REWILD + FREE - STOP 'charging your worth' (76)

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

A spicy rant about the dogma of 'charging your worth' in the coaching industry, particularly among (white) women entrepreneurs, and how it often fuels toxic competition and capitalism.In this episode, I also share my decision to lower my prices, explore the nuances of choosing a pay in your own currency" pricing model, and the importance of intentionality and discernment in our financial exchanges. .As always, I'd love to hear what stirs or lands for you in this conversation. Send me an unscripted voice note on IG (@nicolepasveer) and let me know! Watch this episode HERE.LINKS: All current offerings can be found here:  https://www.nicolepasveer.com/servicesLet's be Pen Pals! Join my email list: https://nicolepasveer.kit.com/penpals 

You're listening to Rewild and Free. This is the go-to podcast for conscious and holistic entrepreneurs who are ditching society's to-do list for intentional living, freedom, and abundance. If we haven't met yet, I'm Nicole Pazvir. I'm an ex-nurse, turn-matrescence guide, and business coach, leading women just like you into the new paradigm. Keep listening if you're ready to unsubscribe from patriarchal motherhood, bro-marketing, and boss-babe culture.

Because in this space, we use nature as our framework as we move towards feminine embodied business development, cyclical orientation, and slow living. Together, let's rewild and remember as we break free from survival and reconnect to what truly matters. Okay, friend, steep your tea and take the most loving breath

you've given to yourself today, and let's go. breath you've given to yourself today and let's go. Coming to you hopefully for a solo mini, so that's what I'm calling these shorter episodes that are just me hoping to be under 30 minutes because that's short for me. I have lowered my prices. We're going to start with that. I've lowered my prices on one-on-one sessions, one-on-one packages with me, and I've also lowered my pricing for Unruly, my upcoming eight week round table experience

for neurodivergent coaches, doers, and healers. And I wanna talk about the whole charge your worth debate, not even a debate, it's like a dogma that is being passed down to us as female and women entrepreneurs. And I actually just had a conversation with my own mentor, Julia Albain, this morning, and that's what's inspired this conversation

because I voiced to her that I was intuitively feeling this urge and this desire to lower my prices and I was really having a hard time trusting that urge because there was a voice in my head that was basically saying, oh, that's just out of scarcity, the whole narrative, the whole story that people aren't going to buy if I raise my prices or another voice that was saying, I don't even know. I don't even know what all the voices were saying. I feel like I've gotten so good at tuning some of those voices out. But what I did realize is there was a lot of friction in actually trusting that urge

and trusting that maybe it was an intuitive urge. And so anyways, voice this to my mentor. I had said that I'm sniffing this thing out. I'm seeing this thing in the coaching industry. And when I talk about coaching industry, I'm basically talking about white women because unfortunately that's who is running the coaching industry right now.

So talking about white women and talking about how white women have this like unspoken competition with each other, I'm thinking from my own personal experience, I caught myself in this unspoken competition of, ooh, I'm better than you when I charge more for a session. We are all just mingling our self-worth with our work. And that's like issue number one. I want to, I want to put a pin in that and come back to it. with our work. And that's like issue number one. I want to put a pin in that and come back to it. But what's happening is we've all kind of been told to charge our worth when don't undervalue

what you're worth. Don't undervalue your offers. And that's true to an extent. And also it's gotten to this point where we are literally just like leveling up with one each one another and in a really toxic and harmful way. It's just feeding into capitalism and basically everything that's wrong with this world. I was expressing this to Julia and saying, yeah, there's this unspoken competition, it's gross, I don't want to be a part of it. As soon as I realized that there was a part of me that was playing that game, that's when I was like, no, this doesn't feel good.

This isn't actually what I want to do. And I think what also came through with that in just sitting with the urge to lower my prices is one of the voices that was in hesitation to doing that was actually like fear of other people's perceptions, fear of like people think oh cool, you should charge more or you are worth so much more. You could charge that and people would pay for it, or that offer is so amazing, you could literally charge 10 times that. Like sometimes those statements aren't actually helpful because I think we just are constantly feeling, well I'm still not doing something right, I'm still not pricing this right, I can't trust myself in discerning what

that energetic exchange can look like. I can't trust myself to choose a number and feel into, yeah, that actually feels really good for the exchange of my time and my energy and my wisdom and my heart, right? And where am I going with this? I think, yeah, just in the brief conversation I had with Julia, she reflected back to me that, you know what, like men aren't having this conversation. Men aren't told to charge their worth. You know how men price their offers? Men price to sell.

