I typed $2,000 into the email, looked at it for a second, deleted it, and put $1,000 in its place, which is a strange thing to do inside a proposal for a workshop about having difficult conversations.
My palms were damp enough that I noticed them against the trackpad, and my breath had climbed up somewhere near my collarbone, the way it does right before you say a thing you cannot take back. Two hours. “Difficult Conversations Made Easy,” a session I have delivered for nine months now to international audiences and organizations, and the irony was not lost on me even while it was happening.
Three months earlier I ran nearly the same workshop for another organization and charged a thousand. Six months ago I ran it for free and told myself I was building something, which was true and also convenient.
One thousand to two thousand, for work that had only gotten better in between. Twice more I put the smaller number back because it felt survivable. Then I caught myself adding a sentence underneath to soften it, something about prep hours and follow-up materials, as though $2,000 could not stand up by itself and needed me there holding its elbow.
I deleted the sentence, typed the two back in, and sent it before I could open the draft again. The decision maker said yes within a few hours. What I felt was closer to embarrassment than triumph, because a yes that fast makes you wonder what else you could have asked for.
The price in my head had been set by a woman who taught the thing for free. What kept the number in the email was a page of writing I did before I opened my inbox.
You have your own $1,000. Maybe it is a rate you have quoted the same way for three years because the first person you sent it to did not blink. Maybe it is a raise you have been rehearsing since February and keep moving to the next quarter, or a paid tier you keep almost turning on. You already know which one it is, because it surfaced while you were reading this paragraph, and you have already started explaining to yourself why now is not the week.
Your brain is pricing you from a file it never opened
Your brain prices you the way it prices everything, by pulling up the instances it has on record and averaging them.
Most of us do not keep a record. We keep a feeling. That feeling got assembled out of moments nobody wrote down: a performance review, a sentence from a first boss, the pause before someone answered you. Because it was never written, it cannot be argued with and it cannot be updated. It sits there issuing verdicts in your own voice, and you mistake the verdict for good judgment.
I keep coming back to the idea that the brain runs on forecasts. It does not so much perceive the room as predict it, then correct the prediction against whatever actually shows up. The forecast gets built out of accumulated instances, which is the encouraging part, because new instances change it.
A team at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry, led by Geert-Jan Will, watched this happen in 2017. They put people in a scanner, had strangers who had supposedly read their profiles send back approval or disapproval, and asked them to rate their own sense of worth as they went. The ratings did not track whether people were liked. They tracked the gap between the response expected and the response that arrived. Participants worked out fairly quickly which groups of strangers mostly approved of them, and it was a thumbs-down from one of those groups, the ones they had come to count on, that took the most out of them.
That is as far as the study goes. Moment to moment, inside that task, self-worth moved on the distance between the answer predicted and the answer that came back.
The rest is mine, and I want to be clear about where the scanner stops and I start. If the prediction gets built out of instances, and your instances are stored as a feeling you cannot open, then the only move I have found is getting them onto a page where you can read them back in your own handwriting. Nine months of watching people do this in workshops is my evidence. Nobody has put my page in an fMRI machine.
So the easy ask is a forecast about the answer you are going to get, and the people who make it without flinching have different instances on file. You cannot argue yourself into a forecast. You can only feed it.
Six things to write. Twenty minutes.
1. Write the ask you are not making, then write the number you would ask for if the answer were already yes. Three minutes. Word for word, the way you would have to say it out loud, with the number in it. “I am raising my rate to $X on March 1.” “My fee for the day is $X.” “I want $X.” “I am taking the first week of December.” Most people write around the number, and noticing that you did is already information. Then, underneath, the number you would name if the yes were guaranteed. Nothing after it. No justification, no because. Watch how quickly your hand wants to explain itself. Mine was $2,000 for two hours, and my hand wanted to put three sentences of prep-time math under it before I would let myself send the thing.
2. Write the evidence file. Five minutes. Ten lines of what you delivered this year that nobody recorded anywhere. The launch you carried while two people were out. The client still using the thing you built. Mine has a line about the stretch where I worked twelve and fourteen hour days, carried three people’s jobs, and was told by a woman in the C-suite that I was not putting in enough hours and effort. Writing it down years later did more for my rate than any pep talk ever has. This is the file your brain was missing when it set your price.
3. Name the voice that argues back. Three minutes. Write the sentence that arrives the second you say your number out loud. Then write down who owns it. Mine belongs to a boyfriend I had at twenty-one. I handed him the newest poem I had written in Polish and he said, “This is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry?” I dropped the page in a garbage can on my way out and did not write anything for more than twenty years. The sentence usually has an owner, and the owner is usually not you.
4. Write what the no-ask costs. Three minutes. One year of not asking, in dollars or in hours. Then multiply by five.
Mine took about forty seconds to work out once I let myself look at it. Two sessions inside six months that should have been two thousand each. I collected one thousand of the four. Three thousand left on the table in half a year, six in a year, thirty thousand over five, for the same two hours a decision maker later approved at twice the price without asking a single question. Thirty thousand is the number I made myself write on the page and look at.
5. Write what the yes makes possible, in present tense. Four minutes. Not the yes itself. The thing the yes lets happen. The day of the week, the room, or the little square of screen with their face in it. Detail is the part your nervous system responds to, and a vague rehearsal rehearses nothing.
Mine was the workshop, the grid of faces on Zoom and the aha moments arriving close enough together that you can feel them land. Two hours does something to a face, makes it lighter and younger until it ends up somewhere near awe, and that is what went on the page: the room filling with something I can feel through a screen, people changing while it happens to them. That is what the $2,000 was for, and the number was easier to type once I had already watched it happen in writing.
6. Write the date, the time, and the first line. Two minutes. When you are sending it or saying it, down to the hour. Then write the opening sentence of the message itself, so the hardest sentence in the whole thing is already written and waiting for you on the day. By the morning I sent mine, the only decision left was whether to open the draft one more time.
The number holds. I send $2,000 proposals now and I no longer sit with the draft open deciding whether the figure can stand up without me there holding its elbow. Nothing about me changed. The file did.
Somewhere in your week there is an ask you are carrying around unwritten, deciding the answer for someone who has not been given the question yet. Write prompt one. Word for word, with the number in it, the way you would have to say it out loud. Then hit reply and send me that one line. I read every one, and I want to see your number before your brain talks you down from it.
P.S. Prompt five is the one people skim and the one that does the work. You see it, you write it down, you act as if it already happened. Rewrite Your Limiting Beliefs, Before They Rewrite You, is a twenty-one self-guided challange to rewrite your self imposed, limited beliefs. Everything opens the moment you join, nothing drips out week by week, and the twenty-one days start whenever you do. Paid members already have all of it. Everyone else comes in as an annual member, which also opens the Courage to Create Academy for a year.
