What could you buy with $25,000? A car? A new roof? Enough clothes to last you a year? Certainly not 6 hours’ worth of self development coaching, right? Ani Anderson and Brian Trzaskos had the same thought when the opportunity to speak with one of the leading coaches in the industry was presented to them. Defying all logic, they went all in despite not having that kind of money to begin with! Was it worth it? How did their big gamble turn out? You’d be surprised at the answer. Tune in!
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Paying For The Priceless: Is $25K For 6 Hours Of Self Development Coaching Worth It?
Welcome to the show. This is episode number three.
This is where we help coaches and holistic practitioners help their clients access their complete human intelligence. In this episode, we are going to talk about the time that we spent $25,000 on 6 hours of self-development coaching. What do you think about that?
I thought we were crazy at the time.
The setup was that we were a part of a small group mastermind. It was going on for a couple of years we were a part of that program. It was pretty cool. It was coming to an end. The coach that we were working with, you can feel the next level of ask coming. That program was coming to an end and the coach was looking around and going, “How can I continue to engage with people and keep helping them further?” At the last live event that we were at as a part of that program, we got called into the office.
Was it lunchtime or before lunchtime? It was at a break. It was like, “They want to see you in the other room.”
That’s what it was. It was like, “They need to talk to you.”
I thought I was in trouble, honestly. I thought we had done something wrong. That’s not us. We do our homework. We sit in the front with our arms crossed, nod, and raise our hands when we need to, but it felt like we were in trouble, which wasn’t the case at all. We got taken into the other room and the door was closed. It felt like the principal’s office.
You called it the principal’s office. It was the principal and his vice principal, if you will, or his lead salesperson. He gives us this invitation. This was a telling moment for you from when we’ve talked about this before when he looked at you and said, “I want to help you build this thing.”
It was this moment where I really felt like somebody believed in us. I thought, “Thank goodness somebody knows what to tell us to do. You recognize that we have something to offer.” It felt good.
It felt great to be seen by someone we had worked with for a couple of years already who knew more than a little bit about what we did and how we operated in the world and understood the framework of learning. We get this invitation, and the invitation then comes with a price tag of $25,000.
Which we didn’t have, full transparency. We had two maxed-out credit cards. I don’t think we had money in the bank. As soon as we knew how much it was going to cost, we started to have thoughts about how it was either we were going to put this money towards this thing for our business and invest in this thing or there was so much with little kids at the time. There was so much for us to do at the house. It was this idea that maybe it was taking away from something else.
It was like, “We could spend this $25,000 for this, a year in college, or a new car.” At that time, we probably could have bought a new car for $25,000, which is not like that anymore, put a roof on the house, or do something. It was like, “This is crazy talk.” It is two things for me. I was taught that spending that amount of money for something that wasn’t necessary was insane balls. You don’t do that. The other thing you don’t do is you don’t spend that much money if you don’t have that much money. Not only did we not have that much money, but we had no clue how we were going to get that much money.
We were up against what we called scotomas. We could not see it. We could not see how it was going to happen. At the same time, the invitation was right there on the table, right in front of us. You already talked about this a little bit, but what made it so compelling for you is you felt like we were seen. What else was compelling for you to say, “We have to move forward with this?”
I felt like saying no would’ve been like giving up on ourselves in front of other people, which didn’t feel good. I felt like saying no would’ve been saying no to our potential and what we had inside of us. It took a tremendous leap of faith to even consider. At that time, my belief system was not the And belief system, but also that there were a limited amount of resources. We didn’t have the money. None of it computed, but I wasn’t going to say no because I wasn’t going to be that kind of person.
It occurred to me. As you’re talking, I remembered this. The first live event we did with this person was about 2 years, maybe 2-plus years, or maybe even 3 years before we had this offer. We were offered that same thing at that first live event that we did with that person.
I don’t even remember that.
We said no. We were in Montreal. We were offered the same exact thing. We were like, “No. We’re going to do it on our own.”
I forgot about that. That’s great. You think you can do it on your own, but when somebody who’s done what you want to do offers to help you and you say, “I’m going to do it on my own,” the thing is you slow down time. If you can even pull it off, it’s going to take a long time to do it because you’ve got to figure out everything along the way. Whereas when you put yourself in a relationship with somebody who’s done what you want to do, they can help to shorten the time dramatically.
