Spilling the Coach Tea: Pricing, Insurance, and Why Therapy Isn't Always Better

Should you invest in therapy, coaching, or both? And why does this question somehow feel more stressful than picking a health insurance plan? (Which, admittedly, is a very low bar.)

In this episode, I'm answering some of the most common questions I hear about coaching and therapy. We talk about whether a degree automatically makes someone better at helping people, why insurance-covered therapy isn't always the bargain it seems, how to choose the right person to support your growth, and why fit matters more than most people realize. Along the way, I share a few stories from my own experiences, including a truly unforgettable 15-minute mental health appointment that left me wondering if I needed therapy for the therapy.

Most importantly, we're talking about the return on investment of working on yourself. Because while a bigger house, a fancy car, or a dream vacation can be lovely, you're still bringing the same brain along for the ride. The skills that help you process emotions, set boundaries, challenge old beliefs, and stay calm when life gets messy? Those are gifts you get to keep forever. If you've been wondering whether investing in your emotional well-being is worth it, this episode is for you.

CALM YOUR TITS

What's that? It's Sarah's six-month nervous system coaching program for humans who are neurodivergent, sensitive, and highly creative. Learn to rewire your brain for calm, load up your stress toolkit, and address the root causes of overwhelm — all while having fun and sprinkling in plenty of unconscious change magic. To learn more and get started, schedule your

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Climb Your Mountain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use coaching, neuroscience, and mindfulness to overcome life's challenges. I'm Sarah Maurer, a certified life and performance coach, front work facilitator, and trance geek. Each week, I show you how to change your brain fast for good and without struggle. Whether you're training to climb an actual mountain, building a business, dating, or claiming a fucking rebellion, these tools will help. Listen and learn so you can enjoy more of what you want: happiness, fun, connection, creativity, courage, and the occasional mountaintop moment. Ready? Let's do this.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hey friends, how you doing? I am really distracted as I am recording this episode. And part of it is because I am on a whole new podcasting setup. For the first time, I am actually recording this as a video podcast. I might not actually post it as a video podcast just because the learning curve is so huge. I'm just so confused right now. I'm like, where do I look? Where do I put my notes? You know how people always, you might have experienced this, hate to hear their own voice on audio. I hate to see my face on video. I just look at myself and I'm like, I am making the strangest faces. I am squinting. I am looking all over like a crazy person. That is all the stuff I'm up against as I'm recording this episode today. But I think it's gonna ultimately be a really awesome thing for me to adjust to this because I'm gonna be able to start putting some of these episodes on YouTube. So if you love to just feel connected to the podcasters that you like to follow and see their faces every week, pretty soon you're gonna be able to do that with me. So I'll keep you up to date so you can subscribe to the channel when it's up. And let's jump back into the money series. The past few weeks on the pod, we've been talking about money and specifically about how investing in anything is really, really tough right now. And if you are in the place where you're like, everything is so expensive right now, how can I possibly, even if I'm really struggling, invest in my mental health? And that's one reason I created this series to come at these decisions with intention, to really think things through, to really think like where you're gonna get the best ROI for your money. I also think just knowing where to start and being educated about the different choices out there is so important. So if you're someone that is thinking, I just really want to improve my life and I'm not sure what the best route is, I definitely encourage you to go back and listen to the first episodes in this series if you haven't. I go pretty deep into what is a coach, what is a therapist, what's the difference between coaching and therapy, what are some of the situations where you might want to start with therapy, and where might it make sense to start with coaching. And I think today is gonna be a juicy episode. I feel like I'm gonna be telling tales out of school a bit, and just really talking about some things that a lot of coaches and people in my industry are not talking about. We're gonna talk about how coaching is priced, kind of the role of insurance. Generally, coaching is not covered by insurance, so the question comes up: why should anyone do coaching? When you can potentially, if you're insured, go to a therapist and have it paid for. And we're just gonna dive into a bunch of questions like that that I think a lot of people wonder, but a lot of coaches don't talk about because there is kind of this, I think, I don't know. I get it sometimes when I hear coaches talking on Instagram, and there's a little bit of a prosperity gospel of why wouldn't you invest in yourself? Manifestation and universe and whatever you believe in is going to send you the money if you have a positive attitude. And I think that that has in general just not been a healthy