“I know I should charge more … but something inside won’t let me”
Maybe it’s not just charging more. Perhaps you’re also saying: I need to be more visible. I need to find bigger clients. I need to actually pay myself properly. I need to step back without the whole thing collapsing. You’ve built something real, done the hard work — and yet there’s this gap between what you’re charging, how you’re showing up, what you’re asking for, and what you know, privately, you’re actually worth.
That gap has a name. And I’ve mapped it into a short audit — but first, let me explain why it matters.
Charging more — or whatever your version of stepping up looks like — is rarely about marketing or business strategy. It’s almost always about identity.
Almost every client I work with grows their business. But not all clients start with this intention.
So how does it happen?
It’s because a business owner assumes the “identity” of their business’s value and services, and it’s almost impossible to separate their perception of their own value and worth. Typically this is price-related since that’s a specific number. So you quietly move from being someone who charges X to an X professional.
And this impacts how prospects, clients, your team and business partners see you too. It impacts pitches, sales calls, trade shows, board meetings. You get “stuck” at this version of yourself — this identity. It gets baked into your being and impacts everything you do.
But when you grow your identity, your view of yourself grows too — and so does your capacity to charge more, do different, and most importantly of all, BE different. And other people’s perception of you grows too.
This tends to matter most to people who are already successful by most measures — but who’ve quietly outgrown the version of themselves their business is still running on.
How Identity Shifts Perception and Opportunity
I navigated this myself last year. As part of redesigning my business strategies, I began showing up in bigger rooms with more senior leaders. And while I had made the decision to change “where” I was showing up, I was still arriving at these events with the identity of the person who used to speak in smaller rooms — so it took enormous energy to act like I “belonged” there.
But when I turned up as what I really am now — a published author, owner of a newsletter that is read all over the UK by leaders and business owners, on a board of directors, mentoring owners of £1m businesses — everything changed. Effortlessly. Not because my CV had changed — it hadn’t. But because I finally stopped editing myself down before I walked in.
It didn’t happen all at once. There were still days I walked in and felt the old identity pull at me. But the direction had changed.
Truly being the coach who solves genuinely big problems that create ROI for my clients that are several times my rates, I met “the right people”. In reality, they were always in the room — but fully embodying my new (actual) identity, we naturally connected.
When we lean into a bigger space from our current identity, eventually one of two things happens:
Either we exhaust ourselves trying to force our way in — or we step forward into a new identity and belong there naturally.
That second step is powerful: a lasting, paradigm-changing growth in your business and your life.
I have witnessed business owners change their wardrobes and turn up looking a wealthier version of themselves. They have changed how they carry themselves — the posture, the pace, the way they enter a room. They “suddenly” landed a higher-value client, increased their rates, changed their taglines on websites and business cards and launched new, bigger products and services.
Before business expansion is possible, the work you and I do in coaching creates the identity expansion that enables it.
What happens when identity shifts
A recent client had been operating at a level that no longer reflected who she had actually become. Her business had grown, her thinking had grown, her results had grown — but her identity had quietly stayed behind. Within a month of doing this identity work together, she stepped into a version of herself that matched her actual capability. She sent two proposals at the highest rates she has ever charged — not because her skills had changed, but because she had.
The identity shift had to happen first.
If you want to do the same work she did, I’ve mapped it into a short audit at the end of this piece — take five minutes with it after you’ve finished reading.
I know “identity work” can sound abstract — especially when what you actually need is more clients, more margin, more time. But in my experience, the tactical stuff only sticks when the internal foundation has shifted first. The strategy was always available to her. She just couldn’t stand in it yet.
This doesn’t mean pretending. Identity shifts rarely happen because you simply decide. They happen because you begin to gather evidence and allow that to reframe how you see yourself. Working step by step with a mentor, you gradually step into a bigger space and learn how to stand there naturally. Your internal identity catches up with your external reality.
And that is when dramatic growth, “co-incidences” and “out of the blue” shifts happen.
A question to ask yourself
Consider your own business, your own situation. Where do you feel you need to step up — be bigger, perhaps more confident, to stand your ground or take more control? These are good indicators of the places your current identity is smaller than the space you want to grow into.
And you will struggle to grow into that new space successfully unless you design and grow your identity first.
If something came to mind just now, that’s not a coincidence. That’s the gap worth closing.
I’ve put together a short audit — The Identity Gap Audit — that helps you name that gap precisely. Not in general terms, but specifically: the number you haven’t been able to charge, the room you haven’t been able to walk into with full confidence, the version of yourself you can see but can’t quite inhabit yet. Because you can’t close what you haven’t clearly identified.
Download The Identity Gap Exercise here — it’s free.