THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: For some of my clients. I tell them to raise their prices and they just do it. I say it should be 5000, not 3000. And they go, okay, that’s it. No spiral, no overthinking, no identity crisis. But when I tell other clients to raise their prices, we basically have to do a 12 step program. And I’m joking, but I’m also not.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to The Inspiration Place podcast, an art World insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey, in case we haven’t met yet, I’m Miriam Schulman. And before we get into it, I wanted to share with you why I’m qualified to even have this conversation. So I didn’t start off as an art coach. I didn’t even start off as an artist either. I started out on Wall Street. That’s right. I left a career in finance to become a full time artist, and I’ve been a working, selling artist for over 25 years. That means I’ve lived the pricing drama myself. I know what it feels like to stand in front of a collector and hear yourself say a number that’s lower than the one you plan to say. I’ve definitely blurted those prices out. I’ve felt the panic. And over the years I’ve definitely improved in it. But trust me, it’s like new level, new devil. Building your money mindset is always something you have to work on. Now, in 2018, I started coaching other artists, helping them build sustainable art businesses. So when I talk about the stuff today in this episode, I’m not just someone who read a book about pricing psychology and then decided to teach it, or has been selling my art for a few years and decided to coach. I’ve lived this as an artist for over two decades, and I’ve watched it play out in hundreds of coaching conversations since 2018. That combination, the decades of making and selling art, plus the years of coaching, is what gives me such a specific window into this particular problem.
Miriam Schulman: And what I’m going to share with you today is something I don’t think anyone else is quite talking about in this way. Now, if you’ve ever hesitated when someone asked you your price or lowered it mid-sentence or felt a wave of nausea, just saying the number out loud, this episode is for you. Because here’s what I want you to understand right away. This isn’t a pricing strategy problem. You already know you should raise your prices. This is something much deeper than that. Now, before I go any further, I want to name something. This problem does show up more for women than for men. That’s what I’ve seen over and over in my coaching practice. My male clients, I tell them to raise their prices and they just do it. They don’t spiral. They don’t need the intervention. But my female clients, I tell them to raise their prices. And yeah, we have to like unpack the hidden trauma that’s keeping them from wanting to, to hold the price. And I say that not to blame anyone, not to make this a gender politics conversation, because it really isn’t. But women are conditioned from the time they’re little girls to not take up space, not to ask too much, to be agreeable, to be likable, to make other people feel comfortable, even at their own expense. And that conditioning doesn’t stay in the background.
Miriam Schulman: When you’ve got a girl on a playground, it follows you into the boardroom, it follows you into the salary negotiation, and it absolutely follows you into your art booth at a market or a gallery or your website. When you have to put a number on something that you’ve made. Now, research does back this up, by the way, women ask for raises less often than men. Women accept lower initial salary offers. Women negotiate less aggressively across virtually every industry. So this is not an art world problem. It’s a human problem that shows up, especially for women. But here’s what I want to be really clear about. I’ve seen this in men, too, and the story I’m about to tell you made me rethink the gender bias completely. A little while back, I was at a dinner party here in New York City, and I got to talking about my book Artpreneur and the ideas in it around pricing, psychology and why artists under charge. And one of the guests pulled me aside, and I don’t want to tell you exactly what kind of doctor this fellow was, because I don’t want to give away too many telling details. You can fill in the blanks, but I’ll say this. His patients pay entirely out of pocket. Nobody’s going to his office because their insurance covers it. This is an elective premium cash only practice on Park Avenue. And he looked at me and said he had the same exact pricing drama I was describing.
Miriam Schulman: He told me he’s constantly checking his prices against what the other doctors in his specialty are charging. He’s crowdsourcing his prices, and this is a Park Avenue practice. And here’s the detail that really got me. This is a man who collects original five figure and six figure artworks. Yeah, but here’s what got me. He told me that he feels guilty raising his prices because he’s afraid that a new client is going to be mad at him. If they were referred by someone who paid less. That told me everything. Because this isn’t about your industry. It’s not about your level of success. It’s not about how much training you have or how long you’ve been doing this. And yeah, it isn’t even about your gender. Fear doesn’t care about any of that. I want you to imagine waking up and knowing your art is selling, not because you hustled all week on social media, not because you ran a sale or dropped your prices, but just because you built something real. That’s what it feels like when the psychology and the strategy are working together. You stop second guessing every price. You stop apologizing for what you charge. You stop waiting for permission to call yourself a professional. And you know exactly how to talk about your art with clarity. You just know your worth and you hold it. That’s the feeling my inner circle clients describe when things start shifting for them.
