Hello everyone, and welcome to The Upstream Leader. I’m excited to have a conversation today, all about knowing your worth, which is a topic that I know many of you that I’ve talked with in the past have discussed: How do we figure out what we’re worth if it’s not related to our time and how on earth do we even communicate that? And for the conversation today, I have with me Dr. Meg Myers Morgan. She is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and also a Drew University alum. We were there at the same time—we’ll just say a few years ago, how about that? Meg, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.
Yeah! I am looking forward to this conversation. I’ve seen a lot of what you’ve posted online, a lot of the conversations that you share on LinkedIn about knowing your worth, and I’m excited to get into the topic. But before we do, I’m going to start this show the same way I start every show, which is, how did you become the leader that you are today?
Oh, I like this question. So, at least the path I’m on right now, talking about self-worth, came very organically from having my first daughter. I have two daughters, and my first daughter was born on her due date with her eyes open, she was already sort of critical when she came out—you could just tell this girl was going to have some feedback for us pretty early on. She just was like a firecracker, and she knew what she wanted. She always has. She’s very outspoken. She has no issue with conflict. It was all these things that I think I was still grappling with, and so just watching her and realizing, “Man, this child can negotiate for what she wants, and I, myself, as a full-grown adult, couldn’t,” watching her helped me develop this framework that I used with my students, that I used to write books, that I used to get on stages for.
Then it’s just been this very almost meta situation of me just practicing that over and over: What am I going to charge for this keynote? What am I gonna say to these students today? Am I good enough to teach this class? And so I guess it comes from practicing it every single day and seeing my daughter, you know, sort of play it out every single day. And I wanna say both—both daughters—but the first one’s sort of teaching the rest of us. The other one’s, you know, she’s more of a free spirit. But yeah, just watching her. So I think we can learn from anywhere. Right. It doesn’t have to be a mentor, it doesn’t have to be a boss. You can learn from anywhere.
Yeah, definitely. I’m curious, how old are your daughters?
I have a 14-year-old and an 11-year-old. Do you have kids, Jeremy?
I have three girls.
Don’t you find yourself not remembering their ages? Am I the only parent that struggles with this?
No, I screwed it up about two weeks ago in front of two of the three, and they were quick to tell me that I was incorrect, so no, it’s not just you.
I’m like, okay. They change every year. I just want to say they’re “yea high.” When people ask me, I’m like, “They’re about this high.”
Yeah.
I have a hard time remembering. I know, you know, I’m a good enough parent to generally know the ages.
So my girls are 13, 11, and 8. The oldest would be very similar to your oldest because we often have conversations. She’s a huge sports fan. All three girls play softball, but she plays softball, basketball, and runs cross country. She just loves everything. She’s like, “I want to be a professional softball player.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s great and I hope that you can achieve that dream. How are you going to make money? Because the reality of the state of women’s sports is that’s a challenge. You can do it, but most of the athletes that are there, that’s probably not their primary source of income at this point.” And even in the WNBA and different things.
I remember at a very early age, she was probably seven or eight, we’re having that conversation and being 13 now, I mean, women’s sports has improved a lot since then, but it’s still a challenging area there. She’s like, “Well, how much do the male basketball players make? And I’m like, well, they make this. And she goes, and how much do the women make? I said, well, they make this. And she goes, “Well, that’s not fair. That needs to be fixed.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re not wrong.”
But can I interject a question there? Did your parents say that to you when you were that young? “How will you make money?”
Not at all.
Okay.
Not at all.
What made you choose to say that to your daughter? I don’t say that from a place of judgment. I’m curious what made you bring that into it.
So, my wife played sports growing up and had the opportunity to perhaps, I mean, she was invited to try out for the WNBA years ago, but chose not to, because she didn’t see that as a viable career path. She’s a high school counselor and has been a school counselor her entire career, with the exception of taking a break when our third was born, just to stay home. When we had three girls in the house, she decided, “Hey, I want to stay home, I want to spend that time with them,” because realistically, it was about an offset. You could pay for a babysitter and it would take an entire salary. She said, “If it’s going to do that, I would rather be at home with them.” And I said, “I will support whatever you want to do. If you want to work, I’m not the one to make that judgment call.” And so I think we both came at it through that lens of, it sounds great, and I hope that she can, and I hope that it’s improved to where it feels more equitable at that point, or that she can be the catalyst. I wouldn’t be shocked knowing my oldest to try to be the to change it. But I think that’s why I asked that question.
