Why You Can't See It Alone
Here's the brutal truth about why you can't just "charge more":
Your brain is literally wired to make your expertise invisible to you.
It's called the curse of knowledge - the more you know about something, the less you can imagine not knowing it. What seems obvious to you feels impossible to everyone else, but you can't see that gap because you're standing on the wrong side of it.
This isn't a confidence problem. It's a perception problem.
Think about it: When you first learned Squarespace, remember how overwhelming it felt? All those settings, the CSS injection, figuring out why the mobile version looked broken? Now you navigate that stuff without thinking.
But here's what happened - your brain filed all that complexity away as "basic." You literally cannot access the memory of how hard it used to be. So when a client says "I just need a simple website," your brain hears "simple" and prices accordingly.
Meanwhile, that "simple" website requires you to:
Translate their scattered vision into coherent user experience
Navigate the psychology of their target customer
Solve technical problems they don't even know exist
Make strategic decisions about conversion, messaging, and positioning
Hold their entire business future in your head while they change their mind seventeen times
That's not simple. That's business transformation disguised as web design.
But you can't see it because you're inside it.
It's like trying to fix poor eyesight by learning about colors. The problem isn't knowledge - it's perception.
When someone says "charge based on value," your brain asks "what value?" and comes up empty because you literally cannot see it from your position inside the work.
When someone says "position yourself as a strategic partner," you think "but I'm just building websites" because you can't access the perspective that would show you otherwise.
When someone says "focus on outcomes, not deliverables," you struggle because the outcomes feel invisible to you - even though they're blindingly obvious to everyone else.
[Continue Reading: Why every attempt to just charge more fails →]
Next, I'll show you why most attempts to get help with pricing actually make the problem worse... and the one approach that actually works.