I’m writing my next book – working title: Permission to Prosper: How to Actually Make Money When You’re Self-Employed – and I want your help. I’d love to hear about your experiences with money as you endeavor to start and grow your business.
The motivation behind the book is that too few people are earning a good income doing work they love. I intend to get down and dirty with the most important interactions we have with money as self-employed men and women.
I plan to cover:
- How to set your prices, stand confidently behind them and not drop them
- How to raise your prices
- How to publicise your prices and talk about them with prospective clients
- The logistics of how to actually charge and receive money
- How to pay money forward
My hypotheses are works in progress – I find we discover what we believe through the process of writing – but here are some strong contenders:
- Our relationship with money affects our ability to go and stay self-employed.
- Choosing the path of self-employment can help transform our relationship with money.
- Our ability to earn good money relates to our sense of self-worth and willingness to receive.
- When we find peace with a solid self-employed income, we can do more good work. By allowing ourselves to earn more, our gifts more abundantly benefit others.
What’s missing
With an outline in place and 25,000 words already written, the key missing ingredient is YOU. I want to hear your specific experiences with money on the self-employment path.
One piece of feedback about the previous book was how helpful people found the examples of real-life practitioners, so there are two options for sharing your experiences and perspectives with me:
- Complete the short SurveyMonkey questionnaire here > >
- Answer the questionnaire more publicly (and create/join the discussion) by leaving a comment below. Here are the two key questions I’d love you to explore…
1) Earning a healthy income through self-employment – what BLOCKS have you encountered? Please give specifics e.g. “I was at a networking events and….”, “As I tried to set my prices, I felt…”, “But when we got to the sales conversation, I…” or “The people around me/who I’d trained with said…”
2) What specific experiences have HELPED, HEALED or EVOLVED your relationship with money? e.g. “I had a session with _____ about _____ which helped me to…”, “I read about ______ which changed my perspective because…”, “During the conversation, I realized that…” or “Over time, I’ve noticed…”
Thanks so much in advance for your responses, whichever option you choose. And a massive thank you to those who’ve already completed the questionnaire; your responses have been incredibly valuable and have helped me give shape to the book.
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© Corrina Gordon-Barnes 2012
One of my blocks at first was letting my self-esteem get wrapped into the success of my business. Starting a business is hard, and making the first sales requires a lot of time, work and luck. My problem was that I felt like a failure when my business was first getting off the ground. That made it harder to enjoy at the time, and it also infused my sales efforts with a tinge of desperation, which I believe made me less effective in selling.
David – Ah, you speak for a lot of people with these points. Was there a noticeable breakthrough moment for you?
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
1) Earning a healthy income through self-employment – what BLOCKS have you encountered? I opened an school for aromatherapy education in 2010. It is growly quickly and I’m beginning to really see a nice income from this business.
My specific “mindset block” in the beginning was “Will I lose business if I set my prices to reflect the value I truly believe they are worth, when there are other schools who charge less?” I had to take a good look at my product (classes). Was there value? Did the products benefits my clients (students)? Did I do anything that set me apart? Did I have enough education to do the work with confidence, integrity and pride (21 years worth!)? Was I passionate about the work? The answer to every question was a resounding YES! That’s when I knew that not only were my prices appropriate, even if higher than others, but students would be lucky to study in my programs!
2) What specific experiences have HELPED, HEALED or EVOLVED your relationship with money? I read the book “Creating Money: Attracting Abundance” Sanaya Roman many many years ago. It is still my go-to book when I need a mindset boost. It is the book I recommend all my students when starting their own aromatherapy practice.
Liz Fulcher´s last [type] ..Interviewed by Prevention: My Experience
Great example Liz – thank you. And wonderful that you flag up the “relationship with money” issue for your own students. It seems many trainers sadly do the opposite and tell their students not to expect to earn much from following their heart’s path.
