Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
A quiet month. A proposal that didn’t convert. A price increase that generated hesitation rather than a yes. For most overachievers, those outcomes don’t just feel disappointing. They feel like a verdict.
And the moment they feel like a verdict, they stop being useful. Because the question shifts from “what is this telling me about my positioning?” to “what does this say about me?” Those two questions lead to very different places.
In this episode, we look at money as a feedback system rather than a measure of worth. We explore why overachievers find this shift particularly difficult, and what it looks like to read financial outcomes as information, with curiosity, rather than as something more personal.
Key Themes
- When quiet months feel like verdicts
- Money as data, not self-assessment
- Why overachievers misread financial signals
- Separating emotion from financial analysis
- What the numbers are actually telling you
If You Prefer Video
Connected Blog
Money As A Feedback MEchanism
Most capable people process disappointing financial results as failure. Here’s why that’s a costly habit, and what to do instead.
Relevant Related Blogs and Episodes
When The Numbers Decide How You Feel
When income determines how you feel about yourself, every slow month becomes a crisis. Keith Blakemore-Noble on separating worth from revenue.
Stop Chasing Work, Start Designing Value.
Most capable professionals deliver great work but neglect structure. Here’s why that matters and how intentional value design changes things.
Episode 013 – The Hidden Psychology of Money
Discover why your income often lags behind your value – hint: it’s all about mindset, not mechanics.
Episode 019 – Money and Identity
Keith Blakemore Noble explores how identity creates income ceilings and what it takes to achieve lasting financial breakthroughs.
Episode 020 – Detaching Self-Worth From Income
Explore how detaching self-worth from income creates real stability and healthier success for overachievers.
Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If a quiet month leaves you questioning everything your direction, your value, your decisions, this episode is going to offer a more useful way to read what the numbers are actually telling you. Foreign welcome to The Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Hello. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, The Overachievers coach, and this is where we explore what it really means to succeed commercially, sustainably, and without the patterns that make it harder than it needs to be. We’ve been building steadily through series two, and we’re now approaching the end of it.
We’ve covered the psychology of money undervaluation, the hard work ceiling, pricing, discomfort, value versus effort, visibility, identity and income, detaching self worth from financial results, earning without overworking. And in the previous episode, we looked at designing value strategically rather than just reacting to whatever comes in. In this episode, we’re going to look at something which sits underneath all of those conversations and makes the whole lot a lot more useful. And that is the idea that money is a feedback system. It’s not a verdict. It’s not a measure of your worth. It’s not a signal about whether you’re fundamentally on the right track or the wrong track. It’s information.
Specific, useful, actionable information if you know how to read it. Now, if you haven’t already, do give us a Follow a Like a Share a subscribe, catch us on whatever your favourite platform is, a platform you’re listening on now, give us a review. It all helps, and it’s the easiest way to make sure that you don’t miss an episode of the Overachievers Podcast. So here’s the idea that I want us to explore together in this episode. Every financial outcome, a strong month, a quiet month. A proposal that converts, a proposal that doesn’t convert, a price increase that lands well, or one that generates pushback. All of those contain information. Information about your positioning, about how clearly your value has been communicated, about whether the right people are finding you, about whether what you’re charging is aligned with what the market understands your work to be worth.
That information is genuinely very useful, but only if you can read it as information rather than as something more personal. And for overachievers, who, as we’ve explored throughout this whole podcast, tend to carry a significant amount of identity into their financial outcomes, reading money as neutral data? That’s a lot harder than it sounds, because the instinct When a month is quiet or a proposal doesn’t convert. The instinct isn’t to ask, what is this telling me about my positioning? The instinct is to ask, what does this say about me? And those two questions, they lead to very different places. The first question, what is this telling me about my positioning? That leads to insight and to adjustment. The second question, what does this say about me? That just leads to anxiety and self doubt. And anxiety and self doubt, as we’ve seen, tend to produce exactly the kind of reactive, defensive decision making that makes subsequent months harder rather than easier. The shift from verdict to feedback may seem like a small one in theory. In reality, it is one of the more commercially useful things that an overachiever can develop.
Excuse me. Let me describe a pattern that comes up regularly. Someone raises their prices. They’ve thought it through. They understand the value that they create. They know that the increase is justified. And for the first few conversations after the increase, one or two potential clients decide not to proceed. The practical reality that this is completely normal.
Price increases almost always produce some attrition, just the way it is. The clients who are a perfect fit at the old price aren’t always a perfect fit at the new one. That’s not a failure of the increase. It’s information about market segmentation. But for overachievers, on the receiving end of those, early declines rarely feels like information. It feels like confirmation of a fear. The fear that the new price was too much, that they’ve overstepped. They need to go back to what felt safe now.
I worked with someone, let’s call him Thomas. Thomas had raised his consulting fees meaningfully after a long period of undercharging. The increase was well considered, and by any objective measure, it was still conservative relative to the value he delivered. He was still, dare I say it, potentially undercharging. The first month after the increase was quieter than usual. Two conversations that he had expected to convert didn’t. And Thomas, instead of reading that as normal attrition during a transition period, read it as evidence that the new pricing was wrong. So he dropped the price back down to where it was before the month was out.
