55. Four questions to ask if you think you might be underpricing

Here is a completely different way to think about pricing — one that has nothing to do with industry norms or value propositions, and everything to do with what your ancestors planted inside you and what it actually requires to steward that.

Listen to hear more about:

• Why the conventional pricing conversation is missing the most important part of the picture
• The question your ancestors would ask if they saw your current price tag 
• The invisible costs of underpricing
• How to tell the difference between a real ethical concern and a fear dressed up in the language of justice

If you have any suspicion you might be undercharging, this episode will give you clarity. And clarity to move past any fears that might be blocking you from taking coherent action.

***

Prices on all existing courses are increasing on Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. 

Grab my favorite courses before the prices go up: 

 👉 https://play.simonegraceseol.com/2026-prices 

Transcript

Hey friends, you are listening to Liberatory Business and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

So I had just announced that my prices for all of my existing courses are going up across the board on Lunar New Year, 2026. That's February 17th. And I've just been having conversations with people generally about price increases.

Pricing is one of those topics that brings up a lot for people, you know, especially those of us who care deeply about things like fairness and justice and access and liberation. It touches on questions of worth and value and who gets access to what. And these are loaded, charged topics, and a lot of us who do healing work, spiritual work, transformational work — it can feel like a lot.

So there are some questions that kept coming up, and I want to address them in this episode. Things like, how do I know if I'm underpricing? What kind of things should I consider as I think about pricing, potentially raising it? And I wanna offer you a different frame of thinking about pricing, one that I think is quite different from the kind of conversations that are normally had in business circles.

When we think about pricing in conventional business circles, we're typically taught to look at things like our positioning, the value you provide, the value proposition, right? And industry norms — what other people are charging, what's the range — and kind of pick your place there. Of course those things do matter, but there's more to the picture.

Because your work isn't just a service that you provide. It's not just the set of skills you learned. It's not just the knowledge that you picked up. It comes from the way that you do what you do, the way you see people, the way you hold space. The way you sense what's underneath the surface, the instincts you bring, the ways of intuiting and knowing that you can't fully explain. These things don't come from a training you got. They don't come from a certification. They don't come from a course.

A lot of that came through your family line

So let's start there. The ancestors whose DNA lives in you and the epigenetic memory of strength, resourcefulness, survival that you carry from them. Maybe you had a grandmother who could perform acts of healing that everybody thought bordered on the miraculous. Maybe you had a great-grandfather who could build the sturdiest houses in the neighborhood and knew how to bring the whole community together. The ancestors who kept the sense of humor alive, a particular way of making people laugh. And then there's the ancestors who were the family historians, the ones who kept the stories alive and passed them down.

And consider the love, the prayers and wishes that these ancestors are breathing into your every move — on top of all the abilities and capacities they coded into your DNA, into your cells. All of that is a critical part of your medicine. And all of that gets transmitted to the people you serve, whether you know it or not.

And also think about what your ancestors went through so that you could be here doing this work. Maybe they crossed incredible distances. Maybe they survived things that were too difficult to talk about. Maybe they worked jobs that were backbreaking so that their kids could have choices that they never had.

Now, imagine all these ancestors are looking down at you. At the work you do, the way it changes people, the gifts that they passed down to you that you have cultivated into something your own. And then imagine them seeing the price tag you put on it. Would they feel like it honors what they gave? Would they feel like the conditions that you're working under reflect what they had in mind when they dreamed you into being? Or would they look at you and say, baby — we didn't go through all of that for this.

So this is something that you don't know in your mind, but in your body. Ask yourself if your current price really honors that. If not, you might be underpricing.

What do your gifts require in order for you to grow?

Now let's move on to the second thing. Imagine something with me. Let's say, just as an example, that you had a kid, and this kid was born with extraordinary, innate talent for, let's say, the violin. Let's say you have a friendly neighbor who's a musician, and you go over to their house with your kid. Your kid goes over there, they're playing with your neighbor's instruments, and your neighbor is like, oh my God, dude. This kid has incredible, exceptional talent. You've gotta help them develop it. I'm telling you, you don't see talent like this often.

What are you gonna do? You just found this out. Are you gonna let your kid loose and say, well, you know, nowadays there's so many resources, tutorials on YouTube and on the internet, you can be resourceful. Good luck. Figure it out.

