Written by: Eva Gregory, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Before you can successfully position your business so that the right people eagerly flock to high-priced packages and pay without a blink, you need to take out some mindset ‘insurance’ to ensure you own the confidence to allow this to happen.
If you are sitting there, quivering internally at the thought of charging, say, $3,000 for a package instead of the $97 package you’ve displayed on your “Plans and Products” page for ages, charging higher prices isn’t going to work yet.
You have to be comfortable enough in your own skin to really believe you deserve higher fees before you post these on any website.
If you’re not comfortable with the idea of raising your prices, do yourself a favor. Identify the cause of this uncertainty and deal with it—as promptly, efficiently, and directly as your average high-end client would no doubt do.
Here are three proven ways to genuinely elevate your ‘deserve level’:
1. Find out what your time is worth.
If you want to know what your own time is worth, first find out what others in your field are charging. This is not to say that you have to charge the same fees, but you will see an average ballpark range.
This concrete, empiric benchmark will help establish a realistic range in your consciousness and reassure you that you are not just pulling a higher price point out of thin air when you raise your rates. You will be able to identify where you fit in within the range you have determined exists.
Here are two things you can do immediately to help identify your financial worth and place in your market:
Google Keywords
Use keywords that reflect the type of work you’re researching. Don’t overthink this: You can type in questions as simple as: “How to become a 6-figure business coach” or “How to become a 7-figure entrepreneur?”
Google Others In Your Industry The other option is to search for others in your industry who work with high-end clients and command higher fees to see how they are positioned in the marketplace.
Knowing what your peers are charging and how they are positioned will give you a more accurate picture of what you can charge and help adjust your mindset.
2. Deal with the secret saboteurs.
Secret saboteurs might include folks like your parents or significant other. (Yes, the people who should be the most supportive may very well be saboteurs!)
What is less obvious is the seemingly professional, together woman who remains trapped and haunted by negative experiences. She doesn’t even realize her own self-talk is deprecatory.
She is the one who lowers her prices, makes exceptions, and goes overtime in coaching for free. This may be because she empathizes too much with her clients.
Often it’s because she is coming from a background of being a rescuer, being helpful, and—the most damaging—believing her only value lies in how useful she is to others. (While helping is what we want to do, we’re talking about skewed thinking here. The reciprocity and balance in payment and respect of time are just not there.)
People’s demons can vary from mild to crippling - from negative self-talk, you can easily identify and choose to re-frame into realistic, positive statements to deep psychological issues that have caused damage, such as severe depression.
The choice is yours. You can seek professional help from a coach, counselor, or therapist if you think you need to deal with past history or patterns before you can move them out the way. Or, to move forward, you could make a few firm tweaks to your habits and mindset and focus on your ideal future.
You may find that simply evaluating what your time is worth and getting a better feel for the income range in your field is all you need to squash feelings of guilt or hesitation.
It’s important to understand that there is no right or wrong decision - just the decision that is right for you at this time. And then make a new commitment to stick to your own rules!
3. Increase small successes.
Once you’ve determined what your time is worth, increase your successes—especially the small ones.
Nothing will set you up for success and positively alter your internal ‘deserve level’ more effectively than actually experiencing success in areas that have traditionally and habitually been problem areas for you.
Even one success, one incidence of public recognition, or a “lucky break” can leave you exponentially more likely to continue on this roll, with the successes increasing more easily each time.
The exciting part about this is that usually, that first initial success has the most life-changing effect.
For example, if you donated that first small sum of money to a lonely Kickstarter campaign, other donations from different sources quickly follow. Or if you give public recognition in terms of a favorable review to an author without reviews, other reviews quickly follow, and so forth.
The practical application of this is that if you break a negative or spirit-flattening pattern or habit even once—you’re setting off that snowball of success. It can’t be stopped.
For example, let’s say you habitually waste half the morning cruising Facebook after your morning coffee instead of writing the book you’ve decided to write.
Five minutes becomes an hour; one hour becomes three. Not because you love Facebook so much, but because you secretly feel paralyzed about actually getting that book done. If you escape like this for several days, it quickly becomes a habit.
Then as this habit reinforces itself and you find yourself opening up Facebook first thing morning after morning, your mood plummets. You feel like a fraud, or you feel voiceless. Pretty soon, you are saying things like, “Nobody is going to read it anyway” or “What could I possibly say that a million other people haven’t already said better?”
What you could do is break that cycle by sitting down at your computer, setting a goal of writing, say, “five hundred words a day” towards that book you need to finish—first thing after morning coffee. Open up your Word document instead of Facebook, and do it. Work with a laser focus on your book.
What often happens is that you find yourself immersed and ignited. Don’t be surprised if, at five hundred words, you’re moving full steam ahead and don’t want to stop. The progress that you made inspires and ignites you!
Once this happens, you are much more likely to feel that you want to tackle that book. If you didn’t feel the flame of inspiration, this would probably wear with a compulsion to revert back to your old habit.
But persevere, and you should find you have actually broken that old avoidance or procrastination habit more quickly than you ever thought possible—and gained true self-worth and (what is more important) self-respect. You may even notice that those negative, shaming self-messages have stopped as well. It’s much easier to replace them with positive feelings by creating, in this example, the small success of spending your morning on your writing.
What self-defeating habit do you need to break? What secretly makes you feel like a fraud? Feel underserving? Inhibit your ability to go out right now and attract higher-priced clients? How can you shift your response and create a positive income?
By giving yourself a mindset makeover to raise your ‘deserve level,’ you’ll feel confident charging higher fees that match your new market position.
Eva Gregory, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Award-winning transformational catalyst and business mentor Eva Gregory is the founder of the Enlightened Business Success Academy. She helps established coaches, thought leaders, and spiritual entrepreneurs worldwide scale to six figures and beyond by integrating Inner Guidance with proven business strategies that are working today in an ever-changing market. It's the combination of practical, step-by-step business training and intuitive spiritual awareness that sets her apart from others in her field. Eva was named International Coach of the Year, was named one of Women E-Commerce Association's International Top 100 Who's Who Among Women, and received the California Excellence Award from the Small Business Institute for Excellence in Commerce. She was the recipient of The Law of Attraction Leaders Award for Best Law of Attraction Coach 2 years in a row. She is the author of "The Feel Good Guide to Prosperity" and "Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction," which she co-authored with Jack Canfield and Jeanna Gabellini.