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
One of my biggest blocks is charging people I know for what I do. I have no trouble charging clients – I recently was asked to see a client on a Saturday, which I never normally do, and quite happily decided on a new policy of charging £30 extra for a weekend session. No problemo. But, the minute someone I know, am related to, or even only vaguely know, asks me to help them, I get all funny inside, and end up offering free information, or hugely discounted work, even if they haven’t even asked for it. It’s as if I daren’t show them how much I believe I am worth! Crazy. Or it’s as if I feel like they must only be asking me because they know me. It’s annoying, as, being at the start of my career, most of the people I see are ones I already know!!arggh!
claire´s last [type] ..Fighting colds…..
Yes. That. Well put, Claire!!!
“How to ask your friends for money for “what you do for a living”?
I wonder how to find physicians or accountants (for example) who’ve figured out how to do this gracefully?
Karen J´s last [type] ..Collected Wisdom for Friday 12-7-12
I don’t! I wouldn’t do it for family, as if anything goes wrong, it immediately makes things difficult, even if it’s resolved.
There are a few friends I’d consider working for – the ones who would understand when I asked to discuss in advance what would happen if we had a dispute or a problem, or if HMRC came calling! Some people can put things like that as separate to the friendship.
Rosie Slosek @1ManBandAccts´s last [type] ..Do you want 1:1 help to stop your accounts being a procrastinating stress zone?
Good point, Rosie – “money stuff” and “family” certainly are likely to be a particularly difficult mix!
Karen J´s last [type] ..Collected Wisdom for Friday 12-7-12
Great angle, Claire – the “mates rates” dilemma. Will be included in the book
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
I have exactly the same block! I like the idea of handling it “gracefully” but I am not sure how. I feel I should charge “mates rates”, as it sort of feels like cheating to have them as a client. How ridiculous is that?!?
For me this is a long process, and I’m still in the middle of it though had some enormous and really positive breakthroughs recently.
I remember a few years ago having a client ask me the price of my birth package and actually not being able to say what it was – lowering it by £50 because I just couldn’t get the words out! A lot has changed for me since then.
One major breakthrough for me came when I realised that actually one part of importance of money was for the client even more than for me, that it was a sign of my clients’ real commitment to our work together – it means they are personally invested in it and feel it is important, allowing me to then give fully. This is crucial for me. I don’t want to work with people who aren’t committed!
Of course, working with you in the Passion to Profit programme and the money meditation in particular was very revealing.
Another thing that helped me a lot recently was Kay Gillard’s Monday Power Talk http://www.kaygillard.com/?p=1203 where she talks about receiving the energy of money as we might receive any other energy – this has been **huge** for me, I’ve been practicing it this week and it feels great!
Right now in this moment I’m feeling really good about my prices, my business and receiving money for my work.
Rebecca´s last [type] ..Other people’s stories about us
Rebecca – You’re such a wonderful example of someone determined to crack this and you’re inspiring those around you by this commitment.
Yes yes yes – charging well is doing the CLIENT a favour as well. I find it very awkward when a practitioner offers to work with me for free or at a massive discount – there’s a kind of passive aggression that I see plays out when they then resent it, and also it diminishes your power as client because the energy exchange means you can’t expect much from them.
When someone charges well, you can see they’re taking care of their own needs (so you don’t have to) and it makes the relationship far more equal and healthy.
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
Love it. Permission to Prosper
Blocks I’ve encountered:
- Not wanting to make a fuss, be seen as pestering or asking overly in marketing
- Conditioning to give time away in order to be helpful
- Not feeling ‘real’ or ‘proper’ or feeling like an impostor (particularly surfaces when I’m isolated or start comparing other people’s offerings or expertise to mine)
– Not actually knowing how it feels to ever have earned enough money (this goes for parents, too)
- Feeling like work should be ‘hard’ – that is, long, excruciating, unenjoyable. Thus doing work that comes naturally, that comes quickly and is fun is somehow not ‘worthy’ and needs drawing out, blocking or procrastinating over.
Healing experiences:
- Recognising that ‘the long idea’ and being very authentic around marketing is the key to feeling safe doing so.
– Recognising that over giving has an equal and opposite reaction (your article ‘Making money isn’t selling out’ was a real trigger there.