Most of our money, our relationship with money is set by the time we’re 12. And so what you find is that I may be working with somebody who’s in grad school or a client who’s trying to negotiate their salary, and all that childhood stuff is coming up with them. So, you can parent however you want—I don’t mean this as parenting advice—but I do wish one of the things we did with kids, particularly when we say things like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We set the end goal so far in the future that if accomplishing it isn’t the end, then it wasn’t worth it. She is going to learn so much about themselves, about teamwork, about physical health, all these things that are coming from softball. That’s already the reward.
And then maybe that gets her a scholarship to college, and then maybe she becomes a doctor. You know, it’s about, and this is what I’m going through with my kids, maybe we shouldn’t focus our children on what they need to be when they grow up, because what I see are people that are riddled with anxiety because they’re like, “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I’m 40,” or “I still don’t know if this is a viable career path.” We don’t really think about life as steps, we think about it as this ultimate end goal. Maybe we reach it and we’re not satisfied. Or something feels off. So I was thinking about the times that my kids, even from two years old on, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Oh my gosh. That’s such a hard question for even an adult to answer. So, I don’t know, just wondered what you were thinking about when you said that to her.
Well, and you’re right. I think it was thinking through the lens of what does long-term success look like? It was interesting, my parents never asked me that question. I also was the first in my family to go to college. So, we had totally different conversations about worth and value and money.
Yes, you did.
And you’re right, those still come up at 42 years old. And I’d never really thought until you asked that question. It was one of those where you kind of get that full body experience of, “Ooh, that’s a good question. I’m supposed to be the one asking the questions. Wait a second.” No—worth starts before we ever get to the workforce. It starts before we ever get to college, before we ever get to high school. It starts perhaps even as young as my youngest, even at eight, just seeing the relationship with things, and yeah, that’s interesting.
You’re raising girls. I’m raising girls. We also know earlier than we’d like, their worth is being how they look, how they act. Are you a sweet and good girl? Are you a pretty girl? That stuff happens when they’re in the womb. They come out with their worth attached by society. And I’m not saying that that isn’t a good question to ask your daughter, and she is going to interpret it however she wants to, but doing softball just for the sake of doing softball is amazing. And I think a lot of adults right now struggle to have hobbies because we don’t know how to have a hobby without turning it into a side hustle. We don’t know how to have a hobby without being experts at it. I think we’ve sort of lost the art of play and just being, just enjoying something that doesn’t have to result in being super successful. When our worth gets tied up in the end result, the accomplishment, the money we made, the worth is in the process, not the product. The enjoyment that we got, the craft of it.
Well, and we talk about their success because all three of my girls do sports. And we talk about, you’ve got to love the process. You can’t tie everything from a worth standpoint to did you win the game? Because you can play a phenomenal game and lose. It’s the process. You can work your butt off and still face somebody who’s better, or had a better game, had a better day. It’s interesting that you say that because we always reinforce that your worth is not tied to the outcome until it comes to earning. As a society, it almost always feels like we almost always tie your worth to the money. How much revenue did you generate? How much profit did you generate? In our profession, how many hours did you put in? And it’s all monetarily based rather than what it sounds like you’re describing as more purpose-based.
Absolutely. Like a great example that I’ll give from the stage a lot is, worth in that regard that you’re talking about is completely contextual. Because if I get a medical degree and I’m a doctor making, you know, $700,000 a year, and now I decide I don’t want to do that anymore, I want to be a teacher. I don’t get to go down to the local elementary school and say, “I’d like to be a teacher and I make $700,000 a year” because the context has now changed. And so if that doctor were to sit there and think, “But wait, I’m worth this.” You’re right. But you’ve put yourself in this context. And if I’m the teacher and I go, “I’m worth $700,000,” yeah, you probably are, but you’re in this context.
