Using the 6-Layer Model to Address Setting Your Prices

If you’ve done mindset work around pricing and the block keeps coming back, that’s information.

It tells you that the work you’ve done addressed one layer of the problem while leaving others untouched. Not a failure. A diagnostic.

The 6-Layer Block Model maps the different levels at which a block can live. Applied to pricing, it explains why affirmations don’t fix the problem, why journal prompts help temporarily and then the resistance returns, and what it means when someone says “I’ve tried everything and still can’t hold my prices.”

You haven’t tried everything. You’ve tried the top layer. Let’s look at what’s below it.

A Quick Map of the Six Layers

The six layers move from surface to depth:

1. Essence — the deepest level: soul-level alignment with who you are and what you’re here to do
2. Ego — the personal identity layer: who you believe yourself to be
3. Narrative — the story layer: the meaning you’ve made of your experiences
4. Somatic — the body layer: what’s held in the nervous system and tissues
5. Behavioral — the action layer: the patterns that play out automatically
6. Relational — the social layer: the dynamics with specific people and communities

Most mindset work addresses layer three (narrative) and occasionally layer five (behavioral). This is why it helps temporarily but doesn’t hold. The deeper layers haven’t been touched.

Layer 1: Essence — Is Pricing Aligned With Your Purpose?

At the deepest level, pricing can feel wrong when there’s a genuine misalignment between the price and the soul-level sense of why you do the work.

This shows up as a specific kind of resistance: “I feel like I should be doing this for free.” Not a practical belief — a deep pull. A sense that money somehow diminishes the sacred nature of what you offer.

If this is the layer at issue, the outer and inner pricing framework has a section on the spirituality-money tension that’s worth reading fully. The work here isn’t about convincing yourself that money is fine. It’s about examining whether your soul-level sense of the work is actually in conflict with charging, or whether you’ve inherited a belief system that says it is.

Most practitioners who work at this layer discover that the conflict isn’t real — it’s inherited. The work is grief: grieving the belief system that says money and sacred purpose are incompatible.

Layer 2: Ego — Who Do You Believe You Are?

The ego layer is the identity layer. The identity ceiling lives here. Your income and pricing tend to match the version of yourself you currently believe yourself to be — not the version you’re becoming.

If your ego-level identity still holds the imprint of someone who grew up with financial scarcity, someone who was taught that wanting more was greedy, someone whose cultural background equated modest charging with virtue — that identity is running your pricing, regardless of what your strategy says.

Work at this layer involves deliberately constructing the identity of the practitioner who holds the higher price. Not performing it — actually inhabiting it. The CLARITI framework addresses this directly through its identity construction step.

Layer 3: Narrative — What Story Are You Telling?

The narrative layer holds the meaning you’ve made of past experiences. For pricing, common narratives include:

“I raised my prices once and lost clients, so higher prices cost me clients.” (One data point made into a general rule.)

“I grew up in a family where money was always tight, so asking for a lot feels like betrayal.” (A loyalty story: charging too much would separate me from my origins.)

“My first mentor charged almost nothing, so that’s what ethical practitioners do.” (A modeled belief presented as fact.)

These narratives feel like reality. They’re not — they’re interpretations that have been running unchecked. What nobody explains about pricing includes this layer: the stories that function as unexamined rules.

Work at this layer involves examining the narrative with curiosity rather than argument. When was this story formed? What data is it based on? What data is it omitting? What would a different, equally evidence-based story look like?

Layer 4: Somatic — What Does Your Body Hold?

This layer is where pricing work often stalls for good, because it operates below language and below thought.

If you grew up in an environment where money conversations were associated with conflict, danger, scarcity, or shame — your body learned to produce a stress response in the vicinity of those conversations. That response doesn’t care about your mindset work. It fires automatically, before strategy can intervene.

The somatic layer shows up as: tightening in the chest when naming a price, an impulse to look away, a voice that becomes quieter or faster, a physical pull toward discounting.

Work at this layer requires somatic tools, not cognitive ones. Regulation practices before pricing conversations. Gradual exposure. Body-based tracking of where the response lives and what allows it to settle.

The deserving wound operates at this layer for many practitioners — a felt sense of “I shouldn’t be asking for this” that lives in the body rather than in conscious belief.

Layer 5: Behavioral — What Pattern Plays Out Automatically?

The behavioral layer is where you can see the block most clearly, but it’s not where the block originates.

Automatic behaviors around pricing include: adding unpaid sessions without negotiation, offering discounts before a prospect asks, extending the scope of a package without adjusting the price, accepting the first offer a client makes when it’s lower than your stated rate.

These behaviors are symptoms, not causes. They’re the downstream expression of what’s happening in layers two through four.

Work at this layer is pattern interruption paired with inner work. Identify the specific behavioral pattern. Design a deliberate alternative. Practice the alternative in low-stakes situations until it becomes as automatic as the old pattern.

Without work at the deeper layers, behavioral change tends to be effortful and eventually reverts. With inner work supporting it, the new behavior begins to feel natural because the internal landscape has shifted.

Layer 6: Relational — Who’s In the Room When You Price?

The relational layer is often overlooked in pricing work. But the specific people around you significantly shape what feels possible.

If your primary peer group is practitioners who all charge similarly to your current rate, you have a relational ceiling. What feels “normal” is calibrated to your environment.

If important people in your life (partner, family, peers) have expressed skepticism about your pricing, you may be carrying their response into discovery calls — pricing against their imagined reaction rather than to the actual client in front of you.

Work at this layer involves assessing the relational environment honestly. Who in your world models the pricing that feels aspirational? Who is calibrated to a different level? Seeking community with practitioners operating at the level you’re moving toward is not superficial — it’s a genuine tool for normalizing what currently feels out of reach.

Finding Your Actual Layer

Read through the six layers again and notice which one produces the most internal response — a sense of recognition, a slight defensiveness, a “that’s the one.”

That’s where your work lives.

Not all six layers need equal attention. Pricing work that targets the actual layer of origin tends to produce lasting shift rather than temporary relief.

The Abundance GPS Skool community is a space where the layered work of building a conscious business — including pricing — gets done with full honesty about what’s actually in the way. Join us here.