message. I think that message is honestly a little cringy. So I am going to really just talk to you straight and honest. And I'm gonna talk to you from the point of view as someone who also invests in my own coaching and someone who also invests in therapy. I have done both in the past couple of years. So let's jump into it. First question: Isn't therapy always better? Because the therapists are highly trained and they're regulated and they're licensed in the state where they work. I think this is such a fair question. And as someone who has worked as a counselor and now works as a coach, I'm gonna answer for you right now. So I'm gonna start with the thought that yes, often therapy is the best place to start. In I think that the second episode of this series, two episodes ago, we talked about how, especially if you're dealing with any kind of mental health condition, if you are in a high-stakes situation, for example, you're having trouble with gambling and your financial health and the health of your relationship is on the line. I mean, there are coaches that help with these kinds of things. I personally might start with a therapist. Um, I never ever want to talk someone out of therapy when therapy would be appropriate. However, I think there are also some downsides of therapy that aren't super apparent on the surface. And I think the first one is despite all the training that they go through, there are some therapists who just aren't great clinicians. And in most cases, it's not like they're terrible. They're definitely not doing harm. However, they just do a lot of sessions with clients and see clients for a long time, and the clients maybe just don't necessarily get great results. So, a common, common example of this, and I feel like I have had this therapist, and people in my family have also had this therapist, it's the therapist that just wants to listen and validate and not to throw shade on that. I think listening is incredibly important and therapeutic in some stages of therapy, but I'm talking about the therapist who never really helps you move forward or change. I feel like a few years ago, when I was going through something really tough, I had the nicest therapist. I loved him. I looked forward to talking to him. He would listen to me all day long. Once in a while, he'd jump in there with a reframe. He made me feel really good. And I think to some degree it was helpful to me in what I was going through because I did not feel seen by a lot of other people or feel like I could talk about it with a lot of other people. But I would definitely not say that this particular therapist changed my life. At some point, I think there was probably some work that could have been done on my mindset, on my thinking, on my strategy for approaching the problem. And none of that just ever really happened. It was just a kind of a place for me to come invent. And honestly, I feel like that that is not super uncommon in therapy. Now, there are also coaches who are exactly like this. I don't want to make this just a therapy thing. However, I think it's easier to hide as a mediocre therapist than it is to hide as a mediocre coach. And that's because generally coaches are working for themselves. So if they're not getting people results, then it gets really hard to get new people. They don't get referrals, getting new clients becomes a lot of work. So the coaches that are not getting great results for their clients, they do one of two things. They either improve their clinical skills so that they are getting good results for people, or they just get tired of it and go out of business. So usually if they're not getting people results, they do not last very long. Whereas I think a so-so therapist can work for an organization that pays them, and if they're basically competent, if they're not getting in trouble, if the clients aren't complaining, if the clients are feeling heard and listened to, even if they're not getting results, probably no one's gonna say anything to that therapist. They're probably gonna stick around as long as they want to. And it's also important to remember there's such a shortage of therapists right now that it's kind of easier for low performers to fly under the radar. So, that is some honest thoughts on coaching versus therapy. Why sometimes it makes sense to not just default to therapy because therapy is more highly trained. It doesn't necessarily translate into better clinical practice or better results for you as the client. So, here's another question that comes up a lot that's kind of along those lines is why invest in coaching when my insurance covers therapy? And I'm gonna say sometimes it makes total sense to do this. If you have access to mental health care that is covered either by your insurance or by your employer through your employee assistance program, I think it makes perfect sense to start there. And especially if that is the only way that you are going to be able to afford to have someone help you with your problems, take care of your mental health, I think it's so worth doing. And I'm also gonna share some reasons why you might choose not to go that route, even if it's available to you. And I would start with the idea that just like most therapists really hate working with insurance, insurance is also a giant hassle for clients. So, insurance, usually the way it's set up, is you get a limited number of sessions, six to twelve, whatever it is, on your insurance, which is kind of set up for helping you through a crisis or helping you through an acute problem, but it's really not what you need if what you are wanting to affect in your life is