This is such a valuable conversation to have. I relate with the woman who asked this question. Everything she said had me nodding my head in agreement. I will definitely take a look at these links you provided in this article. Im a 42 year old women who gave the Mormon religion I was raised in my life. I didn’t finish college, I didn’t focus on building a career, or developing as a young g adult. Instead, I became a stay at home mom because I was taught that this was the best thing for me to do and here I am feeling a lot of grief for not pursing any kind of work that would be sustainable. I want to be able to make money and experience independence but I feel so insecure about entering the work world.
You can do it! You can! Look at the Rosie the riveter poster and get inspired. Good luck! Also Zawn had some good advice here. A lot of us have been through these feelings. And we are cheering you on!
Being a stay-at-home mom is pretty awesome. Try to find new descriptors for the work you've done so it can fill in the blanks of a resume. Your lived experience and investment into family is valuable.
Oh, to have the confidence of a mediocre white man. I understand the LW’s problem and in our patriarchal society, women have been treated as inferior and therefore we do not understand our own worth. I agree that the LW needs to quit paying for courses and coaches unless they really add value to her work. It is so hard to undo years of being told “you’re too emotional”, “you need a man(ly man) to prove your worth”, “you are meant to stay humble and submissive and if you don’t you are a bad person and will be judged accordingly”. I am hoping that the dial is shifting and women begin to realise that men need us more than we need them. I wish her every success in her life ❤️
Ahh! Great advice, as usual, Zawn! I used to be like this when I was younger and married. But when divorce dumped me into financial hardship on my own to raise "our" children (of course guess who always did most of the childraising...), I got a shock of understanding: wow. I MUST value my own work in this world. My life, my kids' lives, our well-being, and our futures all depend on it.
So I read books about how to negotiate raises, and usually (not always) got them. I realized that the "normal" raises were on a percentage---that is, if someone makes 20 and hour and another person makes 30 an hour, a ten percent raise does not land the same: person A now makes 22 an hour, person B now makes 33 and hour, and at the next year's raise, it's A at 24.20 and B at 36.30, and off we go, where over time, person A (used to be me) will retire with less, be able to save less, live less well, and be less financially secure. (And vulnerable to dependency on others.) Every raise I negotiated for myself meant not just that raise but all percentage raises after would be better, meaning a much better life for me and my kids.
We must value our own work. We must value ourselves. We must insist on being treated respectfully and fairly. And we must do so in every area of life, the workplace, the home, the partnership/couple, and the social life with friends and acquaintances. THAT's what a paycheck is about: actualizing your potential in the world; respect from others and self-respect; being valued by institutions/colleagues and self-valuing. and it's very directly about your own well-being. Do great work, and then love yourself enough to insist on getting paid well for your work.
I’m sorry that the questioner is struggling. We all have stuff we struggle with, but women are conditioned to blame ourselves for not being “perfect” - whatever that is, or whoever’s idea of “perfect” it is. We’re all just struggling humans, it’s ok.
And if you’re under an insane amount of stress, that makes harder.
I agree that our capitalistic society sets us up for failure in so many ways. I also agree that paying for coaches who claim to be able to “fix” us is not helpful. I’m pretty sick of the “self improvement” culture. Hang in there as best you can.
I had to go back into the paid workforce at the age of 48 after my ex-husband ran off with his proverbial younger model. I made a point of retraining in a field I knew was in demand, and I regularly check the pay range to ensure that I am being paid what the market says I am worth. For many professions, salary data is widely available. For me, this means I don't worry about my confidence or valuing myself. It's all about the data. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is my friend. I can't possibly overstate what an enormous difference it makes to be economically self-sufficient after having been dependent on my ex. I don't always love what I'm doing at work, but I love having control of my life. It was brutally hard at times, but so worth it on the other side.
The patriarchal systems that imbed how much more of an expert women have to be to be taken seriously is a big driver of feeling like an imposter who will never be good enough to deserve pay for labor. If you’ve experienced a man taking credit for your work, your idea going ignored until a man restates it, being chronically underpaid compared to male peers, etc (which is damn near every woman who has ever worked), that message about how your work isn’t deserving of pay gets pushed into our subconscious and regularly reinforced (by lived experience, media, social stories, social dynamics).
