Let me tell you the most common Google search that lands someone on a business coach's website.

It's not "how do I build a course" or "how do I get more Instagram followers." It's some version of "how much should I charge."

Pricing is the question every Holistic Nutritionist is asking - on Google, on Reddit, in Facebook groups, in DMs to colleagues they trust, and increasingly in conversations with AI tools. And the answers they're getting are all over the place.

So let's actually answer it. And then let's talk about what the price question is really masking - because in 16 years inside this industry, I've learned that the pricing problem is almost never actually about the price.

Let's start with something Morgan Housel wrote that has nothing to do with nutrition and everything to do with why you're probably undercharging.

In The Psychology of Money, Housel's biggest premise is this: financial success isn't about what you know. It's about how you behave.

Swap financial for sales and read that again.

You already know how to help your clients. You know your work gets results. You know what you're worth. The gap isn't knowledge. The gap is in how you behave the moment money enters the conversation.

That's the whole pricing problem right there. And it's worth unpacking.

Most Holistic Nutritionists Set Their Prices One of Two Ways

They look at what everyone else charges and match it.

Or they think about what feels safe, subtract a little just in case, and go with that.

Neither of these is an actual pricing strategy. Both of them are ways of avoiding the real conversation.

The first approach hands your pricing decision to someone else entirely. You have no idea what's behind their number - their overhead, their client avatar, their years of experience, their positioning. Matching it tells you nothing useful and anchors you to someone else's ceiling.

The second approach is fear dressed up as humility. Subtracting for safety before anyone has even hesitated is pre-emptive discounting. You're solving for a rejection that hasn't happened yet.

Your Price Should Be Based on 3 Things

1. The result you deliver - not the sessions, the outcome.

Not the number of calls. Not the length of the program. What does she walk away with? What changes for her? Price the transformation, not the time.

2. Your ideal client - and if you develop her properly, she should not be price hesitant.

The right client for your offer is not shopping around for the cheapest option. She is looking for the right person. When your positioning is clear and your messaging speaks directly to where she is, price becomes far less of an obstacle than you think.

3. A strong strategy based on your ideal client and the result you get her.

This is where most practitioners fall down entirely. They skip the strategy and base their pricing on an assumption - usually an assumption rooted in fear. What will she think? What if it's too much? What if she says no?

Most Holistic Nutritionists skip all three of these entirely. And it shows. It results in prices that could be significantly higher - and that's not an opinion, that's easy to spot.

Here's What Most Nutritionists Expect When They Raise Their Prices

Fewer yeses. More awkward silences. More ghosting.

Here's what actually happens.

The clients who say yes are more committed. They do the work, they get results, and they send you more people exactly like them. They sell for you. The clients who hesitate and don't convert at a higher price often would have hesitated anyway. Price is rarely the real reason someone doesn't buy. It's the most convenient reason to give.

And when the right clients do say yes - when they're fully invested and getting results - your referral pipeline fills with more of the same. The business starts to build itself.

Back to Morgan Housel

He says wealth is what you don't see. True wealth is the options and flexibility you've accumulated - not what's visible.

Your clients work the same way. She isn't saying no because she can't afford you. She's saying no because she can't yet see the invisible return on investing in herself.

Your job is to make the invisible visible.

That's a sales skill. Specifically, it's the skill of helping her understand what her current situation is costing her - in time, in income, in clients she's losing, in the version of her business she keeps putting off. When she can see that number clearly, the conversation about your price becomes a completely different conversation.

The Pricing Conversations We Need to Have Aren't Actually About the Price

You are smart. You know your worth. And yet something happens the moment a client hesitates or even just inquires.

That something is behaviour. And this is where Housel's premise lands hardest.

Financial success - and sales success - is not about what you know. It's about how you behave. And behaviour is exactly what Sales Confidence is built to change.

Not scripts. Not manipulation. Not becoming someone you're not. The specific behaviours that cause you to soften your price before she's said anything, fill the silence before she's had a chance to think, or accept "I need to think about it" without knowing what to do next.

Those are learnable. That's the work.

What to Do About It

If you're sitting with an uncomfortable feeling right now - if something in this post has named something you've been doing - that feeling is useful. Follow it.

Sales Confidence is 4 weeks of live coaching specifically for established Holistic Nutritionists who are done leaving money on the table in their pricing conversations. We meet on Zoom every week from May 6 to May 27. Telegram community and direct coaching between calls.

Early bird is $397 until April 21. After that it's $497.

Leigh McSwan is a certified Holistic Nutritionist of 16 years turned business coach. She helps established Holistic Nutritionists stop being the best kept secret in wellness and start building scalable, profitable businesses that work without them. She is the host of She's The BOSS podcast.