And it just really cascaded this whole thought process in my mind that, yeah, like this is the issue. Like so many of us, like I said, we've mingled our self-worth with our business and so we're on this journey now of trying to create separation between us and our business. And I have some thoughts on that too, because I think like time-wise, tangibly, that can be really hard, especially when our businesses are heart-led and there's actually an expression of our own creativity and our own essence. I think it's hard to create that tangible separation, but I do think it's really important

to create a separation between our business, our clients, how much we are earning, how much we're profiting, how much we're monetizing, what we're charging. That should not be a measurement of our self-worth. I want to say that again. What you are earning, what you are charging for your offers, should not be a measurement of your self-worth. And so if we continue to follow the advice out there to charge your worth, of course we're gonna keep like tangling that shit up. Of course we are. keep like tangling that shit up. Of course we are.

So anyways, coming back to the advice that's given to male entrepreneurs, that's like price to sell. And that sometimes means that you actually price yourself lower than your quote unquote competitors so that people are more likely to choose you. And I know in a like salesy profit over people perspective, that's gross. That's not what we're going for.

But in a very real, okay, me, for example, I have open books right now. I have space for clients to come in. I want to serve clients. I want more people booking with me. I want to fill my Unruly group program, right? I want to fill the other group programs I am currently just dating. It is more important to me that those spaces are filled rather than having, let's say, like a $5,000 offering, a $5,000 container that people aren't signing up for. Do you know what I mean?

It's way more fulfilling for me to actually serve a human in front of me than it is to potentially make more money by waiting for that one unicorn. That's kind of a drastic example. But do you get where I'm going with this? When we are pricing to sell, it means we're constantly just meeting our businesses and meeting our community, meeting our clients with where they're at. And I

don't know if you've noticed, but the world's a dumpster fire right now. There is a lot of very real and valid scarcity around finances and money. If you're in Canada, there's the whole like tariff shit that's going down. There's a lot of just fear around our relationship with the United States. And so for someone like me who coaches globally, and actually who has a majority of like American clients and a majority of American mentors and coaches, I'm feeling myself at this friction point. Like I want to be able to be loyal to my own country and be able to keep circulating money in my own currency and also my entire business has been built

off of charging in US dollars and so this is a bit of a tangent. This is a tangent to say that I'm now trying something new. I'm gonna try pricing my offers at a pay-in-your- own currency because it's important to me that fellow Canadians aren't having to cough up our horrible exchange rate at the moment. And it's also important to me that I'm still like serving my American audience and I want to continue that relationship. I don't want there to be a war between us. I don't want there to be friction between us. I don't want you to not hire me because I'm Canadian and I don't want to not work with you because you're American. That literally doesn't exist in my mind and also the water we swim in in the world that is literally surrounding us is going to create a

lot of like fear and scarcity around that decision. And again I was speaking to Julia about this like it is really important to me that I am actually circulating some money to the good conscious Americans who I know are putting their money in like good conscious places, right? That means that maybe I'm not spending my money at like Walmart and Amazon and Target. And again, just like bringing intention to that. So bringing intention to where we're spending also requires us to bring intention to how we are pricing and how we are receiving money. And yeah, just this is coming back to I'm going to start charging in your own currency. This is going to be really clunky at first because it is a shit show on the back end of things. Yeah, I'm

still figuring out in terms of one on one work. So if you're desiring to just book a single session with me or book a package of sessions, that's probably going to be easy because I can just create like a separate invoice for you. But for some of my group programs, it's really clunky because it's likely going to require me to create like separate like checkout pages. And that's not entirely annoying because I use DriveCart so I can just clone it, but it's still annoying. It's just more complex and I'm really about infusing simplicity into my business. So bear with me as I try this out.