– Working on my internal connection practice, feeling in control, stopping looking around at what others have to offer and refocusing on what my right people actually need from me. (Work with you has really helped this. I loved the feeling that money flows in and out like breath)
– Identifying the family money issues and bringing them into awareness. The lovely Linda Anderson helped me see through a tapping session that I still have huge blocks around feeling safe about both my own family and my clients in terms of being ‘allowed’ to earn good money doing something that is joyful for me.
– Spending some time listening to my inner dialogue and recording how it DOES feel to earn good money so I can save up that feeling and reaccess it.
– Giving myself permission to do work that’s fun that’s aligned with my superpowers
- Cracking up every time my daughters dance down the street singing ‘Price Tag’
Writing them down like this is also incredibly helpful. Off to do some valuable, fun work now
Jo Bradshaw´s last [type] ..Isobel Phillips: showing up
Jo – Hear hear to Linda Anderson and her wonderful EFT/Tapping work. She describes it like there’s an invisible wall, as Rebecca said about literally not being able to get the words out, and so it’s about how to dissolve that wall so you can speak your prices, stand firm behind your prices and receive the money with grace and gratitude.
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
For me, money is freedom, and it’s the fear of freedom that leads to issues about money for me.
I’m currently pricing an e-course I’m writing, and a big problem is teasing out fear issues from my knowledge about what I think people will feel is a fair price.
Rosie Slosek @1ManBandAccts´s last [type] ..Grow your business: put yourself in the path of opportunities
Rosie – Interesting. Say more about the fear of freedom thing and how it relates to money…
Corrina Gordon-Barnes´s last [type] ..Permission To Prosper – Help Write The Book
I will do when I see you – not in a public space. It’s not huge drama or anything, but this is a public blog, that’s all.
I’m starting to use the Dragon Dictate app on iPad for writing. The blocking fear doesn’t respond to logic or my usual tricks round it, so since having conversations in my head about issues is how I normally talk something through, I’m trying dictation to write, instead of typing or pen and paper. So far I’m teaching it to recognise my voice but I do have a good feeling about this one.
Rosie Slosek @1ManBandAccts´s last [type] ..Thinking about your tax return?
Interesting experiment with Dragon, Rosie! That may be a verrrry useful “workaround” – I know that my thoughts flow much more freely when I’m talking, rather than typing or even writing.
Karen J´s last [type] ..Collected Wisdom for Friday 12-7-12
I find it particularly difficult to get past my own “I feel broke” – even when I’m not.
~~~
I just now listened to your October call about P2P – and the very first step “Recognize that there ARE people “out there” who will spend money to have help with their problem (what YOU are offering)” is clearly going to be my next layer…
Thank you for keeping your recordings available!
Karen J´s last [type] ..Collected Wisdom for Friday 12-7-12
Great discussion thread once again Corrina – thank you!
A block that I had around money was how to attract both the general public and corporate attendees to our public War to Peace workshops when the feedback we had was that the corporate world would not value (or send someone to attend) a workshop that was charged at less than around £450+ VAT per person day. I felt this was far too much to charge an individual, not-for-profit organisation or self-employed person to pay and I recognised that by potentially excluding corporate attendees by charging too little, we may be losing out on very profitable corporate gigs.
The obvious answer is to hold separate workshops, yet the beauty of the War to Peace methodology is that it works for anyone under any circumstance and we wouldn’t want to suggest something other than this by holding a corporate only or general public only workshop.
We considered having a booking page for corporate customers with one price and a different one for individuals, but that didn’t sit comfortably – and what if someone in the corporate world wanted to attend for their own personal development? It didn’t seem fair that they would be being charged so much more than another attendee.
I wrestled with this for some time, meditated on it, discussed it with a lot of people and realised that whilst War to Peace was piloted and has run for years in the corporate world, most of the pain, anger and resentment people carry tends to stem from their personal relationships and my passion lies in helping them be free of this. And if someone does want to use the methodology to deal with someone at work, at least if their company won’t send them, we can make it affordable enough for them to attend and pay for themselves.
I realised that whilst the corporate gigs are wonderfully profitable (and very enjoyable), what I want more than anything is that as many people as possible experience the War to Peace methodology. The most important thing for me is that no one be excluded from attending a workshop due to financial reasons, because I personally know the pain of being in conflict – and how brilliant it is to be able to easily handle those people that I’d previously found so difficult.
