The Value Bank: Why I Give Away So Much for Free

We hear it all the time in business:

“Don’t give away too much for free.”

But what if generosity isn’t hurting your business… what if it’s one of the very things helping it grow?

In this episode, I’m sharing a mindset that’s completely changed the way I think about showing up online, serving others, and building a business that lasts. I talk about what I call your Value Bank—the invisible account you fill every time you help someone, offer encouragement, share your expertise, or leave another human a little better than you found them.

We also dive into the difference between generosity and self-abandonment, why keeping score is exhausting, and why the return on your generosity rarely comes from where you expect it to.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re giving too much away, or you’ve found yourself feeling discouraged because your efforts aren’t paying off fast enough, I think this episode will give you a completely different way to look at it.

Because maybe your job isn’t to keep score.

Maybe your job is simply to keep making deposits.

Speaking of, here I am putting in my value bank deposits by offering you a free coaching consult on the house! 60 uninterrupted minutes with a business coach's brain on your business.  

Book here: https://www.tamarcoaching.com/consult

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Brave Little Things is back. Hello guys, and so are you and so am I. And we're all back to do some brave things, learn some brave things, and have some fun, hopefully. So hello, hello everybody. You know, guys, tomorrow is my birthday. Very exciting. Anybody who knows me knows that we make big deals here for my birthday, sometimes a little bit too much, that it can very stressful. And it's been this lifelong journey for me in birthdays, but I've got some really fun things in the works. I mean, first of all, this isn't birthday related, but tonight we are going to have the amazing, a very good friend of mine who is an expert breath work facilitator be doing a breath work session for my unmuters. So if you are not if you are in unmute, my 28-day visibility challenge, tonight we'll be gifted a session with Adina Fagelin inside of our, you'll get the link and everything. So that's really exciting. So that's kind of fun. It's like the night before my birthday. And then different kinds of things are in the works. I definitely see a um beach. Obviously, I'll probably be at the beach like in and out all day long, but I kind of want like a sandcastle woman event. I don't know. It hasn't been worked out the details yet. We'll keep you posted. Hang out my stories. You'll see all the things I did for my birthday, but very exciting and very fun. So today, guys, we're talking generosity. We're talking about how to capitalize generosity in our businesses. We're talking about what I like to call the value bank. It's actually a term I learned from my own coach. So let's jump in, let's get into it. Okay, so first of all, say this that people all the time tell me that I give away way too much for free in my business all the time. I mean, listen, they're not wrong. I'll just name a few things. Number one, first of all, this podcast right here. I've been sitting at this desk for, by the way, I just realized also as I'm saying this, I launched my podcast on my birthday last year. So it has been a year since I have been sitting at my desk every single week hanging out with you guys, hopefully just pouring you down with unbelievable value. So that's number one, podcast. My podcast, brave little things. My joyful networking community, which I know you guys have heard of many times. Many of you are my joyfuls. I'm pour so much into that community, giving away, you know, creating free events monthly, you know, WhatsApp, community, just nonstop. Obviously, my Instagram. I'm showing up constantly, just nonstop, sometimes twice a day, three times a day, just giving over value. My scheduling, not your mama scheduling workbook, that is now as part of a gift I gift every client who coaches with me one-on-one, but that was a free offer in the beginning. I've done challenges for free. I forgot what I called it. I had I had a for a year of free group coaching, free group coaching calls that would happen also monthly. My consults, my one-on-one consults are for free. I mean, they're not wrong, but I'll tell you, they are also on purpose. And we're gonna talk about that all today. By the way, I was just kind of laughing to myself as I was saying this because I had a client of mine who I had shared my unmute challenge that's happening right now. Um, and one of my clients immediately, who's in that group, that WhatsApp group, immediately texted me. She's like, I was so happy to see that you're charging for this. She was like, I thought it was gonna be like another thing that tomorrow is giving away for free. And I was cracking up. Well, I was like, Dad, we're we're we're just we're charging for this kind of a thing here. But listen, bottom line, number one is my biggest value is generosity. Always has been, always will be. I love to give. I generally enjoy helping people, which is, you know, probably why I comment came into this profession and all the other iterations of my profession beforehand, that was not coaching but other things, was also about generosity. And I don't see my free content as giving things away. I'll kind of start off with that. I see it as who I want to be in the world, how I want to lead, how I want to teach people. And so many people, I think that I get so much pushback about this is because, you know, people's questions are like, aren't you afraid people won't buy if they already get so much from you? You know, if they're getting it for free, why would they buy? And don't people take advantage of you? And doesn't it make you resentful? And why would someone pay you when you're already teaching so much, right? And all different kinds of ways of that. And that definitely happens when I'm coaching clients. And I am coaching them also and ex you know, exploring the notion of, you know, creating something for free, doing something for free. And these are things that come up and they make sense, you guys. Like this is literally our primitive brain at its