What does it mean when clients “can’t afford” you? This is such a powerful learning, when you finally get it…

“Can’t afford” to hire you means they don’t want you enough. That’s all. The bottom line is if someone doesn’t hire you, they don’t see the value you give as worthy of the sacrifice. That doesn’t mean you don’t provide great value. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be well paid. They just don’t see an urgent connection between what they need and what you offer. Either you aren’t giving them what they perceive they need, it’s not important enough to them, or you are offering what they need but you’ve dropped the ball in communication.

When someone tells me she “can’t afford” me, I always take the opportunity to point out that it’s more powerful–and honest–for them to say, “It’s not an economic priority for me at this time” instead of “I can’t afford” it. I’m totally cool with not being an economic priority! Nothing wrong with that!

As a coach, I feel it’s unethical to allow (even prospective) clients to relieve themselves of responsibility for their choices. I will not collude with their disempowerment. It is PROFOUNDLY disempowering to make money or time a scapegoat, an excuse for not doing something. This doesn’t serve them. And it can be quite LIBERATING to be given total permission to say “No. Other things are a higher priority.”

At the same time it takes enormous self-management to hear someone talk about having trouble coming up with money for food or rent. Everything in me wants to say, “Don’t hire me! You can’t afford it!” (And I’ve done that, much to my regret.)

It is ALWAYS their call to make. To give a discount, to give it away for free, or tell someone they can’t afford me is, essentially, saying “You don’t have what it takes.” Ewwww.

The people I take on as clients want me so badly that they’ll do whatever it takes to hire me, and they thank me. The moment I find myself trying to convince someone to hire me, I need to pause and acknowledge we probably aren’t a good match, and say so.

Ironically, this hands off approach (trying to “overcome objections” tends to bite me in the a**) is often enough to motivate people to come back and hire me. And if it doesn’t, we weren’t a good match.

I’ll add one last word: I find it helps to be CRYSTAL CLEAR about what results a client will get, how they’ll know, and when. I never promise “you will make money,” but I can tell them precisely what I can guarantee. And I stay absolutely in integrity about what I can promise and what I can’t.

This was my response to a coach who was struggling with a client who refused to connect with her emotions in coaching, a client who believed emotions belong in “therapy” instead.

Here’s what I wrote:

There are different styles and different opinions on what we define as “coaching”.

The International Coaches Federation says:
“Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.”

Your clients isn’t wrong in her expectations: ICF doesn’t say a word about emotions. She could probably find a coach out there who only works superficially (not a good coach). Her expectations don’t match your approach. She needs to be educated without making her wrong. I recommend you have a conversation with her about how you work, and why you use your approach.

Here’s an example. I received a great email response from a listener to one of my Financial Alchemy teleclasses. The writer wanted to know why she had to go “down the well” if she already knew her limiting beliefs.

The first step of Financial Alchemy coaching is to take a client down the rabbit hole, much farther than they knew was there. This may look counterintuitive–isn’t the point of the process to reconnect clients to the abundance and prosperity of the universe? We have to create POLARITY. The first step of Alchemy is “negridio,” the blackening. It works.

Stuff may show up here around child abuse or other hurts, just by digging into negative memories of money. It’s all related. (For those of you who are freaking out right now and thinking I’m overstepping my role as a coach, my clients are creative, resourceful, and whole. I’m very careful to tune into clients who are not well, and to steer them to something other than coaching. I’ve coached this process hundreds and hundreds of times, and I’ve never had a problem.)

Here’s my “why” for dragging my clients down the well in the beginning, insisting that they set aside every positive thought they have about Money: I’m firing up there neurology for change. Einstein said, “We cannot solve problems with the same consciousness which created them.” Information comes to us and new neurological connections are created during heightened states of emotional excitement. This is NLP talk for why we do process coaching.

Here’s a quick and easy HOW for getting a client out of her head. I do this a lot with professional women in traditionally masculine fields–lawyers, accountants, CPAs. I ask my client to stand with her feet spread as wide as her shoulders, and to bend her knees and rock at her pelvis, as if she were hula dancing. “Speak from your hips,” I’ll say.

There are a few reasons this works–I learned this from a coach who spoke at my local PCMA chapter. She has a book on “Four Energies.” I’m taking clients who are stuck in fire (Just do it!) energy into water (give and take) energy. There’s a whole area of somatic coaching that uses body wisdom.

I suspect your client wants more from coaching than she’s allowing herself, but the last thing you want to do is push when she resists.