Why Your Lowest Paying Client Never Shows Up
You charged her less because you wanted to help. She still didn’t show up.
This is one of the quietest patterns in wellness, coaching, and consulting. The client who asks for the discount is rarely the one who shows up to do the work. Therapist and coach Jemima Blazdell shared this exact story on FoundHer Rising. She charged a struggling client five pounds a session. The client never came. She never did the homework. There was no transformation, because there was no investment.
Most heart-centered founders learn this lesson too late. They cut their rate to be helpful, generous, accessible. What they actually do is remove the structural conditions that make their work effective.
Pricing Is Part of the Transformation
The work doesn’t happen in the session alone. It happens in the commitment that surrounds it.
When a client invests at a level that requires real consideration, something shifts before the first call. They show up differently. They prepare. They do the homework. They stay through the discomfort. Not because they’re better clients. Because they’re protecting their own investment.
Lower the rate below that threshold and you remove the friction that fuels follow-through. The client doesn’t engage less because they’re flaky. They engage less because nothing was risked.
This is one of the most common bottlenecks in scaling wellness businesses. Founders confuse access with affordability. They think the way to serve more people is to charge less. But charging less doesn’t widen your impact. It dilutes the work itself.
“The business needs you to charge money, and it works both ways. It’s about value and exchange.” — Jemima Blazdell
That line points to something most founders haven’t named. Pricing isn’t transactional. It’s part of the result you’re being hired to produce.
Real Relationships Build the Business. Algorithms Don’t.
The second pattern that shows up in sustainable wellness practices: the clients aren’t coming from social media. They’re coming from conversations.
Jemima built her London practice by speaking at one local hotel every month for six years. Six years. Most founders won’t do anything for six years if it doesn’t go viral in the first three. That’s why most founders stay stuck.
Real referrals, real talks, real one-to-one connections compound. They don’t trend. They don’t show up in your analytics dashboard. But they build the kind of trust that converts when someone is finally ready to invest.
If your marketing isn’t producing clients, the answer probably isn’t a different platform. It’s fewer, deeper conversations with the right people.
Vision Without a System Becomes Chaos
Visionary founders have a hidden problem. The same creativity that builds the business eventually starts to bury it.
You see it in unfinished projects, abandoned launches, ideas that sounded brilliant in March and look strange by September. The cure isn’t fewer ideas. It’s a structure that protects you from acting on every one.
Christine keeps what she calls a parking lot. Every idea goes in. Once a quarter, she revisits the list. Most ideas evaporate when given time to breathe. The ones that don’t, the ones that keep showing up month after month, are the signal worth following.
Bright shiny object syndrome doesn’t usually kill a business outright. It just keeps it from finishing the things that would have moved the needle.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If you’ve been resenting your rate, the work isn’t to grit your teeth and serve harder. It’s to look at whether your pricing structure can sustain the version of your business that’s actually serving you and your clients.
If you’ve been pouring effort into content that isn’t converting, the work isn’t to post more. It’s to identify the three relationships that would change your business and invest in them this quarter.
If you’ve been collecting ideas faster than you can finish them, the work isn’t to start another one. It’s to build the parking lot, give the ideas time to breathe, and only act on the ones that survive multiple review cycles.
The Quieter Truth
There’s a version of your business where you charge what the work is worth, the right clients show up ready to do the work, and you stop trading hours for the appearance of generosity. That version exists. Most founders don’t reach it because they confuse the discomfort of raising the rate with the discomfort of the wrong business model.
If something in this resonates, this is exactly the conversation we have on a Growth Clarity Call. No pitch. Just clarity on whether the next move is mine to help with.
Book your free Growth Clarity Call Here.
Full Transcript
CLEANED PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: FHR EP 026 JEMIMA BLAZDELL
Christine: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses.
Today I’m joined by Jemima Blazdell, therapist, coach, and author. She helps women resolve trauma using techniques like EFT and EMDR so they can reconnect with their self-worth and stop putting themselves last. Jemima, welcome to the show.
Jemima: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Christine: I’m so excited to have you. I want to hear all the things, but first let’s go back to the beginning. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got started in this work.
Jemima: Well, my story really started when I was about 21. I was diagnosed with depression, given antidepressants, and sent to see a counselor. I’d started self-harming and I knew I didn’t want to do that. So I went to the doctor. I was on antidepressants for about 18 months. I started seeing a counselor, and 12 years and 13 counselors later, I was still having panic attacks. I was still filled with anxiety. Nothing had really changed. I told my story many times. Nothing shifted.
A friend of mine told me about EFT, and it sort of just kept coming into my awareness. I went online, saw a video, and I was tapping away and watching what happened.
Christine: Emotional Freedom Technique. That’s right.
