value

what’s your worth?

As you well know if you’ve been with me for a while, I’m a big language buff. And so I was tickled to see this article on the term “value add.”

In my opinion, Mr. Deckers deserves a snark prize for his term “Quotes of Sarcasm” (at my house, they’re known as Chris Farley Quotes) and for pointing out that value add is “one of those business words that went from being an adjective to a noun with a flick of the jargon pen.”

It made me wonder what the name for such a noun is, enamored as I am of the term “nerb” for verbs that used to be nouns (think: lunch, calendar, and yes, even office, as in “I live in Detroit and office in Ann Arbor”—really, people?!?) Would it be a nadjective?

And of course—as usual—I’m totally digressing.

As I prepare to launch a new program in April, this week has been full of conversations about value (added and intrinsic), pricing, and worth.

And self-worth comes up frequently in my work with coaching clients.

are you worth it?

One of the biggest blocks my clients face in starting, sticking with, and finishing a health journey (although it’s never really done is it?) is low self-worth.

Everybody else, from their children to their parents to their spouses to their bosses to their friends are worthy of their time and energy. Themselves? Not so much.

It feels like a bit of a cliché, claiming that low self-worth is often at the root of an inability to care for ourselves the way we care for others, sort of like blaming all our emotional issues on our parents.

And yet. Clichés exist for a reason, no?

Somewhere along the line, women accept and even embrace the idea that we are on this planet to serve others—even at the cost of our own physical, mental, and emotional health.

what are our priorities?

Having come to coaching from the culinary and nutrition world, I’m always intrigued by this paradox: as Americans, we generally want the best that money can buy, whether we’re talking about homes, cars, insurance policies, mobile devices, or data packages. And yet we want to pay the minimum for food (Why would I pay $5.99 for a dozen eggs when I can pay $0.99 for a dozen?) and health care services, especially those that are really about health care rather than disease care and tend to be out-of-pocket.

It seems that most of us are willing to trust an MD’s advice about nutrition because our insurance pays for that appointment.

But did you know that over four years of education, medical school students in 2018 got an average of 19 hours of nutrition education? That’s not even the measly 25 hours recommended by the National Academy of Sciences since 1985! Compare that to the 155 hours a Naturopath receives. There are definitely other professionals who know much more about nutrition….

A 2018 American Heart Association report points out this gap, documenting the total lack of requirement in most medical schools to understand the practical skills necessary to advise patients struggling with their weight, blood sugar, blood pressure or heart disease—all of which are classified as lifestyle diseases, which means that they can be reversed or prevented through diet and lifestyle choices.

You can imagine what happens when low self-worth and the desire for a freebie/bargain have a love child: not much! That baby rarely even gets to the crawling stage, much less toddling, walking, or running.

are you ready to invest in yourself?

Most people who do an initial consultation with me fully expect to discuss my rates at the end of the call, and I’ve gotten to the point where I sometimes go there, but only when a potential client is clearly ready to invest in herself—financially and in terms of time and energy.

If I’m not certain she’s ready, I tend to ask her to commit to making 2–3 tiny (and I mean really tiny) changes in her diet and/or lifestyle choices for the next two weeks, then we hop on the phone again to see how she did. If she couldn’t invest in herself in this small way, there’s no sense even discussing my rates because it would be a waste of her money and time and energy (hers and mine).

The opposite can also happen: I’ve had women come back after two weeks and say, “OMG—I didn’t just do what we talked about! I picked up the ball and ran with it, and I think it was just the kick in the pants I needed. I’ve realized that I can do this all on my own!”

“That’s crazy,” I hear business people cry, “You’re spending up to two hours on someone who doesn’t become your client?”

Well, Mr. Decker, I guess you can consider it my value add…. Or perhaps I’ve moved to the oh-so-chic freemium model?

make the connection

If you’re ready to invest in yourself and your health, I invite you to schedule a YOURstory session—it’s free and pitch-free. And if we decide we’re a good fit and want to move ahead with working together, know that I now offer payment plans available for every budget.