What I Learned from Investing $10K in Coaching
By: Emily Smith
Tags: Healing, Self Improvement, Personal Development, Money Mindset, Coaching

What I Learned from Investing $10K in Coaching

It felt like jumping off the edge of a cliff

Image by Katie Harp on Unsplash

Just a couple of months ago I made the decision to start working with a coach for six months, by investing $10,000 in full.

At this point, I realized that to get to the next level of growing my business and myself, I had to align with someone from who I could learn.

Someone who is in a place in their mindset, self-worth, and business that I want to be and who can hold the space for me to become who I want to be.

I learned about a positive coaching experience from a friend who referred me to her coach. I knew in that instant that I would be working with this coach, as I had seen how my friend was showing up and how similar we were.

I researched this coach a bit more and knew this investment would be worth it.

After the intro call with my coach, I got the link to the package and put my card in. Pulled the trigger. Hit submit. Then the realization hit me.

“Holy crap. I just dropped $10,000 on myself. I just did that.”

This was the highest amount I’ve paid in full for anything. I felt like I was on a high for the next few days as I noticed the energetic shift within myself for taking that leap.

That’s how it works when you make a life-altering change and decision in your life.

On the flip side, I also worried I had made a huge mistake. It wasn’t another 3 weeks until we started and that gave me time to start second-guessing my decision.

I had worked with a coach before in 2018 when I first started my business and had been badly burned. After 5 months of working together, I realized there were a lot of empty promises and I hadn’t moved forward in the ways I had wanted to.

I felt manipulated and cheated. For this coach, I invested $500 a month, so a considerably lower amount, and thankfully I learned a lot from this experience.

I took the time to work on myself for a while so that I could learn to make better decisions for myself.

Two years later, I chose to invest in coaching again, and this time, significantly more ($1333 a month). What changed? Since then I developed my sense of self and intuition so that I had a better radar for choosing the right person to work with.

I also worked on healing my relationship with money and cultivating an abundant mindset.

Essentially I had to unlearn a lot of the mindset beliefs that were inherited from family and society. I learned this all by reading books and working with essential oils.

In working in the personal development and spiritual industry as a guide myself, I had to let go of outdated myths about spirituality and poverty.

I realized you don’t need to poor to be spiritual, and money is here to support you. In our most natural state, we are wildly abundant beings.

In the book The Reluctant Healer by David Elliott, he has a chapter on money, and in it, he says that “the people that are stuck in their flow of money have negative judgments about money.”

He also says, “those who feel victimized by lack of money, are also stuck in moving forward to grow themselves.”

David noticed this connection: when his clients paid for his work they were able to commit to carrying out the changes and he would feel a surge in his own energy to support them.

However, if people placed no value on themselves and wanted profound healing for free, he noticed that in offering out free sessions to these people that they were not able to receive the healing. It was not an equal energetic exchange.

Issues around money are typically disguised as excuses not to grow, and to stay the same.

My mind was blown when I read this. It made me realize that your views on money dictate the quality of your life, and when you expand your consciousness and ability to believe in yourself, you can create a whole new money and success story for yourself.

So that means your personal development is intertwined with your financial health.

Of course, everyone places different values on different things but at the end of the day if you want transformation you have to be willing to invest. Time, money, and effort.

Here’s what I learned from investing more than $10,000 in coaching for myself.

The more you invest, the more energy you draw to your goals

Investing in a high amount for the betterment of yourself immediately sets off a chain reaction.

The week after I paid for my coaching package, I published an article on Medium that made $500 for the first time. I was also asked on a podcast to talk about this article.

I then received inquiries to work with me from this article, and I started my own podcast with a bang. I fully booked out months in advance with guests to interview.

Even though it felt like I had just jumped off the edge of a cliff with this decision, I saw how the energy changed once I made this commitment to myself.

This is one major shift in how I viewed this type of investment differently than I did two years ago.

Instead of looking at it as me potentially giving away $10K and not seeing the results I wanted, I looked at it as me investing that amount in myself.

