When the Practitioner Realized the Rate They’d Been Charging Was a Story, Not a Price

This is a composite practitioner story based on common patterns in pricing development. Details are illustrative.

Deron had charged $200 per session for three years. It was the rate he had set when he started his practice, and it was the rate he had carried forward without much examination. He raised it once, to $220, and then stopped — not because $220 was obviously correct, but because some combination of client response and internal discomfort had made it feel like enough.

He thought of the rate as his rate — as if it had emerged from a genuine assessment of the work. When he looked more carefully, he found that wasn’t quite accurate.

Where the Rate Had Actually Come From

The $200 came from a conversation he’d had with a mentor early in his training. The mentor had mentioned that practitioners in his field typically charged between $150 and $250 per session, and that starting in the middle of that range was a reasonable approach. Deron had started at $175, moved to $200 after six months, and then anchored there.

He hadn’t thought much about this origin. The rate felt like his own because he had lived with it for three years. But when he traced it back, what he found was that the rate was based on a range his mentor had cited — without knowing the source of that range, when it had been established, what kinds of practitioners were being described, or what their outcomes looked like.

What nobody explains about inherited pricing beliefs is that they don’t feel inherited. They feel like conclusions. The practitioner who has held a rate for three years and adapted their expectations to fit it experiences the rate as appropriate, because the sense of appropriateness has been calibrated to the number rather than to the work.

The Conversation That Surfaced It

The surfacing happened during a conversation with a colleague who had recently raised her rates significantly. Not to criticize Deron’s rate — she wasn’t aware of it — but to describe the process she had gone through. She had sat with the question: is this rate something I chose, or something that happened to me?

Deron took that question home and sat with it.

The self-worth beliefs behind pricing are rarely at the surface. They don’t announce themselves as beliefs — they announce themselves as facts. “I can’t charge more than X because…” and the reason that follows feels like a reason rather than a belief. Deron had a set of these. He could charge $200 because that was what the market expected. He would lose clients if he charged more. He hadn’t been in practice long enough. None of these were things he had examined; they were things that arrived ready-formed whenever he thought about raising his rate.

What the colleague’s question did was create a small gap between the feeling and the conclusion. If the rate was something that had happened to him rather than something he had chosen, then the conclusions it carried might also be inherited rather than examined.

What the Examination Found

Deron spent a few weeks doing something he had not done before: looking at his client outcomes with something like an auditor’s eye. Not through the lens of impostor syndrome and not through the lens of self-promotion — just: what actually happens for clients who do this work with me?

What he found was specific enough to be useful. Clients who worked with him over a six-month engagement typically experienced a defined set of shifts — not every client, but most clients, and the exceptions had identifiable reasons. He had results he could point to. He had client language describing those results. He had referrals that came specifically because of particular outcomes.

He then did the uncomfortable calculation: what was that outcome worth to the clients who experienced it? Not in the abstract — he knew that transformation was “priceless” — but in rough, honest terms. A business that generated $40,000 more per year because the practitioner’s work had cleared the blocks to sustainable growth. A relationship that didn’t end, the cost of which in legal and emotional terms would have been substantial. A health pattern that reversed, with downstream effects on longevity and quality of life.

His $200 session rate — $1,200 for a six-session engagement — didn’t quite seem to track those numbers. Not because he should charge whatever the outcome was worth in dollar terms, but because the gap was wide enough that his rate was clearly not based on an honest assessment of the work’s value.

What pricing from honest assessment produces is a different kind of certainty in the pricing conversation. Deron had not had that certainty. He had had a number and a set of inherited beliefs that kept him from examining it.

What Shifted and What Didn’t

Deron didn’t immediately double his rate. Moving from story to honest assessment wasn’t an event — it was a process. What shifted first was the quality of his attention to the question. The rate was no longer something he had settled and moved past. It was something he was actively working with.

Over the following months, he raised his rate in increments — not to the hypothetical number that the outcome assessment might have supported, but to successive points that felt honest rather than arbitrary. He developed a reason why not built on inherited story: a clearer, more specific articulation of what the work produced and for whom, which gave him something to stand in when the rate was questioned.

What he found, at each new rate, was that the catastrophe he had predicted didn’t arrive. Some clients didn’t follow him. Most did. The clients who didn’t tended to be those for whom the original rate had never quite been creating the right kind of engagement. The clients who followed were clients he wanted to work with at a rate that felt honest.

He also found something harder to name: a different quality of presence in sessions. The work felt different when the economics felt fair. Not dramatically different — not a sudden flood of energy or renewed passion. Just a reduction in the ambient taxation of imbalance. The work was still the same work. The practitioner was somewhat more free inside it.

The story Deron had been carrying — the inherited conclusion about what his rate should be — wasn’t a bad story or a malicious one. It was just borrowed. And borrowed stories, as containers for something as important as the practitioner’s relationship to their work, tend to fit imprecisely. The Abundance GPS Skool community supports the work of examining those stories and replacing them with honest assessment. Join us here.