Miriam Schulman: Now, if you want that, I’m taking new clients, you can head on over to SchulmanArt.com/APPLY. And now let’s get back to the show. Here’s the idea that changed everything for me, and it’s the one I come back to over and over again in coaching. When you set a price, there are two people that you have to sell it to. The first one is you. Most artists think that they only have to sell to the buyer, but you’re not even there yet because you have to sell it to yourself. If you don’t believe your price, if you don’t own it, if you’re not convinced about it, you’re not going to be able to sell that artwork. If you don’t feel safe asking because you haven’t sold yourself on that price yet, you won’t be able to sell it. Here’s what that looks like in practice. I was working with a client, and we’ll just call her Joan for this. And she had just done an art market. Beautiful work, beautiful, I love it. People love it. And she was selling prints. And let me just pause here for a moment. Whenever I say print, we’re using the colloquial term for print. Yes, I know that there are hand-pulled prints, but we’re using collector facing language throughout my episode and throughout this YouTube channel. She was selling prints and she had a few small originals.
Miriam Schulman: Original paintings on panels. Beautiful work. Beautiful. Very detailed. But here’s what I noticed when she told me what she sold it for. Her prints were priced almost as high as the originals. Yeah, let that sink in. A reproduction. Something printed by a machine, something you can make as many as you want was priced within dollars of her. One of a kind, handmade, original pieces of art. And when I asked her why, she said something that was so honest, but it broke my heart. She said I just felt I couldn’t charge more. Not no one would buy. Not the market doesn’t support it. Not my work isn’t good enough yet, just I couldn’t. And that right there, that one sentence, is the whole conversation we need to have. Because notice what she didn’t say. She didn’t give me a market reason. She didn’t give me a strategy reason. She didn’t give me a research based reason. She told me the truth that something insider hit a ceiling and she listened to that ceiling without even questioning it. That’s what we’re dealing with. So what’s actually happening in those moments? Let me give you a little bit of the science, because I think it will help you understand this is not weakness. This is wiring. When you say a price that feels too high, even just practicing it in your head, your brain can treat it like a threat. And we’ve talked about this.
Miriam Schulman: When your brain thinks it’s in danger, our brains have evolved for survival, not goal achievement. So it will talk you out of it. It wants to keep you safe. It will tell you why that price is a terrible idea. So it’s not a logical threat, but it’s an emotional one. And your nervous system doesn’t distinguish very well between, I’m about to say a price somebody might push back on and I’m in danger. So your brain is going to respond the same way as a stress response. Cortisol spikes. Your body wants to resolve the threat. And the fastest way to resolve it is to make the discomfort stop, which means maybe lowering the number, softening the ask over, explaining, backing down. And there’s actually research on this. Neuroscientists have found that social rejection activates some of the same neural pathways as physical pain. And that’s not a metaphor. Your brain genuinely processes the anticipation of social disapproval of something to be avoided, the same way it avoids physical harm. So when you’re standing in your art booth and somebody says, how much is this? And you feel that spike of anxiety before you answer, that’s not you being weak. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. And the problem is that it’s responding to something that isn’t actually a threat. Saying a price isn’t dangerous, but your brain hasn’t gotten the memo yet. And that feeling shows up as hesitation when you’re saying it over explaining after you say the number, adding justifications.
Miriam Schulman: Nobody asks for maybe changing your prices the last minute before you show up at your next art fair. Right. Lowering them. Okay. I know my clients have done it. We spend a lot of time saying, this is the price, this is the price. And then they show up and they put different prices on their artwork. Yeah, just saying a lower number than they planned, or giving a 20% discount that nobody asked for. Now, I’ve watched this happen in real time. So when I was helping Joan, I decided that it would be really helpful for us to role play. So I said, let’s just practice saying the number out loud. And so I said, how much is this artwork? I love it. And she said the number. And then immediately, immediately, like her throat caught. She made a face. I didn’t even challenge her. And then she repeated it. But the second time she sounded even less sure of herself. She was like $300. You know that with the question mark at the end? Just that I didn’t give her any pushback. I just said, what? But she felt that shift inside of her immediately. Her face changed, her energy changed. And I talked to her about it. She said, yeah, it’s so weird. I felt like you were about to reject me, even though I know that’s not what was happening.
