Know Your Worth: Finding Confidence as a Self-Employed Worker

Confidence. It’s a hot word for self-development articles and self-care websites, however, it’s never as easy as just “feeling confident in yourself” or learning to “believe in yourself”. To some people, confidence comes naturally, a swelling feeling in their chest and a sense of pride about themselves, the less confident look up to these individuals, inspired, enamoured, all while wondering “could I do that?”.

Finding your feet, knowing your worth, believing in yourself, it’s all part of a long journey of growing self-confidence. This belief in yourself helps you tackle challenges, develop new skills and try new things and is especially important for workers that may not be in an environment to receive confidence-boosting praise and rewards like others might. Good examples include home-workers, stay-at-home parents, and the self-employed.  You can easily find freelance jobs for mums with Jooble.

So how does someone firmly on the outside of a typical working environment, like an office or warehouse, know their worth?

What Do You Have to Offer?

Consider your skillset, do you have the necessary office skills like experience with Microsoft software? Interpersonal skills? Are you organised, good at planning or have strong problem-solving abilities? Do you have experience in client-relationships? All these things contribute to your self-worth and a lot of abilities are transferable, applying to multiple industries and roles, offering greater value to your skillset.

Make a list of the skills you have picked up during your working life, if you get stuck, consider looking up points often found on CVs and consider your experience in these areas and whether they contribute to your strengths. Remember, there isn’t anyone out there that is truly good at everything, there will be areas you lack experience or knowledge in but rather than consider this a weakness, put yourself in situations that allow you to grow and develop these areas of yourself.

Growing Confidence

Never feel guilt over a weakness or something you’d consider a flaw, consider the type of advice you’d offer a friend who confided their own weaknesses in you, would you call them worthless, a failure? (Things we often call ourselves). Absolutely not, you’d offer support, raise them up, find ways to help them develop their weaknesses into skills or even strengths. Do this for yourself, encourage yourself, whether this is standing in the mirror every morning repeating a self-inspiring quote or seeking ways to expand your skillset. These are great ways to build your self-confidence and practiced daily can contribute to changing your outlook about yourself and your future.

Putting a Figure on Your Worth

If you are self-employed or a freelancer of some kind, you will need to agree what your rates are for your business, whether you offer cost-effective packages for your services, an RRP on your products or an hourly rate for services rendered. Finding your worth can be difficult unless you are the sole business available for your niche product or service, otherwise you need to compare yourself to your direct competitors.

Consider what your competitors offer in their costs and compare yourself to their experience, do you offer a better background of experience in the industry? Are you offering more for the price you are asking? Finding your worth can be difficult and while larger companies use a benchmarking service, like those offered here https://www.paydata.co.uk/services/pay-benchmarking/ to find out the industry standard salary and ensure equal pay for their employees. Setting your own rates is best done with plenty of research into your direct competitors and what you can offer to increase the value of your services to your potential customers.

Without confidence in yourself and your abilities, you will find it harder to market yourself effectively, shying away from jobs that you would enjoy being a part of because you lack the confidence to say, “I can do that!”. Selling anything instantly becomes easier when you have confidence in the product or service, so before you start marketing and promoting your services or products, build your confidence up and face the world standing tall. As your belief in yourself and your business grows, so will your opportunities and if you feel like you might still struggle, believe in me, because I believe in you!

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