This is literally all just to share my own process out loud and invite you to question and challenge the norm around charging your worth and like just reflect on what does that even mean and what does that mean in terms of you deciding how to price your offers and like how often have you priced something just because it's like what your mentor told you should do. The other thing too is if like you've priced so high that now you're not even talking about the thing because it is so activating for you to talk about and to try to sell your thing, that is a disservice to you, that is a disservice to your people because now you're not talking about the thing that can actually transform someone's lives and they're not actually getting to be in your space and in your energy and have their life transformed. So you need to find that sweet spot where you like are so deeply rooted in the

belief that what you're charging is in right relationship to just what it is that you're selling. And again, this gets really murky because even for me, like the stuff I offer is literally life changing, like it's priceless, right? So I can't really put a value on that. But what I can do is I can put a value on what feels like a clean exchange for like my time. And this is also tricky because we've been taught and again, this is just women empowerment spaces, we've been taught to really come away from this like time is money narrative. And I do agree with that.

Like I do. And also, there's just more nuance to it, right? There's just more nuance to it. I'm actually really inspired. I'm in Simone Sol's Truth or Dare program right now. And you guys, it is incredible. Everything Simone does is incredible. I could, I would literally give her

I don't think I'd give her my firstborn child Because I love Aubrey but Aubrey's a handful I would give her my secondborn child Am I isn't allowed to say that out loud that is probably like really bad to say it loud I think I take that back. Maybe we'll edit it out Maybe we won't the point is I love Simone the type of person that I have so much trust in her wisdom and her offers that before she even tells me how much something, so how before she says how much something is I'm already in and I'm willing to pay like whatever she tells me I'm gonna have to pay. But her Truth or Dare program is only, it was only $250. It was only $250. This is

the type of stuff that like some other coach might charge like $25,000 for. It's like that high level of coaching that is happening in this space. And I'm just so inspired that like you don't have to charge, like she's not charging the value and the worth of the transformation. So how do we do more of that? And again this is nuanced. This is not me saying oh go lower your prices. This is me just asking you to do a vibe check with yourself and check in like the do your

current prices actually feel good to you the do your current prices actually feel good to you? Are your current prices actually like egotistical? Have you created that pricing based off of like performance and like fitting in and trying to please your coaches and your mentors and the people before you that have told you like this is how to price offers? Are you just trying to be a good A plus student? I know I was. And yeah, I think there is something to be said about the ego driving some of that because I think as humans, it's human nature to want more. And when we get an inch, we want to take a mile and I don't want to shame that. I think that's very natural. That's like where we get our like growth mindset. And obviously there's purpose in that there's yeah like it's an adaptive response that I don't want to shame us about and also as conscious human we get

to flex that discernment muscle we get to check in wait is just this my ego wanting more for the sake of seeing if it can get more is it just to feel like oh I'm better than so-and-so because I charge $300 per session and she only charges $100 per session. It's comical even saying that out loud, but I want you to like check in with yourself and even notice when you're seeing someone else's prices, do you automatically dictate, oh, they're probably not a good coach then, they're only charging $100 for a session. not a good coach then. They're only charging $100 for a session. Oh, that course probably isn't very good because it's only $250. We've been so programmed to believe that like that $25,000 program, that $25,000 mastermind or that $500 a session coach is better. And I

just want you to question that. I want us all to question that. I want us all to challenge that and really begin to price our offers from just this place of like groundedness and integrity. This isn't even like a bro marketing thing because I think the bro marketing thing really is like this profit over people and it's like charge as much as you can with the least amount of you involved. The bro marketing way is this obsession profit over people and it's like charge as much as you can with the least amount of you involved. The bro marketing way is this obsession with scalability and this obsession with yeah just having more conversions with less time. And I think if you are hanging out with me in this space, that's not actually your goal.

Like you actually are fulfilled by having connections with your clients. You don't actually want everything you do to be passive. Here's a brief story for you. The very first online course I made, it was just like a mini course, and it was completely passive. It was self-paced. It had nothing to do with me. Like, other than me creating the course and it having the pre-recorded videos, there was no actual interaction with me once someone

purchased it. And for it being one of my first offers, it was like quote-unquote successful because I think I had, I don't even know, over five sales from it which I think as like a first-time person without knowing what she's doing, that was pretty cool. The thing is, all five of those people, as I would get the little email notification to say blah blah blah signed up for blah blah blah, I felt nothing. I felt so disconnected from them. I felt so disconnected from that offer. And it was a real point of illumination for me in getting to move forward in a deeper connection to my values, recognizing that a really big value, potentially like one of my highest

values is like connection and community. And so to be able to infuse that in my business means that I want a part of me in my business. I want to be in relationship with you. I want to be in relationship with you. I want to have a connection with you. If I am providing you a service or an offer, a course or education or something, I want to see it through. I want to know how it impacts you, right? I don't just want you to pay me money, take the thing and then I don't know who you are.

