Your Worth Is a Misguided Pricing Metric (Pricing for HSPs)

I've lowered my pricing to get the job and then quietly resented the work the whole way through. More than once. It's one of the worst feelings there is — because you want people to get the best of you, and it's very hard to give someone your best when you don't feel good about what you agreed to.

This came up with several coaching clients in the last week, so I wanted to talk about it: why pricing gets so strange for deeply caring people, and why "what am I worth?" is the wrong question to build a business on. 

There's a far more useful question we need to be asking.  

This Episode Dives Into:

• Why "what am I worth?" is the wrong pricing question
• The hidden energetic cost of highly sensitive work
• What sustainable pricing actually looks like — and how to test for it
• Why ongoing access may need to cost more (and why that isn't greedy)
• How to build your offers around your energy, from free to highest-touch
• Why we predetermine what people can afford — and why we need to stop
• Resentment as information: what it's telling you about your price or scope
• Why your nervous system belongs in your business model

Who This Episode Is For:

• Highly sensitive people, empaths, and deep feelers running a business
• Coaches, consultants, and service providers who are the business
• Anyone who's undercharged and then resented the work
• People who lower their prices before anyone's even asked
• Sensitive helpers trying to serve generously without burning out
• Anyone building offers that need to be sustainable for the long haul

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Episode on Friends & Family Discounts
• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Book a Full-Scale Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast with deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional and spend years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today we're diving into a business topic that has come up with several of my coaching clients just in the last week. If you are a business owner or a side hustler who genuinely loves helping people, pricing can get weird. Especially if you're a highly sensitive person or deeply empathetic. You don't want to take advantage of anyone. You don't want anyone to think you're greedy. And you would often rather someone get the help they need than walk away because they can't afford it. This can create a really interesting tension when you're running a business, especially when you are the business. When you're the primary service provider and the person responsible for setting the price, pricing can feel extremely personal. And a lot of us might approach this by asking, what am I worth? Have I earned the right to charge this much? But that's such a weird question. And it's really not the right question because our worth is infinite. It's impossible to price. A more useful question is, what is it worth to me to provide this service at this level? That question can help us get more specific about what we should actually be charging because providing a service costs more than you know that hour you spend with someone. It includes your time, your energy, your emotional bandwidth, your years of experience, and all the training and learning that allows you to do what you do at the level that you do it. It might also include the recovery time that you need after providing that service. That recovery time needs to be included in the time factor. So does your ability to continue showing up for your other clients, your business, and your own life. When we factor all of these into the equation, it completely changes the pricing conversation. For my fellow sensitive souls, what we have to remember is that there is an energetic cost to the things that we do. And that cost is going to vary depending on the type of work, the specific project, or even the particular client that you're working with. I'm going to use coaching as an example. It's not just the hour that you spend with the client that we're pricing out. It's preparing for the session, following up afterward, remembering their story, holding emotional space, thinking about them between sessions, remembering what they said three weeks ago and connecting it to something they're telling you today. For a lot of highly sensitive people, that invisible work is the expensive part. And we often don't factor that into our pricing. In the same way that you would factor in your operational expenses, a storefront, software, insurance, whatever it takes to run your business. We also have to factor in the emotional and energetic cost of delivering our work. On a corporate job, we're paid a set number of dollars for a certain amount of time or output. But in our own business, we have to account for everything happening outside of that specific amount of time that we're working directly with a client or on their project. One of the biggest pricing mistakes I see, and something that I've dealt with certainly throughout my own solo career, is charging based on what feels good to the client instead of what is sustainable for you. And this comes up especially when we're just starting out. Maybe you have some imposter syndrome, you don't really know what the market is asking for yet. And if you're doing something that's a little outside of the box, you might not really have a frame of reference for what to charge. We need to be asking ourselves questions like how many of these sessions could I realistically do every week? Could I still love this work six months from now, doing it this way? Am I gonna start resenting my calendar? Will I still have energy for my own life? Because sustainability matters. We also need to get clearer about what it's gonna take to live the life that we want. How much money do you need to support the life you want to live? We start there and then we work backwards. We have to bring some logic to the conversation. And of course, what feels affordable for the client is important. We need we do want to consider that, but the price that makes the work sustainable. But if the price that makes the work sustainable for you and keeps you genuinely excited to provide that work doesn't feel accessible to everyone that we want to serve, that doesn't automatically mean we lower the price of that service. It might mean that we create other ways for people to access our help. You could offer a lower level of service that takes less time and less energy, but still gives someone support. You can create some free resources, a podcast, YouTube videos. Having free content fulfills that part of me that just really deeply wants to serve, teach, and support more people while still preserving that time and space for my deeper work with clients. There are tons of ways to fulfill that deep desire for mission, meaning, purpose, all the things without sacrificing your own sustainability. I'm gonna include a link in the show notes below for an episode I recently did about friend and family discounts, which I think are a terrible idea, by the way. But in that episode, I include a lot of other ways that we can support our people and feel really good about what we're providing without sacrificing what we need in order to live the life that we want to live. Another important part of pricing is honoring the way that you naturally work best. Like one thing that I've noticed about myself is that I really love project work. I love those one-off projects where we identify a problem, we deep dive into it, get completely wrapped up in it, solve it, and everyone leaves happy and we move on to the next thing. That fulfills my need for novelty in my life. You know, there's always something new and exciting to work on, and I get to serve more people, which is something that I also genuinely enjoy. So when I look at my mix of offers, I want to make sure I leave room for that kind of work. Now, the downside, of course, is that you might not know exactly how much money you're