long-term behavior change. So if you think about long-term behavior change, and let's use a really simple one, like you are someone who is trying to take care of your physical health more. So you're trying to eat better, drink less, work out more, establish a lot of new habits. All the research tells us that it takes at least 12 weeks to dial in a new habit. And that's kind of the best case scenario. In most cases, most people fall off the wagon, most people run into obstacles, things come up in your life. You are trying to get to the gym every day, and suddenly you're sent on an unexpected work trip and you're living in a hotel for a week, and now you have to come back and figure out how to get started all over again. So, what normally happens, even though it's possible to change behavior in 12 weeks, is that it takes longer than 12 weeks. In my world, I talked a little bit about this on the last episode. I've run six-month packages for my clients the first time that we work together, because that's really is, in my mind, kind of the minimum responsible time to help someone change their behavior. Within six months, there's time for them to make the change and time for them to practice it, and time for them to um actually like groove it into their brain pathways so that it becomes natural. But minimum six months to really get it done. That is how I think about it. So if you like it's six sessions of therapy with your insurance, that's probably not gonna be enough to really groove the change into your brain. And if you really do want change, you're gonna end up paying for more sessions. You may end up going with a different provider. So, in some cases, I think it makes sense to start with a different provider in the first place, the provider that you want to work with. And I have a really good example. I think this is a little bit of a worst case scenario, but I had an experience with insurance and going to therapy, and the way that it worked, I was going to Kaiser. So I was in their long COVID program. I have long COVID, like a post-viral syndrome, and I kind of struggled with that on and off long term. It's been a couple of years. I'm generally doing really well right now. But when I first like fell sick with it, it really was intense. It was a good year that I had symptoms that were pretty debilitating, that were life-limiting, and I couldn't do the things I enjoyed, and I couldn't work out, and I couldn't be outside, and I didn't really have the energy to socialize and be with friends. So this was really a life-altering illness. And so Kaiser, just when I went to see their long COVID doctor, he said, Do you want to have a session with a therapist? We'll actually cover it for free. And I was like, Oh my gosh, yeah. I feel like that's like one of the big things I need on top of medical help. I just need help with all my feelings around this. I feel like my whole life and my whole identity is getting ripped away from me. So the therapist calls up, and I notice, like, when they schedule it, it's only a 15-minute telehealth session. So I'm gonna talk to this person on Zoom for 15 minutes. And I mean, I'm like, maybe this therapist is really good. Like, maybe they can actually help me in 15 minutes. I I wasn't down on it initially. And so the therapist comes on and he says, I'm gonna go really fast. I'm gonna talk to you just about a number of things that you can do to help your mental health as you're moving through this. And then he just goes off like a machine gun for 15 minutes, like firing all these techniques, all these neuroscience techniques at me. And he explained one technique. I'll give you an example, and see if you can follow. Because he did it almost exactly like this. He said, When you feel bad, you picture a movie screen and you make a movie up there of how you want to be in that situation, and then you float through the screen and into your body, and then let the movie play from beginning to end. And then he like barely paused and went on to the next technique. And I was like laughing because I I actually do this technique with clients. This is actually a good technique. However, when I do it, we actually take time to do it together. We talk about the problem before and really come to an understanding, make sure this is the technique that's gonna help. And then we actually take about 10 or 15 minutes to do that technique, and we make it a whole experience with relaxation before and music, and then we take 10 minutes afterward to talk about what came up, what was helpful, how the person wants to use that knowledge going forward. We take a little bit of time to integrate, so there was none of that. This guy just described that technique in 30 seconds and then went on to the next thing. And he basically just talked a blue streak at me for 15 minutes. I could barely keep up. He didn't even offer to record it for me. Like if it had been recorded, that might have even been better. But he just talked really fast for 15 minutes, and then at the end, he was like, Okay, do you have any questions? And I'm like shell-shocked. So I said no. And he said, Okay, bye. Check in with me if you need anything. So I hung up from this Zoom call and I had two thoughts. One was, now I feel even worse than when I got on this call, if that was possible. I'm like, wow, if this is the care for this disease that I have, like no one really gets it or cares how hard this is for me. And my other thought was, this is mental health care in America now. This is what my clients are dealing with. And my kind of adjacent thought was, I'm so glad I'm a coach because I'm proud of how I help people. I do