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Raise your rates in the most elegant way possible: YOURS
Making the decision to raise your rates is a grade A biggie. There are good reasons to keep your old rate (everyone will be happy). And there are consequences to keeping your old rate (everyone will be happy except you...and you know how well THAT usually works out). Once you’ve made the decision to raise rates, all the negative self-talk and naysaying saboteurs/gremlins/inner critics love to show up for a feeding frenzy. They’re your first obstacle. And they hate nothing more than clarity. So that’s what you must feed them: a steady diet of straight talk.
Here's What You Tell Yourself (and Your Saboteurs)
Say this, loud and proud:
I am raising my rates because: 1) I know the value of my worth and it’s time that I was compensated accordingly. (This may mean saying “no” to brain-picking too…your call). 2) I know what I need to do to grow my business and raising my rates will allow me to create more. (More of what is up to you). 3) I have done my due diligence and I know what the market will bear. (Because you HAVE). 4) I know the value of my worth and it’s time that I was compensated accordingly. (This bears repeating…saboteurs like to pretend they didn’t hear you the first time).
So, that's what you say to your saboteurs...but let me be clear. How you handle your saboteurs is very different from how you handle your beloved clients.
Here’s What You Tell Your Clients
With respect and appreciation and clarity, state: “I am raising my rates next month.”
Period.
You could try to explain how your rate increase means you’ll be working with fewer clients and providing them with better service etc, but truthfully, when I’m on the receiving end of this speech, it rarely resonates. I get it. You’re in business. And you deserve to be compensated. But as your client, I’d like to know:
“What’s the impact on me?”
At this point, you have two choices:
1) Temporarily grandfather the existing rates of your current clients and in doing so give them a couple of months grace before the new rates take effect. If you do so, it remains important that you tell them about the increase. If you’re good (and you must be, you rate-raiser, you) they are referring you to others. And if that’s so, you must educate your sales force – a.k.a “your clients” – about your price. No one likes sticker shock.
2) Have your existing clients start paying your new rate immediately. If this is the case, I am hoping that you have managed expectations early in the hiring process. When I start work with my coaching clients, we typically agree to a three month arrangement at a given price ($400/month + tax, if you’re curious). In our written agreement, I have included this caveat: Client and coach will discuss any rate increase at least one month prior to the agreement ending in order to establish a new agreement. People like surprises even less than they like sticker shock.
Will clients walk away?
The simple answer is...possibly.
Possibly yes, possibly no.
If you opt for choice #2, then it’s possible they have become quite comfortable with the old rate and they may believe your new rate is outside of the perceived threshold of what they can handle. DO NOT TAKE THIS PERSONALLY. You can either try to convince them the work you’re doing together is every bit as valuable as it ever was (feel the energy drain?), or you can invest that energy in finding new clients that are happy to pay your new rate (feel the energy lift?).
And for those who choose to walk away, lovingly hand them a list of people in your field that offer their services at the lower rate. It’s a classy and unforgettable act of generosity. No regrets, no hard feelings. Just expansive growth. Stand as a model for your clients. Chances are good it’s time they raised their rates too. Show them how to raise rates in the most elegant and masterful way possible.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Thing Finding Thursday with Tara Sophia Mohr
Remember that beach vacation when you were a kid and your older sibling was off chasing boys (or girls) and you were on your own? And your parents, who were more interested in their sangria than managing your social life, distractedly waved you off to “go make a friend” and it seemed impossible in that moment until you saw HER and went over and said: “let’s be friends” and she said yes?
For me, that was Tara Sophia Mohr. We’ve been hanging out on the same beach for a while now and I’ve always been curious about her and her sandcastles (they always seem SO WELL put together). And do you recall the 2012 planning post wherein I declared my search for a publicist and I committed to “Ask my coaching colleagues/peers who they work with (by Dec 31, 2011)”?
That’s what I did. I asked the girl with the well constructed (and beautiful) sandcastle for a Skype chat and she said yes.
I knew she was wise. I knew she was wonderful. What I wasn’t prepared for was how WARM she is. (Frequent and regular Skype tea dates are in the works.)
If you don’t know her, here’s what she’s up to in this world. She’s an expert on women's leadership and women's wellbeing. She has created the wildly popular "10 Rules for Brilliant Women" and the 6-month Playing Big women's leadership program(full disclosure: that there is an affiliate link), Tara's work has been featured on The Today Show, ForbesWoman, USA Today, More Magazine and is regularly published in Huffington Post. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and her MBA from Stanford University. Tara is also the author of Your Other Names: Poems for Wise Living.
