The Month Everything Went Well and What She Did Next (Part 2)

Part 1 followed a practitioner through November — her best practice month ever — and the December that followed, in which she unconsciously managed her income back toward her previous average through a series of individually reasonable-seeming decisions: a preemptive discount, a scope extension, a new lower-priced offering. This piece follows what happened when she approached the next strong month differently.

Recognizing the Pattern in Advance

She and her peer had a conversation before her next strong month. The conversation was theoretical — she didn’t know when a strong month would come — but she wanted to have a plan for when it did.

“What did you notice when December started?” her peer asked.

“In retrospect: I was uncomfortable. Something about how much November had produced felt like too much. Not consciously — I wasn’t sitting there thinking I earned too much. But something in me was restless.”

“What did the restlessness produce?”

“Actions. Small ones that each felt justified. The discount, the scope extension, the new pricing tier.”

Her peer asked: “If you’d named the restlessness at the time — said to yourself ‘this is the ceiling reasserting’ — do you think you would have made the same decisions?”

She thought about it. “Maybe not the discount. That one I can see most clearly now as the pattern. The scope extension is harder — it felt genuinely like the client needed it.”

“What about the new lower-priced offering?”

“That one was the ceiling. I can see it clearly. The timing was too precise.”

They agreed on a protocol for the next strong month. Not a rigid intervention — just two steps. First: any time she felt an impulse to discount, extend scope, or add a new pricing tier, she would pause and write down the impulse before acting. Second: she would send her peer a brief message describing the impulse so the peer could witness it.

When the Strong Month Came

The strong month arrived four months later, unexpectedly. A referral source sent three clients in the same month. A speaking engagement led to a direct enrollment. Two long-term clients renewed in the same period.

She noticed the familiar restlessness about three weeks in.

She didn’t act on it immediately. She wrote in her journal: “Noticing restlessness. Practice has been unusually strong this month. Something wants to do something about that.”

She sent her peer a message: “Restlessness is here. Watching for ceiling management.”

Her peer responded: “What’s the impulse today?”

She wrote back: “There’s a new prospect who I keep wanting to offer a discount to. She hasn’t asked. I haven’t had the call yet. I keep imagining the call going badly.”

Her peer: “Has she said anything to indicate budget concerns?”

She: “No. She reached out after the talk. She seems like she has resources.”

Her peer: “Have the call at the full rate. Write down what you imagined before the call and what happened after.”

She had the call. The prospect enrolled at the full rate without mentioning pricing. When she wrote down what she’d imagined — “she’ll say it’s too much and I’ll be in an uncomfortable negotiation and she’ll leave thinking I’m mercenary” — and what happened — “she enrolled and asked how to access the intake form” — the contrast was stark in a way that caught her off guard.

“I almost discounted her before the call. Based on nothing she’d said.”

Her peer: “That’s the ceiling trying to reassert. It found the available mechanism: preemptive discounting.”

Sitting With the Discomfort

The restlessness didn’t go away when she resisted the discount impulse. It shifted.

She found herself feeling, for several days, a background unease that she couldn’t fully name. Not anxiety, exactly. More like a state of alert — as if something needed to be managed and she wasn’t managing it.

She described it to her peer: “It’s like there’s a problem that needs solving and I can’t figure out what the problem is.”

Her peer said: “The problem is that your income is above the ceiling and the ceiling wants to come back down. The discomfort is what it feels like to not manage it down.”

“Is it just going to stay like this?”

“The research I’ve read suggests it decreases over time as the new income level becomes more normal. The nervous system updates when it accumulates enough evidence that the higher level is sustainable.”

“How long?”

“Depends on the person. Could be another strong month or two. Could be longer.”

She sat with this. It wasn’t comfortable. But she held the rate, didn’t introduce new lower-priced offerings, and kept her scope within her commitments.

The Following Month

The month after the strong month was quieter — two new enrollments rather than five. Her income was still above her previous average, though below the peak.

She checked her response to it. No restlessness. No impulse to do something to compensate.

She sent her peer a message: “Quieter month. I notice I’m not trying to recover to the strong month peak. But also not trying to pull it back. Just… what it is.”

Her peer: “That sounds like the ceiling being at a different place.”

She thought about that. The ceiling — the band her income had stayed within for years — appeared to have shifted. Not because the strong month had been exceptional, but because she’d held the rate through the strong month and hadn’t managed it back down. She’d allowed the nervous system to accumulate evidence that the higher level was survivable.

What This Story Adds

Part 1 described the ceiling working from both directions — preventing income from rising and pulling it back down when it exceeds the threshold. This part demonstrates what it looks and feels like to resist the pull.

It’s not dramatic. She didn’t have a confrontation with the pattern or a breakthrough moment of liberation. She noticed the impulse to discount a prospect who hadn’t asked. She wrote it down. She sent a message to her peer. She had the call at the full rate. She sat with the restlessness that followed. She didn’t introduce a new lower-priced tier.

That was the entire intervention. It was quiet and uncomfortable and it worked.

The ceiling shifted because she did the opposite of what the ceiling requires to maintain itself. The ceiling maintains itself through the practitioner’s management behaviors — discounts, scope extensions, new lower pricing. When those behaviors don’t arrive, the ceiling has no mechanism to hold. The nervous system accumulates evidence that the higher level is sustainable, and the template updates accordingly.

This is slow work. It doesn’t happen in a month. It doesn’t happen through understanding the mechanism alone, or through affirmations about deserving the income. It happens through the practitioner sitting in the discomfort of not managing the income down, consistently enough, for long enough, that the nervous system accumulates what it needs to update the prediction.

The Abundance GPS Skool community exists to support this kind of sustained, uncomfortable, necessary work — in a peer environment where others are doing the same thing. Come take a look.