Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast. Episode 23, I Don’t Get Paid What I’m Worth. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to that series in the footer of the website, bipolarexcellence.com.

Not getting paid what I’m worth. This was big for me for decades, before I understood what was really happening. For me this primarily applied to jobs, being an employee. It stemmed from not living life the way I wanted.

I was blaming the lack of pay per hour on my problems. And I was blaming the ceiling, the ceiling on my pay for my problems. And then these variables are controlled by the employer you worked for. So he sucked or she sucked as well. Not realizing the whole time I agreed to the relationship and nobody shoved me into the interview with a pistol to the back of my head.

I agreed to the terms. Therefore I was getting paid what I was worth. Now, going underneath that going deeper. Of course I knew I was worth more. I knew my value was higher than what this pay rate reflected. Always. That’s always been the case. Well, I understood that once the entrepreneurial bug bit me back in the late nineties.

I didn’t understand it prior to that, everything just sucked prior to that. But everything sucked after, because I never succeeded at becoming an entrepreneur. I did, briefly, for varying amounts of time. I would experience a certain amount of greatness. But either it was very short lived or the profit got consumed by the effort and the fueling of the machine that created it.

Or there was no monetary profit. There was just the fact that I would live life the way I wanted and not get paid anything for it. Even in those situations, when I actually had the most fun, I was being valued for my input and my presence and my energy and my perspective, but there was little to no money involved.

So now I’m still not getting paid what I’m worth! At least in that respect, I was closer to the true definition of my worth. But even in those situations, nobody had a pistol to the back of my head making me do things as I was doing them, with the people I was doing them for. So really what the problem becomes.. Twofold.

What’s your actual value? And what can you do? Where can you go to be properly compensated?

Depending on what you’re after in life, this may or may not involve money. It’s always involved money for me. One of my biggest complaints has been: the jobs I’ve had the most, absolute, most fun at never paid anything. It’s things I was excellent at doing, but you don’t get paid a lot of money to do.

And really there’s only been two jobs that this was that true on within, and it had to do with the people involved. So I’ll digress a hair. When I was trying to figure out what it was I’m supposed to do with the world to get paid to do so, to wake up to be me, which has always been my main goal. I just want to wake up, not change a thing about anything about myself.

Just be me and get a check for it.

I realized people were at the root of the things I enjoy doing the most. I just had to find a better way to get paid to do it. Then I run into the problem of really, it becomes one of getting licensed of getting lettered, diploma-ed, degreed, and then climbing some sort of career ladder. None of which ever appealed to me.

That’s death to me. That’s just, just sounds painful. I tried it here or there and realized this is not what I want to do. Through my training from various coaches and online resources and gurus and reading books, I eventually understood that I was correct. My value could translate into a vastly higher amount of money than any job could ever pay me.

If I could figure out how to turn it into a proper business. So to bring this back around full circle, that’s what you’re really frustrated, if this is you. If you’re not getting paid what you’re worth… you are, due to the simple fact that you agreed to whatever situation you find yourself in.

But you’re correct in this feeling, this, this unease, this unhappiness, this distress over your inability to pay your bills or get paid fairly for what you know it is that makes you, you.

So the actual problem is, are you doing something that lets you be you?

I realized there’s no easy way to solve this problem. There really isn’t I’ve been picking away at it for decades. Excluding the eight years of bipolar fun I was working on, where I just wanted to survive and not hurt anybody and somehow experience happiness once again in my life, because that was in the middle.

I’ve been at this 20 some odd years. I get better at it as I go, I get more focused as I go. It’s becoming more enjoyable as I go, because I’m seeing that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. But cripes it’s a slog. There’s people that have done it far faster than I have. I’ve studied them. It just didn’t didn’t work that way for me.

And then as someone who has, who I call it bipolar prone, I feel I get in my way sometimes, in a fashion that the non bipolar prone people don’t. It could be splitting a fine hair here or there. It’s a lot of what stopped me from succeeding at the level I wish to succeed, is no different than what anybody else has experienced trying to succeed at something big.

I feel with the bipolar aspects of my personality. It…they’re problematic. They get in the way a little more effectively than they would if I didn’t have bipolar, you know, I stop myself. I overthink things. I have a certain amount of laziness.

Then I get an argument with myself over am I lazy or just… I mean, you see what I’m saying? This can just go and go and go.

On that note I will say, as long as you do a little something every day on your project, you’re winning. At least you’re not backpedaling. You may not, you might not be winning the way you want or to the scale or degree that you want.

But as long as something gets done every day, that’s one thing that it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And you’d have been that far behind had you not done it. So keep this in mind when you don’t get paid, what you’re worth… you are.

You just have to change the context. If it’s not… if what you’re getting paid is not making you happy, you have to change the context of your situation.

That’s going to require you to become very honest with yourself over what, what you’re about. And then you’re going to have to do some research to find out who would want someone like you in their world.

And then looking at your skill sets and your likes and dislikes, you’ve got to hone down all of that into some sort of product that the people you figured out that like you the most, want to buy, want to interact with.

It’s a lot of work. I help people do it all over at bipolarexcellence.com. All right, that’s a tight ending. I’m going to leave it at that. See you on the next episode, guys.