Cerebral and soulful stuff. Interested in hearing about her path? Me too.
What's your thing?
Tara Sophia Mohr: My thing is being Tara. These days (these years, really,) that generally looks like this:
bringing women’s voices into the worldhelping women play biggerspeaking-writing-communicating to bring about the world I want to see. every day there is something new to say. I love saying it.letting poems come through.creating beauty. basking in beauty.laughing in community, being with friends, being over the moon happy that you (and you, and you and you) exist and are right here, with me!being silly and dancing around the apartment cracking up my husband.compassion, compassion, compassion, because compassion is the natural expression of wisdom, the fruit of seeing things as they really are.
Note on the above: nothing in my life is linear. So please picture these words in a big swirling circle, not in a list.
Was finding your thing the result of a divine revelation, an insane invention, a culmination of insights...or something else?
Tara Sophia Mohr: It was a return. It was a return to my childhood dreams. I’m not someone who was fundamentally confused about what my thing was, though I spent many years saying “I don’t know what my thing is.” Translation: “My thing might be that thing I’ve been dreaming of since I was five, but frankly that thing seems too impractical and scary to go for, so I’ll ignore that and take some career assessment tests instead.”
I don’t think we all “find” our things. I did some combination of remember, recover, listen and experiment my way into my thing.
There was a time in my life about four years ago when I made a pretty radical shift toward living a more authentic life and career. I don’t know what caused that to happen on one day and not another, but the change felt precipitated by intensifying pain: the pain of the inauthentic way of living grew great enough that I was willing to face the discomfort involved in change.
When the old shoe really, really, really gets uncomfortable? That’s when I often start to make change. But what causes the shoe to get uncomfortable at a certain point? Something mysterious, something that has to do, I believe, with the timeline of our soul’s unfoldment.
Obstacles/fears/doubts – what were they, how'd you vanquish them?
Tara Sophia Mohr: For me, life has often felt like trying to sew together two pieces of fabric: one piece is my authentic self. The things she loves. Her natural, confident, uninhibited, blissed-out self. Picture a happy five year old, totally unself-conscious, in her element, doing her thing. That’s piece of fabric #1.
The other piece of fabric is the world: the more competitive, judgmental landscape where that natural self was not always welcomed or safe or validated.
How to sew the two together? How to make them connected, so I can move across them easily? How to walk in the world as my authentic self comfortably and confidently – to say what I had to say – no matter how radical or how ridiculed?
That has been my primary challenge. What has helped me has been in part outer: having powerful support people in my life –community, teachers, friends – who gave me tools and championed my dreams when I was just getting started in listening to them and acknowledging them. But inner work has been equally important, particularly work around 1) clarifying my vision 2) understanding what the inner critic is and how it operates and 3) getting wise about how to deal with fear.
The programs I lead are very informed by what has most helped me – and what most helps the other women I work with.
What questions did you ask yourself to trigger your a-ha moments...and what signs and milestones should others be looking for in their journeys?
Tara Sophia Mohr: Some of my favorite questions:
What is my message to share in this situation, my unique truth? (Note: if no one else sees what you are saying or is talking about what you are thinking, that makes your perspective more needed, not less; more valuable not less).
What does my heart need in order to follow itself? (In any situation to ask your heart, “Dear heart: what do you need right now, to follow yourself?”)
How can I be a representative of love in this situation? (This question has saved me a hundred times. Saved me from pettiness, fear-based responses, aggression and brought me right back into love. You be surprised how well it works in business environments too.)
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I'm appreciating the notion of the two fabrics. I'm appreciating her powerful questions. I'm appreciating the power of support systems. And I'm appreciating the worn shoe metaphor. I'm appreciating it all.
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Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
My Christmas wish list for you...
We celebrate Christmas on the Eve with my family. It is a quieter affair, with smoked salmon, pierogies + boeuf bourguignon (always), Christmas story reading, stockings (each item, no matter how small, yields an appreciative "ooohhhhHHH" so this is a very long, very humourous ordeal). Once our daughter reluctantly goes off to sleep clutching her bear, the adults will sit together, listening to Mahalia Jackson tell us what her heart knows about Christmas, then get lost in our own thoughts about Christmas Eve's gone by. Mine will stray to that magical Christmas Eve in Innsbruck, or to the first Christmas spent with my boyfriend (now husband) when he gave me the Led Zeppelin box set (uh huh) and Coco Chanel. We will miss my Mom.