No. If you're a loving parent, you try to find the best teachers that you could. You try to create and protect time for them to practice. You'd create the conditions where their gifts have a chance of becoming what they can really bloom to, right? To reach their full potential. That's what you would do as a loving parent.

And guess what? You are that child — except probably not with the exact same gift of violin, but something else. You also carry an extraordinary, exceptional gift. Because your gifts aren't something generic that anyone with a similar experience or similar training or similar certification can claim to have. It's something so specific to the human being that you are, the lineage that you carry, the perspectives, the instincts, the discernment that you and you alone carry, that you alone have been gifted by your ancestors.

And stewardship over that gift and development of that gift requires specific conditions and resources. Because just doing the thing is not enough. You also need to rest. You need to study. You need stillness. You need space where you can go deep — space for your future initiations. You need time and resources to go sit at the feet of your teachers. You need the ability to say no to work, to obligations that are gonna take you away from what you need to do — work that isn't yours to do — so that you can say yes to work that is yours to do.

So are your current prices actually allowing you to do all those things? In other words, are your current prices allowing you to merely coexist with your gifts, or are they resourcing you to steward and cultivate them in ways that are needed for them to reach their full potential? Because those two are not the same. And if all you're doing is coexisting with the gifts you've been given, you might be underpricing.

What is your current pricing preventing from being possible?

Now, here is a third journey I wanna take you on. You probably already know what your current pricing makes possible, right? Oh, it makes it possible for certain people to access blah, blah, blah. Yes. But what does it prevent from being possible?

It's common for people to only look at the direct cost of a price increase. Like, who might not be able to afford it anymore? How many fewer people are gonna be able to have access or be able to buy? But there is such a thing that I wanna call your attention to, which is called opportunity cost.

And in this context, the opportunity cost is everything that doesn't get to exist because of the price you're charging. The program that you haven't had the bandwidth to build because you just don't have time after you work all those hours. The depth of work that you haven't had the spaciousness to reach. The time that you haven't had to digest who you are becoming, what you have learned, to let all those things settle in your body and change the way you show up. And because of that, the people who are waiting for the practitioner and the teacher and the elder that you've never had the resources to become — those are costs that we don't see because they're invisible, right? But that doesn't make them not real.

Maybe you consider all this and it's clear that whatever those invisible counterfactual realities are, they're worth giving up for the sake of what you have now. You're like, yeah, there is no alternate reality in which I have something better than what I do now. If that's the case, then you know your current price is right.

Or maybe there's a body of work inside you that's been waiting very patiently for the right conditions to be met so that it can emerge out of you. If it feels like that might be the case, pay attention. What price would create those conditions?

What work in the world is yours to fund?

Now the last thing that I want to tell you about is the question of what work in the world is yours to fund — and do your current prices allow you to fund it?

For example, I know exactly what my revenue goes to, what business bills it pays, what living expenses it covers for me and my family. And I also know what work I have earmarked to fund with the surplus revenue. I have specific food sovereignty, land sovereignty, and ecological restoration projects that all my profits beyond my salary and my business expenses will go to.

Look, no one's asking you to write checks for every cause in the world, everything that pops up on your feed. But you do wanna discern — what are the specific things that your ancestors are asking you to resource? What are the places in your world where your particular lineage, your particular wound, your particular medicine has a corresponding responsibility?

For some of you, it might be the land your family comes from, or maybe it's the community that you've made chosen family. Maybe it's the cause that tugs at your heart and won't let you go until you do something about it.

So the question is, do your current prices allow you to become a conduit for the flow of resources toward that work? If not, you might be underpricing.

Two timelines

And last thing — just imagine something with me for another minute, right? Imagine two parallel timelines.

In one, imagine that you are being paid exactly what you're being paid now, and imagine you have five more years of that. Go to the future and imagine what you've been able to create, who you've been able to reach. The quality of your transmissions, what your presence has been like over those five years, and what ripples that has created.