So it’s the same thing when we tie our worth to our hours or our revenue or anything like that. We’ve let an environment tell us our value, not coming from a place of this ability to have confidence, this knowing who we are, attaching our worth shouldn’t be what we do in life. It’s who we are. And getting even more specific, just existing is having worth. I think in a capitalistic revenue-based world, we lose that, because we think if I wasn’t productive today, or I didn’t earn rest today, if I’m not constantly churning out something, I’m not worth anything, and that’s not true. So we kind of have to break down that it’s the context that you’re in that’s sort of driving what you think is worth.
For example, in your space, it’s all about the hours. In my space, it might be the number of students and what those students go off and do. It might be more subjective. So you and I can’t even compare apples and oranges of who is worth more in their profession if we just went off money, or we went off lives changed or what would be our scale. You kind of have to get your own scale because the context will chew you up.
How do you define that scale though? Because, especially thinking a lot of our audience is accountants, the easy metric is the numbers, it’s the dollars. So thinking about all of this, how do you disconnect success from worth and still feel like you are worth something? So if it isn’t tied to the dollars, you’re a doctor, but you decide I want to go be a teacher building on that example, but the whole time you’re thinking “I was worth $700,000. I’m worth $700,000. At this point, how much am I really worth?” How do you disconnect that societal definition of success from worth, knowing that you could be worth that, but what you’re doing is even more impactful?
One easy way that I always talk to people about is what do you want your life and your work to feel like? So if I’m the doctor and I’m making $700,000 a year, but I dread going into work every day, to really say the word again, that’s not worth it. To find that worth, you have to define what’s worth it to you. If I want to go make 40 grand and be as peaceful as a clam, then that’s worth it. And it’s understanding what I value at any given time. I think it’s okay that that changes.
When we talk to young kids about the future, what also happens is if that value that we have changes, we stress out as though we think like, “Oh my gosh, my principles have changed, or my values have changed.” When I was right out of college, I valued the title. Then I valued having an office. Then I valued the money. And now I value flexibility and purpose. Those pieces should be changing as you’re growing. So if you’re not constantly thinking about how does this feel, not what does it look like, not what does it bring revenue-wise. Because let me be clear. I want everyone to be a millionaire. Let everyone be a millionaire, go forth. But I worry when we tie up money with worth or success because one is very, very emotional, and the other one is very tactical and transactional, right? I need this amount of money to live this life, but I don’t need this amount of money to make me feel a certain way because it doesn’t really work that way. It doesn’t really fill those emotional goals.
So worth is more of an emotional definition than it is transactional, if you will.
Yes, for sure. And it’s an internal understanding, it’s an internal confidence, it’s internal clarity, and it’s peace in knowing that your worth is not at all tied to what you do. You can definitely do things from a place of your worthiness, but it’s sometimes not going to work to try to make what you do make you feel worthy, because then we’re just going to keep chasing sort of this unending—we have to lay down at night and go, “Me just laying here, I have worth.” That’s how we have to strip it down to.
I watched my oldest, who’s going to be a freshman, and the level of stress she has, she’s going into her freshman year and is stressed about her finals. I’m sitting here at 41 going, oh darling, that’s nothing. But I remember it. I remember that stress back then. And you can’t tell her that’s not stressful. But I always try to remind her, whatever happens, whatever you do out there, all you can focus on is your effort and attitude. All you can really do is what you can do, sort of to the sports analogy, we can’t really control what you make on it. It’s about going very inward and recognizing that you do have to show up in the world and participate in the world, but you don’t necessarily, you shouldn’t be tying it to any sort of success or accomplishment. Because I think we’ve all experienced this situation where you go, okay, as soon as I pass that CPA exam, as soon as I get this promotion. As soon as. We never clue in that the itch isn’t scratched. We’re not happy by that because that’s misaligned to what we want to feel, we’re chasing what we think is going to make us feel something, but we haven’t quite identified what that feeling is.