Once Santa visits (usually around 11pm...odd), we will wake our girl up and she will be bleary-eyed and searching for proof of his visit, grilling us on the details. Her heart's desire will be wrapped in shimmery paper and this will quell any more discussion. For now.
And it will be beautiful.
The next day, we'll spend it with my husband's family. It's a large family so everything will be a little, MORE. Many presents, many people, many stories, many memories.
And it will be beautiful.
I am more grateful than I could ever express that I get to be with two families where there is love. In several different homes where there is food and light and heat. Where there are happy, healthy children.
In fact, I feel a little overcome by it all.
So today, as I charge around, picking up last minute things for the "ooohhhhHHHs" of the stockings, pop in to visit friends for some cheer, and try not to fret that the (PERFECT) gift I found for my husband seems to be stuck at the US-Canadian border, I will keep checking my look in the mirror to make sure what I'm feeling in my heart is found in a smile on my lips.
I am also grateful to you, Dear One. That I get to do the work I get to do is an honour. That I get to write to this blog (and that you read it and love it and tell me in your comments, in your emails, and with your subscriptions) makes my heart fuller still.
So, until we meet on the other side of Boxing Day, here's my Christmas wish list for you:
That you set your intentions for how you want these holidays to be, so that there are no regrets.
That you have it be easy.
That you enjoy being as gracious of a receiver as you are a giver.
And once again, that your days are filled with warmth and love; that your mind is filled with curious wonder; and, that your heart is filled with joy.
Wishing you peace, elation + hydration (that smoked salmon can be a doozy).
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Thing Finding Thursday with Megan Potter
Today's Thing Finding Thursday features a guest post by Megan Potter.
Megan is an an Archetypal Counselor & Chinese Face Reader. Yup, thought you might be curious about that. Read on to find out how she woke up (consistently at 1:00 am) to THAT.
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Fireworks, Epiphanies, and Gestating Things that all Come Into Being in their Own Time but are Really In There All Along.
I have the freaking coolest job in the world, seriously. I double dog dare you to find a job as cool as mine.
When I show off for fun (cause if you had my job you’d totally show off for fun too) I literally get to watch people’s jaws drop; they tell me I’m crazy - unbelievable, or they sit speechless with eyes wide. In fact, their reactions are so much fun that my husband likes to use me as entertainment at boring parties and in large groups.
My totally, way cool, job is to read people’s faces. Not their expressions, not their feelings, but their noses and eyebrows and foreheads and cheeks. (For example, I can tell you that with cheeks like that Tanya is a Woman of Authority who can handle being the boss, but also demands a certain pride in everything she does.) [ed. note: oooooh, she's gooood]
My work is centered around Chinese Face Reading, but that’s not my Thing. It’s just one vehicle that lets me express my thing.
Rewind to two, three, years ago.
It’s approximately 1:00 am, and I’m curled up on the couch with a book and pen. Everyone has gone to their respective beds and I’m soaking up the dark stillness, allowing myself to be swept up in this treasure I recently found, my first book on Chinese Face Reading. I’m not even at the face reading part, I’m still only in the front matter: the stuff on why the author (who would later become my teacher) thinks This Work matters.
Every now and then I need to set this book down. I need to tug it away from my body so that the electric shock it is radiating though me can release enough to let me catch my breath.
She is talking about the importance of knowing ourselves, about her work of being a mirror for others so they can rediscover - have affirmed - that Self for themselves.
And fireworks are going off inside of me. I can’t sit still. I have to stand up, then sit down again, to keep reading.
How could I have missed that? Of course that’s my thing. I’ve known it all along, I just never knew it before.
My work is Chinese Face Reading, but my Thing is seeing people’s souls and empowering them to live from their selves. It always has been, even when I had no bloody idea what I was going to do with myself.
Rewind to Six years before that.
It’s approximately 1:00 am; everyone’s in bed and I’m sitting in front of my computer chatting it up on my favorite forum. The flicker of the computer screen is the only light in the house, the clack of my keyboard seems to echo deathly loud.
A friend posts: “I’m having a coaching session tomorrow, wish me luck.”
What’s a coaching session?
I click the link she, so kindly, provides.
A new world opens in front of me as I read a blurb: What is Coaching?
I could feel it, energy moving up my body, my stomach flips, my heart pounds to the rhythm, “This is me. This is me. This is me.” I could feel it throbbing through me.
It’s me, it’s who I’ve always been, what I’d always been doing - even when I had no freaking clue what I could do with my life.
Fireworks I can’t contain push me to my groggy (formerly asleep) husband’s bedside, “Oh my God Jeff, you have to listen to this!”
