When someone asks me on a podcast what the most common pricing mistake is among healers and coaches with adverse childhood experiences in their history, I usually pause for a beat before I answer — because the question itself tells me the person asking has almost certainly already lived inside the mistake, more than once, and is hoping I’ll name something they can’t quite name for themselves yet. You’ve read the pricing books. You’ve watched the videos about value-based offers. You’ve probably raised your rates at least twice in the last few years, each time bracing for a backlash that didn’t fully come — and yet something about the way money moves in your business still feels wrong in a way no spreadsheet has been able to fix. So before I tell you the mistake, I want to say the thing I think people forget to say first: it isn’t a character flaw, and you’re not behind. You’ve been given one piece of the pricing puzzle at a time, and nobody ever showed you how those pieces fit together.
The mistake, said plainly, is this: pricing from the part of you that was trying to stay safe as a child, rather than from the part of you that is actually delivering the work today.
That sounds abstract, so let me make it concrete with a story I tell often on podcasts, because it shows the shape of it better than any framework can.
The story I keep telling
A few years ago I was working with a healer — let’s call her Priya [illustrative example] — who had been in practice for eleven years. She had a waitlist. Her clients adored her. Her outcomes were, by any honest measure, extraordinary. And she was charging £85 a session.
When we sat down together, the first thing she said wasn’t “I want to charge more.” It was, “I keep trying to raise my prices and something stops me.” She had read the books. She had done the worthiness journalling. She had repeated the affirmations. She had even hired a business coach who told her, with perfect confidence, that her real rate was £350 and she should just charge it on Monday.
She charged it on Monday. By Friday she had quietly emailed everyone in her pipeline and offered them a “transition rate” of £120. She came to our call ashamed.
Here is what I told her, and what I want to tell you if any of this is landing: the £85 wasn’t a pricing decision. It was a nervous system decision dressed up as a pricing decision. The number was the shape her childhood had taught her to make her body into so that the people around her would stay calm, stay close, and not punish her for being too much. Eighty-five pounds was small enough that no one could accuse her of being greedy. Small enough that nobody would leave. Small enough that she could keep being the helpful child who didn’t ask for too much room.
And the £350 her coach told her to charge? That wasn’t a pricing decision either. That was a strategic instruction handed to a body that hadn’t been prepared to receive it. Of course she snapped back. The only surprise would have been if she hadn’t.
Why this is the most common mistake
I see versions of this in almost every conscious entrepreneur I work with. The specific number changes. The mechanism doesn’t. People who grew up adapting to adult emotional weather learn very early to price themselves — their needs, their visibility, their requests, their hours — at whatever level kept the household survivable. That setting doesn’t switch off when you open a business. It just gets a more sophisticated wardrobe.
So the mistake isn’t “charging too little.” Charging too little is the symptom. The mistake is treating pricing as a strategic question on the surface of the business when it’s actually living three layers down, in the body, in identity, and in the very old contract you signed with the people who raised you. It’s trying to solve a three-dimensional problem with one-dimensional tools.
And the second, quieter version of the mistake — the one people almost never name — is the opposite: pricing aggressively high as a way of overriding the same wound. The number gets bigger, the marketing gets louder, the body still isn’t there. Both directions are the same root. Both are a relationship with money that’s being driven from underneath, not from the seat of the practitioner who is actually doing the work.
What actually moves the needle
What worked with Priya wasn’t a new pricing model. It was, in this order:
- Naming, gently, that the £85 had a job, and that the job had once been important. You don’t get to release a brake by yelling at it.
- Building enough nervous-system capacity, week by week, that her body could stay present for the conversation in which she said a larger number out loud. We rehearsed the sentence. We watched what her chest did.
- Raising the rate to a number she could actually feel — not the number her coach thought she deserved, and not the number she had been clinging to. Somewhere in between, where she could deliver the work without the price being a confession.
- Then, only then, raising it again six months later, with the body now caught up to the new floor.
This is what people mean, or should mean, when they talk about reconciling spirituality and charging well. It isn’t about pushing past resistance. It isn’t about manifesting a bigger number from a smaller self. It’s about closing the gap between what you deliver and what you ask for, in a way your body can actually hold.
A gentler way to start
If anything here has landed, you might not need a new pricing strategy this week. You might just need to sit with the question: what was my current rate originally protecting me from? Not as an attack. As a kindness. The answer is usually older and more tender than people expect, and naming it is often the first thing that lets the number move.
If you’d like company while you do that — people who understand that pricing is rarely a pricing problem, and who are working on the same release in their own businesses — that’s exactly the conversation we’re having inside the miraclesfor.me Skool community. There’s no urgency to it. Come and sit at the back if you want. The door is open whenever you’re ready.
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