I think about how much time we potentially lost in not saying yes. We lost three years of potential growth by not saying yes. Let’s back up again a second before we talk about the outcomes of the things. Here we are. We’re back in that room where we’re being offered this opportunity. $25,000 is the price tag. We couldn’t even schedule this strategy day until we coughed up the $25,000. He had to have it in his hands before we could even schedule it.
We were being asked to put down a deposit. At that time, what was the deposit?
It was $5,000.
We had maxed out credit cards. We didn’t have the money in the bank or so we thought until they said, “The deposit’s $5,000.” I don’t remember which one of us all of a sudden remembered we had one more credit card, and it had exactly $5,000 left on the credit limit. It was an interesting scotoma because neither one of us remembered that until we were ready to sign on the dotted line.
I remember what we said was, “We want to say yes, but we have no money.” We were pen-in-hand kind of thing. The thing is, we knew enough about the natural laws to know the money had to be there. We didn’t know where it was. We did ask ourselves a different question. We must have. We were like, “The money must be there. Where might it be?” One of us was like, “We have another credit card,” and there it was.
We were able to make the deposit. We started off on that journey and left that meeting to fly back home trying to figure out how the heck we were going to get the rest of that money because we had to have a plan for it. We had a lot of faith, trust, and fire lit under our butt in order to make it happen.
We were trying really hard. The payments were coming. I remember I was muscling through this thing like crazy. We had a payment that was coming up and it was that day. We still had no idea what we were going to do. I hear Brian call me down the hall, “You’ve got to come see this.” He had gotten an email from one of our credit card companies. I still don’t understand how this happened. They emailed him and said, “We know you have three maxed-out credit cards, but we’re going to increase your credit limit,” in the exact amount that we needed that day.
It was exactly what we needed.
It was so wild. It was the first moment I really understood that the Universe had my back.
There’s this saying that God meets you in the field. That’s the same thing as the Universe has your back. It’s when you are in action in an inspired way and in a really sincere way. We are sincerely doing everything that we could do. We are in action. We are also using all of our somatic tools to stay grounded on purpose, connected, and all those things. We were doing a lot to keep moving this forward and being in a way of faith. I’m not saying that I wasn’t freaked out for much of that time, too, but it’s managing those experiences that kept us moving forward and staying alert to the continued opportunities of support that kept showing up for us along the way.
God meets you in the field. The Universe has your back. Click To TweetOne of the things that is interesting for me is we talk about seeing reality in a new way. Somatics are such a powerful way to help us to be able to shift our reality so that we can see reality in a new way. Reality isn’t what we see it to be. It’s malleable. At that moment, I realized that I could see reality in a different way. I could see reality in a way that the Universe did have my back, that maybe what I desired, what I wanted, and what I committed to was going to work, or that maybe money does show up when I need it to.
It was enough to make me question reality and wonder if it could be a different way. The strategy day was great. We’ll talk about that. For me, the process of getting to the strategy day was as important as the strategy day itself because, to be honest with you, through the process of paying for it, I got to see and accept a completely different monetary reality.
Reality isn't what we see it to be. It's malleable. Click To TweetA big part of that, too, is that somewhere along that trajectory or that transition from the first day when we were like, “With $25,000, we could buy a car or do our roof,” it was an either-or thing. Somewhere along the way, we started comparing differently. Instead of comparing the $25,000 to other things that we would have to give up in order to have the strategy day, what we started doing was comparing that $25,000 to the promise of what we could create beyond the strategy day.
It was millions in our business.
Year after year, that was our anticipation of doing the strategy with this person.
Also, being able to continue to create.
The $25,000 would be a drop in the bucket the following year compared to what we would have as an outcome of the information, the experience, and the transformation that we would get as a part of the strategy day. That’s what a lot of people lose in understanding when we’re making decisions like this. We were being asked to put down an amount of money and we were like, “If do this, I don’t have that money. I don’t know where it’s going to come from. I could do something else if I did have it.” That’s a way to keep us stuck, for sure, to not change anything at all.