it much better than this guy who is a therapist, who's a psychologist, who has a PhD. And granted, this guy is working under insurance constraints and all kinds of things, but man. So, and that kind of brings up one more benefit of working with a coach from the get-go, even if you have some therapy covered by your insurance. You actually get to choose the person you want to work with when you hire a coach. This can also be true in therapy. You can often choose your own therapist, especially if you want a private pay. But if you're in a situation where it's being covered by insurance or by your employer or by your school, often you just kinda get what you get. You get the therapist who has the next appointment available, and that becomes your therapist. So, a really good example, I worked with a client who um was a veteran. So she was going to the the VA and she had really been waiting a long time for a therapy appointment for just some service-related trauma that she was dealing with. I think she waited a good three or four months for a therapist in the particular area where she was at. And she didn't get any choice in who they matched her up with. There was no matching process. So she finally gets an appointment, she gets informed that your appointment's gonna be at this time, and she was really excited because she had been waiting a long time and just living with some tough symptoms. And from minute one, her hopes were kind of dashed. She started talking to this therapist, and she felt like it was not a good fit. She felt that the therapist was not really hearing her, that they were saying some things that felt a a bit judgmental, and she was so disappointed because she knew really her only choices were to just kind of deal with this person and hope they could come to a relationship that would be more productive, or she could go back in the queue and wait a few more months for an appointment. So I think one of the great things with coaches is that you can usually choose who you want to work with. You can get to know them before you work with them by consuming their free and low-cost content ahead of time. You can do a consult if they offer free consults to see if it's a good fit. And generally, when you sign up and pay your money for your sessions, you have a pretty good idea what you're getting, who's gonna show up, and what the sessions are going to be like. One more question I will address that comes up often. Why is coaching so expensive? And in some cases, more expensive than therapy? And I think that this is sometimes the perception that's out there, and I'm not sure the perception is actually always true that coaching is more expensive than therapy. I think a lot of times when you're scrolling through the internet and you're seeing coaches advertising their services, a lot of these are coaches who are, I don't know, for lack of a better word, just really aggressive and good marketers. They're really good at getting people to sign up. They've created a lot of demand, good on them, and because of that, they can charge these really high prices. So I think the average person who's kind of just like hanging around on social media and once in a while seeing an ad, or once in a while listening to a podcast is another example because a lot of times the people with a very big, very popular podcasts, they're good marketers, they're good at creating demand. They can generally charge more, because there's more people that want to work with them than they can actually see. But I think, like, all that to say, there's a lot of coaches out there that are charging probably prices that are either in the realm of or below what a therapist would be charging. So, to give you an idea of how coaching is priced, and I'll talk a little bit about how I price mine, a couple of thoughts. And the first is that ideally the price of the coaching package really should reflect the value of the transformation and also the experience and the expertise of the coach. So, for example, I have a business coach and I pay her a lot of money. I pay her way more than I would pay a therapist ever, because she helps me make a lot of money. And you might also be willing to pay more money for very specialized coaching. For example, if you're trying to lose 100 pounds, you might be willing to invest more in a weight loss coach who has helped many clients do exactly that. Maybe they specialize in helping people lose 100 pounds. There are coaches that specialize in that. And generally, if they have a good track record of getting results for people, they can charge more. And let me also talk about it as a general life coach. I am a general life coach. I work on my clients just with a wide range of issues, and I think because of that, I think about pricing a little bit differently. A lot of my clients who come to me, they are hiring their very first coach. So they're not 100% sure about the value of coaching at the start. They have a lot of questions. They may never have invested this much in themselves before. Also, my clients they are generally not super wealthy people. They're not executives, they're not entrepreneurs with lots of money to reinvest. And often they are coming in and they're not 100% sure what exactly it is that they want help with or even need help with. They just have this feeling that they want to change, they want to feel better, even if they're functioning well, they they feel like there is more for them in this life, but they're not necessarily coming in. With a super clear goal, like I want to lose 100 pounds or I want to make $200,000 in my business. So for all these reasons, I tend to price