About the whole Money Thing

Money, Money, Money the mere men­tion of the word causes many a stom­ach to tighten, that sim­ple word is the source of  a lot of pain for a lot of folks.  The approach­ing  out­door art fair sea­son has caused the annual revis­it­ing of that whole “how much do I charge” thing.

So what is the deal with this paper and coin thing? And why does it  cause artists to get all stiff, uptight and down­right grumpy? Well…to start with, many of us grew up being told that talk of money was not polite, that it was also a source of…of PRIDE that awful thing. We grew up hear­ing our dads grouse about how much some­thing cost and how he could “do just as good if not bet­ter even with his hands tied behind his back!” thank you very much! To even more com­pli­cate the issue, those of us from the “heartland“here had an extra thing to deal with…the only brag­ging we could do was related to bar­gains. So in addi­tion to hear­ing the old man grouse we also had to deal with stuff that really didn’t work or really didn’t fit but oh was it a deal!!!

What this is all about is that we have been raised with a habit, that has turned into a value state­ment all tied to moolah, right and wrong and our own self worth. This is espe­cially true for us small busi­ness folks. We tend to tie every­thing to money and then blame it when things get ugly or blame it as the rea­son for the world’s woes…it is the log­i­cal con­se­quence of how we have lived! Even worse,our sto­icism and tight liped  mind­set has iso­lated us lim­it­ing our abil­ity to receive and give sup­port. Because of all the fear, regret, anger, des­per­a­tion around money and our closely held habit of not talk­ing about “that stuff” in polite soci­ety, we think we are the only ones with a money issue .

So before we can even talk about pric­ing we need to talk about money and our rela­tion­ship with it. Yes..I did say rela­tion­ship and no I’m not going to go all woowoo on you, and yes, yes it is impor­tant to under­stand our rela­tion­ship with it. All of the energy behind the habit you have given power to leads you to see money as some­thing big­ger than it is.

Because money touches us at all lev­els of our lives and because that touch is so deeply rooted a lot of what we feel around money is auto­matic and our feel­ings about it are no where to be found because we are col­lec­tively liv­ing in denial.

So…let’s step back and take a look at this money thing. There are gen­er­ally three main areas that hang us up when we talk about pric­ing  each is loaded with poten­tial trig­gers from our past:

• Value- as in we have to start “valu­ing our­selves more”
• Get­ting- as in we can “get more money”
• Receiv­ing- as in ” I need to learn how to receive”

So let’s first look at the “value“thing…

My friend and Men­tor Mark Sil­ver points out that the prob­lem with the way we use the word value turns it into a fun­da­men­tal judg­ment state­ment. The judg­ment state­ment puts our wor­thi­ness  some­where on a value con­tin­uum between great and worth­less. Even more yucky is that judg­ment implies com­par­i­son, one thing is bet­ter than the other based on where it lies on the continuum…because value has no mean­ing if it isn’t mea­sured, com­pared and eval­u­ated. Ulti­mately what ever we are com­par­ing ends up on the con­tin­uum includ­ing our selves.  So when we make state­ments about “valu­ing our­selves more”  we are uncon­sciously invok­ing judg­ment which starts the whole snow ball to avalanche thing going. How help­ful is that? Not so much…

The other thing about assign­ing value, espe­cially when we look at pric­ing, is we almost always end com­par­ing our work with that of oth­ers. Here’s the prob­lem though …we may as well be com­par­ing apples and oranges. Because, espe­cially any one who cre­ates, our work is unique to us and our pric­ing should reflect that. Also, we tend to com­pare our­selves by sales which repeats the whole apples and orange thing all over again. If we make pots it doesn’t make sense to com­pare our pots even with another pot­ter because she has a whole difer­ent vision than we do. Finally, com­par­ing our sales of pots to Joe the wood turner, also doesn’t make sense, because we each have buy­ers look­ing for the kind of stuff we sell.

What about the “get” thing?

Well first of all, announc­ing that we need to “get” more money kinda does a cou­ple of things, first it turns that money into some­thing to be “got­ten” through shear force of will. Essen­tially turn­ing the whole thing into a com­pe­ti­tion,  with our­selves that can never be won because we have no con­trol of the impulses of our buy­ers. We can become so focused on the “get” that we eas­ily miss other oppor­tu­ni­ties that might pop up unex­pect­edly and lead to more sucess. Iso­la­tion hap­pens here also, because we “have” to be focused if we are going to “get what we want” and miss pos­si­bil­i­ties and sup­port avail­able from others.

On to the “receiv­ing” thing…

Learn­ing to receive is a good thing for the most part, but say­ing “I just need to learn to receive” implies that what­ever comes our way  is from some exter­nal power dol­ing stuff out by some unknown cri­te­ria. Think­ing this way can lead us to the slip­pery slope of blam­ing oth­ers for our short comings…think blam­ing those “idiots who couldn’t reco­ga­nize good art if it hit them in the face”. The other thing this mind­set of “receiv­ing” can lead to is scarcity which turns into fear and we all know where that goes…right back another time around the loop. If chas­ing your tail sounds fun then have at it, but sooner than later we all get dizzy and fall over from run­ing in to many circles.

So…before you start cring­ing and obsess­ing about pric­ing our work let’s spend some time look­ing at our­con­ver­sa­tions about money. We need to pay atten­tion to our view point, how we  frame the money thing because how we see money will show up in our con­ver­sa­tions, by way of our body and your emotions.Our feel­ings about money can cause a buyer to auto­mat­i­cally push the “reject” but­ton close her ears and run for the hills. If the mere men­tion of money trig­gers a flash back to hear­ing your par­ents you might want to spend some time sort­ing out this whole money thing.

Pay atten­tion to all this stuff and know that all it is, is habits and habits, we can change… all we need to do is be ready.