Fast Forward 3 or 6 years from now
It’s approximately 1:00 am and I’m up reading, or surfing, or chatting - when I should clearly be in bed. But the dark, quiet, aloneness brings me to a place of internal stillness nothing else does.
I’ve found a new idea, a fascinating article, amazing person and one more thing is expanding within me. I can feel it, the energy rush that confirms this is exactly the thing I needed to find at this exact moment. There are fireworks and excitement, and something clicks into place for me.
As a result my work - my job - will grow, expand, or maybe shrink - or even leap, take an entirely new shift. But when it happens, I’ll stand there open mouthed (like so many of my Face Reading clients), and say: This is me. As soon as I see it I’ll know it’s true, has always been true, even when there was no way I could possibly define it before.
I’m not the least bit worried about it though, because I know whatever happens at that 1:00 am epiphany I’ll still be looking into soul’s, I’ll still be empowering and affirming and reflecting back every gorgeous Self that plants itself in front of me.
Because that’s my Thing, and my Thing is ME.
Which is why I’m constantly walking through life with eyes raised, arms open, and heart singing just waiting for Fireworks and Epiphanies knowing they’ll only take me closer to who I already am.
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You can find Megan Potter at her blog, on Facebook or on Twitter. She does one-on-one Face Reading sessions, teaches the Five Elements, and offers Elemental self-care retreats.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Have it be easy
I am so over the whole "for-it-to-be-important-it-must-be-hard" thing. That’s never worked for me. Oh, I’ve tried it. I’ve white-knuckled and fretted, and all it's ever won me was this worry line (the one that yielded the “have you thought of Botox?” question from the dermatologist). No.
Ease is my new port of call. Yours too?
Here are some thoughts on how to make alllll easier.
Decide to make it easier. (Just like that).
When you notice yourself clenching up, ask yourself: how can this be easier? Inhale and release your shoulders on the exhale. Proceed.
Know your values. If you ignore everything else, please don’t ignore this one. They inform E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G you do.
Evernotes for your smart phone. Super smart, super easy way to remember everything.
Whether you scrapbook or not, document every kid-ism you can. (Evernotes!)
Short bursts of exercise burn goodly amounts of calories and fit into your day (like, 10 minutes of running). Making excuses takes more time than that.
You can never give (or receive) enough hugs in this lifetime.
When you clink those glasses, do like your mama told you and look the other person in the eye. Acknowledgment is a gift.
If you’re Canadian, get yourself a TFSA and add the option of saving 50 cents from every Interac transaction. Set it and forget it, (because invisible savings rocks my socks.)
When it just doesn’t want to be written, record yourself talking about it. Have that transcribed. (Trust me…)
Know that you have permission. Always did.
Take three hours once/month to get your bookkeeping up to date.
Keep the pulp from your morning green juice in a freezer bag and make a vegetable stock when the bag’s full. Start with olive oil, onions + garlic, throw in the pulp, add water +bay leaf and simmer for as long as you like. You’ll be tweeting about how virtuous you feel.
Next time you’re stuck, try a handstand against the wall. Oh, don’t worry about it being elegant…it won’t be.
Remember Master Godin’s words: Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.
Know how to fill in this blank: I am ridiculously good at __________. (This is your super power…knowing it will come in handy).
Set big + beautiful goals that make your heart soar. Then break them down into the smallest, most delicious morsels you can. Savour.
Cut corners, but be clear about which ones must stay sharp.
Know the difference between fear and intuition.
Write a love letter. To your business. To your self. To your love. To your daughter. To your father. To your ideal client. To your future spouse. The universe loves love and rewards it with ease.
“No, but thanks for asking”. You must stretch this muscle, otherwise your yes’s have no value. And what a colossal waste of energy that is.
Clarity will set you free from the shackles of “hard”.
You could say it, but you could also sing it. (Insta-mood lift).
Bootstrap until you can hire the very very best.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Thing Finding Thursday with Jasmine Lamb of All is Listening
I missed you last week, Dear Reader. iMovie and I were having a lovers' quarrel and it was trying to keep us apart. We're on speaking terms again and I am thrilled to share with you the interview I did with Jasmine Lamb.
As a coach, one of my skills is the capacity to listen to my clients at different levels. I listen for what they say, and to what they DON'T say. I listen to the pauses in speech, to the speed of the words and from whence said words come (diaphragm, throat, nose...it all indicates something different). So, yeah. I'm pretty skillish. And yet, YET, this woman has brought me to my knees. She is a LISTENER. A masterful listener who energetically reminded me to sloooowwww waayyyy, WAAAAYYY down.
