LinkedIn Post: Anxiety Sets Your Rate

Source: Ghost Coast Video — "in atlanta the rent is too damn high" (ghost_coast_video_2_pMY0lV6fI.txt, 2024-06-27, own channel)

Topic: Whatever's making you anxious is also making you accept less at work

Last summer I made a video about Atlanta rent and there's one line I keep coming back to. It wasn't the headline stat.

The headline numbers were bad enough. Eight hundred evictions a week in Fulton County. More than half the people in shelters have jobs. The jobs just don't pay enough.

But the part that stuck with me was the ending. That the things meant for you get blocked by systems designed to keep you anxious about housing, so you'll accept less at work.

Read that again slow. The anxiety isn't a side effect. It's the point. When you're scared about losing your housing, you don't negotiate. You don't ask for more. You take the first offer and feel lucky you got it.

I see the same mechanic in a less brutal form with the people I work with. A slow month makes a venue owner take a bad client. A thin pipeline makes a freelancer cut their rate before the prospect even asked. The fear does the negotiating for you.

Whatever's got you anxious right now, know that it's also got its thumb on the scale when you price and pitch. Worth naming that before you send the next proposal.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's Ghost Coast Video, 2024-06-27