What are your clients ACTUALLY paying for?

Plus a virtual b*tch slap ❤

I was on the phone with a coach this past week, and he was telling me that he’d feel better about charging higher coaching fees if he believed more in his program.

If the results were somehow more tangible, or guaranteed, he’d be able to ask higher fees more confidently.

I asked him what he thought his clients were paying him for.

“Help changing their lives? And the results from my program.”

“What else?” I asked.

“My skills to help them get there. Their results.”

He was getting closer.

I offered a hint. “What they are paying you for has nothing to do with you, your skills, your training, or even your program. So what are they paying you for?”

He was stumped.

“Possibility. If you can help them see their dreams as possible for themselves, they will pay you whatever fee you ask. But take it one level deeper. What your clients often come to you for is not what they are really after. Humans don’t have shallow problems. By shallow, I mean surface level. We don’t have weight problems, money problems, career problems. We have deep desires that we think solving those problems will reward us.

So your job as a coach is to help them first see their deepest desires. The ones under the surface level problems they come to you to solve. Then help them see that those are possible. That is what they are paying you for.”

I could see that he was getting this. Taking a few breaths to let it sink in. He processed, took a breath, and then looked up.

“But I don’t believe I can get them there. So how can I ask those fees?”

Here is the virtual bitch slap:

If you don’t believe your client is capable of getting what they want, then you have no business working with that client.

AND not believing they can get there because of you is still not believing they can get there.

Your job as a coach is to help your client see possibility where they previously saw obstacles.

And if you make your skills, knowledge, training, or whatever a part of their problem, then you are putting yourself directly in the way of your client getting what they want. You are making YOU their obstacle.

Your job as a coach, therefore, is not to believe in yourself as a coach. It is to believe in them as your client. The less you make it about you and the more you make it about them, the more success you both will have.

Believe in your client more than anyone else has in their entire life.

Believe in your client’s dreams more than anyone else ever has.

Believe in their dreams more than THEY do, and you can charge whatever fees you want.