prime doing her job, like what? Right, we need money, money, money, money, and not equating that creating things for free, giving for free, and being aligned with your own generosity and being like just literally walking the very powerful walk of generosity, is it's saying it's not connected, but it is very much connected, a hundred percent connected. And I just want to be clear because I think this can be confusing when we're talking about generosity, right? Because especially I think for women out here, I want to be talking about this because generosity is not people pleasing. It is not overgiving, it is not trying to earn love and proving your worth and abandoning yourself in the process. It is not those things. Because I think that's what comes up when we talk generosity. It's kind of like, but I want I don't want to charge my worth and I you know and my value and you know, I'm I'm not gonna get walked on all over and you know, all those kinds of things. Where we've been conditioned to give. And when many women here give more, they immediately tense up. Right? And that totally makes sense. But the generosity I'm talking about is a chosen kind. I want to. I wanna be giving. Not that I have to and I need to, because if I don't, then people aren't gonna like me and people aren't gonna buy from me and anything like that. None of that stuff. And you'll know which one you're doing, by the way, because of how it feels in your body, because the body don't last, that is for sure. Right? Do you feel excited when you're gonna be giving something, when you're gonna be sharing something? Do you feel honored? Do you feel grateful to be in this position? Do you feel alive and lit up? Or do you feel resentful? Do you feel drained? Do you feel annoyed? And boundaries are what make generosity sustainable, by the way. We have to be resourced enough to be able to give. We have to be able to create boundaries for ourselves. Are we going to be responding to every comment on on every Instagram post that we have? Probably not, right? That's not necessarily even about giving in that kind of way. But before we give, we do want to check in there. Because if we're giving from a place of like real resentment or just feeling annoyed and frustrated and drained, and I'm doing this because my coach said me for me to do this, that's not what we want to be doing. And that will literally do the ex exact opposite of what we're trying to do here. So we want to be in a place of like, this feels really good. This feels really right. This feel I feel honored to be able to do this. Okay. And, you know, I want I want to kind of g bring it over in a I want you to picture this kind of a thing. I think this will make it make it more sense in an easier kind of way. I want you to imagine this like invisible bank account. Okay. And every time you generally help somebody and you generally give to another person, whether it be a client that you already have, or a future client, or a follower, somebody in your audience, whatever it is, whether that be in the form of, you know, sending off a beautifully written email that gives the exact process, let's say your sourdough workshop maker, gives the exact process of how to make sourdough bagels, right? Or something like that. Or to be, you know, to record a podcast like I'm doing right now, or to be at a networking event and specifically, you know, offer your assistance and help, let's say your business coach, to look over somebody's website to give some kind of feedback, right? Or to show up and be giving a consult. I find that my consults are insanely generous. I give, you know, not only time-wise, which it is, is six sixty minutes, an hour of my time to have my eyes and my mind on their business, but what I'm able to offer and the shifts I'm able to give, I hear all the time that even for the folks who might not decide to book with me, but that hour together shifted something inside of them, or they now feel like, you know, that they're more able to charge really what they're wanting to charge or or whatever it is, right? So there's all different kinds of ways. And so every time somebody walks away feeling clearer or braver, calmer, more confident, more hopeful, anything that you are are, you know, that's what you're what you give to your people, that's like a little deposit into the little value bank, right? And what I kind of also I I kind of this is this is there's literally no scientific evidence for this, okay, guys? So just let me say that up front. But somewhere along the way, I made up this kind of rule where there's like for every deposit I make into the value bank, something gets deposited into my business bank. Okay. And the reason what I say scientifically, obviously it's not like exact, like you do 10 things and then you get one thing. It's roughly, right, it's an idea. But that every time you do, you put you put in value, you give value generously from your heart. You're so excited to give over. For every 10, one is put into your business bank, right? Which it looks like in real life, a client who books with you, a customer who purchases something from you, a referral, a speaking opportunity, maybe someone sharing your work with somebody else, a testimonial, a collaboration, an invitation, a sale, whatever it is, that is a deposit into your business account, right? The numbers don't matter exactly, right? But this idea that the more you're giving, it's gonna come back to you. I definitely feel that way. I imagine that a lot of you out there listening feel that way as well. I feel that way about money, I feel that way about energy, about happiness, about all those kinds of things that really you are a reflection back, that it always kind of comes back to you. You are a boomerang back, right? And listen, the mistake that I think people make when I talk about this and share about this is they expect the return to be from the exact person that they served. Right? I gave so much in that workshop and nobody, you know, nobody uh went on to buy my bigger package. I spent hours making that real. And now they expect that, you know, exact person who who liked it or commented to then book with them or buy something from them. You don't want to score keep, guys. That is just exhausting. I'll give you a really great example of