Miriam Schulman: Her brain went. She doesn’t like it. That’s too much. I need to fix it. Even though nothing happened, I didn’t say it was too expensive. I didn’t frown, I didn’t cross my arms. I said one word and she was already negotiating against herself. That’s how fast this pattern runs. That’s how automatic it is. And here’s the really important thing to understand. I didn’t reject her. I didn’t even respond, but she rejected herself before anyone else had the chance to. Now this artist, she sold out on one of her prints completely. And I think she told me she sold like 12 prints that day at her lower prices and maybe a few originals. And I showed her that even just raising her prices a little bit. She would not cannibalize her sales and how much more money she would make because she was saying like, well, how many more of these should I do? Do I need to do it every week? That’s when artists burn out. When you’re not holding a price that your art is worth, and you’re trying to make it up by doing more. Now let’s be really clear about what this problem isn’t. It’s not the pricing formula. It’s not the website. It’s not the audience. And it isn’t even that the work isn’t good enough. And it’s not that the market or the economy won’t support higher prices. The problem is this you don’t feel safe holding the number.
Miriam Schulman: Pricing isn’t about the market. It’s about how safe you feel being seen at that level. That’s a completely different problem than the one most people think they have. So they’re sometimes they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. So instead of asking, what should I charge? The better question is, can I say this number out loud to another human being without negotiating against myself? Because if you can’t say it cleanly, no one else is going to believe it either. You know, the little hesitation, the over explanation, the little laugh before the number. You feel uncertain. Guess what your customers will pick up on that uncertainty is contagious, but they won’t know that it’s your uncertainty. They will just feel uncertain. And the brain hates uncertainty, especially when their wallet is involved. Now here’s the other reframe I want to give you because it changes things so much for so many of my clients. You’re not being rejected. You’re just giving information. Those are two completely different experiences. When somebody asks for your price, you’re not putting yourself on trial. You’re not asking them to validate you as a person or as an artist. You’re just telling them a number. That’s it. It’s information, but your brain has fuzed those two things together. If saying your price and risking rejection feels like the same event, you’ll underprice every single time because you’ll do anything to avoid rejection. Even if the rejection never comes.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so here’s what I did with Joan in our coaching client. Now I’m warning you in advance. It’s going to sound completely ridiculous, but it absolutely works. Practice saying your number out loud, but not in dollars. Not yet. So you’re just going to use it with random objects. In other words, this piece is 400 bananas. This piece is 400 pencils. This piece is 400 cans of beans. This piece is 400 monkeys. And repeat it over and over with different objects until the number feels neutral. Until you can say it without hesitating, without laughing, without flinching. And then when you’re ready, it’s $400. Okay, now, why does this work? Because it separates the number from the emotional charge. When you say 400 or, or 4000 or whatever it is, let’s go with 4000, 4000, because that’s more triggering for some people. When you say 4000, your brain’s going to light up with all its associations. Is that too much? Will they say no? What will they think of me when you say 4000 bananas, none of that fires. It’s just a number attached to a silly word. And what happens, and this is the fascinating part, is that number itself starts to lose its charge. 4000 starts to be just 4000. And when you go back to dollars, the number carries less weight, less threat, less drama. So the goal, and I mean this literally is to make the number really, really boring.