It’s happening largely unconsciously and shows up as dread, anxiety, defeatism, pessimism and all the other by feelings behind procrastination.
Anything that works only on the intellectual or mindset level (like most coaching) is going to slow at best to help shift things. You can’t think your way out of anxiety.
What I have found does help, is self hypnosis (and even better, personalized guided hypnosis until you’ve got your own sense of how-to really familiar). Making an ally of the subconscious, shifting the automatic connections it is making behind the scenes that help drive the emotional state, that’s where faster shifts are possible. Other practices where the sustaining skills of nervous system regulation is what you’re learning and practicing can also help, hypnosis is just my favorite.
It’s still not going to address patriarchy or capitalism that are at the core of all of this, but it makes it easier to survive and move towards thriving.
First is with interrupting the unwanted/unhelpful emotional habit when you notice it happening. So when I notice that I am avoiding a task, I can use that noticing as marker that it's time to do some extra trance work because there's some emotions around it that are getting stuck. Because the feeling of trance is fundamentally different than the feeling of whatever it is that is stuck, shifting into that different feeling state helps to get the emotion moving again and shifts me from a tense/restricted/tapped/anxious/etc lace where it is very hard to move forward, into a more open state where I can access more of my own wisdom/insight/power and use that to take the next step towards whatever I need to accomplish.
The second way it helps is with building up lived experience in non-stressed states. It helps to strengthen the neural habits of being regulated, being safe, being okay even when X stressful thing is happening (like an important meeting, salary negotiation, a reasoned argument etc). That build up of lived experience is invaluable! It makes it easier to go back to calm more quickly, and gives me a growing body of evidence that shows me that I do not have to always be stressed. That I can rest.
Resource wise - I trained as a hypnotist 😂 but that's not a necessary path.
I trained with Melissa Tiers, so I'm a bit biased towards her - she has a fair number of free classes on her site that might be a good fit. Try "Rapid Self Hypnosis" she goes through a few different methods
And feel free to message me through Substack (Today I Learned that's a thing!) if you want to chat about it. I love the practice and love to talk about it with folks!
Women have been made to think their work is less than and that working for free or serving others is "better". Don't get me wrong, I love to serve in my church and my community. However, if you work, you need (and deserve) to get paid. I'll never forget my little 12-year-old after getting a pittance for baby-sitting. She looked at that adult and said, "That isn't enough. I worked hard taking care of your children and even cleaned your home." That lady paid up. She never asked my kid to work again because that lady knew she could get some other girl to do it for free. Again, service and volunteering are noble, and so is advocating and asking for what you are worth.
This was me. My solution was to work for myself. Not freelance, not a job job. I work in great bursts on something and then put it on autopilot. My PDA was such a disability that it forced me to find ways to create passive income and be able to fuck off for a whole month if I felt like it. I could never go back. I can do work that helps others, but I can't seem to tolerate working for a boss or a client. How lucky I am that my brain works in such a way that I had no choice but to get innovative and find a better way!
I relate to the PDA thing. As soon as I get a commission, I don't want to do it. I had an idea recently and had loads of interest in the product I want to launch, and now, I can't get to work on it. I'm giving myself a little bit of space as I've just gone through a family emergency, but still, charging for my work feels HARD.
I have confidence that I'm good at what i do.. However I find so many obstacles and then I get confronted with more. The demand of setting up a product feels too much.
Also, charging for my skill is acknowledging my worth as a skilled creative, and that's also HARD to do.
I tend to either spend the money I get, or want to do everything for free/cheap/donation, so other people get to decide the value my work has, if that makes sense? Doesn't help that I'm close to poverty if not in poverty, so that pressure to survive is also really heavy.
I love the question of what a mediocre white man would do. Like they'd charge double what I would haha.
Also the ethics of consumerism/retail/capitalist society gets in my way, but I know that I have to work with the system I'm in, at least for now.
