Hey everyone,
One of the things I teach to my 15-Week Miracle students is the value of transparency.
What is transparency? It means we are not “hiding” stuff. We speak our truth spontaneously and share “what’s alive in us” so that other people can stay more connected to us in the moment.
I noticed an oversight this morning, that I did not share with you the motivation for my recent change in policy to make coaching services and products “non-refundable.”
So let me share with you what was going on for me when I made this change.
I’ve been writing my blog for about three years now. Over the past two years, as this turned into a thriving business, I’ve had many, many clients (I don’t know exactly how many, I would need to go back and count them up), but I’ve had a lot of clients.
A significant number of those clients have worked with me long-term, either doing ongoing HBR sessions and/or participating in my 15-Week Miracle program.
And although I only recently shifted my attention toward creating products and memberships, I’ve had a significant number of people purchase products from me as well.
In all that time, I’ve had very, very few refund requests. To give you an idea, for both products and services, you can count the refund requests on less than one hand.
Indeed, until the situation I’ll share with you below (read on), I’ve had zero requests for refund on the 15-Week Miracle program, and every single person who began the program has stayed committed and finished it (some with a modified curriculum, but finished it nonetheless).
Those facts — along with the spontaneous testimonials I receive on a regular basis — make me happy, because with very few exceptions, my clients and customers have been very, very satisfied with what they received from me. And I feel good about that.
Just yesterday, in fact, I received a new spontaneous testimonial from another of my long-term clients (someone you haven’t heard anything about because she likes her privacy). She gave me permission to share this though:
“It’s exciting that the studio is doing so well… a lot of it I think is because of the work that you and I did together over the past year. It’s incredible how far my life has come in that time. Thanks for being a huge part of why I’m where I am today! You’re the best!”
– Emily from the United States
Like so many of my long-term clients, Emily has seen massive changes in her life as we worked together on many issues, including quitting a job she didn’t like and beginning a new and now thriving business that she loves :)
So let me share with you why I changed the policy.
It is very, very important to my integrity as a healer that I do whatever it takes to keep ego from sabotaging our healing process. This is why I require upfront commitments from my clients, and why I do so much expectation management through my blog and with my clients directly. It is essential that you understand — before you sign up — that whenever you are doing deep transformational work such as we do here, the ego WILL try to sabotage it. It is almost guaranteed. The ego will do this by creating “obstacles” that appear to be “beyond your control.” It will do it by bringing up extremely uncomfortable feelings that you want to RUN AWAY from as fast as you can. It will sabotage you by creating any number of very “logical” sounding excuses for why you “can’t” afford the program, why you “can’t” do the homework … and, after you commit, it will attempt to persuade you that the process “isn’t working” — moreover, the ego will pull out its strongest defenses in the moments immediately before you are about to have a massive quantum leap that catapults you to the next level.
Which is why you signed up for the program in the first place, right? So you can finally have this MIRACLE happen in your life …
My job in these moments is to do everything in my power to keep you committed. If you quit, your benefits go out the window, and we both lose. If you stay committed, you get your miracle (quantum leap), and we both win.
Recently, two things happened that made me think it was important to make the programs non-refundable in order to ensure our mutual success.
First, a man who is currently enrolled in my 15-Week Miracle program (and who is getting excellent results, read more here about EFT tapping for procrastination), wrote to me before he signed up to negotiate the “money-back guarantee” with me. We actually had quite an interesting dialogue about it before he signed up, and it was very illuminating.
At the beginning, he sent me a list of (if I remember correctly), more than TWENTY goals he wanted to accomplish (even though the program is only 15 weeks long lol :) ). Many of these goals I could tell right away were not “higher self” goals but rather things his ego thought he “should” accomplish. Meaning, they are what I call “impossible” goals because they are not what your soul truly wants. Much to this client’s credit, as soon as I pointed this out, he immediately realized the truth of what I was saying. We discussed it at length, and he ultimately agreed that he was better off not asking for the money-back guarantee about goals he wasn’t even really sure were in alignment with his highest good. I explained in detail how the evolutionary process has worked for so many of my clients, and how they realize during the course of the program that what they really want is not what they thought they wanted at the beginning.