Jemima: Yes, EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping, as it’s also known. It’s tapping on specific points on the head and hands, and it shifts and moves energy, beliefs, thoughts, sensations in your body. So I was watching this video and tapping, and I felt a shift in my body and in my jaw. It was like something happened to me.
I went on to do the training. There was a guy there who’d had a car accident in the sixties. When he recalled this accident, he was shaking and crying. All that trauma came into his body as if it had just happened. The trainer got him up on stage and tapped with him. He worked through the memory, cleared all this emotion. About half an hour later, the trainer asked, “How do you feel now?” The man said, “I feel like I’m somebody else.”
I wanted to tap with anyone who’d get near me. I felt like I had the cure for everything. I went on to do about six months of swaps with people I’d trained with. Within six months, I didn’t have anxiety anymore. I could become a school governor. I could stand at the school gates and have a conversation with people, rather than just throwing my son into school and running off and pretending to be busy. I’d been suffering for 12 years. Well, all my childhood, all my college years, completely hiding it the whole time and just pretending I was okay. Suddenly things were different.
Christine: So your own healing led to your path of giving back. How did that happen? You didn’t wake up one day and suddenly open your private practice. What was that journey like?
Jemima: Before doing EFT, I’d already started down the path of becoming a counselor. I’d started the counseling skills course. I knew I wanted to be in therapy in some form. I did psychology A-level when I was 15 or 16. I knew I was interested in that. When I found you could actually do something practical and physical to create a change in someone’s body, that’s when I became the therapist rather than going down the counseling route. I want people to feel different. I want to affect the change that I’d felt.
I got a job at a local spa giving talks and running sessions. That just kind of led to a practice on its own because it was a ready-made audience.
Christine: From the beginning to going into private practice. How did that go?
Jemima: I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Someone must have recommended me to that hotel. I went and said I do EFT, and they were looking for somebody. She said, “Do you want to give a talk?” I’d never done public speaking. I rocked up, gave a talk, and I talked about what fascinated me, what really made me understand it, which was the formation of beliefs, how those early memories impact us still, these early moments of trauma, how we make decisions and how we maintain those decisions that become beliefs.
I’d give a talk like, “This is what happens in your mind.” Then I’d do a demonstration. I’d bring someone up. People would see the demo and then go, “Does it work with this? Does it work with that?” Suddenly they could see and feel potential clients. That’s what led to my private practice.
Christine: You had the demand first, and then thought, “I’m just going to open up my own practice. I have the clients.” What were some of the biggest challenges in those early days? Opening a private practice isn’t just like that. The clients are a huge part of it. But what were the early challenges of becoming a business owner?
Jemima: I remember handing my notice in and signing up for a marketing course on the same day with somebody else, an EFT practitioner. I was like, “Okay, I’m in.” I’ve always trusted my instincts. The challenges at the beginning were doing the talks and the public speaking. Could I do this? I’ve always been very ambitious. I’d have a vision: I want to be at Wembley tapping with 50,000 people. This is what I want to do. I want there to be an EFT person in every school and every Samaritans to be tapping. It was so much bigger than me.
I actually rang the O2 in London. I said, “Hi, can I book you? I want to do an event.” They were like, “No offense, but who are you?” I was like, “Okay, maybe I’m a little bit early for this. I haven’t done that yet.” But the drive and the passion has always been there so deeply that it’s kind of led me. The difficulty has been: I want to be over there and I’m here. So it’s taking the time to set up those steps.
I used to do webinars back when GoToWebinar was the software, before Zoom and all that stuff. I’m in the corner of my bedroom pretending to talk to a hundred people, month after month, just honing the skill. Always my intention was there, and it’s taken time and energy and trying lots of different things. I would do groups and workshops and speak on other people’s events. It’s just been what’s driven me for 15, 16 years now.
Christine: I love this. I can resonate with having the vision and then bridging the gap. Not everybody thinks like that. As someone who has always had that vision and noticed the gap of where you are and where you want to be, what have some of those big turning points been that have shaped your business as it is today?
Jemima: One phrase really sticks out. It summed it all up: “Why would I learn to swim when I have a boat?” Like, you need to learn to swim in case you fall in. I was on the boat, over there. But the whole process has made me learn the basics, get really good at everything, understand how the business works, how to connect with people, what works, what doesn’t.
The most important thing, and I know you know this, is if you’re in therapy or in any kind of service, you need to keep doing the work. So I’ve had therapy of some form or another every week for 30 years now. And I will, forever.
Christine: You’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not receiving the service. How can you serve anyone else?