So it’s okay to have initiative and drive and want to achieve. Obviously, you’re not saying that’s not important, but what is important is ensuring that you don’t attach your worth to achievements, because they are not who you are. They’re the things that you just happen to do. So how do you keep drive and initiative going?
Well, I wonder how many people in your audience, say if they go to a party and somebody goes, “Oh, hi Jeremy. Who are you?” You go, “I’m an accountant.” Is that a common thing? I very rarely say I’m a professor. I’ve trained myself not to let my whole identity be this thing that we accidentally do all the time. “Oh, I do this, I do that.” Right before we started recording, you’re like, how do you want to be referred to as? It’s this jarring thing where it’s like, let me tell you my whole life so you know everything about me. It’s coming from this place of I don’t want to show up leading with that first. So if we think about that as square one, I definitely am going to show up at work and function in a way and work really hard, but I’m not going to let that be my whole identity. It doesn’t mean you can’t have goals. You should have goals. You should be striving for stuff. You should be proud of yourself when you do things. But if we live by that accomplishment, we will die by our failures. If we live by, “Oh, I didn’t get this thing and it’s crushing,” it’s just not a healthy place to be to have that much of your identity wrapped up in what you do, not who you are.
Wow. “If we live by our accomplishments, we will die by our failures.” That is incredibly, incredibly powerful.
I had this revelation maybe a year ago where accomplishments just made me feel relieved, not accomplished. They made me feel, “Whew. I pulled it off, got it done.” And I love, relief is my favorite emotion. I’ll chase it all day long. But I don’t want my life to feel like, whew, I just missed it. I just almost fell off that cliff and didn’t. I want my life to feel playful and connected. Connection is one of the things that occurred to me in my own career, where you’re sort of chasing in academics, it’s a very ego-driven field. You’re very much scrutinized. You’ve got student evaluations, your own colleagues evaluate you. I got really twisted up in that and was catering to that, and I just wasn’t enjoying my work. No one ever says, “Go to work and enjoy it,” because what would happen if we decided we wanted to enjoy our work?
Yeah.
And when I did that and I switched the way that I taught in the classroom, switched the way I showed up, everything else got better. I got better marks, I got all those things because I just started going after this feeling less of, “Whew, I accomplished that,” and more of, “Oh, I enjoyed myself today. I was really present today. I was really connected today.” I guess that’s what I’m trying to say in a long-winded way. What is the feeling you want to have every day? Because we think in these broad strokes, but we don’t talk about the day-to-day. Our work is not broad strokes. Our work is 75 emails today, and these clients today, these client meetings. So really thinking about it on a more microscopic level, what do you want it to look and feel like?
Yeah. And bringing that joy back is incredibly important. In fact, at Upstream, we call it the all red metric, and it’s a measure of how much do you look forward to Mondays? Because our founder of Upstream, at a conference years ago, he said, “I love Mondays.” I remember thinking, this man’s out of his ever-loving mind. Nobody loves Mondays. I knew I didn’t at that moment, for a variety of reasons, but I talked to him more and as I joined Upstream and we worked together, I realized that for accountants looking for metrics, such a great way to think about it: On a scale of one to 10, how much do you look forward to Mondays? You want to maximize that number for everybody in your firm because if they are, they’ve got joy. They’re enjoying it. They probably have that self-worth because they’re finding purpose in what they do.
Now I want to pivot just a little bit because all of that is great, but as I mentioned, our audience is accountants, so somebody is sitting here going, Jeremy, you’re 20 minutes in—you haven’t talked about how do we make money (while all of this is important)? And one of the LinkedIn posts I love, you already said everyone should figure out how to become a millionaire; that’s a great thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve talked about ambition and drive. I mentioned to you before we recorded that one of your posts that really caught my attention was the idea of not outgrowing free. You said the goal is not to outgrow doing things for free. The goal is to grow into understanding how much you can get when you give. So I understand that. Help me understand how do you, if we’re detaching success and worth, once we feel like we are worthy, how do we make that jump and that bridge to pricing what we do, and getting what we feel we are worth in the marketplace? How do we make the somewhat “feels really good” emotional side get tied to the transactional side so they aren’t disconnected?
