort and value are not the same thing. I’ll say that again. Effort and value are not the same thing. Effort is what you put in. Value is what the other person gets out.
For someone early in their career, those two things can often be roughly proportional. You’re learning as you go. The time you spend is real. The results are decent, but not yet exceptional. But expertise changes that relationship entirely. The more skilled you become, the more value you can create in less time. The consultant who can diagnose a complex business problem in an afternoon because they’ve seen 100 versions of it before creates far more value than the junior consultant who takes three weeks to reach the same conclusion. But if both are charging by the hour, the expert gets paid less, which is backwards.
It’s exactly the wrong way around. This is the effort trap. And overachievers fall into it consistently for a very understandable reason. Hard work is core to the overachiever identity. Effort is something overachievers respect. It’s something they trust. It’s something that has historically produced results for them. So when it comes to pricing, they reach for effort as the measure almost automatically.
It feels honest, it feels fair, it feels safe. What it doesn’t feel is accurate because it’s measuring the wrong thing. There’s something else worth naming here because it goes a layer deeper than just the mechanics of pricing. Undervaluation in overachievers is rarely just about not knowing how to price. It’s also about what feels permissible. There’s often a quiet internal rule that says, I haven’t done quite enough yet to justify charging that much. Maybe when I have more experience, maybe when I’ve worked with bigger clients, maybe when I feel more confident. That threshold, the point at which charging well feels justified, tends to move.
It’s not a fixed destination, it’s a horizon. And the more you achieve, the further it recedes. Which means the under evaluation isn’t actually about readiness. It’s about permission. It’s an internal permission that the overachiever is waiting to feel before they allow themselves to be paid appropriately. And that permission, if it’s waiting to arrive on its own, tends not to arrive because it isn’t granted by achievement, it isn’t unlocked by experience. It comes from a decision, a conscious re examination of the belief that effort, rather than impact, is the right measure of worth. That’s the real shift.
Not a pricing decision, a belief decision. So what does this look like in practice? It starts with changing the question you ask when you think about pricing. Instead of how long will this take me? What’s a fair rate for my time? Ask what is the likely impact of this work for the person receiving it? What problem does it solve? What does that problem cost them if it stays unsolved? And what becomes possible for them if that problem is solved? Those questions orient you towards value rather than effort. Looking at what the problem solved, what the Looking at the impact of the work you do, Looking at the problem you help them solve. Looking at the cost of the problem if they don’t solve it. Looking at what becomes possible when they do solve it. All of that orients you towards value rather than effort. And it’s not always easy to answer those questions exactly, but even a rough answer will tend to produce a very different number than the effort calculation produces.
And now this is not about overcharging. It’s not about inflating prices artificially. It’s about pricing in a way that accurately reflects the what the worth that accurately reflects what the work is worth, which for most overachievers means moving that number up rather than down. The work is already good. Your work is already good. The results you get for people are already real. The only thing that needs to change is the ruler that you use to measure to decide what to charge. In the next episode, we are going to look at something closely related.
We’re going to look at the belief held by a remarkable number of overachievers that hard work is the primary driver of financial success. That if you just put enough effort in, the results will follow. It’s a belief that feels entirely reasonable, and it turns out to be one of the most limiting ideas that an overachiever can have. That’s episode 15, the hard work Myth, coming up next time round, and I think it’s going to challenge the some of the assumptions you might not have examined for quite a while. That’s next episode. For now, here’s something to think about. Think about the work you do and the value it creates for the people you work with and ask yourself, am I being paid for my effort or am I being paid for my impact? If the honest answer is effort, not impact, maybe it’s time to change that ruler. Hey, if this is all making you think differently, do follow the podcast.
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Second series of 12 episodes and every episode connects to the previous and connects to the next. This is all taking us somewhere. Do subscribe. Give us a review. A like as I say, share it far and wide and head over to KeithBN.link/TOP where you’ll find this episode. You’ll find the show notes, you’ll find all the other episodes, you’ll find everything else from today. And you’ll also find the Overachievers quiz, if you haven’t already taken it yet, to find out exactly what kind of overachiever you are. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the mindset master for overachievers.
And I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to. To succeed. See you next time.
