The Difference Between a Money Block and a Pricing Problem

The money block framework is real and useful. It’s also not the explanation for every financial difficulty in a practice or business.

Some financial problems are pricing problems: the offer is priced wrong for the market, or wrong for the work involved, or wrong for the clients it’s attracting. Some are positioning problems: the right work at the right price but aimed at the wrong people. Some are conversion problems: the right offer, positioned correctly, but the consultation or sales process isn’t working. These are strategy gaps, and they require strategic responses — not inner work.

The confusion between money blocks and strategy gaps produces two kinds of waste. Addressing a strategy gap with inner work leaves the strategy gap in place. Addressing a money block with strategy produces temporary results at best, because the block regenerates the problem in new forms.

How to Tell the Difference

What money blocks are in their purest form is a pattern that persists despite the practical conditions for success being in place. The money block explanation applies when: the offer is genuinely good, the pricing is reasonable for the market, the positioning is clear, and the financial problem persists anyway — specifically through the practitioner’s own behaviours rather than through external conditions.

How to distinguish block patterns from strategy gaps involves looking at what specifically is producing the financial difficulty. If the income is low because the practitioner consistently discounts before being asked, offers excessive free help, or finds ways to avoid conversations where payment is the outcome — these are block-driven behaviours that a different strategy won’t fix. If the income is low because the offer is genuinely unclear, the market being targeted genuinely doesn’t value the work, or the conversion process has structural problems — these are strategy problems that inner work won’t fix.

Diagnosing whether the problem is a block or a strategy gap requires honest assessment of both dimensions. Most practitioners who have been in a practice for more than a year have accumulated enough data to distinguish between “people don’t value this offer” and “I consistently undermine the offer through my own financial patterns.”

When It’s Both

The most common situation for experienced practitioners is both: real strategy gaps and real money blocks, each reinforcing the other. The money block produces the avoidance behaviours that prevent strategy from being implemented clearly. The strategy gaps provide external confirmation of the block’s internal narrative.

When the block is the actual limiting factor is usually visible in the persistence of the pattern across strategy changes. The practitioner who has tried multiple offers, multiple niches, multiple pricing approaches, and finds the same financial ceiling appearing each time has probably been moving the strategy while the block remains unchanged. The block, not the strategy, is the limiting factor.

When inner work is aimed at the wrong problem, the practitioner has been doing real inner work on a real block — but the financial problem they’re experiencing is primarily strategic, and the inner work, however valuable, doesn’t address it. This produces the frustrating experience of feeling more resolved internally while the external financial situation remains stuck.

The distinction matters because it determines what you actually do. A block requires inner work. A strategy gap requires strategic adjustment. Honest diagnosis of which you’re dealing with, or in what proportion, is the starting point for change that actually reaches the right level.

The Abundance GPS Skool community works with David Cameron Gikandi on both dimensions — the inner blocks and the outer strategy — and how to distinguish which is limiting growth at any given point. Join us here.