So this is gonna be a very weird metaphor, but I think about self-worth as what it’s like when you’re driving your car. Self-worth is, “I am focusing on my car and my lane. That is the easiest way for me to keep other people safe. If I start trying to drive other people’s cars, or roll down the window and start yelling to them about how to drive their car, I’m not gonna be safe in mine,” right? So first and foremost, I’ve got to get right in my car. I have to understand what it is I offer, the value I bring, the way I’m trying to drive, and then I’m keeping track of everyone else. When I have the capability to let someone zipper in on a merge, or when I have the ability to let someone go through the stop sign first or whatever, then I can do that, right? I can be in service to others, but not until I’m good in my car.
And I say that metaphor because starting out, I’ve been a professor when I was asked to keynote, what tends to happen is they keep asking you to do it sort of for free, and you start to get this chip on your shoulder. “Everybody wants me to do this for free!” And you get honestly a little bit bitter and angry about it. I was like, don’t they know how much I like, I put so much into the talks I give, I give really good talks. They take a lot out of you. So then I got to where I was pricing myself, and that is insane. The people who have to price themselves should just get little medals every day. Like, good for you, buddy, for getting out there and putting a value on your work, because it’s not fun to price yourself. It is a mind bend to just sit there and try to think about what you’re worth.
Then I got to where I was getting paid well to keynote, but I was still getting these free asks. And instead of feeling bitter, I realized: everyone gets free asks. I’m sure people come up to you and they go, listen, how do I do this or that? Whatever your expertise is. I’m sure you get asked for free advice. Every doctor gets asked for free advice. And I think we think if I give this away, when I’m also charging, my worth is getting blown away because we’re attaching worth to money. And I had to really think about this car thing of, like, “no, I have the capacity right now to wave them in the merge lane; I have the capacity to do a free talk right now. And if I can, I will. Thank you for thinking of me, thank you for asking me, little rural Oklahoma library,” or whatever. That made me feel so much more worthy of not attaching my keynote fee and trying to be like, what this massive corporation charges, I should get that from this little library. I kind of went in this full cycle of, “I won’t speak for free. I’ll never get up and speak for free,” then I realized, truly, that’s actually not how I want to feel. I want to be a very giving person. Once I get a handful of good keynotes, I’m very happy to go talk for free.
Yeah. How do you come up with, and this may be getting a bit deep, how do you come up with pricing when you’re already struggling with worth? Like you said, somebody has to price themselves in the marketplace, and accountants, whether they’ll admit it or not, they do it every day. Whether they’re in tax, they’re in audit, they’re in consulting, wherever they may be. Every new client, you’re pricing yourself and your team in the marketplace.
One thing that I know about our profession is accountants are probably the first to under-price. They will look at it and say, “What does it cost? Ooh, that’s probably too much. I should charge less,” even before being asked. I’ve seen firms, I’ve done it in the past, where you go to a client, you throw out a number, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s a bargain. I’ll take it.” And it’s like, “Actually, that feels like a lot. Maybe I should give you $10,000 off.” Why are we doing this? So how do we, when we have that conflict, because that’s what it feels like to me, a conflict, this tension of, I can’t charge that much because it seems we could do it for less, why would we charge that much? How do we start to define worth in the eyes of others—and in our own eyes—from a pricing standpoint?
Yeah, I don’t know why you talking about that made me think of when my daughters were in daycare and I remember confronting one of the women that worked at the daycare and said, “Do you do babysitting?” And she’s like, “Yes, but all of the teachers in here have come together and we all charge the same amount.” And it was astronomical but I thought, that is so smart because if we are transparent with each other in our industries, then we all can raise our prices.
So one, I think it’s a little bit of, I’m guessing with accounting, there’s such a historical industrial way that you all do pricing, that you set by hour, it feels to me a little bit like the legal industry, I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers and how they do billable hours and things like that. It almost feels unshakeable because it’s this institution of pricing. So, one, just be aware that that’s happening, and two, can you talk, can you all be the teachers in the daycare and talk and trade? Because I’ve noticed, that’s how I have done it with keynote speaking. For example, I’ve had to just call up other keynote speakers and say, what are you charging? What should I look for? How do I do this? And really relying on that peer-to-peer counsel of how to better do it.
