A very common theme in the hypnotherapy and complementary therapy world is that of “charging as much as you can” and “the higher you charge, the more you will be respected.”
Something I have encountered a lot is “If it is important to the client, then they will pay anyway.”
I’m not so sure about this idea, and I personally wonder if this reflects the elevated egos of so many private therapists.
The reality is that many people with problems simply do not have the money, and so to insist that they pay a high fee will only add to their burdens and not necessarily help them in a positive way.
The other issue with a high fee is that it acts as a very good filter by excluding those people at the really shit-end of life and instead works to select those who have a significant disposable income to spend on a luxury such as hypnotherapy.
Therapists do like their YARVIS clients (Young, Attractive, Rich, Verbal, Intelligent, and Sane), and the really screwed-up ones who are without money, have poor articulation, and poor personal hygiene are definitely the ones to be avoided.
It’s easy to claim a high success rate when one’s clients don’t really have any major problems in life and what they do have are basically cosmetic problems.
But then we all want to earn a good living and have the dream life that they told us about in our training course. Or more importantly, the dream life they told us about in order to get us on their training course in the first place.
Well, what did you expect?
What do therapists do when they don’t get enough clients? They run training courses on how to get clients, of course!
So here’s a simple guideline for knowing how much to charge: do you feel bad, guilty, or awkward with the amount of money you charge? Are you scared of “being found out”?
That is the clue, you are charging too much.
For years, I have suffered the problem of egomaniacs and general dipshits in the NLP world telling me to put up my prices. Well, where are those people now? Most of them are either in enormous debt or have gone back to their day jobs. Really. But their websites are all still online, displaying the ridiculous prices they pretended to be charging when, in fact, they never got any clients at all.
How do I know this? I do a credit check on these people.
The internet is a graveyard of websites that preach success but actually were never successful in the first place, and this gives the illusion that people are all earning loads of money and we are the ones who are not doing so well. I have copies of many trainers’ and therapists’ financial records, and they make for very poor reading.
Despite it all, I still don’t understand how it is possible to rack up a six-figure debt by being a hypnotherapist, but it isn’t uncommon.
Something I did several years back which was quite successful was to offer two prices – £25 (students, low wage) and £95 (waged) – I always let people decide for themselves which price they paid. People coming via my websites rarely selected the cheaper option. The local social services such as community housing, probation offices, crisis centres, and so forth did provide me with a steady stream of £25 clients, which kept me very busy indeed and helped me to build the extensive professional network that I have today.
Years back, I also did “Free Fridays”, where I’d offer one or two sessions for free on Friday – anyone could book those sessions, regardless of income. Again, people were kind about that. The waged ones would mention that they deliberately weren’t asking for a free session.
What about the people who booked the free sessions? Well, most of them were either late, didn’t show up, or were moaners who always wanted more, more, more, and nothing was ever good enough. So I stopped the free Fridays.
Anyway, just some random thoughts. I hope this helps.