this actually. That there's a woman who comes every month to my joyful networking group, every single month. She has never bought she's never bought any of this thing from me. She has never done coaching with me, and she I don't even think she attended my national networking dance party, not in unmute yet, and nothing. And she then went on to share with a friend my Instagram account, because it this, I think this friend has a business happening. She shared my Instagram account with this friend, and this friend went on to book a consult with me and now coaches with me. Six-month package, bam, bam, bam. We have no idea. Our only job is just to put out the love, put out the generousity, generosity, put out the the fire that we have inside of us into the world, the good fire, and really just like layer it on, like give, give, give. And how it comes back to us, not our business. We will not know. Most a lot of the time we will not know. And that's okay. That's actually a good thing. We just want to keep on depositing, keep on depositing, keep on depositing, knowing that at some point it's gonna be deposited into our business account, to our business bank account as well. That's what we want to know, right? We don't get to decide where this return comes from. Maybe it's gonna be a friend, a sister, someone you heard their name. We don't we don't know. And we don't want to know. Because we could know. I mean, there are it is a good thing to know also when you can trace back, okay, you know, the way when I show up on Instagram for this real, people can really come in, whatever, but there's gonna be so many times when we don't know, and that's okay. We don't need to kind of fight around that. And this kind of work also allows us to build real relationships, like actually helping humans. Imagine if you were like, okay, I am going to just generously, generously step up every single morning when I wake up and say, like, how can I be generous with my people? How can I show up in a way that I didn't yesterday that feels even more generous? Imagine that. I mean, it's like literally the opposite of like the desire of going to go viral, right? Where it's just kind of like, what kind of thing can you know that can work for the algorithm and what can I like get, you know, hook people into? It's like the it's like bringing the human back in, which we have lost so much of, you guys. We have lost so much of our human because we have gotten so caught up in these robotic systems. But when we are leading with generosity, it will always lead us back to the human, which is what we want to be doing. So, you know, listen, it's not just about making more deposits, right? It's also making better deposits, really getting better at things like our our coaching if you're a coach, learning different kinds of modalities and bringing that in, right? Doing your writing, working on your writing skills to be able to speak to people very specifically, working on your listening skills, your teaching, your craft, right? Making your your deposits even more valuable, more available. And that and that sometimes takes time, but we can do that, right? And so this notion of like 10 to 1, right? Again, detach the actual number, just takes all this pressure off of us. We don't have to think about like, okay, you know, have to get this exact amount you know in. I have gotta, if I give this and they gotta give me that, no, just like let us loosely and freely just go crazy with being generous. And so I really want you to think about what are ways in my business that I could be generous, that I can give in a really open kind of way. And I want to tell you something that's really important because you know, it's actually, I wish I could actually address it in the beginning of the podcast, but when people kind of come up to me with these questions and these concerns, like, well, if you give so much, why would I want to buy from you? I guarantee you that when somebody is like receiving something from you for free, whether it be they're watching you on Instagram, getting your free opt-in, whatever, you know, putting something out, your your free webinar, whatever it is, and they're getting a 1% shift inside of them, or maybe even more. They're feeling a difference, they're feeling a change. When it comes down to the time where they are now ready to buy something, and they're ready for a bigger evolution, a bigger growth, really going into, you know, really solving this problem that they have, you better believe that you're the person they're coming for. You better believe that you're the one they have in mind that they are going to be buying from because you've already led the way, because they're already thinking, wait, if I could get a change, a shift, and get closer to what I'm wanting from something for free that they put out, imagine what it'll be like when I pay them. Right? And that's just how it goes. And so I say, do not hold back. Give it over. The way I kind of get here every single week and give you guys over all my stuff. Like I giving you all my stuff here in coaching. But it there is gonna be obviously a difference when you are just hearing this stuff and then you're sitting in my container and you're actually studying it and learning how it's apply to you. But you're under you're already feeling the shifts. I imagine those who come week after week to hear this podcast are already experiencing the shift, and that is what we're doing here. So in this week, instead of asking, will this thing that I'm doing get me clients? I want you to ask, can I leave someone 1% better than I found them? And how would I do that? Right? How can I help leave them 1% braver, 1% clear, 1% more hopeful? Right? Just we want to be keep on making these little deposits, these brave little deposits every single day. So that we can then also seeing how our our bank, our business bank is growing as well. Because nothing generous is ever wasted. I will promise you. I promise you, promise you, promise you. So go fill up your value bank this week, guys, and see what happens. See how good it feels for you. See how good it feels for your audience and see how good it feels for your business. I guarantee you that it will absolutely make a change. Go have some fun, guys. I love you all so much. Have a great day.