Don't Hide Behind the Camera If You Believe in What You Offer

Most people wait for external permission before charging what they believe they're worth, a track record, a credential, someone else's approval. In a recent conversation on my podcast, a much simpler mechanism came up instead: the number becomes real the moment you decide it is, not the moment you feel fully qualified to claim it.

There's a common assumption that pricing should follow proof, build the credentials, gather the results, then raise your rate accordingly. In practice, plenty of successful pricing decisions happen in the reverse order. Someone states a number they've never been paid before, expecting doubt or negotiation, and the market simply agrees. That's not recklessness, it's recognising that confidence often has to precede the evidence, not follow it. Waiting to feel fully deserving before charging accordingly usually means waiting indefinitely, since that feeling rarely arrives on its own schedule.

Rather than preparing different material for different opportunities, it's far more efficient to build one well-refined message that can expand or contract as needed, a thirty-minute version, a ninety-minute version, a half-day version, all built from the same core structure. When a schedule changes unexpectedly, a shortened slot, an extended one, a stand-in role because someone else cancelled, that flexibility becomes the difference between being ready and scrambling. Depth in one message serves you better than breadth across several.

One line closed our conversation and is worth remembering: he struggled, he cried, he struggled again, but he kept going. Terry Fossum, a TEDx speaker and founder of a speaker-training program, made clear that persistence mattered more than any single skill he'd built along the way. It's a familiar message, but an accurate one. Plenty of businesses and speaking careers fail not from lack of ability, but from someone giving up right before the traction that was already building had a chance to show itself.

It's tempting to stay behind content, posting, editing, refining, rather than putting yourself directly in front of an audience. If you genuinely believe in the value of what you offer, hiding behind indirect channels caps how quickly people can actually discover that belief. Positioning yourself as the expert in even a narrow, unglamorous field, whatever that field happens to be, is available to nearly anyone willing to claim it deliberately.

Confidence in your price, your message, and your visibility rarely arrives fully formed before you act. Usually, it's the acting itself, stating the number, showing up, refusing to quit, that produces the confidence, not the other way around.