I have done so much self work to overcome issues related to money. In some instances, I would rather not get paid than ask for payment.
As a checkout operator at a supermarket - no problem at all. But as a professional in my business, I would do a consult and provide expertise then my mouth would go dry and I couldn’t bring myself to pull out the square reader so they could tap their card.
I would apologise via email later and send an invoice for bank transfer and NEVER follow up if they didn’t pay. I did find other ways, adding it to the next invoice and not progressing the process until payment was received - prior to delivery of the final service (where their desire to finalise was high so payment meant something to them).
I seriously would rather work for free than ask for payment.
This has reduced but asking for money is still a problem for me. I know where this comes from (no shock that it’s the way money was talked about and used throughout my childhood) but it’s still constant work to do.
So please think about how money has been talked about throughout your life, the messages you’ve received about money and value and worth and start challenging those beliefs (once you figure out what they are). Change the way you talk to yourself about money, about the value of money, about assumptions relating to money. And if that’s all too hard, change the word money in your self talk. Instead of ‘here’s an invoice for the work I have done for you’ say to yourself ‘this product/service is $x please pay the invoice’. This way it’s not about you but rather the service/product provided and when you know the commercial price of an item eg. Comparative to another product like a banana at store one is $2 and it’s $2 at store two, then it’s not about your provision of the banana but the banana itself. So you separate yourself from the transaction. That’s how I started anyway. There are a couple of other ways, but this comment is already long enough! lol
Just one last thing - sometimes my brain thinks I have completed something when I think about doing it and being paid for it before I complete it seems to reinforce this. So I had to find a way to remind my brain that the service was ‘ordered’ ‘paid’ but needed delivering. So I created a deliverables tab in trello (that’s just the way I organised my to-do’s) and focused on deliverables rather than sales or orders or ‘to-do’s’. I trick my brain all the time lol it’s crazy.
This is such a valuable conversation to have. I relate with the woman who asked this question. Everything she said had me nodding my head in agreement. I will definitely take a look at these links you provided in this article. Im a 42 year old women who gave the Mormon religion I was raised in my life. I didn’t finish college, I didn’t focus on building a career, or developing as a young g adult. Instead, I became a stay at home mom because I was taught that this was the best thing for me to do and here I am feeling a lot of grief for not pursing any kind of work that would be sustainable. I want to be able to make money and experience independence but I feel so insecure about entering the work world.
You can do it! You can! Look at the Rosie the riveter poster and get inspired. Good luck! Also Zawn had some good advice here. A lot of us have been through these feelings. And we are cheering you on!
Thank you 🥹
Being a stay-at-home mom is pretty awesome. Try to find new descriptors for the work you've done so it can fill in the blanks of a resume. Your lived experience and investment into family is valuable.
I appreciate your encouragement 🥹
Oh, to have the confidence of a mediocre white man. I understand the LW’s problem and in our patriarchal society, women have been treated as inferior and therefore we do not understand our own worth. I agree that the LW needs to quit paying for courses and coaches unless they really add value to her work. It is so hard to undo years of being told “you’re too emotional”, “you need a man(ly man) to prove your worth”, “you are meant to stay humble and submissive and if you don’t you are a bad person and will be judged accordingly”. I am hoping that the dial is shifting and women begin to realise that men need us more than we need them. I wish her every success in her life ❤️
Ahh! Great advice, as usual, Zawn! I used to be like this when I was younger and married. But when divorce dumped me into financial hardship on my own to raise "our" children (of course guess who always did most of the childraising...), I got a shock of understanding: wow. I MUST value my own work in this world. My life, my kids' lives, our well-being, and our futures all depend on it.
So I read books about how to negotiate raises, and usually (not always) got them. I realized that the "normal" raises were on a percentage---that is, if someone makes 20 and hour and another person makes 30 an hour, a ten percent raise does not land the same: person A now makes 22 an hour, person B now makes 33 and hour, and at the next year's raise, it's A at 24.20 and B at 36.30, and off we go, where over time, person A (used to be me) will retire with less, be able to save less, live less well, and be less financially secure. (And vulnerable to dependency on others.) Every raise I negotiated for myself meant not just that raise but all percentage raises after would be better, meaning a much better life for me and my kids.