Miriam Schulman: A boring number is a number. You can hold a charged number. It’s like a hot piece of coal. You’re not going to want to hold it and you’ll give it away. Okay, my next story is about Donna. Also fake name. Donna was already selling and she had an audience. She has a following and her work is genuinely beautiful and people want it. She’s not a beginner, but her prices were too low and we raised her prices and her prices are still too low, but she couldn’t bring herself to raise them more. So I tried something. I said, okay, I know you have the show coming up. Let’s not raise your prices in person yet. Let’s just raise them on your website first. The reason I did that, because I knew the act of her changing her prices on her website and editing them, was kind of the first step for her for accepting it. So the logic was simple. The website doesn’t argue back. There’s no customer standing in front of you with a face you’re trying to read. There’s no moment of eye contact. There’s no silence to fill. It’s just a number on the screen. So she did it, but then she panicked, which I should have expected. She updated the prices and basically had a minor internal collapse and she emailed me. She was like having a meltdown about it. But guess what happened? By the time we met for the coaching call the following weekend, she said somebody bought some of her prints at the higher prices.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, yeah. No negotiation, No complaints? No. I used to pay less just to sail. And that one sail did something that weeks of mindset coaching hadn’t fully done. It gave her evidence. It proved to her nervous system, not just her logical brain, but her nervous system that the new price was safe. And then something else happened that I love. That sale made her look at her print prices and her original prices side by side, and she suddenly couldn’t unsee it. Her originals were embarrassingly underpriced compared to her prints. The fear had distorted everything, and the evidence that one sale helped her see clearly for the first time. That’s what happens when you stop waiting to feel ready and just do it. The evidence comes after the action, not before. Here’s something I’ve noticed after years of working with artists, the people who struggle most with this aren’t always beginners. They’re artists who are already making 10,000, 15,000, $20,000 a year from their art and they’ve proven they can sell. They’ve proven people want their art. They know the strategies they’ve taken, the courses they’ve read the books. They might have even read mine. But there’s a ceiling and they can’t seem to break through it. And I want you to understand that ceiling is not made of market conditions. It’s not a strategy gap.
Miriam Schulman: It’s not made of identity, not gender identity. They think, who am I to charge that if I raise my price and nobody buys? What does that mean about me? What if I price myself out of the market I’ve built? And if people who supported me think I’ve gotten too big for my boots yet, remember that Park Avenue doctor I mentioned earlier, the one who collects the Joan Mitchell’s. Yeah. He collects Joan Mitchell’s for real? I’ve seen it. He was worried that his new clients would be mad at him for charging more than he charged their friends. The fear doesn’t care how successful you are. These aren’t pricing questions. They’re identity questions. It’s the same thing at play when somebody loses a lot of weight but cannot hold on to the identity of being a thinner person, or somebody wins the lottery, but cannot hold on to the identity of having more money. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s the identity of somebody who charges higher prices. No formula is going to fix that. Getting from $20,000 a year to six figures isn’t usually a strategy shift. It’s a psychological one. It’s the moment when an artist stop seeing themselves as someone who makes art and hopes people buy it and start seeing themselves as someone who runs a legitimate business, who values their time and their skill appropriately, and who can hold a price the same way a professional does that shift.
Miriam Schulman: Recognizing it, naming it, and doing the actual work to move through it. That’s the deeper work, and it’s the work that most podcasts and courses and YouTube videos aren’t equipped to help you with, because it’s not information you’re missing. It’s a relationship with yourself. So I want you to try this too. I want you to try this right now. Say your price is out loud. The real one, the one you charge or the one you want to charge and say it. And how does it feel to you? Did it feel clean? Does it feel loaded? If it felt loaded. If there’s a little catch or a little Laugh or a little wince. That’s your data. Oh, and let me tell you something else. If you stay your prices out loud and you have absolutely no problem saying it, I would wonder if you had the opposite problem. If you are not raising your prices enough to get through to the next ceiling, to that next threshold, to that next level, because your prices should stretch you just a little bit. Not enough that you’re nauseous, but it should stretch you. And that’s where the work is. All right, so let’s wrap up. You don’t have a pricing problem. You have an identity problem. And until you solve that, no amount of strategy is going to fix it. Your pricing formula doesn’t matter if you can’t say it. If you can’t say the number, your beautiful website doesn’t matter if you discount the moment someone looks uncertain.
Miriam Schulman: Your email list is not going to help you if you’re quietly undercharging everyone on it. The work isn’t out there. The work isn’t here. Now, if you recognize yourself somewhere in this episode, if you’re already making money from your art, you know the strategy, but you feel that there’s an identity ceiling you’re bumping up against. That’s exactly the kind of work we do inside my Inner Circle program. It’s for artists who are already selling and ready to move from where they are now, to a genuinely sustainable art business, one that supports their life and definitely not just as a hobby. We work on the strategy for sure, and the psychology, because you do need both, and most programs only give you one. If that sounds like something that you need and you want, go to SchulmanArt.com/APPLY and tell me about your art business. I’d love to hear from you. Now, if this episode hits something for you and it’s named something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t quite articulate, make sure that you are subscribed because next week, I’m breaking down why most artists never reach six figures, even when they’re talented. So make sure you hit that subscribe button and the notifications bell. And if that sounds like something you want, hit a thumbs up. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt and of course on SchulmanArt.com.
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