So, I decided that we would charge a standard rate for a one-day workshop of £150+VAT, an early bird rate of £99+VAT and of the 12 places available in each workshop, we would offer two places at just £20+VAT and ask that people use their integrity when booking these super discounted places. I decided this in the full knowledge that we would be unlikely to attract anyone from the corporate world to attend ‘on business’, but have such faith in the methodology, I trusted that we would get the more profitable corporate gigs when the time was right.
Funnily enough, having made this decision some time ago, we recently got contacted by one of attendees from the War to Peace we ran in London in October who attended for personal reasons. He was so blown away by its effectiveness in his relationship with his daughter, he has now organised for us to meet several HR directors of huge corporates with a view to us running War to Peace in house for them! I have to say this mimics what happens generally for me with regards money, in that whenever I make money a focus, work feels difficult and clients seem hard to come by. On the other hand, when I focus on my passion (helping people to avoid and resolve conflict) and trust that I’ll always have enough, I always do and life and work is much more enjoyable and the money and clients really do flow!
I hope this is a helpful example Corrina and wish you all the very best with your second book – go girl!
I just wanted to say thank you for this:
“I find we discover what we believe through the process of writing” – as I thought I was the only soul who experiences this. Wonderful validation, thank you!
Great questions, Corrina, and plenty of inspiring replies on this page – thanks everyone for sharing.
One of my own biggest blocks has been around identity and the belief that ‘people like me don’t earn a lot of money’. So a part of me made sure that I never made more than ‘just enough’.
From a long line of Yorkshire coalminers and factory workers, I was surrounded as I grew up by people who worked really, really hard to have ‘just enough’ – and often they had ‘not enough’.
I saw the evidence of my limiting belief (that I was a ‘just enough’ person) in the pattern in my own bank account once I started using EFT/Tapping to address money issues.
In the months where I had workshops scheduled and could potentially earn well from less hours contact time, most of my 1/1 client work would mysteriously disappear. Conversely, in the months where no workshops were scheduled, I’d magically have just enough clients to stay in my ‘just enough’ comfort zone – no more, no less. I had discovered my ‘money set-point’ and to think of going beyond that set-point felt like stepping away from my family of origin, which to some part of me did not feel safe at all.
I could go on at length here about money being a first chakra issue, about safety and survival (hence the vow of loyalty to our family of origin) but maybe this is not the place. I do come across money set-points a lot with clients though – it can feel like there’s a glass ceiling to our income that we can’t get beyond no matter how hard we try.
Everyone has a money set-point, even those who have achieved financial success, just the way we all have comfort zones (yes, even Wayne Dyer and Jack Canfield!). If there is a subconscious downside to having more money or more success, our brilliant subconscious minds will find a way to keep us at or just below the level it believes is safe for us.
The best method I know for clearing the blocks is EFT/Meridian Tapping, combined with information on the chakras and the different subconscious vows we take at each chakra when we don’t receive all the emotional support we need in childhood to be our authentic selves.
Hope this provides some grist to your mill, Corrina ☺. It’s a fantastic subject to write about and I can’t wait to read the book.
PS: I’m currently doing my own research on the blocks to money and marketing that are so common amongst coaches/healers/creatives, and am offering a free half-hour Discovery Session in return for a research interview by phone or Skype. Anyone interested please feel free to book a session here: http://www.tapintoyoursuccess.co.uk/appointments
Linda Anderson´s last [type] ..Money blocks and the games we play …
Linda, I grew up in a mining town too (I was the one considered a snob because I didn’t live on the pit estate). It is difficult to move the ‘just enough’ mindset as my family had a lot less money than a lot of my class mates families (experienced miners were paid very well in the 1980s). I found it easier to break it when I started working fewer hours. It was very hard at first – the ‘must work’ anxiety came in, but it eases over time when you stick with it.
Hi Rosie – thanks for the encouragement. I’m definitely a work-in-progress on this one.
