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What Are You Worth?

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: The other day, I was listening to a highly-successful (millionaire) internet entrepreneur coaching three new colleagues. Each of them had recently decided upon a career transition, leaving their trade-time-for-money jobs to strike out on their own in cyberspace. The coach asked each of them to address three questions: how much money they'd made in the job they just left, why they left, and what they expected to make in their new venture. The conversation went something like this....

What Are You Worth?

You Will Get The Abundance You Expect - And Share The other day, I was listening to a highly-successful (millionaire) internet entrepreneur coaching three new colleagues. Each of them had recently decided upon a career transition, leaving their trade-time-for-money jobs to strike out on their own in cyberspace. The coach asked each of them to address three questions: how much money they'd made in the job they just left, why they left, and what they expected to make in their new venture. The conversation went something like this.

"I was making a little over sixty thousand," said the first guy. "I left because I really want to spend more time with my family. I was working sixty hours a week, and I just didn't have enough hours in the day!"

"But how much do you want to make now?" asked the coach.

"I'd be very happy to just match that, so I'm looking for five thousand a month, maybe more."

The second new entrepreneur said "I may sound greedy, but I was already making about twice that - about $120,000, plus bonuses. I'm in this business because I want to be my own boss, and give myself a raise. My boss in my old job was making more like one-fifty, so that's what I'm after."

"My salary was right around thirty thousand," said the third newbie. "That's before taxes. We're expecting our first baby, and I'm looking for at least three grand a month."

There was a brief silence, then the coach asked whether the three new entrepreneurs wanted a rah-rah pep talk filled with praise for their courage, or whether they wanted him to be blunt, and hit them between the eyes with some harsh truth. All of them chose the harsh-truth smack-down.

"None of you is going to make it," he said.

Silence.

"The reason is that you have allowed your previous bosses to tell you what you're worth. Each of you had an employer who set your personal financial thermostat at a certain level, and that's what feels normal to you. You bought into the notion that, whatever salary you were making, that's more-or-less what you're worth. So unless you change your personal thermostat, and reset it much higher, you won't make even what you had before."

He went on to declare that every one of the new entrepreneurs could actually add a zero to the end of whatever compensation they were expecting... but that changing one's self-worth setting wasn't easy.

"More than that," he said, after more silence, "I asked each of you to say why you'd decided to make the jump to your own business, and to a man, you all gave reasons that were all about what you wanted your business to do for you. Until you put yourself on a mission to do great things for others, you won't develop the mindset of abundance that you'll need to truly change anyone's life, including your own."

It was a harsh dose of inspirational leadership... and, I'm happy to say, despite the harshness it did have an inspiring effect on the new adventurers.

But what was suggested did seem like a tough combination to me: a focused mission of service to others and a wide-open expectation of abundance for yourself. But I've found that advice to be absolutely valid. Sales guru Zig Ziglar famously said that you get what you want in life by helping others get what they want... and the old adage that your altitude is determined by your attitude is also spot-on.

So what's your personal thermostat setting? Are you on a service mission?

It might seem like this is a tough time to develop a mindset of abundance, with major challenges in a crumbling global economy. But those challenges actually make this the best time for new enlightenment. Experts say we're on the eve of a $50 trillion global wealth transfer from the uninformed to the enlightened. What worked to make people wealthy in the past several decades will not work for another decade to come... so the new wealthy will need new strategies, and a new attitude. Whether you own your own business, or you exercise your entrepreneurial spirit in the service of an employer, the time is now for what Ziglar called a "check up from the neck up" to eliminate the "stinkin' thinkin'" that might be keeping you down.

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Article Tags: entrepreneurship, health wealth and happiness, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility



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