What Is Setting Your Prices? A Practical Framework

You’ve invested in your craft. You’ve done the training, the certifications, possibly years of personal development work that most of your clients haven’t done. You understand your value, at least on paper.

And yet the question of what to actually charge — and how to say it without flinching — keeps coming up as something unresolved. Something you circle back to without ever fully landing on solid ground.

If you’ve been there, you’re not alone. And it’s not that the frameworks don’t exist. There are plenty of them. The issue is that most pricing frameworks only give you half the picture.

This is a complete one.

What Setting Prices Actually Involves

Pricing, for a conscious entrepreneur, involves two distinct domains. Most advice addresses one. Almost none addresses both together.

The outer domain is the business strategy layer. This includes understanding your market, researching what comparable practitioners charge, calculating your minimum sustainable rate, and deciding which pricing model fits your service structure (hourly, package, container, retainer, membership). This is the domain most pricing courses cover thoroughly.

The inner domain is the identity and nervous system layer. This includes your beliefs about what you’re allowed to receive, your body’s conditioned response when a high number is spoken aloud, the internalized stories from family or culture about money and worth, and the invisible ceiling that was set long before you ever launched your business.

Outer-domain work without inner-domain work produces a practitioner who knows exactly what to charge and still quotes a lower number in the room. Inner-domain work without outer-domain clarity produces a practitioner who has done tremendous healing work and still has no structure to translate that into a functional price.

What nobody explains about pricing is that these two domains require different tools, and both are necessary.

The Outer Framework: Four Approaches

Cost-plus pricing starts with your expenses and adds a margin. It’s a floor, not a ceiling — it tells you the minimum you must charge, not the optimal price. Useful as a starting reference but rarely sufficient on its own for transformational work.

Market-rate pricing anchors to what others in your niche charge. It’s a useful calibration tool, not a target — your work may be worth significantly more or less than the market average, depending on the specificity of your outcomes, your experience, and your client profile.

Value-based vs cost-plus pricing is the approach most suited to coaching and healing work. It anchors the price to the outcome the client receives, not the hours you spend. If a client invests $5,000 with you and generates an additional $30,000 in income, or avoids a painful decision that would have cost them their marriage, or finally breaks a ten-year income ceiling — the price is a fraction of the value received. This is the math that makes high prices logical, not exploitative.

Energy-based pricing is a less commonly discussed approach that works well in combination with value-based. It asks: at this price, do I show up fully? Do I feel I’m in fair exchange with this person? This is not arbitrary — practitioners who feel underpaid often unconsciously withhold effort, creativity, or presence. Pricing at a rate that feels like genuine exchange tends to produce better outcomes for both parties.

The Inner Framework: Three Layers

Once you have an outer price — the number that makes business sense — you need to do an honest audit of what the inner framework is doing with that number. The 6-Layer Block Model identifies multiple levels where resistance can live. For pricing specifically, three layers tend to matter most:

Beliefs about worth. Do you genuinely believe, at a cellular level, that the transformation you facilitate is worth the price you’ve set? This is distinct from knowing intellectually. Many practitioners know their work is valuable and still do not believe it deeply enough to hold the price under pressure.

Identity alignment. Does the price you’ve set match who you currently believe yourself to be? The identity ceiling concept matters here: if your internal identity still carries the imprint of a struggling practitioner, or someone who doesn’t charge much, your pricing will tend to drift back toward that identity — even if you’ve intellectually committed to a new number.

Somatic capacity. Can your nervous system hold the price without generating a panic response? For many practitioners who grew up in environments where money was scarce, unpredictable, or charged with shame, the act of asking for a significant amount of money triggers a stress response. That response, not logic, often determines what gets said in the room.

Putting the Framework Together

A practical pricing process looks like this:

Week one: external calibration. Research what practitioners at your level, with your outcomes, charge. Identify the range. Choose a price within or slightly above that range that reflects your specific results.

Week two: inner audit. Say the number out loud daily. Notice the body response. Journal what comes up. Is the resistance in belief (“I haven’t done enough to justify this”), identity (“I’m not the kind of person who charges this”), or sensation (tightness, shrinking, the urge to discount immediately)?

Week three: targeted work. Use the appropriate tool for the appropriate layer. Belief work for belief resistance. Identity reconstruction (the CLARITI framework addresses this directly) for identity resistance. Somatic regulation for nervous system resistance.

Week four: integration. Hold the price in real conversations. Notice what shifts. Adjust what doesn’t. The goal isn’t a price that never feels challenging — it’s a price you can stand behind with genuine conviction.

The Sign That You’ve Found the Right Number

There is a feeling that accompanies a price that’s genuinely right. It’s not comfortable, exactly — there’s often a healthy edge of stretch. But it doesn’t feel like lying. It doesn’t feel like claiming something you haven’t earned.

It feels like a fair exchange. Like you’re meeting someone with full presence, offering the depth of what you’ve built, and asking for something real in return.

When the deserving wound is active, that feeling is blocked by an older story about what you’re allowed to receive. Working with the wound — not around it — is how you get there.

That work is not a detour from building your business. It is the business.

FAQ

What if I’m just starting out and have no client results yet?
New practitioners often make the mistake of pricing based on experience rather than outcome potential. Even without a portfolio, you can price based on the transformation you’re designed to facilitate. Starting at the lower end of a range that reflects your actual training and capability is appropriate — but “lower end” does not mean lowest-possible. It means the entry point to a range that takes your work seriously.

What’s the difference between a pricing model and a pricing strategy?
A model is the structure — hourly, package, retainer, membership. A strategy is the logic behind the number within that model. Both matter. Many practitioners have a clear model (packages) but no clear strategy for what goes into the price. The inner audit helps translate the strategy into a number that holds.

Is it okay to have different prices for different clients?
Structurally yes, with transparency. You can have a standard price and a sliding scale option, or different tiers for different depths of engagement. What doesn’t work is secretly discounting for some clients while charging full price for others based on your own anxiety about whether they’ll say yes. That pattern tends to create resentment over time and signals to clients that the price isn’t real.

If you want a community where pricing is discussed with honesty about both the strategy and the inner patterns — and where you’re not alone in working through the layers — the Abundance GPS Skool community is built for exactly this. Join us here.