Now imagine a different timeline. It's been the same five years, but you've been resourced differently — resourced the way that your assignment actually requires. Maybe it meant you finally had the space to build a program that you've been carrying in your bones for years. Maybe you had the time and space to write the book. Maybe you took on fewer clients and went deeper with each one. Maybe it meant you could fly across the world to study with an elder, or take six months to grieve something that needed to be grieved before the next body of work could be channeled through you. Maybe you could say no to the client who wasn't meant to be with you, so you could say yes to the one who was.

Imagine five years of that. What you've been able to build in that timeline, what you've been able to develop, whom you've been able to reach, and what impact you've had.

Now follow the ripple forward. The person who came to you in the first timeline versus the person in the second timeline — all the people that you impacted went and impacted their families, their communities, and their descendants differently. Because guess what? Your pricing doesn't just determine what one person pays you. It determines the quality of the ripple that begins with every single person that you impact. And what does that look like when that ripple goes three nodes out, five nodes out from you? What does it look like when it goes all the way out? What's the difference between these two timelines?

Maybe there isn't a meaningful difference. Maybe you're like, my current pricing is allowing me to do exactly what I'm supposed to do. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe if these two timelines look different, pay attention to where and why — because it might point you to where you are underpricing.

The fear underneath

Okay, so now you might be thinking — okay, Simone, maybe I do need to raise my prices. But I think here is where an unspoken fear creeps in. For a lot of people it's — okay, in theory sounds great. If I could raise my price and be paid more, that's great. But what if I do raise my price and people actually just stop buying? What if no one can afford my new prices and I don't make any money and I can't fund anything?

That's a real concern and it's valid.

And here's what I see happening all the time. People say, oh, I can't raise my prices because I don't want it to be inaccessible to people who need it most. They tell themselves that. But underneath, what's really going on — what's really driving the decision — is the fear that, oh, I'm afraid that I won't be able to sell at those higher prices. Like, no one's gonna wanna buy from me. People will only buy from me if what I offer is cheap.

I work with people on this all the time, and what I need to tell you is that you have to be honest with yourself. Because "I'm not sure how to sell this thing at a higher price point" is a marketing and sales problem. It's a business problem. It's not an ethical problem.

It's important that you don't mix up the two. Because when you conflate them, you end up using the language of justice to avoid addressing what is really a skills gap. When you tell yourself, I'm just being equitable, I'm just being caring — when you're actually just wanting to avoid risk, not wanting to learn new skills, wanting to stay in your comfort zone — then you never get to addressing the real issue.

If you need to learn how to communicate the value of your work at the level that your work actually operates at, that's something worth being honest about. That's something worth figuring out. Because it is figureoutable, it's learnable, it's solvable. But you'll never get around to solving it if you're telling yourself, oh, the reason I'm not doing that is because I care too much, I'm too ethical.

Know the market — and know yourself

Now, to be sure, there are external considerations that you have to take into account. Your pricing has to reflect market reality. Know the ranges of what people are typically charging in your field. If you're not sure, do some research. Understand what constitutes higher end, what's the lower end, what's the average, and understand why.

Pricing that doesn't reflect the market at all will be quickly slapped down by the market. But pricing that doesn't respect you and your lineage, your dignity, your unique genius, and the full weight of the ancestral assignment you carry will be quickly slapped down by your ancestors.

Look, no one can claim authority over your life's work but you. No one can answer these questions for you. No one can give you the permission to go do the thing if you're not gonna claim that permission yourself. No one can take responsibility for the gifts and responsibilities that are yours to steward alone.

It's your call. But when you make a decision, make sure it's one that you'd be proud to carry back to the ancestors who have planted their bigness in you. They've planted the treasures of their lineage in you with designs for exactly what changes you're meant to birth into this world. Make sure your pricing is something that reflects that.

So I hope that helps, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.

***

Hey, so speaking of price increases — all the prices on my existing courses are going up after Lunar New Year, February 16th, 2026. My courses have always been priced super generously from the beginning, and those prices reflected a chapter of my life that was right for me at the time, and I'm grateful for all the ripples of impact that those seeds have been able to bloom into.

And now I'm being led into a new chapter. The work that I'm being called to step into is asking for different soil conditions. So I'm raising my prices for the first time and probably for the last. Check out the course catalog and the pricing changes — I'm gonna leave the link in the show notes. Legacy prices are available until February 16th. And if you've been looking at my courses at any point, thinking, oh, one day I'd like to get to this — today is the day.