My dad started to get ahead in life when I was around 8 and we moved to a wealthy market town the other side of the county, leaving all our extended family (and my beloved grandma) behind. So I’m sure there’s still grief and trauma there from that time, and certainly an echo of the feeling that ‘they’ (successful, professional, middle-class people) are not ‘my people’ – even though logically I know I’m part of that socio-economic group now.
Chipping away at it with EFT/Tapping and finding plenty of gold among the garbage that’s really useful in sessions with clients
Linda Anderson´s last [type] ..Money blocks and the games we play …
Hello Corrina,
Do you know what, when I last posted, I really thought I had this all worked out. Wrong! My relationship with money is much more complex than I realised and I just thought I’d share, partly because what I posted is now out of date and mainly because I hope it will help your thinking (and others’) when you write this part of your next book!
In my last post, I had been battling for a long time with what to charge for our open access War to Peace workshops, so that it was accessible to both the general public and the corporate world, as the methodology works for anyone. I was very clear that I didn’t want anyone to be excluded from the work for financial reasons, which I concluded meant charging rates that most people could afford and I had accepted that this may not attract the more lucrative corporate client gigs.
I thought I was being magnanimous and putting the work before the money and it was a sign of my growth, having quit the corporate machine years ago to do meaningful work that makes a difference. Little did I realise that I was kidding myself and hadn’t fully considered my value around ‘no one being excluded for financial reasons’. Groan.
This became clear to me when my mentor called to say he was working with someone (who worked in a large corporate) who would really benefit from War to Peace and wanted to know the cost. When I told him it was £150 +VAT, he said ‘it’s too cheap, he won’t come if it only costs that much. He won’t think it’s any good’.
Then, that same week, I met the HR director of a large bank who was very interested in our work. When I said we were running an open access workshop in February, he was keen to send some specific people, until I shared the price and he said they wouldn’t take it seriously unless the workshop cost around £500-600 per person. Even having read the testimonials, he said people in his organisation would question how good it was if they were only being charged £150+VAT, even though he accepted that this thinking was at odds with the drastic cost-cutting measures that are prevalent in his organisation at the moment. Back to the drawing board.
I hadn’t really considered that I might be ‘excluding people for financial reasons’ by not charging enough and that some people who equally need the work might not come if it wasn’t expensive enough. On reflection, I realise I had been considering ‘corporates’ as an entity, rather than really considering the individual people who happen to work for corporate organisations. This was definitely tied up in an unquestioned story I was telling myself about ‘big, bad corporate money-making machines’. I cannot believe I fell into that trap, especially when some of the most heart-warming stories I’ve heard from War to Peace participants have been from those who have been sent to an in-house corporate training we’ve run and they tell us how it has transformed their relationship with their kids or it saved their marriage. Big juicy stuff and the whole purpose of creating the work in the first place was to have this exact kind of impact – doh!
To this end, I’m throwing out the self-imposed rules and offering the workshop to different audiences at what feels like a price that would be right for them. If people end up paying different prices for their seat at the same workshop, I guess it’s no different to being on an aeroplane. And if people discover they have paid different prices and want to talk about its fairness or otherwise, I realise that I’m really happy to have that conversation!
Like all things in life, I’m realising that my relationship with money is a journey that will develop and change as I go along – so I’m giving myself permission to be a work in progress! I hope this helps add to the discussion and would welcome your comments.
In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that War to Peace is available to members of the Inspired Community at £99+VAT, rather than the general rate of £150+VAT or the corporate rate of £500+VAT! There is also £20+VAT rate for people who really can’t afford to pay more than that. So that’s where we are for now.
The rationale – as the Inspire Community largely comprises fellow self-employed folk, to do any personal growth work you are paying out of your own pocket and giving up either a day’s work or a day’s holiday. Furthermore, everyone I’ve met in the Inspired community is doing work in service of others, so it’s doubly important to me that you are given access to great training at a discounted rate so that you can be your best selves when you are sharing your gifts with others. For more information, please see: http://www.wartopeace-inspired.eventbrite.co.uk The password is ‘inspired’.
Wishing you all my best – and good luck with working out your own relationship with money!
Chloe