☕️ (R)emote Expresso #84

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

Somewhere around third grade, a teacher told me it was okay that I wasn't good at math.

Because girls aren't good at math.

I want to say I laughed it off. I didn't. I was a kid. I filed it under "true," the way kids do, and then I built the next forty years on top of it.

Numbers became the thing I flinched at. Not disliked. Flinched at. A little full-body no.

But a sentence like that never stays about math. It teaches you a shape: doubt yourself first, quietly, before anyone else gets the chance. Math was where mine started.

And that shape is not mine alone. Researchers have measured it. Women rate their own work about a quarter lower than men rate theirs - same work, same scores. The gap holds even when you pay people to be accurate. And it shows up by sixth grade.

Right on schedule for me.

Then came Oxford. 1989, junior year abroad, and a job I was not supposed to have - pulling pints under the table at a pub called The Lamb & Flag. No scanners back then. You added the whole round up in your head, then rang it into the till.

Turns out I could do numbers fine when there was a queue of thirsty Brits glaring at me and money on the line.

I got fast. Genuinely fast.

(A few punters may have received a generous discount along the way. For the historical record: I regret nothing.)

But the flinch didn't leave. It went quiet and waited.

For years my whole money strategy was: earn more so I never had to look. No budget. No spreadsheet. More. Always more. Outrun it. That is a very expensive way to avoid a spreadsheet.

At one point I took a job at PwC as a data management senior associate. Shoulder to shoulder with audit and accounting teams. Doing work I had no business doing, with zero interest in learning it. Zeeee-ro. Numbers made my brain go wiggy and I could not make myself care if my life depended on it.

(Got diagnosed with ADHD at 55. A lot of my greatest hits make more sense now.)

So when I started a business, I dragged all of it in the door with me. Plus one more belief, free of charge: that sales meant slimy men in bad suits, taking people's hard-earned money and calling it a deal.

You cannot say your rate out loud when that's the movie playing in your head.

The flinch is not paranoia, either. When women actually do it - name the win, hold the rate - they get docked for it. Read as less likeable, less hireable. A tax men don't pay. So if saying your worth out loud has ever quietly cost you, no, you did not imagine that.

Which makes the flinch smart. And also a cage.

Getting out of it took months. A coach. A hundred tiny, slightly humiliating experiments.

None of them were the power pose. Let me save you the two minutes. You know the one - feet planted hip-width, fists on the hips, chin up. Amelia Shepherd does it on Grey's Anatomy. People swear by it.

The science behind it fell apart years ago. One of the original researchers came right out and said she no longer buys it. So if that pose has been your pre-call ritual: drop it, hun. It was never the thing.

What worked for me was smaller, and a lot less heroic. Say a number. Don't discount it on reflex. Say it, and then - the genuinely hard part - shut up and let it sit there.

And now? I can say my rate without flinching.

Most of the time.

That "most of the time" is not me being modest. It's the actual finish line. Not some version of me who never flinches again. A version who says the number anyway.

That's the whole thing. It was never confidence. It was reps.

Wednesday is one more rep, in a room that won't let you round yourself down.

Bring your number. I'll bring mine.

(The research, if you want the receipts: Exley and Kessler on the self-promotion gap, and Laurie Rudman on the likeability penalty. Not vibes. Measured.)

Say one true thing about your work out loud this week - with one real number in it. To one actual person: a client, a boss, a friend who'll get it. Not a post. Not the whole highlight reel. One sentence. Say it plain, skip the discount, and then stop talking and let it sit there being true. You're not bragging. You're done calling it nothing.

You already know the shrunk-down way you describe your own work. Paste it in. Get back the version with a real number and no apology on it.

Copy this, then paste your own cringe-y sentence at the bottom:

Here it is working on a sample sentence:

In: "I kind of do social media for small businesses and my rates are pretty flexible."

Out: "I run social media for small businesses. My last client's engagement doubled in 90 days, and my rate is $2,000 a month." Plus the normalizing line: "That's in line with what most managers charge for this scope."

(Swap in your own sentence and your own real result - don't borrow mine.)

A Framework for Confident Sales - our final Creator event.

Wednesday, July 29 · 10 AM CST | 11 AM EST | 4 PM GMT | 5 PM CET
On Google Meet · Hosted by Silvia Coco with speaker Shruti Agarwal

What if the reason you're not closing more clients isn't your pitch - it's the tiny ways you talk yourself down before the call even starts?

Shruti (founder of Insight North, ex-analytics lead for Lenovo and CAVA) walks through a Miro-based framework for spotting the self-limiting patterns in how you position and price - then picking one thing to change right away.

This is the last Creator event we'll run in this space. If you've been meaning to show up "next time," this is next time.

I keep thinking about how this room found each other. Fifty-something countries, all these people who chose the weird, take-your-laptop-anywhere version of work - somehow landing in the same tiny corner of the internet, cheering each other's wins like they're our own.

We were always better at seeing each other than seeing ourselves.

Say it like you'd say it about someone you're proud of. That was always the assignment.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: If you read this at 1am and thought "I'll catch the next one" - there is no next one for this. It's the last Creator event in this space. Come round yourself up instead of down, while we're all still here.

Less shrinking, more saying it. 😏

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.