Are you wondering how to determine your worth? Letitia Frye is sharing how to know your worth so that you can continue to improve your business.
IE 166: How to Know Your Worth with Letitia Frye
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As women, I believe we all struggle with knowing our worth. I hear it from my clients and from other women I talk to. We don’t understand our self-worth and we confuse our personal worth with our business success.
My guest today knows a bit about this topic. Letitia Frye is known most for being America’s foremost “auctiontainer.”
She is a classically trained auctioneer and specializes in non-profit benefits. She is a theater major, so she combined her entertainment background with her job of auctioneering to create “auctiontainment.”
She is also a published author and motivational speaker.
Blurring the Lines Between Business and Person
As women, we struggle with knowing our worth. It’s important that there is a separation between personal and work-related worth.
Worth is defined as “the level at which someone is to be rated, considered or valued.” When you put the word “self” in, and talk about self-worth, the meaning changes to self-esteem, a sense of security, confidence, etc…
A lot of times people become their job. They let their job become their identity.
As a serial mentor, Letitia allowed this to happen a lot when she first got started. The better your company does, the more you allow that to define your worth. You end up blurring the lines between yourself and your company.
The Line Between Who You Are and What You Do
You create a brand based on who you are: your core values and beliefs. That brand should still be able to run without you.
If you are blurring those lines between your personal life and your business, and your worth is directly connected to your business, you will never be able to step away or move on.
Letitia’s website and brand are her own name, but eventually, someone else will be able to be the CEO of her company and the name can remain the same.
This is because the company is built on Letitia’s brand, but Letitia is not needed for the brand to continue.
When you wear many hats it can be easy to base your worth on those hats.
As a stay-at-home mom, it might be easy for you to base your worth on how your house looks or your kids’ success. It’s important to keep a line between what you do and who you are.
Learning Who You Are
Letitia realized when struggling with adversity that she didn’t know who she really was.
She was used to being a girlfriend, a mom, a CEO, etc… but she didn’t understand herself. She couldn’t value what she didn’t know.
She had made changes to her life to accommodate these adversities she was facing, but she hadn’t made changes to herself. The changes were all outer, not inner.
If you don’t know who you are, you can’t create value for yourself.
Letitia has now spent over a year without any romantic relationships, in order to truly get to know herself and what she values.
Self-Care = Self-Examination
In our culture, self-care is often viewed as getting a massage or taking a bath. That is not great self-care; that is a treat.
In a high-paced career, Letitia was on and off planes continuously and taking medicine to sleep.
Self-care for her was taking the time one day to really examine why she was taking the medicine. She took a look at what she was doing and what it would look like to stop taking the medicine.
She hasn’t taken the medicine in years and sleeps like a baby.
One day when her teenage kids were setting the table, there was automatically a wine glass in front of her seat at the table. Her son said, “You always have a glass of wine with dinner.”
She knew there wasn’t anything wrong with having wine with dinner, but as a single mom of two teenagers whose father is no longer alive, she didn’t really want to continue that.
Self-care for Letitia is about self-examination. It’s not about the judgment of yourself or other people.
If you’re trying to grow and yet you’re always in the same place, self-care should be looking at yourself and examining whether or not you are working towards your greater good.
You have to put your blinders on and run your own race, not being distracted by what’s happening on your left or right.
We’re so used to running in a million different directions.
We need to be mindful and take those moments to examine ourselves in order to continue to grow.
Starting And Ending The Day with Gratitude
Letitia starts every day on her knees, praying.
She spends time being grateful for what she has. She prays for herself and her children and others who she knows are struggling. She eases into her day with those prayers and calm music.
This is how she ends her days as well. It allows her to be focused as she starts her days instead of just waking up in a rush.
Ending her days this way allows her to be calm and that helps her sleep like a baby.
Living A Life of Service
There are a couple of ways to improve your self-worth.
When you find one area of your life to take care of yourself, (like Letitia starting her days with prayer and gratitude) you will do it in other areas as well.
When you begin implementing the feeling of joy and passion in one area of your life, it will spill over into other areas.
How do you ignite this feeling?
You give back. This can look like helping a neighbor getting groceries once a month, reading at the library, volunteering in hospitals, etc…
When you hit rock bottom and have no hope, helping others will bring about a sense of self-worth. It will help you realize that you don’t have it as bad as you thought you did.
Things that happen around and to you can be difficult, but you can choose how you experience these things. It can either be life-ending or life-beginning.
If you can get up and get out and show up for others, you can do that for yourself as well.
No Reserve
Letitia wrote the book that she needed to read and it is coming out in July. You can pre-order “No Reserve” right now.
She discusses the “trifecta” of adversity that she faced. She was divorced and it left her in poverty. She started her business, was able to come out of poverty and thought she had it all figured out. She didn’t.
She was hit by a car while running and suffered a brain injury. 8 months later, the father of her children committed suicide. She later fell in love and they blended their families. And then her step-son committed suicide.
These things leveled her and the people she loved. During all of this, she wrote a book about everything she was learning.
She titled the book “No Reserve,” which auction term. A reserve is something you place if you’re not going to take less than a certain amount on an item.
The question she wants us asking is, “What kind of reserves do we put on our own lives?”
If you aren’t willing to leave a bad relationship until a good one comes along, that is a reserve you are placing on yourself.
The reserve you place on your life is what you’re telling the world and yourself that you’re worth.
Risk-taking is scary but if you place a reserve on your life you will only get back what you’re saying you’re worth.
Providing Help to Others
Letitia wrote this book to help whoever she can. It’s not about the money or raising a speaking fee.
If one person doesn’t have to go through the pain and tragedy she experienced through reading what she wrote, it will be worth it.
There will be plenty of challenges and setbacks in life. No one can avoid those.
Providing this book to people will not only help them catch up to Letitia, but she also hopes that it helps them pass her. She wants to be able to learn from those people after they learn from her.
If just one of you is facing death, grief, despair, poverty, loneliness or depression, and one of these chapters gives you a chance to change that, the 9 years it took Letitia to get the book published will be worth it to her.
Make sure you pre-order No Reserve so that you can be one of the first to read it in July. You can follow Letitia on Instagram for a look into her daily life and connect with her.
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