What People Pay Coaches For | 3 Principles Coaching

Something I see coaches struggle with is understanding why people would pay them a higher fee than others charge.

If you’re coming from the mindset of teaching someone something – which was the mindset I was coming from when I started coaching – then it does seem difficult as to why someone will pay you more than somebody else, because it puts a mental limit on the cap of what you can charge.

For example, if my mentors were charging $300 a session, in my mind I couldn’t charge more than $300 because I was learning from them. However, when I learned that coaching isn’t teaching – it’s a different service that I’m providing – then it changed my whole thinking around fees, money, what clients were paying for and how long they would work with me.

Coaching is about creating a different future than the default future that a client would have, had they not hired you.

To give an instance, if a small business owner wants to grow her revenue from a million pounds a year to one and a half million pounds a year, she may hire a coach to help her do that. What she’s paying for is not for the coach to teach her something – although that might be part of the coaching – she’s paying for the coach to help her create an additional half a million pounds a year.

Similarly, if a busy executive is struggling in his marriage with his wife and that’s affecting his career, he may look to a coach to help him come back to having a good solid relationship with his partner where they’re no longer fighting and they’re falling back in love with each other. Again, he’s not paying for being taught something, he’s paying for his marriage to be different than it is right now.

Within coaching, there may or may not be teaching involved. What’s most important is that clients are paying for a certain future.

Also, something I didn’t understand about clients renewing when I first started coaching was that once clients achieve the outcome they set out to achieve from hiring a coach they often now see other things possible for them that they didn’t see before and they’d like support to achieve those things – again, a different future than they might have had should they stop working with a coach.

This is how coaches can end up coaching clients for years. Not because they’re ineffective, not because the client doesn’t get it. But because they’re constantly helping the client create different futures that the client didn’t see possible for themselves.