Jasmine works one-on-one with people through her Healing Heart Sessions. She writes the blog All is Listening: Tools and Tales for Breaking Up, Waking Up, and Falling in Love. She is author of the forthcoming digital book, A Call to Listen: How to Start an Inner Revolution.
She has plenty of thoughts for you Thing-seekers and non-seekers. {Hint: it has everything to do with listening.}
So please, get your cup of tea, settle into your comfiest chair, and give this a good listen. Then turn everything off and take the time and make the space to listen to your own self.
Interview with Jasmine Lamb for Thing Finding Thursday
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Ooooh yes. Stop and listen. What is your life, right now, trying to tell you?
You can find Jasmine at her blog, All is Listening and on Twitter.
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Edited Transcript of Interview with Jasmine Lamb For Thing Finding Thursday
Jasmine: My thing is listening. And when I say listening what I am talking about is listening first to my experience in this moment and to what is arising for me right here. And extending out from there is listening to the environment, to the actual sounds, and then also having from this place of presence, listening to others.
Tanya: I suspect it’s always been with you but it hasn’t been articulated as such.
Jasmine: That’s right. It always has been with me and I’ve always almost known it, but haven’t quite and I’ve been confused about it. Because what was reflected back to me when I was younger, both as a child and a teenager and then in my career in my twenties, was my skill in relating to people and in listening to people and my skill in taking care of people. And I have really powerful skills in this area and I got enormous amounts of positive feedback from it. And at that stage in my life I was confused into thinking that the thing that I got lots of positive feedback about and the place where I got all the compliments and the place where people gave me attention, that that was my thing;
Jasmine: I was a fixer and a problem solver and a hand holder and a “let’s navigate this divorce successfully” person.
And that’s all a part of me. It still is; I have those skills. I want to use those skills. But, it wasn’t entirely feeding my soul.
Tanya: So there was a point at which you went from this listener in this capacity to another kind of listener. The listener that is very informed by your center – so what was that shift?
Jasmine: It was a culmination of catastrophes. I woke up one day five years ago, ready to go to work. I felt a pain in my side and it brought me to the ground. And as I descended, my back seized up. And I just couldn’t move.
And what first was my back being seized up transitioned to something where the bottom fell out of all my senses. I couldn’t tolerate sound; I couldn’t tolerate fast movement or even slow movement.
Jasmine: What I could be with was the very quietest, most still part of the center of me. That was where I could be. And I had touched that place in my life, but I had never really rested there. It gave me this incredible opportunity to rest within myself and to listen there. And really to listen in the moment there . When we are really listening, we are open to what we don’t know.
Tanya: I’m sensitive to that person who’s listening and saying, “Okay, but I haven’t known what my thing is for my whole life and now I’m open to being open to it and I want to find my damned thing.” I feel that there’s that sense of urgency, so I think that you have a lot to offer in this realm of confusion and bless you and I hope that comes across with the respect that I mean for it to. But I know that you have a belief that confusion, that feeling lost is actually a really powerful place so will you say more about that?
Jasmine: When we are lost it doesn’t feel powerful; it feels often miserable. Particularly when we are trying to get out of feeling lost. When I have been able to accept my lost-ness, and often it comes because I just am so fed up and so exhausted and so at my wit’s end that I just say, “Okay, I am lost. I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what is next and I don’t know what my thing is.” And then, I can feel it right now, I just took this big breath. My body, my being, sighs a sigh of relief that is like, “Great. You are accepting where you actually are.”
And from that place, knowing really does come.
So if I was working with a client around this, you would actually slow way down and I would give them this opportunity to feel the sensations of felt sense. Their physical sensations that are coming up in this wanting and desire and lost-ness. And let those unfold and let those unwind.
Tanya: I love this – on your site. Breaking up, waking up, falling in love and I was wondering if you could play with me and knit that into the context of finding your thing or stitch it in for me.
Jasmine: But for those people who are seeking their thing, they’re on a journey and what I think is exciting is that your life is going to take you there if you will listen to it. And if you’re willing to go for the ride, which might mean some breaking up happening and it doesn’t happen consecutively; it all gets mixed up. You’re going to wake up to what is true for you and it might not be what you expected and it might be scary.
Tanya: What is it that you want for people who are watching this right now who may be looking for their thing or trying to claim their thing or in process or maybe they think they found it but they’re feeling, “Is this it?” What do you want for them?
Jasmine: I want them to open to the possibility that their thing is inside of them. And that they can move towards it by trusting themselves and slowing down to include more parts of themselves in the conversation.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.