gonna make from month to month. So we have to factor that in too. Our offer structure still needs to support our financial sustainability. But creatively, energetically, project work works really well for me. Ongoing client relationships is a completely different animal. So we want to make sure those are relationships that feel really good to us. When you're a deeply feeling person, your clients don't leave your brain when the session ends. You're gonna remember what they said, you're gonna think about how they're doing, you're gonna think of solutions for them while you're in the shower. I carry pieces of my clients with me all day. And look, if you're great at compartmentalizing, that's amazing. But I don't know a ton of highly sensitive people who would say that about themselves. It's a skill that we have to learn, it's not a natural tendency. So, with that being said, ongoing access may need to cost more. Not because you're being greedy, but because it is genuinely costing you more. You know yourself. You know that you're gonna be wrapped up in that client. You're gonna be thinking about their business, their goals, or their life outside of the specific time you work together. So your pricing has to reflect that. And being that ongoing resource provides a huge benefit to the client, also. They have one person who knows their situation inside and out. They don't have to explain the entire backstory every time they need help. You can probably get things done a lot faster and provide solutions that are more specific and on point because you understand the full picture. That continuity is valuable. So the goal is to find the balance that makes the most sense for you, one that feels exciting, keeps you invested in the work, and compensates you appropriately for what the work is actually asking of you. I personally like to build my offers around my energy. Now, everyone listening is going to have their own structure for their business. So this might not exactly apply. My work includes a little bit of business and energetic coaching. It also includes some hands-on marketing work, so there's a little bit of a mix there. The way I structure my business to support both my sustainability and my deep desire to teach and to serve is I have different tiers of offerings for what I do. Each has a different level of access, which means it also has a different energetic cost. First, I have my free offerings. A lot of this content is just my creative outlet. No one's paying for it. So it can be whatever I want it to be. I'm not molding this content around anyone specifically. So I really like that for my creativity. But having something available to people, if they can't afford to work with me on a more deep level, it helps me feel good that I'm not turning people away. Like I'm still bringing something to the table for them. So I have my podcast, Instagram, newsletter, YouTube content. And then in my day-to-day life here in Montana, I'm also happy to meet someone for coffee or happy hour and chat about their business within reason and as my schedule allows. So those are ways I can reach more people and stay connected to that desire to be of service. And then I have my lower cost offers. So those include recorded workshops, mini trainings, digital resources. I've had a few email courses over time. I create them once and people can purchase and use them without requiring my ongoing attention. And then I have my mid-tier offers. These are more short-term engagements with clients. It could be a one-off coaching call, a strategy session, a marketing audit, a VIP day where we deep dive into their business. So these are all those one-time high-touch experiences delivered within a limited window of time. Something like that can give people direct access to you and your expertise, and they might still carry a premium price, but because the experience is condensed, that might be more accessible for some people than a long-term engagement. And then I have my highest touch offers. These include my deep one-on-one services, long-term coaching containers, retainers, long-term coaching containers, ongoing marketing services, and programs where people have that ongoing access to me through email, messaging, and voice memos. And those offers are going to be priced higher because there are only so many of those things you can provide. Logistically, there are only so many hours in a day, but then there's also so much emotional and energetic capacity available if you want to provide top-tier service, which I do, and I'm sure that you do as well. They have to be priced higher because they require more of you. There is a really important mindset shift that we have to make as deeply caring, deeply feeling people. We need to stop predetermining what people can afford. A lot of helpers, and I'm including myself here, have a natural tendency to lower the price before anyone has even asked you to do so. We start making financial decisions for strangers. Or when it comes to people close to us that we really want to help, we feel this need to make the offer more affordable to them before we ever say the price. Let people decide for themselves where they fit into your world. That's why I really like having those tiers of services. I think that's a phenomenal model for the helpers, for the people who really feel driven to give and serve because it meets people where they're at while allowing you to financially support yourself in the way that you want to. So let people decide. Some people will stay with your free content forever. That's okay. Some people will follow you for a year before they invest with you. Totally fine. And in my experience, people that have followed you for a while, when they do want to work with you, you never have to sell them. They already know what you're about and they are committed to working with you. So that's a really great energy, too. Some people will happily invest hundreds or thousands of dollars up front. Wonderful. But your job is not to decide for them. Your job is to create the options and get comfortable letting the chips fall where they may. The last thing you want to do is lower your price, get the job, and then feel resentful that you're doing the work for that price. That is one of the worst feelings. I've lived it many times. And it sucks because you want people to receive the best of you. But for people to get the best of you, you have to feel good about what you're charging and what you've agreed to provide. If you feel any twinge of resentment, overwhelm, or, you know, gosh, why did I agree to this? That is information. It's your cue that the price was too low, the scope was too broad, or the energetic commitment was too expensive. You made the service more affordable to the client, but you made it more expensive for yourself. That is not sustainable. Setting your pricing is not about setting your worth. It's about creating an exchange that allows both parties to thrive. If serving people eventually burns you out, nobody wins. So instead of only asking, what should I charge? It's more helpful to ask, what pricing allows me to do this work well and for a very long time? Your worth is a terrible pricing metric, guys. Your nervous system also needs to be part of the business model. The hour isn't what people are paying for. They're paying for the solution. They're paying for the years it took to make that hour valuable. They're paying for your ability to listen, to understand, to see what they might not be able to see themselves, and to help them move forward faster than they could on their own. We're not just pricing a session. We are pricing everything that comes with being the person who can deliver that solution. And that price needs to work for you too. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. If this episode resonated with you, please share it. I'd love to get more like-minded people into this space. Thank you so much for spending time with me today, and I will chat with you next week.