Whereas before, I focused on the potential for failure, I now focused on the potential for success.

In making that mindset shift, I viewed this payment as a token of how much I believe in myself, no matter what happens.

I’m willing to pay for a service that I’m confident will help me achieve my goals. The coach I chose showed me that she understood the pain points I was going through and the solution to my problem in her marketing.

I trusted my intuition and myself enough to make the right decision. Make sure to do the same for yourself if you’re thinking of investing in a coach, don’t listen to just the words your potential coach speaks but also tune into how they make you feel too.

If you ever feel pressured, that’s not the right coach for you.

The more you invest, the more you commit to action

When you have more time, energy, and money at stake, you tend to put in the effort to show up for yourself. You want to get your money’s worth so you make the effort to show up each session and do the hard work.

If it was free you would have no incentive for showing up and you would have no issue with skipping a session or any of the in-between work.

I look at it the same way on a smaller scale for my offerings in my business. I offer a free masterclass each month and about 30 people sign up each time.

About half of that amount shows up, the rest get the recording. I do the same thing as I’m sure you do too, I sign up for so many free webinars but other commitments then take precedence!

Money equals commitment, and the more you invest the more you commit.

The more you invest, the more you instill the belief that you can charge what you’re worth too

I now value myself much more than I did two years ago and came to the realization that if I invested in the right person that I could really be supported in growing my business and helping more people.

As a coach myself, if I’m willing to pay for similar services of quality I can believe that others would do the same with me. If I’m not willing to invest that amount in similar services then why would I ever expect someone to pay me that?

What I’m learning by working with this coach is to raise the value of the wisdom and guidance that comes through me. Once I do that, the universe has no choice but to match that frequency with financial abundance.

This can be applied to any business or career. When you value yourself, clients and companies do too and are willing to pay you accordingly for the results you can give them.

That’s essentially what you’re paying for with coaching: life-changing results that you wouldn’t be able to create on your own otherwise.

Even though it’s only been a few months of working together, so much has shifted as I continue to experience the returns on my investment.

Just being in a quality coach’s energy can provide you with change on a subconscious level as you learn to embody their aura for yourself (like osmosis) through your mirror neurons.

Since starting our coaching relationship, I’ve received guidance on how to show up in networking calls to create authentic connections, how to let go of specific childhood beliefs that are holding me back, how to onboard new clients successfully, how to market myself from a heart-centered place and how to design my offering for the highest outcome for my clients.

I’d rather learn these things from someone that’s successfully doing them, in a 1:1 format, in a shorter amount of time than it would take figuring it out on my own.

After investing in other courses and group programs that were closer to the $300 and $800 amount, I found that what I got were $300 & $800 types of results. I was ready for more and knew that specific guidance for myself was needed.

Two last important notes.

First, I invested $10K because I was in a place financially to do so. When I first started my business though, I invested in a lot of certifications, marketing, and websites, and was able to do this with a credit card.

I was willing to get creative and just paid off the credit debt (investment) this year.

You can view your investments in credit cards for your self-development in the same way, while still being clear on how much risk you feel comfortable taking.

Second, there’s only so far you can get on your own in self-development, whether that’s in your healing work or in your career and business.

I’m a full believer in self-healing, it lays the groundwork for working with a coach because the more work you do on your own, the more you’ll be clear on what areas you need support in.

Once you’ve worked on yourself enough, you’ll get to a point where you have blind spots, no matter how self-aware you are.

And no matter how much work you do on your own, there’s always going to be people with different skillsets from you and a higher experience level that you could stand to learn from.

If you got burned before like me, try again. Just like finding the right therapist, you may have to go through a few at first so make sure when you do go big and invest, that you’re certain.

With coaching, you can get from where you are to where you want to be much faster, by leaning on the support of someone who knows the ropes and believes in you before you’re fully able to see your potential yourself. Investing in yourself is always worth it.

That’s what I learned makes an investment in personal development for yourself truly priceless — $10K in yourself to change your mindset, beliefs, and business has an everlasting ripple effect.