with that in mind. I tend to price for accessibility. I intentionally price to be in line with online therapy services like Better Help. And personally, having used some of these services, I feel like my coaching is way more valuable. I feel like I do a better job than some of these online services. However, I also realize that these prices kind of feel safe and familiar to potential clients. And I'm pretty cool just aligning myself with that. I really want to be accessible to people. I want people to sign up for my coaching if they feel like it's really gonna help them. I don't want anyone who could otherwise have gotten help with their chronic stress, gotten help with the overwhelm that they feel, created more time, more space, and enjoyment in their life. I'd hate for them to miss out on that because my price is just not in line with what they think about paying for something like therapy or coaching or counseling or just help for their emotional life. So, final thoughts on investing in coaching, investing in therapy. It's easy to put off investing in your emotional health and personal growth. And it's really easy to do this when you haven't saved for retirement, and maybe you're of a certain age where you feel like you should have a certain amount of money in the bank and you don't. It's hard to invest in your emotional health. When you have huge student loans and loan payments, when you're worried about AI stealing your job, these are all things I think I think we think about in this day and age. And also, in my opinion, your emotional health is one of the most important things to invest your money in. And if you think about it, people are spending lots of money, and maybe you are spending lots of money on things that give you a dopamine hit, but don't really create long-term or even medium-term happiness for you. And that might be something like buying a cool car or a big house or taking a lovely trip. And the high from buying these things, it really doesn't last. You're just the same person with the same brain that's creating the same problems, and now you're sitting in a bigger house with a bigger mortgage. So if ROI is really about enjoying your life more, when you look around where you want to invest that money, investing in coaching or therapy really can be like one of the highest ROIs that you could possibly get. I think about my first coach, I was in her group program that she ran for a while. And I feel like there's such an inflection point in my life when I joined that program. It was kind of like life before was completely different from life after. When I before I joined the program, I felt very at the mercy of life, like everything bad was just happening to me. I had bad luck, there was just no way to deal with it. This was just how my life was gonna be. And after that program, I think I joined it in like 2017, so nine years after that program, life is so different, and it's kind of been different ever since. And bad things still happen, and arguably, honestly, in the last nine years, a lot of bad things have happened in my life. There's been a lot of challenges, but I am a lot less stressed when things come up, and I'm just like able to, despite having a lot of tough circumstances, to live so much better. And some of my favorite things I've learned from coaching, not just from that program, but from all my coaches, are to process emotions in healthy ways instead of shoving them down. I've learned to really have compassion and acceptance for myself, no matter what. I've learned to challenge my own limiting beliefs. So things like I'm weird, I'm too much, I'm not lovable, I'm not good enough, I've really let a lot of that go. And I've also learned how to really diffuse triggers and feel calm around things that once would have made me really mad or annoyed me. I motivate myself through desire and excitement instead of constantly shaming and whipping myself. And I really have like learned how to feel discomfort and have a higher tolerance for that, which is so helpful when you're running a business because there are a lot of uncomfortable situations and a lot of uncomfortable emotions that just are kind of part and parcel of that. And I feel like I've I've really increased my capacity to feel those things and be okay. So that's kind of just an idea of what's on the other side of coaching for me, for you. Um, if you have questions about coaching, couple things you can do. My email, it should be on all the the show notes. If it's not there, it's Sarah at misadventurepants.com. Just email me at that. I should get it. I should be able to respond to you. If you're feeling ready to coach, definitely check out the free coaching consult. It's where you get to come and just really share what you want to work on in coaching. And even if you're not even sure what you want to work on, like what do you want to happen? Are you wanting to feel better? Are you wanting to not feel something that is coming up in your life a lot? Are you wanting to solve a problem that you've been working on for a long time and you just can't seem to solve it on your own? Definitely bring that to the free consult and I'll walk you through exactly how in coaching we might approach that, what kind of things we might do. So definitely check out the consult if that's something you feel ready to do. All right, friends, take care. And oh my gosh, I got through my first video episode without freaking out. So, depending on how terrible this is, I may or may not post it on YouTube, but also keep an ear out for the YouTube channel that's coming soon. Okay, I'm really gonna leave now. I'll talk to you later.