Like I wrote an email earlier this week, basically just saying, Hey, are we pen pals? I don't want this just to be me broadcasting to you because you are not just a number to me. And I truly believe that. And I think obviously there might be a time and place where it is time to quote unquote scale my business. And when and if that happens, like, there's still going to be a very big foundation of me being present and connected with, like, real humans,

right? I never want that to be gone and I needed that first experience of creating a completely passive offer to show me that. And this isn't to say that, like, I'm never going to have completely passive courses down the line, but if I don't have that foundation where it's meeting this need of me wanting to be in service and connection to real life humans, then this business is never gonna feel fulfilling.

And that's where I was going with it. It's actually more fulfilling for me to have a business where I'm in connection with human beings. And so if that means lowering my prices so that I can be in deeper and greater connection with humans, then I'm going to do that. When and if things like start filling up and I have a waitlist, then maybe it's time to increase my prices. And also, there's like boundaries here, right? There's a boundary of what I'm willing to exchange my time and energy for and I'm not going to

go below that. I'm not going to just give shit out for free, but I'm not letting my ego drive the show when it comes to pricing, just to outperform someone that's doing something similar to me because we've been fed this belief that if you charge more, you're a better co-worker. Okay, rant over. Thank you for listening. Like I said, my one-on-one sessions, one-off sessions, pricing has changed, packages with me have changed, and Unruly pricing has also dropped down to $440. So it's honestly a steal and it's all at pay in your own currency. So if you're Canadian, that means $440 Canadian, not $440 American. If you're American, that

means $440 American. And you're American, that means 440 American. And you know what? I think I'm just going to quickly say more about that because for me, I truly believe that like the exchange of money is just an exchange of energy. It's a currency, right? And currency literally is like the movement of energy. And so this is where it's complex because there's not a lot of people talking about this.

And I get it because it is complex, but like here in Canada, basically if someone is charging $2,000 for their course and I have to pay in US dollars, that's basically costing me 3,000 Canadian. The thing is, I don't actually think there's a big discrepancy in my cost of living versus your cost of living. My mortgage and the costs we pay for daycare and groceries and buying a book really aren't

that different. So why is it that I have to cough up literally like 30% more than someone that lives south of me? I don't even know I'm going with this. The point is like it's just an energetic exchange and so to be able if we're talking about oh you have to invest in yourself and it's not actually about the, it's about what you value and what you're willing to, what's that stretchy amount that you're willing to invest on. First of all, you know what? We are all stretched in so many different facets right now. Can we stop stretching ourselves with money? Please, can we stop stretching ourselves with money?

Can we actually find that like cushy exchange of money and stop feeling like we can't heal ourselves if we don't stretch ourselves financially? Because again, that's like a load of bullshit that is only talked about in the white woman coaching space. Men aren't talking about that. My husband isn't being like, oh, like, I'm only going gonna go invest in this if it feels really stretchy for me. And also there's a whole buttload of conditioning that comes with this, right? As women really in, like, only a few generations ago were women allowed to open a bank account for themselves. And

we've been taught be smart with your money. What the fuck does that even mean? Or you better marry rich, you better get a job that pays well. What the fuck is all of that? It's just really interesting when you start dissecting it all. And I'm not going to go there today, but I just want to open up this conversation. I want you to start exploring this for yourself. And like I said, start flexing that discernment muscle when it comes to how you price your offers and also noticing what kind of like preconceived judgments and projections you're making when you see the way other people are pricing. Are you thinking oh she's charging too low or she's charging too much and again I'm always a she whenever making those comments

about men. And yeah as always like I want to hear from you so let me know what lands and stars in this conversation. Obviously come join Unruly with me, it's gonna be a kick-ass eight-week group for neurodivergent weirdos really wanting to explore their own neurodivergence and lean into their weird in their world-changing business. Of course links are in the show notes and yeah if you're curious about one-on-one work with me say hi, don't be a stranger, as awkward as I am on this podcast is how awkward I am in your Instagram DMs. So send me a rambly voice note that I have a big fat permission slip to send you one back. Okay, my friend. Goodbye. I love you.