Hello, brave hearts. How are you? I pray that you are doing well, that you are growing, that you are expanding, and that you're becoming brave in all things. Yes, this is Dawn Damon, your brave heart coach. So great to have the opportunity to talk to you again and to see you and to visualize you through the camera and say, "I believe in you. I'm here for you."

And this whole month of September, we are talking about hope and healing and a heart full of brave. And if you don't know what your heart is full of, then I invite you to stop on over to the braveheartedwoman.com website and take the quiz. I'm gonna tell you, it's gonna help you discover what's in your heart, and then we're gonna give you a prescription. Here's what you need. This is how you could grow and expand and learn or be free. God's got greatness in store for you. Don't settle, don't stop, don't quit. Don't say, "Oh, my age, I'm too old. All those great things are beyond me now or behind me." No, that is not brave-hearted vocabulary, and that is not the way that you should be speaking or thinking.

So we wanna change all of that. I'm here every week just reminding you to stay brave, and sometimes I know that I offer some things that feel maybe counter-cultural to our Christianity, like, "Oh, I should believe in myself? Oh, I should stand up for myself, or I should do this, or I should do that?" I'm not asking you to live or to believe or to adopt anything that's outside of God's word, but I believe that sometimes the way the enemy gets at us is by confusing us about our ability to love ourselves, to have self-respect, self-care, and to keep ourselves as a person that deserves being invested in, growing, stretching. And so that's what we do here on the BraveHearted Woman. I help you be brave. I help you love yourself. I help you take steps of courageous action. We call them BAM around here. I help you to take that brave action move. Sometimes we just need to be like, bam, bam, get going.

Well, today, I wanna talk to you about this core message: knowing your worth. And what I mean is, knowing your worth internally should eventually affect how you operate externally. I wanna talk to many of you who are in the business world. You're in corporate, or you're an entrepreneur, a solopreneur. You've started a new business. Maybe you're a coach yourself, and you're listening in on this.

This is where I wanna talk about money and equal pay and undercharging and negotiating and giving away your gifts. Because you can say all day long, "I know my worth," but if you're constantly undercharging or overgiving or under-asking and accepting less and apologizing for what you're charging in your fee, then we need to have a conversation.

Now, I'm not saying that I'm great at this yet, because I am you. I have done the same thing. I worked in a church for 25 years where we were not permitted to ask to be paid for anything, because we were ministers, and you can't charge for the gospel. So I have a programming in my mind that I still really adhere to many times. But in the business world, I have to understand and discern my value. I have to know that giving away over and over and over and over again, generosity is wonderful, yes. But maybe not accepting pay is more of a belief that I haven't earned it or I'm not worthy of it than it is a desire to be generous.

And I think many women, instead of a heart full of brave when it comes to money, we have a heart full of fear or, at the very least, some trepidation around it. So we're gonna take our BIHI, our brave inner heart investigation, just for a moment. Do you believe in your worth to the point where you can charge for what you're doing? Just let that sit with you for a minute, and let's go through this.

Four points this month of September as we're talking about hope and healing and a heart full of brave. Your worth and your price are not the same thing, number one. This is important. Your human worth is priceless. There's no value that you could put on that. You're priceless. But your professional expertise, your time, your experience, your intellectual property, otherwise known as IP, they have economic value. What I'm doing right now with my podcast has economic value, and I can't confuse the two. Don't confuse the two. So in what I'm doing, it is acceptable for me to believe that if I offer the wisdom and the value and this opportunity for growth and development for you, that I am okay to put a price tag on it. It is okay for me as a coach to say, "Here's what I charge." And to be honest with you, many coaches out there right now, probably myself included, undercharge because we're still afraid of the ask.

Number two, did you know that experience has value? Everything you've done in your life has value. Literally today, if you've had surgery, you could teach someone how to go through a hysterectomy with happiness, the happy hysterectomy. The gallbladder surgery, back in the day, they'd slice you all the way open. That's how I had it.

Today, it's just a little thing, but you can teach someone, in other words, how to prepare for surgery. You can tell you... Do you know how to can? You can become a canning diva. You can teach someone how to can peaches. Everything that we do has value and worth. I'm not saying we should charge for everything, but I'm saying that there are many people who are doing it. Midlife women often have something else, something that younger people can't manufacture, and that is years of experience. Truly. You've solved problems. You've led people. You've survived things. Can I get an amen right there? You've learned some things the hard way. You've overcome some really difficult situations. You have endured some agony, some pain, some grief. Stop treating all those years like they're irrelevant because they're not shiny and new. We sometimes say, "Oh, I don't have any skills."

