Choose Your Own Price Coaching – What I’ve Learned and Why I Still Do It
I realised earlier this week that it’s been three years since I first adopted a “choose your own price” model for Pick The Lock coaching calls. I’ve been asking myself what this approach has taught me and why it still feels right. I mean, it must do. If it didn’t, I’d have fiddled with it by now.
I can pinpoint the moment the idea lodged itself in me. I’d been talking with Rob Hardy about something similar he was experimenting with, and it had the flavour of pull Justin Sunseri, and I talked about recently. Less “Eureka!” more “Oooh, nice…” followed by an invitational flow, beckoning me towards it.
The Pull Towards Choose Your Own Price Coaching
Accessibility
I’ve long had a visceral reaction to people being priced out of support. Especially when the offer is framed as “life-changing” and then paired with high-pressure sales tactics like saying if you genuinely cared about changing, you would “find the money”. Personally, I’ve never found urgency, panic, or manufactured scarcity to be reliable companions for meaningful decisions or long-term sustainability. Even when a decision turns out well, it’s unlikely to be because we were rushed.
I wanted a way for people to work with me without wrestling with those pressures. Everyone receives the same respect, attention, and support from me. In a culture obsessed with premium access, it felt like a refreshing leveller that leaves no one out.
Removing Pressure
I don’t find “free discovery calls” an easy first coaching conversation. They feel haunted by the words “potential client”. I don’t know about you, but I can sense the elephant ghost, aka the dangling threat of the looming sales pitch, in the corner, making it very hard to relax.
We may feel unsafe investing too much of ourselves, being honest, or expressing too much enthusiasm, for fear of how it might be used to lure us deeper into the pressure web. That can affect the quality of the conversation.
What if this is enough?
A choose-your-own-price approach was partly a way of testing that question. What if this call could be enough? No funnel or threat of the sales sledgehammer lurking behind the curtain. It helps us both settle into the conversation, allowing vigilance to soften into spaciousness. This spaciousness leaves room for creativity and clarity, which arrive in surprising ways when nobody’s trying to force it.
“But Surely People Won’t Pay Anything”
“People will take advantage of that, and they won’t pay anything.” This assessment may reveal more about them and their cynical view of human nature because, in my experience, it’s simply not true.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how generous people are, though I’m not new to this…
I’ve sold my music on a Pay-What-You-Can basis for many years. At gigs, while some folks find a few coins at the bottom of their pockets (or take a CD for free – no judgement!), others give me more than I would have ever dared to charge. It’s the same with these calls. I want people to feel free not to pay and to give whatever they can realistically afford. But it also amazes me that people sometimes want to give more. And that’s because value is quite odd. It rarely fits neatly into fixed numbers when left to its own devices.
When people decide whether and what to give, they do so from a different place, expressing themselves through gratitude, resonance, relief, and recognition. The amount becomes a response rather than a negotiation. Some tell me they only booked because the pressure was lifted, and then they might end up giving what they would have given anyway. Sometimes more. The feeling of freedom shifts the dynamic.
Deep Processing Beyond the Coaching Call
One pressure I deliberately avoid is the idea that the call must deliver a concrete outcome. Deep processors (e.g. highly sensitive and introverted individuals) rarely have lightning-bolt moments during a conversation. It happens as things unfold later and connections are organically made. This is why I follow up in the days afterwards with reflections or questions that surface as things settle.
This is about making space to slow down, to widen the margins, and to listen beneath the familiar noise we might have stopped noticing.
This contrasts with some messaging around a metric and outcome-based performance culture, where SMART, measurable results are expected for everything. We are not machines, as we are often encouraged to believe. I often see meaningful progress come from curiosity and creativity rather than obsessive striving and productivity hacks.
Creative safety fuels learning, tinkering, and noticing. These impulses remain alive within us, despite many systems at home and work that try to instrumentalise them. Much of my work involves helping people reconnect with what is already inside, beneath the pressure to optimise and perform.
The choose-your-own-price model wasn’t used as a novel business hack. Perhaps it’s not a wise business decision at all. But that wasn’t the point. The appeal was more intuitive for me, regardless of whether it made sense to others. It was a way to align my work with my instinctive values, and over the past three years, it has been a source of great joy and satisfaction to see people connect with it as they have.
Three Years of Choose Your Own Price Coaching
Working this way continues to show me that people don’t need fixing (even though that’s how we’ve been taught to think). Most of us need somewhere to move at a pace that lets us actually hear ourselves. The slowness of my “slow coaching” label (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) isn’t passive or avoidant. Quite the opposite. It’s what stops us from racing into choices we don’t actually want, but which help us look and feel busy and productive.
Progress can develop quickly when we feel confident and safe in the company of others. It’s not my role to command or direct, but to support the other person in discovering their own creative drive and then build pathways around what matters to them.
Book a Pick The Lock Session
If this speaks to you, you’re very welcome to book a Pick The Lock call. I love doing them and really enjoy helping loosen the hinges on stuck places, open sideways angles on familiar goals, and find routes through challenges that honour who you are and how you naturally move. Any questions first? Give me a shout!
