The Conversation Where She Found Out Her Rate Was Lower Than Everyone Else’s

This is a composite practitioner story based on common patterns in pricing development. Details are illustrative.

Nina found out by accident. She and three other practitioners who worked in adjacent fields had agreed to have an honest conversation about the business side of their work — not as a formal group, but because one of them had suggested it might be useful to talk openly about what they were each experiencing. Pricing came up, as it tends to, and without making a formal plan to share numbers, they did.

Nina’s rate was $280 per session. The other three practitioners were charging $400, $450, and $500 per session. All of them were in the same city. All of them were at roughly comparable experience levels. Two of them worked in the same modality Nina did.

Nina did the math quickly in the room. At her current rate and client volume, she was earning about $68,000 per year. At the median of the other three practitioners’ rates, for the same volume, she would be earning roughly $112,000.

The Immediate Reaction

The first thing Nina felt was embarrassment. Not at having charged $280 — that was the number she had, she couldn’t undo it — but at having not known. At having operated for years with a rate she hadn’t examined, in a context where comparable practitioners were charging substantially more.

What nobody explains about peer pricing gaps is that they don’t feel like pricing gaps from the inside. They feel like normal. The practitioner whose rate is low relative to peers doesn’t experience the rate as low — they experience it as appropriate, because it’s the rate that has been calibrated over time by the clients they’ve worked with and the conversations they’ve had. The gap is only visible when the comparison happens.

The second thing Nina felt was skepticism. Maybe those practitioners were overpriced. Maybe their clients were different. Maybe the work they did was more specialized, or their outcomes more specific, or their positioning more distinct. She spent a few internal minutes building the case that the gap didn’t mean what it appeared to mean.

Her colleague — the one who had suggested the conversation — gently noted that two of them worked in essentially the same field, with the same modality, with similar client profiles. The case for the gap being explainable by quality difference required a lot of evidence Nina didn’t have.

What the Gap Actually Represented

Nina left the conversation thinking about what the number represented. Not what it said about the other practitioners, but what it said about how she had been relating to her work.

The self-worth beliefs the discovery surfaces in a moment like that are not usually articulated beliefs. They’re more like ambient orientations — a set of unexamined assumptions about what’s appropriate, what she was entitled to charge, what the market would bear. When the gap appeared, those orientations became suddenly visible as assumptions rather than facts.

She traced the $280 back. It had started at $200 five years ago and increased incrementally as she gathered the courage to raise it. Each raise had been accompanied by anxiety — will clients leave? will the conversation be difficult? — and each raise had been slightly smaller than what she had actually considered. The $280 was the accumulation of five years of incremental, anxiety-mediated increases.

None of the other three practitioners described their pricing history that way. One had set her initial rate by doing a market survey and positioning herself at the top of it, believing that her training warranted it. Another had raised his rate twice, both times significantly, based on demand signals. Their rates were not the result of incrementalism under anxiety — they were the result of different decisions made from different starting assumptions.

What the gap between your rate and the market means is not simply that the practitioner has been leaving money on the table, though that’s true. It’s that the process that produced the rate has been running on a particular set of inputs, and those inputs are now visible.

What She Did and What She Learned

Nina didn’t raise her rate the following week. She sat with the discovery for a month — not out of paralysis, but because she wanted to do something different from what she had always done when facing a pricing question. She wanted to actually think about it rather than respond from the familiar anxiety.

The path from discovery to adjustment is not a formula. For Nina, it involved two things. First, she did honest work on her outcomes — gathered the evidence of what clients experienced, how they described the work, what changed for them. This wasn’t new information, but she had never organized it as a value case before. Second, she worked on building a reason why after the discovery — a specific, honest articulation of what the work produced that she could stand in when stating a higher rate.

She raised her rate to $380, not to $450. She told herself she’d see how the rate held, and that she could raise it further after she had more evidence of how the new number landed in conversations.

The adjustments she feared — clients leaving, conversations becoming difficult — were smaller than anticipated. Some clients asked about the change; she explained it honestly, in terms of the work’s evolution. Most stayed. A few new clients came specifically because the positioning felt more aligned with what they were looking for.

The Thing She Still Thinks About

What Nina still thinks about, years later, is the five years between $200 and $280. The annual income difference between operating at $280 and operating at $380 — for the same volume of work, with the same clients — was about $24,000. Over five years, that gap represents $120,000.

That number is not the point of the story. The point is what those five years of incrementalism under anxiety represented: a pricing process that was being run primarily by discomfort management rather than by honest assessment. The discovery in the peer conversation was just a mirror. What it reflected had been there all along.

Having a context in which pricing can be discussed honestly — with peers who are navigating the same questions — is part of what makes those discoveries possible before five years pass. The Abundance GPS Skool community is that context for many practitioners. Join us here.