No More Giving Away Your Gift

In your healing practice, you have one goal. To get people healthier, more whole, feeling better, and operating better in their lives. You can see the indicators of a root cause sometimes as soon as a new client contacts you.

You want to solve it. Directly and immediately. You’ve got the skills, you’ve got the ability to see the inner workings and make an impact on their experience.

But there’s one big thing standing in the way.

If you’ve chosen to make healing your profession and to make a living from exchanging your time, energy, attention and expertise for money - giving your services away as soon as you meet someone with a problem is a bad idea.

Your heart may disagree at first, but hear me out, because the mind has to bring some things into balance so that everyone can win, and you’re not left over-giving to ungrateful people who won’t value your gift or respect you for giving it.

Think of your Business as a Game.

The game is pretty simple. Do something you’re good at for people that need it and pay you for it. Do it enough so that you can afford things in your life that you want.

As a healing practitioner, you are, no doubt, moved by a compulsion to see people well and happy, and you have the ability to help them make progress there.

But if you just heal everyone you see, not only will you not be able to build a practice and afford the things you want, but your clients will also not value the service you’ve offered them.

Without an exchange, without an investment, without “skin in the game”, very few people actually value really anything in any exchange. The context of a transaction is critical in order for the people you’re serving to take the work seriously.

Picture this:

You’re taking a stroll and you see a car pull to the side and woman in the passenger seat get out, walk to a public trash can and throw away a pair of perfectly good high heels.

Confused, you get a little closer and realize they’re Louboutin - with their iconic red bottoms. You wave to get her attention before she drives away, “Hey! Sorry to bother you, but weren’t those heels pretty expensive? Why are you throwing them away?”

She replies, “Oh, no. I saw those at an estate sale and the owners threw them in for free when I bought their old Peloton bike.”

“You can actually have them if you want them, they just don’t fit me right.”

Curious, (and you never do this) you grab the heels that were sitting on top of the bin and take them home to see how much they’re worth.

Google Shopping comes up with $795 for the same pair new on eBay.

If Nothing Is Invested, Nothing is Valued.

Your work is powerful. You’ve put time and heart developing your gifts and you really don’t like seeing people in pain. However, if you’re in the business of regularly discounting or giving away your time and energy, you can be sure that many of the people who receive what you have to offer simply do not place the appropriate value on it.