Sometimes as a midlife woman, if you're not in the workplace, you might think, "I don't have any skills." Yes, you do. You have problem-solving skills. You have coaching, counseling skills- not, maybe, like you don't have the letters behind your name, but you have wisdom and... insight to share. You've got thoughts and ideas. You've got creativity. Maybe you've done a few Bible schools in your life, or you've done some vacation Bible schools for children. You got crafts that you know how to do. You have all kinds of wisdom. What you haven't done is harvest those. You haven't named them. You haven't identified them. You haven't allowed them to come to the surface, and you haven't thought about them.

So number three, women, stop giving away what should be paid for. Yeah. Stop giving it away. This is particularly true and relevant for entrepreneurs, as I've been talking about speakers, coaches, authors, consultants, ministry leaders. For all of you in this arena, generosity is wonderful, as I mentioned, but constant free labor isn't generosity if it leaves you feeling resentful and embarrassed and depleted or unable even to sustain your calling, unable to quit your full-time job and take this entrepreneurial effort to a full-time market because you don't charge what you're worth. Stop giving away what should be paid for. Learn the difference. Learn that generosity, once again, it's wonderful when it's meant to be generosity, but when it's just because you're shy or embarrassed to ask for what you're worth. So put it out there, because then generosity isn't really generosity, is it? It's just scarcity. It's feeling less than. It's feeling scared, and so that's not a bravehearted move.

And number four, learn to ask. Ask. Oh, we don't ask. I don't always ask. Do you? Do you? Are you afraid to make the ask? Do you ask for the raise? Do you ask for the fee? Do you ask for the opportunity perhaps? Oh, that's gonna be ... I'm too humble for that. That's bold. That's audacious. Then keep getting what you're getting. Do you ask for a seat at the table? Do you ask for the contract? Go ahead and ask for what you need, and it's okay, by the way, to have needs. I never wanted to have needs.

As a survivor of abuse, I thought it would be better for me; I would be less vulnerable, and I wouldn't get hurt if I didn't have any needs. If I couldn't take care of it, then you don't get it. You don't need it; you're not gonna have it, because God forbid that you have to rely on someone else to get that need met. No, no, no, no, no. And I learned to be very independent, and most often I probably didn't even rely on God for some of those things. I don't live that way today. Sometimes you have needs, and it's okay to ask. Stop explaining your price. Stop defending why you have the ask that you do. So how does that sound to you?

Today, I have a challenge for you. I want you to think about this and answer this question: What is the value I bring? What's your value? And then come up with five things. Not your degrees and not your titles, but what are five things or five areas of value that you could bring to someone? Value. What problems do you solve? What transformation do you create? What experience do you bring to the table? What knowledge do you have? What opportunity can you offer? What are five areas of value that you can bring? You don't have to apologize for being good at what you do, okay?

And you don't have to make yourself smaller so that someone else can afford you. You don't have to shrink yourself so that someone else can pay for you to know your value. Don't be afraid to ask. Stand and wait and see what God will do. My daughter has a podcast called Her Money Revolution, and in that podcast, she talks about a woman who was so afraid to ask for her worth in pay until she discovered that the male counterpart that she just that the company had just hired, whom she was actually going to be the supervisor over this man, was making double. He was offered double. When she went to them with that information that she found out, guess what they did? They doubled her salary. But without her having the courage to ask, she wouldn't have done it. She came to my daughter, asked for some counsel, and she was able to find a solution, take a step of courage, be brave, and make the ask.

What about you? Is there a big ask that you need to make? Be brave. There's hope. There's healing. Have a heart full of brave. Hey, I wanna give you a free download today, so stop on over to my website, braveheartedwoman.com, and there, you'll see my e-book. It's a complimentary book just for you, and it's called Ignite Your Confidence and Soar With Self-Esteem. I'll offer that to you today. All right, brave hearts, love you. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to like, review, and follow- all the things that help me continue to get Christian messaging out there. And until then, this is Dawn Damion, your brave-hearted coach, saying, find your brave and live your dreams.