We must value our own work. We must value ourselves. We must insist on being treated respectfully and fairly. And we must do so in every area of life, the workplace, the home, the partnership/couple, and the social life with friends and acquaintances. THAT's what a paycheck is about: actualizing your potential in the world; respect from others and self-respect; being valued by institutions/colleagues and self-valuing. and it's very directly about your own well-being. Do great work, and then love yourself enough to insist on getting paid well for your work.
I’m sorry that the questioner is struggling. We all have stuff we struggle with, but women are conditioned to blame ourselves for not being “perfect” - whatever that is, or whoever’s idea of “perfect” it is. We’re all just struggling humans, it’s ok.
And if you’re under an insane amount of stress, that makes harder.
I agree that our capitalistic society sets us up for failure in so many ways. I also agree that paying for coaches who claim to be able to “fix” us is not helpful. I’m pretty sick of the “self improvement” culture. Hang in there as best you can.
I had to go back into the paid workforce at the age of 48 after my ex-husband ran off with his proverbial younger model. I made a point of retraining in a field I knew was in demand, and I regularly check the pay range to ensure that I am being paid what the market says I am worth. For many professions, salary data is widely available. For me, this means I don't worry about my confidence or valuing myself. It's all about the data. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is my friend. I can't possibly overstate what an enormous difference it makes to be economically self-sufficient after having been dependent on my ex. I don't always love what I'm doing at work, but I love having control of my life. It was brutally hard at times, but so worth it on the other side.
The patriarchal systems that imbed how much more of an expert women have to be to be taken seriously is a big driver of feeling like an imposter who will never be good enough to deserve pay for labor. If you’ve experienced a man taking credit for your work, your idea going ignored until a man restates it, being chronically underpaid compared to male peers, etc (which is damn near every woman who has ever worked), that message about how your work isn’t deserving of pay gets pushed into our subconscious and regularly reinforced (by lived experience, media, social stories, social dynamics).
It’s happening largely unconsciously and shows up as dread, anxiety, defeatism, pessimism and all the other by feelings behind procrastination.
Anything that works only on the intellectual or mindset level (like most coaching) is going to slow at best to help shift things. You can’t think your way out of anxiety.
What I have found does help, is self hypnosis (and even better, personalized guided hypnosis until you’ve got your own sense of how-to really familiar). Making an ally of the subconscious, shifting the automatic connections it is making behind the scenes that help drive the emotional state, that’s where faster shifts are possible. Other practices where the sustaining skills of nervous system regulation is what you’re learning and practicing can also help, hypnosis is just my favorite.
It’s still not going to address patriarchy or capitalism that are at the core of all of this, but it makes it easier to survive and move towards thriving.
Can you say more about self hypnosis and how you used it to help you? Any good resources you'd recommend to get started?
Two big ways it helps:
First is with interrupting the unwanted/unhelpful emotional habit when you notice it happening. So when I notice that I am avoiding a task, I can use that noticing as marker that it's time to do some extra trance work because there's some emotions around it that are getting stuck. Because the feeling of trance is fundamentally different than the feeling of whatever it is that is stuck, shifting into that different feeling state helps to get the emotion moving again and shifts me from a tense/restricted/tapped/anxious/etc lace where it is very hard to move forward, into a more open state where I can access more of my own wisdom/insight/power and use that to take the next step towards whatever I need to accomplish.
The second way it helps is with building up lived experience in non-stressed states. It helps to strengthen the neural habits of being regulated, being safe, being okay even when X stressful thing is happening (like an important meeting, salary negotiation, a reasoned argument etc). That build up of lived experience is invaluable! It makes it easier to go back to calm more quickly, and gives me a growing body of evidence that shows me that I do not have to always be stressed. That I can rest.
Resource wise - I trained as a hypnotist 😂 but that's not a necessary path.