What he’d missed, what the quieter month was actually telling him, if he’d been able to read it clearly, was that his messaging hadn’t caught up with his pricing. The value he delivered was real, but the way he communicated it hadn’t shifted to match the new number. The feedback wasn’t about the price, it was about the communication around all of it. Now, that’s a very different problem, and it has A very different solution. But he couldn’t access that solution because he was reading the outcome as a verdict rather than as a signal. Here’s something to consider. Think about the last time a financial outcome, a quiet period, or a proposal you didn’t convert, or a month underperformed. Think about the last time one of those produced a strong emotional response in you.
Now, thinking about that, what question did you instinctively ask at that point? Was it a practical one? You know, like, what does this tell me about my positioning, my messaging, my pipeline? Or was it a more personal one? What does this say about me, about whether this is working or about whether I’m good enough? If it was that second question, what information might you have missed because the emotional response got there first? It’s worth thinking about. Here’s the distinction that’s at the heart of this episode. Failure and feedback, they’re not the same thing, but they can feel identical in the moment. Failure is a conclusion. It says, this didn’t work. And that fact tells me something definitive about the situation, the approach, or the person behind it. Feedback. Excuse me? Feedback, on the other hand, is a question.
Feedback says, okay, this outcome happened. What is it telling me, and what might I adjust as a result? The same commercial outcome, A quiet month, a lost proposal, a price that generated hesitation. The same commercial outcome can be read through either lens, failure or feedback. And the lens you choose determines almost everything that happens next. Through the failure lens, the quiet month triggers retreat, lower the price, chase more work, return to what felt safe. None of which addresses the actual issue, most of which makes the underlying pattern even harder to shift. Through the feedback lens, the quiet month triggers inquiry. What’s the pipeline looking like? Is the messaging clear? Are the right people finding me? Is there a particular type of engagement that’s converting well and another that isn’t? What does the pattern across the last six months suggest? Those questions.
They are commercially useful. They lead to specific targeted adjustments rather than generalised anxiety. And that’s what turns financial outcomes from a source of stress into a source of intelligence. There is something worth understanding about why overachievers find this shift particularly difficult. It connects directly back to the Identity work we did back in the first series, when Identity is closely tied to outcomes. You know, when how you feel about yourself rises and falls with results. Every financial outcome carries more than just commercial meaning. It carries self assessment.
And self assessment is not a neutral, curious process. Self assessment, that’s a very emotionally loaded process, which means the feedback gets distorted before it can be useful. A quiet month doesn’t just tell you something about the pipeline, it tells you something, or rather it feels like it does, about your capability, your direction, your fundamental visibility. And once that distortion is in place, the information in the outcome becomes very hard to access clearly. And this is one of the reasons that identity work matters so much commercially. Not just for well being, but for the quality of the decisions that you make when identity is more stable, when who you are doesn’t rise and fall. With the monthly numbers, you can look at a quiet month and you can ask, what is this telling me? And you can ask that without that question being contaminated by what the answer might mean about you. That’s when money becomes genuinely useful as a feedback system, when you can read it the way a scientist might read an experiment, with curiosity, without attachment, and with genuine interest in what the data suggests.
That’s all well and good. What does this look like in practice? A useful habit that you can cultivate is to separate the emotional response from the analytical one. This is not about suppressing the emotional response that is real and pretending otherwise doesn’t help. Bottling it up. It’s not going to make it go away. Rather, this is about noticing that emotional response, acknowledging it, and then quite deliberately stepping into the analytical conversation separately. It could go something like this. I noticed this month’s numbers are producing a feeling of anxiety.
That’s understandable. Separate from that, what is this month’s data actually telling me? Those are two very different conversations. Running them simultaneously tends to contaminate both. Holding them separately allows each one to be more useful. Hold the first one first. I notice this month’s numbers are producing a feeling of anxiety. That’s understandable. Have that conversation with yourself.
And then separately, okay, what is this month’s data actually telling me? The analytical conversation, when it can happen without emotional interference, tends to be quite productive because the data are genuinely there, the patterns are in the numbers, and you can see them if you look for them. And the adjustments they suggest, the adjustments to messaging, to positioning, to pipeline activity, to the design of your offer, all of those adjustments are quite specific and they are quite, quite manageable. It’s the contamination of that conversation by identity concerns. It makes it feel overwhelming rather than useful. The next episode, episode 24, is the final one in this series. We have spent 12 episodes exploring the commercial and financial psychology of overachievement. We’ve looked at mindset, identity, pricing, value, visibility, positioning. In the final episode of this series, we’re going to bring it all together around one practical question.
What does financial stability actually look like when it’s built sustainably, not through constant pressure and maximum effort, but through the systems and structures that allow income to become genuinely reliable over time. That’s going to be in episode 24, building financial stability Without Burnout. I think it’s going to be a satisfying place for us to reach after everything we covered in this series of 12 episodes. With that said, here’s something for you to take away. Think about a recent financial outcome that produced a strong reaction, positive or negative reaction. Think about a recent financial outcome that produced that strong reaction. And ask yourself when you think about that specific financial outcome, ask yourself this if I set aside what that outcome felt like, what is it actually telling me? What is it telling me about my positioning? About my messaging, about my pipeline, about my offer? What’s the data saying separately from the story that the data triggered? Definitely worth exploring. Hey, if today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love it if you take a moment to leave a review or a rating on your favourite platform.
Genuinely helps other people to find the show, share it with someone you think would benefit, and if you haven’t already, give us a like and a follow or subscribe so that you’re there for every episode. Head over to KeithBN.link/TOP where you’ll find this episode and all the other episodes. You’ll find the show notes for each episode, along with some additional resources worth exploring if you’re on a deeper look. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, The Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed. See you in the next episode. It.