We could flip it and go, “This is an investment in my business, my life, and my process,” or whatever you want to think about it. It’s an investment that’s going to yield larger returns on the other side. When we did that, it seemed like the Universe, all of a sudden, then swept up behind us like a benevolent wind or something. It was behind our backs and started moving us forward where we couldn’t see what was coming up. It almost didn’t matter as much because things started showing up for us.
As I was listening to you talk, some people were going to be like, “Why are you talking about this investment in money in terms of the somatic coaching?” The reality is that in terms of our self-development, money touches every area of our lives. A big part of what we work on with our students is their money consciousness, abundance mindset, prosperity, and things like that.
I was talking to somebody. They were like, “I got to spice up my self-development.” I thought that was funny because they didn’t have kids. One of the ways that people do that is by doing work around money consciousness. It’s a fantastic way to grow ourselves. This was a tremendous part of my self-development. I teach things that I experienced through this process. We haven’t even gotten to the stuff that we learned on the strategy day.
The strategy day was great. I remember there was one big takeaway that was at the end of the strategy day. It was the domino effect of opening doors for years with us. It was the cascading domino effect of expansion in our business and our lives. That one suggestion was well worth way more than $25,000 over and over. How do you put a price on becoming a different person? How do you put a price on changing the way you look at something for the rest of your life? I will never approach money again like I did because of this experience.
I love what you’re bringing up. It’s about the self-development journey of going from the signing of it to getting to that strategy day. It was hugely transformational around understanding how the Universe and money work together. Do you remember that last investment we had to make in it and it was due at midnight on a certain day?
Yes.
We were like, “Where’s this going to come from?” It was the day of. We had $10,000 due left for that last final payment and a client showed up. When you went through the enrollment conversation with this client, you had to grow and expand tremendously. When I think about you and your self-development journey, and we’ve been together on this journey for a long time, I see that as a pinnacle moment for you in your own self-development.
I never went back from that. How do you put a price tag on those things? It was a day that I’ll always remember I didn’t just learn new skills, but I learned how to believe in myself differently. I’m thinking about when people join us at the academy for certification programs. We tell them, “The process of getting to the place where you’re signing up, we take it with a lot of compassion. We have your backs around it.” These are worthy conversations that we have with our students because, like us, it helps them to get to that place.
I know that I became a different person that day. I’m happy with the person that I became. I love to see that for our students, too. When they sign up for certification programs, there are tools they’re going to learn, but that’s a small part of it. It’s who they become along the way. That’s really profound. My favorite things that our students say at graduation are things about how proud they are of who they’ve become and things like, “I believe in myself now. I can be my best ally and advocate.” Those things are priceless.
It is that breadth of trust in themselves grows from one end to the other end. It really is this beautiful self-development journey cascading the whole arc of their experience. People change so much. I love what you said. That one key takeaway we got from that strategy day propelled us into places that I would never have seen beforehand. It’s almost like the invisible hand of the Universe was guiding us along the way, but we still had to make our own decisions. We still had to step into those kinds of things to be able to move forward with that.
We put our desires, like what we really wanted. We wanted to grow this thing. That’s what we wanted. It takes courage to get to the place where you can put your desires out there and trust in yourself enough to allow the Universe to be that bullying force.
It takes courage to put your desires out there and trust in yourself enough to allow the universe to be that building force. Click To TweetIf we had to transition out of this episode with a hot tip, for me, what transformed was the idea of how we compare things and overcoming or switching that mindset. Looking the other way on that like, “I’m comparing the $25,000 to what I’m going to lose,” rather than, “I’m comparing that $25,000 to what I’m going to gain on the other end,” completely turned us in a direction where the Universe had our backs and we were able to keep moving forward. That was probably really one of the first times I used that, but it has not been the last time. That little hot tip tool has been an amazing thing to keep us moving forward in our business.
For me, it was this idea of it’s not about or. It’s about and. It’s about being able to grow my business and my personal life. It’s about self-development and professional development. It’s that and. There’s always an and when we’re looking at the natural laws. That’s a really powerful lesson that I never go back from. It’s one of the reasons why we love to teach the natural laws to our students. That is a big part of what you’re going to get as you continue to learn with the Somatic Coaching Academy. We are so glad that you decided to join us for this episode. We’ll see you next time.