Is It Wrong to Want to Make More Money as a Healer or Coach?

Q: I feel guilty for wanting to make more money. Part of me thinks I’m supposed to do this work for the love of it, not for income. Is it wrong to want financial success in a healing or coaching practice?

No. And the question itself is worth examining carefully, because the guilt it surfaces is often doing something specific in your practice economics.

The Cultural Narrative in Conscious Fields

Conscious practice fields carry a cultural narrative about money and service that has real historical roots — service traditions, community healing, cultures of reciprocity — but that often produces a specific distortion in practitioners who have internalized it: that wanting appropriate financial compensation for skilled work is somehow opposed to caring about the work.

This is a false opposition.

A practitioner who is financially sustainable can continue practicing. A practitioner who isn’t eventually can’t. From the perspective of service effectiveness alone, appropriate compensation enables the work.

More fundamentally: the belief that wanting appropriate compensation reveals something morally suspect about the practitioner’s relationship to their work is itself a worthiness pattern in cultural clothing. It provides ideological support for keeping the rate below the level the work actually supports.

The Distinction That Matters

There is a genuine version of the concern embedded in this question: it matters whether financial decisions in the practice are made primarily to maximize income at the expense of the client’s experience and outcomes, or whether they’re made to create a sustainable practice that serves clients well.

Entitlement — claiming significantly above what the work produces, prioritizing the practitioner’s income over the quality of service delivered — is a real thing and a real problem in some practice contexts.

But the practitioners asking this question are almost never in this category. Practitioners worried that wanting more money makes them bad healers are, by and large, practitioners with significant worthiness deficits who have found an ideological framework that makes the deficit feel virtuous.

The question “Is it wrong to want more money?” deserves to be examined in the direction of its function: Is this question protecting clients? Or is it protecting the worthiness deficit?

What Financial Sustainability Actually Produces

Practitioners who are financially sustainable — who are appropriately compensated for their work — typically report:

• Greater capacity to show up fully in client work, without the background stress of financial precarity
• Clearer professional boundaries, because the relationship isn’t carrying the weight of financial anxiety
• Less resentment or depletion, because the compensation reflects what the work requires
• More professional longevity, because sustainable practices don’t require the practitioner to sacrifice their financial health indefinitely

None of these outcomes serve the practitioner at the expense of clients. They serve the quality of the work.

A Different Frame

The question “Is it wrong to want to make more money?” can be replaced with: “Would my clients be better served by a financially sustainable version of me?”

For the large majority of conscious practitioners, the answer is yes. A financially sustainable practice produces a practitioner who can sustain the work, maintain their professional development, and show up without the distortions that financial precarity introduces into the therapeutic or coaching relationship.

Wanting appropriate compensation for skilled, dedicated work is not morally suspect. It is professionally appropriate.

The Abundance GPS Skool community holds this framing explicitly — financial sustainability and quality of service are not opposed, they’re aligned. Come take a look.