I did it. I lost my possessions. Twice. And there are irreplaceable lessons in these situations. I’ll tell you why.

The first time was years ago. It happened to me mostly because of decisions I was putting off, and partly maybe because of fate. But despite the stress level being immense, I discovered unexpected benefits for myself: the many fake “friends” disappeared; I survived; I received support from people I didn’t even expect. The lesson I apparently missed then was that my self-worth is not actually a function of my net worth, so I felt ashamed, guilty, and even isolated myself from certain circles for a long time. So the second time I decided to focus on that very lesson: relationships.

The second time is now. This time it’s mostly intentional and arose out of my desire to become a digital nomad. Of course, fate has a hand in it again. But the process reflects my own internal changes – my priorities have changed, my consciousness has changed, my way of thinking is changing in motion, as is my identity. This was unexpected for me – a change in my own identity actually means transformation. But this time I am not trying to isolate myself from others, because I am not ashamed. In fact, no one knows or cares about my possessions, because my value has nothing to do with them – I have received confirmation of this fact. And perhaps the most important transformation for me is in the way I work and the way I make money now and plan to do so in the future. The old ways, which are based on location, are not applicable to my new lifestyle, and the new ones are just unfolding. So, there is a big challenge, but along with the uncertainty and stress, there is also a lot of curiosity and passion in this move.

The most important question seems to be how much am I really worth. Because before I started thinking about it, my self-worth seemed to be tied to how valued I felt by the others. Especially in financial relationships – my self-worth in a transaction was tied to the attitudes and expectations of the client, which were in turn determined by the market. You know the classic belief: he who pays is the one who orders the music. But in my case… what I sell is difficult to compare to another similar service, and even less to find a fixed price for such a thing. Classic methods – pricing based on hours worked or the project principle – a fixed price for a desired result cannot be applied to the transformation business, unlike typical change, because of the unpredictability of the expected results, the time needed to achieve it and because of changing outlooks during the process itself. And the most important – the client himself is transformed during the process. So the one I agreed to at the beginning is different from the one that changes during the process and becomes the one at the end.

Why do I think so? Well, there are different kinds of change – the simplest is development – you just fix or improve something so that it looks or behaves better. But the core remains the same. You have a solid foundation and the unknown is not that great.

Then you have change – you change the way things are done, but the end result is the same or very similar. That’s what happened for many years with technology implementation – we changed processes to achieve the same result in a more optimal way.

Of course, we can have another type of change – a reboot – when things seem to be heading towards or are already at a dead end. So we just get back to the right safe place and reboot – maybe in a different direction.

We have a transition type of change – that’s exactly how my own life has worked so far – from point A, which is a clear state that I no longer like, to point B, which is the new desired state where I would like to be. Think of it as changing your role, for example – from employee to business owner. That was also my specialization in business – managing change and business performance.

But transformation is a different story – the end destination is a new identity that you can’t even imagine when the process begins. And to make it more complicated – the process can be triggered unexpectedly and by factors outside of yourself. Think of it as if artificial intelligence has appeared and your business is directly affected, so you can’t continue the old way anymore, because of the external pressure imposed by technology, so you just start feeling tense and start moving, but you don’t know where the end destination will be that would release that tension.

Now imagine that I can trigger and facilitate, supporting people and organizations in such transformation processes, but I can’t promise them any specific desired outcome at the beginning, because I don’t know how their own needs & desires will change during the process. So how can you sell that, hmm? And how can you monetize it – how much does such a service cost?

That’s right. It’s a question of self-worth. If I believe that my contribution is worth $1, it will be worth $1. The client has no experience with a similar service to compare the price, nor can they calculate it in hours worked. They can even – and it typically happens during the process – doubt about chance to achieve positive outcome at the end. So the only stable basis in this case is my self-assessment, which has to be strong enough, because otherwise this whole process can collapse. Correct me if I’m wrong. Because during the process, the client identity is changing itself.

So how much I’m worth is a matter of self-perception, which determines my prices. And that’s my job, which I can control and need to do for myself – to judge how much I’m worth. But whether I’m worth it to you is a matter of the perceived value of my services compared to my prices. Which you can control and it’s your job to judge.

Ultimately, the price itself is a matter of value delivered + rarity of your offering. Seth Godin, whom I highly respect, has a brilliant post on this here. The only difference in my case is that it has to be re-negotiated dynamically during the process, because goals change unpredictably and my perceived by the client value changes itself.