But then, the final thing I’d say is it is messy and awful, and I think we all just have to give ourselves grace. I had a, this was just a couple of weeks ago, a quote for a keynote and I was like, this is so high, and they laughed and they were like, “Oh yeah, no problem.” Then I was like, “Oh my gosh, I left money on the table.” There’s always this worry that you’re undercharging or overcharging. I think eventually, water finds its level. You’ll figure it out. Am I going to have people come in and ask for free? Of course. Am I going to have people come in that can pay more? Of course. I say all this to end with, I just don’t want us in this space where it is so hard to price ourselves, whatever you do. I just want us to give ourselves grace that it’s hard.
But everybody I’ve ever talked to ever in the world is charging too little on anything they’re doing. So keep that in mind. Whatever you’re doing, you’re charging too little. And if I have to be the one to say that, or somebody else has to be the one to say that, because you know, you want to price yourself up to the better client. Every time I do that and price myself higher, like with keynoting, I get better gigs. They’re better gigs where I get to shine better. That’s what I think sometimes people don’t realize about raising their prices is a good client raises your skills and a good client raises your confidence in yourself. So only good things come from that.
That’s an important lesson for our listeners, especially that when you raise your fees, it commands a higher quality of client, and I’ve been saying this with some firms lately, that they not only need you, they want you. When they want you, they will pay more. That sets you up for more success than if they only need you. If they only need you, you’re more likely a commodity, which nobody’s paying more for commodities unless they’re forced to. But to your point, when we can start to price ourselves to the clients that we want, not necessarily the clients that we currently have, we have the ability to improve that. And as you said, sharing is always good. There are a lot of firms in our profession, they’ll talk, they’ll share, they’ll share tons of information. Pricing, it’s one of those that does. When you learn that information is powerful, it can really help you move up in that way.
I had a business coach years ago, and I was working with him, and then he raised his prices pretty substantially and it kind of stressed me out. He was like, “Or is this an opportunity for you to raise your prices so you can afford me?” That sounds a little bit salesy, but it was so effective. I was like, oh, you’re right. So then he sort of modeled for me, oh, I could raise mine, but I was stuck not raising mine. So I think sometimes, imagine if you’re an accountant and you raise your prices and you’re working with a client, like if you were working with me, I might be like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t afford my accountant. I better up my keynote fee,” or, you know, and then you’ve, you know, all ships rise. We don’t realize how a domino effect can happen. I’ve seen so many women that have asked for raises and then because of that, people under them felt like they could ask for raises. We’re modeling something in that, just the same way we model things for our kids; right? We’re modeling that for other people.
So I think the psychological tendency is to always go to the most catastrophic: “Oh, if I raise my prices, I’ll piss someone off. If I raise my prices, I’ll lose clients.” And we never use our imagination for the beautiful thing that can come from it: “This might make others value me more. This might give me better clients. This might raise up other people.” So if we just switch our imagination instead of catastrophizing something, and make it really, what if it all worked out? What would be the best? We never play best case scenario, and best case scenario is just way more fun. It’s always more fun to think about that and just spend our energy on that.
Yeah. Well, Meg, this has been incredibly helpful. I know you even have a book on negotiating, is that correct? What is the title?
I do. It’s called Everything is Negotiable. Everything is Negotiable, anywhere books are sold. But you can also just go to MegMyersMorgan.com. I have people send me emails and ask me random negotiating questions. I’m always open to those as well.
Awesome. And if I recall correctly, you have a novel coming out.
Yeah, it comes out tomorrow! I don’t know when this podcast airs, but…
Yeah, this’ll air a little bit after, so July 15th is when [the book] comes out. And remind me of the title?
The Inconvenient Unraveling of Gemma Sinclair.
Gemma Sinclair. Very good. Well, I wish you all the best with that. I’m excited for that to release, and we’ll put links to that and all of your information in the show notes. But thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. And all of our listeners, I’m sure they have gotten something out of it. There’s a lot of really good information there. Meg, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, Jeremy.
