Where Is Martyr Math Hiding in Your Business Right Now?
A practical audit for the rebel healer who’s ready to close the gap
She came to me convinced her problem was visibility.
Not enough leads. Weak messaging. Her offer wasn’t landing. She needed a better website, a stronger platform, a more magnetic presence.
She wanted my permission to hire a new high-end marketing consultant (that’s a whole other conversation we’ll touch upon in future weeks). We opened her books first.
In ninety days, she had given away $14,000.
Not as a deliberate strategy. Not as a scholarship program with intention behind it. In the gap — the invisible gap between the number she meant to charge and the one she actually invoiced. Twelve clients. Dozens of small adjustments made in the moment, in response to an imagined need she’d never been asked to fill.
Her marketing wasn’t the problem.
Her math was.
The system has been seen. The equation named. The difference between the cup and the cart — felt.
Today we follow the money. Specifically yours.
Not as a metaphor. Not as an emotional concept.
In the line items. In the scope agreements. In the invoices you haven’t sent yet.
The Five Hiding Places
Martyr Math is not a single moment of weakness. It’s a system — a set of small, automatic adjustments that compound over time into something that looks a lot like a business model. It hides in five places. Go through each one slowly. Notice what lands in your body.
1. Your Pricing
Is there a gap between your rate card and what you actually invoice? Not a strategic, considered gap — the automatic one. The reflex.
Do you have a rate card at all, or do you quote from instinct and adjust for the energy in the room? For what you sense the client can bear? For how much you want them to say yes?
If your pricing lives in your nervous system instead of a document, you don’t have a rate. You have a mood.
2. Your Scope
What do you include that isn’t written into the contract?
The voice memo you send on a Sunday. The follow-up email after the session that turned into a half-hour of research. The “quick check-in” that you offered because you were worried about them and you wanted them to know you cared.
How many extra calls have you added because the client seemed to need it? How many “one more thing” sessions have you absorbed without adjusting the invoice?
Scope creep feels like care. That’s exactly what makes it so hard to see how you’re paying for it.
3. Your Discounts
In the last ninety days: how many discounts have you given that weren’t asked for?
How many payment plans have you extended without a conversation — because the conversation felt harder than the loss? How many invoices went out late because the act of sending them felt like confrontation, like greed, like making it about money when it was supposed to be about the work?
The discount you gave before they asked is a data point. So is the invoice sitting in your drafts folder from three weeks ago. When you decided what they could afford before they opened their mouth, you were playing God with their sovereignty.
4. Your Packages
Are your offers priced to what you need to feel fully resourced — or to what you think they’ll say yes to?
And, the sneaky thing about packages is that we don’t tend to consciously discount them — we stuff them. We add another session, another bonus, another deliverable — not because the work requires it, but because the price feels too high to defend. So we build a case for it instead of holding it.
Martyr Math in your packages looks like more work for the same money. The price didn’t move. You did.
5. Your Body
This is the one that doesn’t lie.
When you hit send on an invoice, what happens in your chest? In your stomach? Is there relief — the clean, exhaled feeling of a fair exchange completed? Or is there a held breath, a brace for impact, a quiet apology somewhere in your nervous system?
When a client questions your rate, what’s your first impulse? To hold the price — or to explain, accommodate, find a way to make it easier for them?
Your body has been running the audit all along. It filed the report. You just haven’t read it yet.
The Audit
Pull up your last ninety days. Actually open the file.
Take a breath. This is information, not indictment.
Write down five numbers:
The gap between your rate card and your average invoice. The dollar value of scope you delivered outside the contract. The total of discounts given without being asked. The number of invoices sent more than three days late. The number of times you overrode your body’s signal and adjusted anyway.
Add them up.
That number has a name. You’ve known it all week.
Whatever it is — it’s data. Just data. And it deserves to be seen.
Clarity is the only goal here. Because the system’s greatest tool is invisibility — the unexamined gap, the automatic discount, the scope that disappeared without a line on an invoice.
What can be seen can be changed.
What can be measured can be reclaimed.
The one concrete move
Pick the hiding place that landed hardest. Just one.
Set your rate card in a document today — not in your head. Write it down. Make it a number that doesn’t move without a conversation.
Or send the invoice that’s been sitting in your drafts.
Or have the scope conversation you’ve been postponing because it felt like too much to ask.
One move. Begin a new equation.
Tomorrow we talk about what becomes possible when you stop negotiating away your own abundance — and what one sovereign decision actually looks like in a body that’s ready to make it.
Reflection Questions
What did your Martyr Math audit reveal? Which number surprised you most?
Which of the five hiding places sits deepest in your body — and what is that place trying to protect?
What’s one boundary you can set this week that closes the gap by even 10%?
What would it feel like — in your chest, your shoulders, your hands — to send the invoice for the full amount?
What would your business look like in 90 days if the gap closed by half?
Daily Affirmations
I require, desire, and deserve books that tell the full truth of my impact — and accounts that echo it back.
My rate is set. My scope is clean. My invoice goes out whole.
I require, desire, and deserve the sovereign move — made today, held tomorrow, compounding forever.
I am the new equation. The math changes here.
PS. Profit is Protest and so is opening the books even when you’ve been afraid of what you’d find.
The audit is an act of love. Pure presence. Seeing the gap without flinching is one of the most radical things you can do in a system built on your invisibility.
You weren’t careless. You were compliant in a way that felt like care. See it clearly, name it cleanly, and then make one aligned move.
That’s the whole thing.
One move.
Want support doing this work? The math, the pricing conversation, the scope renegotiation — that’s exactly what we do together. Come work with me!