"charge your worth" is the diet culture of money

Hi there,

I've been sitting with a question this month: what have our fields taught us about money?

We are people who can sit with so much. Grief. Shame. The body someone has been at war with for forty years. Sex, death, rage. We lean in. We stay.

And then someone asks about our fee, a colleague asks what we charge, or we open a spreadsheet to look at what we actually earned last year, and something in us flinches.

We get vague. We apologize. We put the spreadsheet away.

That flinch is worth listening to. There may be a history inside it: what we learned about care, who gets to be paid well, and what wanting money is supposed to say about us.

I notice two tensions that can make these conversations especially difficult for helping professionals.

What caring is supposed to cost us

Many of us inherited the idea that care work should be an expression of love or calling. The expectation to give generously can become tangled up with an expectation to need very little ourselves.

So we find ourselves in a bind.

Charge more, and we worry about making care inaccessible. About what colleagues will think. About becoming someone who is "in it for the money."

Keep our fees where they are, and we may need more hours than we can sustain to meet our own needs.

Access matters. So does the life of the person providing the care. It's painful to feel as though every fee decision asks us to choose between them.

And there are conditions around that decision that we didn't create: what insurance pays, the cost of running a practice, the resources available in our communities, and how much unpaid work happens around each paid hour.

When all of that becomes a test of our individual goodness, we end up carrying far more than a pricing question.

How much should I charge becomes: How much am I allowed to need?

I want us to be able to hear the difference.

The advice we find when we ask for help

I notice two directions money advice can pull us in.

One puts the responsibility almost entirely on us. Change your money mindset. Think abundantly. Charge your worth. Raise your rates and trust that the right clients will come.

There may be beliefs worth examining. But advice like this can skip right past debt, caregiving, disability, discrimination, access to family wealth, and the realities of the community where we work.

Sometimes I think "charge your worth" is the diet culture of money. It takes something shaped by history, resources, and circumstance, offers a simple personal rule, and leaves you feeling like a failure when the rule doesn't work.

Your worth as a person was never something a session fee could measure.

And I want to say plainly: I believe most of us truly need to be charging more and making more than we currently do. We need income that covers our lives, allows us to rest, and helps us prepare for the future.

There are real constraints on raising fees, and a fee increase won't solve every income problem. But our need to earn more deserves to be taken seriously, without requiring us to prove that we still care.

The other direction gives us a structural critique with very little help deciding what to do next. We can understand how care is undervalued and still need to decide what to charge, whether to change our schedule, or how to pay the rent next month.

Understanding the problem matters. So does having support with the decisions available to us.

In our work with people, we make room for context, history, resources, and choice. We know those things are connected. We deserve that same complexity about money.

Earning for your real life

When I work with helpers around money, I want us to have room for all of what's true.

Your housing costs are real. So are healthcare, debt, the people you support, and the future you're trying to prepare for.

Your capacity is real. There is an amount and intensity of work you can sustain while having room for the rest of your life. That deserves attention.

The conditions of your field are real. You can't change all of them yourself.

And the choices you do have are worth understanding clearly.

This is why, in EMBER, our work with money begins with your life.

Before setting a fee, we look at what it actually costs to be you: housing, healthcare, debt, caregiving, savings, retirement. Then the costs of the practice itself: workspace, insurance, consultation, training, software. We account for taxes, too.

We call this earning for your real life.

It can be a surprisingly tender exercise. You may discover that you've been setting your fees by what other people charge, what you were told was acceptable, or a number you chose years ago and have been reluctant to revisit.

Then we consider three levels:

Essential: What your life and practice need to function.

Comfortable: Enough for some breathing room, savings, and a sustainable workload.

Thriving: Room for greater security, rest, creativity, and investment in what matters to you.

Some helpers I work with realize they've been earning at Essential, or below it, and asking themselves to be satisfied there.

Seeing the numbers doesn't mean you can immediately earn them. It helps us see the gap clearly and consider what might change, over time, with the resources available.

We also look at where the income comes from and what each kind of work requires. If your income depends on individual appointments, your available hours place a limit on what you can earn. Adding another offer has costs of its own, including the time to develop and share it.

The question becomes: What combination of work could meet your needs within the capacity you actually have?

Sometimes that leads to a fee change. Sometimes it leads to simplifying, collaborating, changing a schedule, or exploring another way to use your skills. Sometimes it helps explain why a change you hoped would be simple needs more time and support.

You don't have to solve all of this in one sitting. Looking at money can bring up fear, grief, and memories of what has or hasn't been available to you. Go at a pace that gives you room to notice what's happening.

Wanting to be paid well belongs in a conversation about caring. Your needs are part of the life your work has to support.

A few questions to sit with this week:

• What did you learn about who gets to be paid well in your field?
• What does your real life actually cost right now?
• What would you like to understand more clearly before making your next decision about money?

If you'd like company with this, it's part of the work I do with clinicians and helpers in The Practice Shift.

Over five private, 50-minute sessions across eight to ten weeks, we look at your income needs, your capacity, and the changes you're considering. We work with the numbers and the conversations involved, including the ones that are hard to begin.

The package is $1,750, or three payments of $584, and includes a shared working plan and between-session support. Ongoing Support is available afterward if you'd like to keep working together as you put your plans into practice.

EMBER opens again in February 2027. For now, private coaching is the way to work with me on what's next.

Let's talk about your practice, or reply and tell me what you're working through. We can talk about whether The Practice Shift would fit.

With care,

Hilary