I trained with Melissa Tiers, so I'm a bit biased towards her - she has a fair number of free classes on her site that might be a good fit. Try "Rapid Self Hypnosis" she goes through a few different methods
https://the-center-for-integrative-hypnosis.mykajabi.com/OpenAccessclasses
And feel free to message me through Substack (Today I Learned that's a thing!) if you want to chat about it. I love the practice and love to talk about it with folks!
Women have been made to think their work is less than and that working for free or serving others is "better". Don't get me wrong, I love to serve in my church and my community. However, if you work, you need (and deserve) to get paid. I'll never forget my little 12-year-old after getting a pittance for baby-sitting. She looked at that adult and said, "That isn't enough. I worked hard taking care of your children and even cleaned your home." That lady paid up. She never asked my kid to work again because that lady knew she could get some other girl to do it for free. Again, service and volunteering are noble, and so is advocating and asking for what you are worth.
This was me. My solution was to work for myself. Not freelance, not a job job. I work in great bursts on something and then put it on autopilot. My PDA was such a disability that it forced me to find ways to create passive income and be able to fuck off for a whole month if I felt like it. I could never go back. I can do work that helps others, but I can't seem to tolerate working for a boss or a client. How lucky I am that my brain works in such a way that I had no choice but to get innovative and find a better way!
Huzzah this hits home.
I relate to the PDA thing. As soon as I get a commission, I don't want to do it. I had an idea recently and had loads of interest in the product I want to launch, and now, I can't get to work on it. I'm giving myself a little bit of space as I've just gone through a family emergency, but still, charging for my work feels HARD.
I have confidence that I'm good at what i do.. However I find so many obstacles and then I get confronted with more. The demand of setting up a product feels too much.
Also, charging for my skill is acknowledging my worth as a skilled creative, and that's also HARD to do.
I tend to either spend the money I get, or want to do everything for free/cheap/donation, so other people get to decide the value my work has, if that makes sense? Doesn't help that I'm close to poverty if not in poverty, so that pressure to survive is also really heavy.
I love the question of what a mediocre white man would do. Like they'd charge double what I would haha.
Also the ethics of consumerism/retail/capitalist society gets in my way, but I know that I have to work with the system I'm in, at least for now.
I have done so much self work to overcome issues related to money. In some instances, I would rather not get paid than ask for payment.
As a checkout operator at a supermarket - no problem at all. But as a professional in my business, I would do a consult and provide expertise then my mouth would go dry and I couldn’t bring myself to pull out the square reader so they could tap their card.
I would apologise via email later and send an invoice for bank transfer and NEVER follow up if they didn’t pay. I did find other ways, adding it to the next invoice and not progressing the process until payment was received - prior to delivery of the final service (where their desire to finalise was high so payment meant something to them).
I seriously would rather work for free than ask for payment.
This has reduced but asking for money is still a problem for me. I know where this comes from (no shock that it’s the way money was talked about and used throughout my childhood) but it’s still constant work to do.
So please think about how money has been talked about throughout your life, the messages you’ve received about money and value and worth and start challenging those beliefs (once you figure out what they are). Change the way you talk to yourself about money, about the value of money, about assumptions relating to money. And if that’s all too hard, change the word money in your self talk. Instead of ‘here’s an invoice for the work I have done for you’ say to yourself ‘this product/service is $x please pay the invoice’. This way it’s not about you but rather the service/product provided and when you know the commercial price of an item eg. Comparative to another product like a banana at store one is $2 and it’s $2 at store two, then it’s not about your provision of the banana but the banana itself. So you separate yourself from the transaction. That’s how I started anyway. There are a couple of other ways, but this comment is already long enough! lol
Just one last thing - sometimes my brain thinks I have completed something when I think about doing it and being paid for it before I complete it seems to reinforce this. So I had to find a way to remind my brain that the service was ‘ordered’ ‘paid’ but needed delivering. So I created a deliverables tab in trello (that’s just the way I organised my to-do’s) and focused on deliverables rather than sales or orders or ‘to-do’s’. I trick my brain all the time lol it’s crazy.
I love this question…and zawns response…AND all the comments in here…all the solidarity, care and understanding. 🙏🏻💖🫂