Money Blocks for Coaches Working Primarily With Struggling Clients

The coach who serves clients in financial difficulty is in a real ethical bind that isn’t imaginary and shouldn’t be dismissed. Their clients genuinely cannot afford standard market rates. The need is real. The financial constraint is real. And the impulse to make the work accessible — to not be the person who turns away someone who needs help because they can’t pay — reflects a genuine values commitment.

The money block enters when the coach’s own financial constraints become structurally linked to the client base’s financial constraints — when the coach’s inability to earn adequately isn’t just a consequence of who they serve but is driven by a money block that the client base conveniently confirms.

What money blocks are for the coach in this situation includes both the genuine ethical challenge of serving clients who can’t pay standard rates and the specific blocks that attach to that situation — blocks that use the client’s financial difficulty as their activation context.

The Empathy Enmeshment Pattern

The first pattern: the coach who works primarily with financially struggling clients often develops a form of money enmeshment with those clients — an inability to separate their own financial wellbeing from the client’s financial situation.

The logic runs: if my client can’t afford food, how can I justify charging more for a session than their weekly grocery bill? If my client is in debt, how can I profit from their distress? If my client is struggling, charging them standard rates feels like extracting from a person already depleted.

This logic sounds compassionate. It is partly compassionate. It is also a version of the receiving block: the coach cannot allow themselves to receive at a level that would be uncomfortable given the client’s situation.

The relational layer of client-adjacent money blocks is where this enmeshment lives: the coach has allowed the client’s financial identity to partially define their own. This is a boundary issue in its financial expression — the coach’s worth has become contingent on the client’s capacity, rather than being separate from it.

The practical consequence is the coach who is chronically under-resourced, serving clients who need them, from a financial position that eventually produces burnout, resentment, or the inability to continue the work at all.

The Client Base as Mirror

A second pattern: the coach who consistently attracts struggling clients often has an unconscious reason to do so. The client base reflects the coach’s own money blocks back to them in useful ways — the struggling client provides external justification for the coach’s internal reluctance to charge more, and provides a genuine reason why the income isn’t higher that doesn’t require the coach to examine what’s running internally.

The identity blocks in serving struggling clients include this mirror function: the financially constrained client population becomes, partly, a context that allows the coach to maintain their current financial identity — the generous server who prioritises people over profit — without having to confront the blocks that would surface if they were working with clients who could afford to pay well.

This is not cynical. The coach genuinely serves struggling clients well and with real commitment. The mirror function is running beneath the genuine service, not instead of it.

The receiving block in service-oriented coaches is activated specifically in the context of clients who need but cannot give back at the level the coach’s work is worth. Learning to receive adequately from clients who have more capacity — which requires attracting or developing relationships with those clients — means confronting the receiving block directly rather than managing it through a client population that makes over-giving structurally inevitable.

The Sliding Scale Trap

A third pattern: many coaches working with struggling clients use sliding scale pricing as their primary revenue model. Sliding scale is a genuine and useful tool for accessibility. It is also a model that requires the coach to operate at the top of the scale — with clients who can pay full rate — in order to fund the reduced rates at the bottom.

When a coach’s sliding scale has very few clients at full rate and many at reduced rates, the model has stopped being a sliding scale and has become a model in which the coach subsidises client access from their own financial wellbeing. This is not sustainable and is not actually serving the clients in the way the coach imagines — because the coach who is financially depleted serves from depletion, and that has consequences for the quality of the service.

Diagnosing which block the client base is activating requires the coach to be honest about which clients they have at full rate, why those clients are rare, and what specifically stops them from attracting or developing more. The answer to those questions usually points directly at the primary block — whether it’s the empathy enmeshment, the mirror function, or the receiving block.

Sustainable Service

The coach who resolves these blocks doesn’t stop serving struggling clients. They build a practice that can sustain that service: with some portion of their income coming from clients who pay full rate, a structure that genuinely allows for accessibility without requiring the coach to absorb the financial gap personally, and a receiving capacity that allows the work to be compensated at a level that makes it sustainable over time.

The Abundance GPS Skool community works with David Cameron Gikandi on the specific money blocks that arise in service to financially struggling client populations. Join us here.