A Step-by-Step Practice for Setting Your Prices

You’ve heard enough about pricing in the abstract. You understand — in theory — that you need to charge more, that your work has value, that cost-plus is the wrong anchor.

What you want is an actual practice. A sequence you can follow, step by step, that takes you from where you currently are to a price you can say with genuine conviction in a real conversation.

This is that practice. It draws on the Future Self Letter approach — one of the most grounding tools available for bridging the gap between your current identity and the identity required to hold a new pricing tier.

Before You Begin: One Clarification

Pricing work operates on two tracks simultaneously. What nobody explains about pricing is that the outer track (strategy, packages, market research) runs alongside an inner track (identity, belief, somatic capacity). This practice addresses both, but it does not pretend they’re the same.

You may find that one track needs more attention than the other. Some practitioners already have solid outer strategy and need primarily inner work. Others need structure and clarity on the strategy layer first. Follow the practice in sequence — the sequence is intentional — but notice which steps generate the most charge. That’s where your work lives.

Step 1: Clear Your Starting Point (30 minutes)

Before building anything new, name what exists now.

Write down your current pricing structure clearly: what you offer, what you charge, how you present it. Be specific and unsentimental.

Then write down, also specifically: what you believe you should be charging, if you could somehow remove all the noise about what feels too high, what clients will accept, and what you’re “allowed” to ask for.

The gap between these two numbers is not a problem. It’s information. It is the gap your practice is designed to close.

Step 2: Build the Outer Case (45 minutes)

Using value-based pricing as your framework, build the case for the higher number from the outside in.

Map the outcome you deliver. Not the sessions, not the methodology — the result. “After working with me, clients typically…” and fill in the specific observable change. If you don’t yet have this from client experience, extrapolate honestly from your training and the transformation you’ve witnessed in yourself.

Quantify where possible. If the outcome has financial dimensions, map them. If it’s relational, physical, or emotional — describe the before and after in concrete terms that the person living it would recognise.

Stack the components. List everything included in the offer. Assign a fair market value to each component individually. Total it. This total should feel larger than your proposed price — it is the perceived value that makes the actual price feel reasonable rather than arbitrary.

Compare the cost of not working with you. What is the cost — in time, money, wellbeing, or opportunity — of the client continuing without this intervention? When the cost of the problem significantly exceeds the cost of the solution, the price becomes obvious.

By the end of this step, you should have a written value case that makes the higher number logical. This is the pricing framework you will carry into conversations.

Step 3: Write the Future Self Letter (45 minutes)

This is the inner track counterpart to step two.

Set a specific timeframe: one year from today. Close your eyes for a few minutes and imagine stepping into that future version of yourself — the practitioner who has been holding the new price for twelve months, who quotes it easily, who feels settled rather than anxious in the moment of naming it.

Now write a letter in present tense, from that future self.

Specific prompts:
– “I work with clients at [price] and I feel… because…”
– “When I name my price now, I notice… [what happens in my body, my voice, the conversation]”
– “I no longer… [what old pattern is gone]”
– “The thing I understand now that I didn’t a year ago is…”
– “The clients I work with are… and they experience my pricing as…”

Write for at least thirty minutes. Don’t edit. Let the future self describe the present in full.

When you finish, read it aloud. Notice which parts feel true and which feel aspirational. The parts that feel aspirational are precisely where the identity work is needed.

The letter itself becomes a decision-making filter: when facing a pricing conversation, ask “What would the person in this letter do?”

Step 4: Identify the Gap (20 minutes)

Compare what you wrote to your current experience. Three specific questions:

What belief is the future self no longer carrying? Name it specifically. (“I no longer believe that charging highly makes me inaccessible to the people who need me.”) That’s the belief in need of work.

What does the future self’s body do in a pricing conversation that mine currently doesn’t? (Settles, rather than tightens. Holds the silence. Doesn’t reach for a discount immediately.) The somatic difference points to the regulation work needed.

What identity claim is the future self making that I haven’t fully inhabited yet? (“I am someone whose work is worth this. I don’t need to prove it every time I say the number.”) That’s the identity gap.

This mapping tells you where to apply the CLARITI framework or other inner work tools.

Step 5: Practice the Number (Ongoing, daily for two weeks)

Begin saying the price. Daily. In structured practice.

Day one: alone, in a quiet space. State the offer and price as if in a discovery call. Notice the body response.

Day three: to a trusted peer or practice partner who can hold space without judgment. Notice what arises differently with a witness present.

Day seven: in a low-stakes real context — a prospective client conversation where the stakes feel manageable.

Day fourteen: review. What has changed? What is still triggering the old response?

Each conversation — real or practice — is a data point. The identity ceiling shifts through accumulation. Two weeks of daily practice produces more movement than a single breakthrough insight.

Step 6: Hold Under Pressure (When It Arrives)

At some point in the practice period, you will encounter the moment the old pattern wants to take over. A client will hesitate. A prospect will say “that’s more than I was expecting.” The silence will stretch beyond comfortable.

The practice, in that moment, is not to have a perfect response. It is to stay in contact with the number you’ve named rather than retreating from it.

Breathe deliberately. Allow the silence for a count of five before responding. Then, rather than immediately offering a discount, ask a question: “What were you hoping to invest?” or “Can I share what that investment typically produces for my clients?”

Holding under pressure is itself a practice. Each time you hold, you build capacity. Each time you retreat, you send a message to your own system that the higher price was never real.

The future self in your letter holds. With practice, so will you.

If you want a community to practice pricing in — where the strategy and the inner work are equally welcome — the Abundance GPS Skool community is built for this kind of full-picture support. Join us here.