If you've ever typed a price into your booking system, stared at it for ten minutes, then quietly lowered it - you're not bad at business. You just haven't been taught how to price.
Most of us were told to look at what everyone else nearby charges and land somewhere in the middle.
The problem is, that number was never actually about value.
It's a story someone else told themselves, wearing the disguise of a market rate. Here are 3 better ways in.
Head Pricing: What Does It Actually Cost You to Be Open?
Head pricing is the numbers approach. Add up what it costs you to be in business per hour - rent or software subscriptions, insurance, CPD, utilities - then factor in what you'd like to personally earn, and divide by the hours you actually work.
This gives you a hard floor: the number below which you're not covering your costs, let alone paying yourself properly.
If you lean logical or have a finance background, this is a useful starting point. It's also, on its own, a fairly old-school way of pricing - it tells you the minimum, not the value.
Heart Pricing: What Does the Number Feel Like in Your Body?
Heart pricing is for the high-empathy practitioners among us (most of us). Say a number out loud and notice what happens in your body. Tight chest, gut drop, arms crossing - that's heaviness, and it usually means old stories are talking, not truth. A little stretch and flutter, without the full-body "no" - that's closer to alignment.
This isn't about talking yourself into whatever number feels comfortable. Comfortable often means underpriced. It's about noticing the difference between a genuine values mismatch and a growth-edge wobble.
Gut Pricing: What Would Your Ideal Client Actually Invest?
Gut pricing asks you to step into your ideal client's shoes - not the story you tell about them being broke or price-sensitive, but a genuine read on what they're already willing to invest in their health. Someone going through a fertility journey, or trying to get their energy back after years of burnout, rarely measures the value of that transformation in dollars at all.
Why the "Just Copy Everyone Else" Method Falls Short
Comparing your price to the praccie down the road tells you what their stories are - not what your work is worth. And it assumes there's "a lot around you" to compare to, which isn't true for every location or niche. Head, heart, and gut pricing, used together, will nearly always land you somewhere more honest than a competitor spreadsheet ever will.
Putting the Three Together
You won't get a single "correct" number from any one of these alone. Try this instead:
- Calculate your head price - your floor.
- Say a few numbers above that floor out loud and heart-check each one.
- Sit in your ideal client's shoes and gut-check what they'd genuinely invest.
- Land somewhere the three overlap - usually higher than you expected, and rarely lower than your head number.
A Quick Permission Slip
Please don't put your initial consultation under $100. It undersells the work and it undersells the profession behind you. If that number still makes your gut drop, that's exactly the conversation to have with yourself - or with a mentor - before you touch your booking page again.
Take This Further
My free workbook, How to Make Money as a Practitioner, walks through a fuller pricing and income model if you want to take this beyond a single number.
And if pricing keeps circling back as the block - not just once, but every time you think about raising your rates - that's precisely the kind of pattern we work through inside the Natupreneur Membership, alongside practitioners doing the exact same head-heart-gut recalibration.
Feel the fear, say the number anyway.
Keep being you, everyone else is taken.
Tammy
