Why You Cannot Set Your Own Salary — What Decides the Authority to Price

Introduction: You Offer, and Another Prices

How much value you generate, you yourself know best. And yet how much that value is priced at, you cannot decide yourself.

Salary is decided by the company. Work on contract and the payment is decided by the party placing the order. You are the one who offers; the one who prices is the other. You must have felt, in this asymmetry, something that does not quite sit right.

Techniques of salary negotiation have been told at length. What this article treats is the ground beneath it: why the authority to price is always on the other’s side — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because you do not hold the means to deliver value to the world. And that unsettled feeling is not your greed but a proper reaction to a position robbed of authority.

Non-Ownership of the Route to Deliver Produces the Subordination of Pricing

Come to think of it, most of us do not price our own value ourselves. However much value you generate, how much that value is priced at is usually decided by the buyer’s standard.

Why is the authority to price always on the other’s side? Because you do not hold the means to deliver value to the world.

The route to deliver what you made to people. The mechanism to sell it. Unless you hold these yourself, you can only pass through someone who does. And to pass through means to follow that someone’s standard. Non-ownership of the means to deliver produces the subordination of pricing. These two are not scattered grievances but the front and back of one structure.

In my own experience, music was so. To put a song into the world, I could only pass through a route owned by another — a label, a production company. To pass through that route, I had to fit the standard of the side that holds it. What to deem good, what to make. The centre of that judgment left my hands and moved outside.

At the time, I processed this unease as I am merely sulking, being naive. A professional delivers what is asked and receives payment; failing to is indulgence, I told myself. But however much I scolded myself, the unease did not vanish. However many years passed, the same small bone stuck in the same place.

Raising the Payment Does Not Erase This Unease

Here, run one thought experiment.

Suppose the payment were piled several times higher — would that unsettled feeling vanish? Honestly, it should not. If anything, if in exchange for a high payment you were asked to surrender your judgment more deeply, the resistance might rather strengthen.

Conversely, even for the slightest payment, if you can make what you truly want to make by your own standard, that voice of refusal does not rise.

That is, the variable the senses were reacting to was never on the axis of the size of the payment. It swayed on an entirely different axis — whether the authority to judge value is yours or outside.

This distinction releases many people from years of self-misunderstanding. I receive payment, and yet somehow I am not satisfied. Those who have felt this may have reproached themselves as greedy. But the true reason is not greed. Satisfied with the figure, the senses were reacting to the fact that the authority to price was not theirs.

The problem was not the amount received but the location of the right to decide. Once you see that, there is no longer any need to reproach yourself.

Psychology Calls This a Want of “Autonomy”

This structure can be explained in the language of psychology too.

The self-determination theory of the psychologists Deci and Ryan names “autonomy” as one of the basic psychological needs indispensable for a person to be well [Deci & Ryan, 1985]. Autonomy is the sense of choosing your own action yourself.

Note that this differs from the freedom to behave selfishly. Even while cooperating with someone, even while following rules, if you feel you are taking on and choosing that choice yourself, autonomy is kept. Conversely, even if it looks free on the surface, when you feel the initiative of action is always outside, autonomy is impaired. The key is whether there is a sense that you hold the reins of choice.

When a state of unmet autonomy continues, people lose vitality and carry a restlessness. In the money context, the very state of having to keep meeting a standard imposed from outside produces, even if income is stable, an anxiety that runs at the bottom.

This point explains well why a person who looks affluent cannot become free of anxiety. Even earning a high income, if that income is held by a client’s convenience or the market’s appraisal, autonomy is not met. The size of the figure is a separate matter from the location of the reins.

A person unsettled though their annual income rose, and a person calm though on a modest income. What divides the difference is not the figure but how much you can choose, yourself, your own way of working and how money comes in.

▸ On this structure of income itself, see why raising your income does not reduce the inability to stop.

Why “Be Grateful You Are Paid at All” Misses the Mark

Once this structure is visible, the wide-of-the-mark quality of a common persuasion also comes into view.

Be grateful you are paid at all. This persuasion mistakes the problem. Because what guilt questions is not the presence of payment but the location of authority.

Even paid, if the authority to price is with the other, the unease remains. Conversely, even for a small figure, if you can price it yourself, the unease is unlikely to arise. So trying to console with the talk of the figure, the senses do not agree.

Likewise, the advice change your mindset and you’ll be fine misses the mark. Even if you fiddle with attitude and suppress the unease, as long as the structure is the same, the unease wells up again in another scene. Natural, since the source is untouched.

Let me draw a line, to be safe. I do not intend here to develop the economic theory hold the means of production itself; that is another theme. What I want to say is more limited. Among the structures that guilt over money points to is non-ownership of the authority to price. That one point.

Conclusion: Surrendered Authority Can Be Taken Back

You cannot set your own salary not because you are poor at negotiating, nor because your value falls short. In a position that holds no means to deliver, the standard of pricing too is held by the other — such was the structure.

If so, the road to quiet that unsettled feeling is not to change attitude. It is to take the authority to price back to your own side.

And its first step lies in holding the route to deliver yourself. What, at what price, to whom you deliver — preparing on your own side a place where you can decide this without waiting for another’s order or appraisal. This is not merely a means to earn but a means to take back authority.

Of course, this is not a single-leap story. Keep your present income and, alongside it, increase the ratio on your own side little by little. What was surrendered can be taken back. This whole structure is gathered in the true nature of the guilt around earning.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation” (2000) American Psychologist, 55(1)
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten