The practitioner in this story is a composite illustration — a character drawn from common patterns experienced by practitioners who raise rates. She is not a real individual.

The Practitioner Who Discovered the Announcement Was the Easy Part

Jennifer had been preparing for her rate increase for six weeks before she sent the announcement. She had done what she understood to be the right preparation: she had decided on a new rate ($210, up from $165), she had reviewed her client outcomes from the past year, she had written and revised the email until it was clear and warm and did not over-explain. She had been scared about the announcement for weeks. When she finally sent it on a Thursday morning, she felt something like relief.

She did not expect what came next.

The responses started arriving within hours. Most were straightforward — clients acknowledging the change, confirming their next sessions, asking a clarifying question or two about the transition date. Five of her eleven clients responded in the first 24 hours, and all five were fine.

By Friday, she had heard from eight. Three had not responded.

By the following Tuesday — five days after the announcement — she had heard from nine. Two had not responded. She sent a gentle follow-up to the two who had not replied. One responded the same day, saying she had been traveling and would confirm her next session. One did not respond to the follow-up.

That silent client was the first test. Jennifer found herself refreshing her email at intervals she was not proud of. She wrote and deleted two follow-up messages to the silent client — messages that, in her drafts, had begun offering to discuss the rate or to make some kind of accommodation. She deleted them both before sending.

What the announcement does and does not accomplish: the announcement is the declaration. It states the rate, the date, the transition. It does not resolve the practitioner’s inner relationship to the rate. Jennifer had spent six weeks preparing for the announcement and almost none preparing for what came after it.

By the end of the first week, Jennifer had realized that the preparation she had done was preparation for the announcement — not preparation for the holding period. She had focused her readiness on the act of sending the email, not on the sustained capacity required to hold the rate through the responses, the silences, the conversations that would follow over the next weeks.

What the holding period actually is: the holding period is the phase after the announcement during which the rate must be maintained through client responses. It is not a single moment. It is a series of moments, spread over days and weeks, each of which requires the practitioner to hold a position they took in a single announcement.

The silent client eventually responded — ten days after the announcement, after Jennifer had resisted sending three additional follow-ups. The client said she had been thinking about the change and had decided she needed to step back from coaching for now. She thanked Jennifer warmly. She did not cite cost directly.

Jennifer did not know whether cost was the reason. She also noticed that she had spent ten days making up stories about what the silence meant — stories that had included the possibility that the entire rate increase was a mistake, that she should have stayed at $165, that this client was going to tell others about the rate change in a way that would damage the practice.

None of these things happened. The client stepped back. The practice continued.

The more difficult test came two weeks after the announcement. A client she had worked with for eighteen months — one of her most engaged, whose outcomes had been among the clearest Jennifer had witnessed — called rather than emailing. She wanted to talk about the rate change.

The conversation was warm. The client genuinely valued the work and said so directly. She also said that $210 was going to be a significant stretch for her current budget, and she wanted to understand whether there was any flexibility.

The last mile that was harder than expected: Jennifer had thought about this conversation in the abstract while preparing the announcement. She had decided, in the abstract, that she would hold the rate. In practice, sitting on a phone call with a client she valued and cared about, the decision was harder than it had been in the abstract.

She felt the pull of the concession before she had finished processing the client’s words. She wanted to say yes — not because she thought it was the right business decision, but because saying yes would end the discomfort of the moment. She recognized this wanting as the moment the preparation was designed for.

She said: “I understand, and I appreciate you calling to talk about this. I’ve thought carefully about this rate, and it’s the rate I’m working at. I don’t have flexibility on the number. I recognize that creates a real decision for you, and I want to give you whatever time you need to make it.”

There was a pause. The client said she appreciated Jennifer’s directness. She asked if she could have a week to think about it. Jennifer said yes.

The client called back six days later and confirmed she was continuing at $210. In the conversation, she said something Jennifer filed and kept: “I respect that you held it. I was testing, a little. I’m glad you didn’t bend.”

Jennifer had not known the client was testing. She had responded to the conversation as though it were a genuine question about cost. In retrospect, she suspected the client was doing something more complex — assessing whether Jennifer believed in what she was charging, whether the rate was real or provisional.

What distinguished her experience from a failure: the rate increase worked because Jennifer had held the rate in the moment that mattered — the phone call she had been least prepared for. She had held it not because she was certain or fearless, but because she had recognized the pull of the concession as the signal that something important was happening and had responded to that signal with restraint rather than relief.

The sabotage patterns she had to avoid: the patterns she had almost fallen into were the ones she had not anticipated: the pre-emptive follow-up email she had drafted and deleted, the in-the-moment softening she had felt pulled toward in the phone call. The announcement had not required her to avoid these patterns. The holding period had.

By the end of the sixth week after the announcement, nine of her eleven clients had continued at $210. One had stepped back. One was still in a liminal place — semi-continuing, scheduling sessions inconsistently, never quite resolving either way. Jennifer made a note to herself to address that relationship directly rather than letting it drift.

The rate had settled. She stated it in discovery calls without the qualifications she had been inserting in the first weeks — the pauses before the number, the explanatory sentences that followed it. By week six, she said $210 the way she said $165 in year four: as a fact, not a proposal.

She understood something she had not understood before she began: the announcement was the easy part. Six weeks of preparation, a single email, a moment of relief when it was sent. The holding period — six weeks of sustained commitment to the rate across eleven different client relationships, each with its own dynamic and its own moment of test — was the actual work.

The Abundance GPS Skool community helps practitioners prepare not just for the announcement but for the holding period that follows it. Join us here.