Now that he’s in the program, it is indeed working for him the same way it has worked for many of my other clients. For now, he’s still keeping many of his goals, but the primary revelations at the moment are at a much deeper level of awareness of who he really is, what patterns he wants to erase from his life, where he needs to get his power back … and, as we resolve these core issues, the end results in the physical world will sort themselves out without our help. If he’s meant to get the job he thought he wanted, he will, and it will probably happen much more easily than he ever imagined.
After this dialogue with my client, I realized that the money-back guarantee aspect of my policy wasn’t really practical, because attempting to decide in advance what “should” happen in the 15 weeks actually works against allowing the magic of the process to take us even beyond where we thought we “should” be — sometimes in totally unexpected ways (for example, I never in a million years anticipated that my next career step would be abandoning legal practice altogether and being a seduction blogger and life coach — that came from inspiration, not from ego).
Second, another person signed up for my 15-Week program and is the very first person ever to have quit the program. She quit the program before it began, so it was in no way related to the quality of the program. However, she quit the program just a few days before it began, after I had already arranged my schedule around her schedule and we had scheduled six sessions. She was entitled to a 90 percent refund under my old policy, and I gave that to her because keeping my agreements is important to me.
However, nobody was served by this. The unexpected refund was disruptive to the cash flow of my business, especially at a time that I was making huge investments to improve the infrastructure so I can give all of you higher-quality content. And although she thought she had a “good” reason to quit, in truth it was simply a classic case of ego sabotage (an event happened in her life just a few days before we were to begin the program, a continuation of old co-dependent patterns with her family that gave her a “good” reason to think she “had” to spend the money there instead of on the program that she had committed to).
If I’d already had the no-refund policy in place in that moment, she likely would have stayed committed in the moment when the ego wanted to sabotage the process. And if she had stayed committed, I can virtually guarantee the situation would have worked out in a happier way for everyone involved, because the very first issue we would have addressed in the program would be the family situation and the dynamic of the family expecting her to take care of everyone at her expense. (In the 15-Week program, we let go of the idea of “sacrifice,” as it is at the heart of most of the world’s pain and dysfunctional patterns. But that’s way beyond the scope of this article.) This situation was extremely frustrating for me as a healer, and was the final straw for me.
So with those two occurrences, combined with the fact that the only two product refund requests I’ve ever received were totally bogus (one person claimed that she thought my colleague’s voice was “annoying” and one guy complained that he wanted a physical product even though the marketing clearly states that this is a digital product), I did some soul-searching and decided to change the policy.
It is really, really important to me that YOU SUCCEED with my services and products. This is why, Join our Advanced EFT Tapping Gold membership, I am providing tons of free email guidance to them way beyond what was promised in their program. You can ask any of my clients. I go above and beyond with them, giving extra support and guidance, being there on time for sessions, and supporting them with any resource I can think of that will accelerate their results.
But your success ultimately depends on YOUR level of commitment. If you let excuses sabotage the process (even really “good” excuses, such as family dramas and tragedies), you will find yourself a year from now stuck in exactly the same place you are now. You must commit if you want the results, and you must stick to that commitment ESPECIALLY when staying committed seems most difficult.
And, I’ll add to that something that is equally important … the success of my business also depends on our mutual commitment. I have relatively few clients at a time, to whom I give a LOT of attention. The cash flow of my business depends on you keeping your commitments to me.
So … that’s where we are at in this moment. If you are seriously interested in my 15-Week Miracle program, and you have any concerns about this at all, I invite you to get in touch with me, and we’ll talk it through … I guarantee you are better off making a firm commitment and being unwavering about it, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you make this commitment to both of us.
Thanks for your understanding :)
Sincerely,
p.s. I’m not alone in reaching this conclusion. I noticed that Landmark Education, a pioneer in transformational work, also emphasizes commitment and has a “no refund” policy. They’ve been doing transformational work for years, and I’m sure they’ve seen the same patterns I’ve seen. Ditto with the transformational CITO program I recommended to all of you a few months ago.