Jemima: Exactly. A therapist who really helped me, I call her the one who woke me up. We were talking about victim story. She said, “Do you know what a victim story is? Because you’re running one.” I was like, “It’s not me, it’s them.” She literally woke me up. She said, if you want to do this, you need to do the work that I have. That was a real moment for me.
Christine: Those moments in our lives stand out, not only as personal turning points, but you feel them viscerally even as you remember them. What advice would you have to somebody who’s earlier on in their journey, whether they’re a therapist or other wellness provider, starting their own business? What are the core learnings that stand out for you that you want to pass on to anyone listening?
Jemima: Trust yourself and your vision. If you want it, it wants you too. If you want to help people, they need that help. People are waiting for you. That’s been the biggest thing in the last few years. All the work I’ve been doing has finally been coming back. I’m being noticed a bit more. The cloak has fallen, almost. All the work’s paying off.
You realize that there are certain people who need you, only you, to be woken up by. They’ll only hear that message from you. Your voice is so important. I’m currently writing my second book, and I’m working with a book coach, and she said, “I know that your voice is vital.” And as I would say to every person, that self-belief is there.
Christine: I love how poignantly you cut to the chase. There’s somebody out there that needs to hear your voice, not somebody else’s. I often hear, especially newer service providers say, “Why would anyone choose me when there are people who’ve been doing this for 10, 20 years?” The clients that get drawn to us do so for a reason. Maybe we’re not the best in the world, not the most experienced, we do a different approach, but there’s a reason that the clients are drawn to us.
You’re somebody who has walked the walk, not just talked the talk. You’ve lived this your entire life and now you continue doing the personal work and you’re really dedicated to giving back as well. What would you say are some of the biggest differences or lessons learned between being an effective service provider versus an effective business owner?
Jemima: When I first started out, I didn’t charge very much per session. I remember charging 20 quid for a session, just learning the way. I had a client who said, “Can I pay less? I’m really in need.” So I charged her five pounds. She never turned up to the sessions. She never did the homework. She had no value in the work.
It was such a good lesson for me. If people aren’t going to show up and not going to commit and not going to pay the money, they’re not going to get the work. They’re not going to get the change. The business needs you to charge money, and it works both ways. It’s about value and exchange. If you can see your business as a vehicle for producing results, rather than something that’s in control, it is the vehicle. The work is the work, and you need to charge for it.
Christine: We’ve also talked on the show about how it’s important to charge a rate that is sustainable, that allows us to keep doing the work. When we undercharge and we’re not earning enough and we can’t take care of ourselves, the business becomes unsustainable, and then we’re not doing anyone a service.
I want to point out what you’re touching on. It’s something I learned early in my days as a therapist. When we’re undercharging a client, we might initially think we’re doing them a favor. But time and time again, when we undercharge, clients don’t value the service in the same way. There are exceptions. Typically, the more we charge and the more people are paying, the more they get out of the work, because they’re committed.
Jemima: They’re investing. They’ll receive. It’s all about that investment in self-value. I have a lot of free stuff. I give a lot. There’s accessibility if people need it. But if they really want change, then the one-to-one work is the only thing that’s really going to hit those deeper parts. Your unconscious mind won’t let you go to those deep parts on your own. It just won’t, because it doesn’t want you to go there. So you need someone to walk with you to get to those deeper parts that really change your life when you change them.
Christine: I appreciate your business model, how you have a variety of different offerings. Some are paid, some are higher paid, some are free. We can do all the things. It’s just that unless we have a massive trust fund, we can’t do it all for free all the time. Just finding that balance so that the work becomes sustainable for you, and you can still be of service.
Jemima: We need work. We need each other. It’s not wrong to have work or to do this personal development. It’s very important for the whole planet and for everyone individually as well.
Christine: Agreed. If something in this episode feels uncomfortably familiar, that’s not an accident. A lot of the women who listen to this show are at that in-between stage. The business works, but it’s heavy. You’re the bottleneck. You’re stretched. You know something needs to shift, but you’re not sure what the right next move is. That’s exactly why I offer free connection calls with my team. It’s not a pitch. It’s a real conversation about where you are, what’s actually in the way, and whether I’m the right person to help you scale this without burning out or compromising your values. If you want clarity instead of more guessing, book one. The link’s in the show notes.
All right, let’s keep going. Speaking of real work and real relationships, one of the things I wanted to discuss with you is, you’ve done a lot of speaking. You’ve spent a lot of your life and career building meaningful relationships with people. That’s something I bring up that I talk a lot about in the context of marketing. Sometimes when we hear the word “marketing” as a service provider, we think about posting on social media or running Google ads or rebuilding our website. Talk to me about how you see marketing and how that connects to your experience of building real relationships, whether through speaking or otherwise.
Jemima: Relationships are everything. Whether you’re helping someone or sharing information. This took a while. The social media thing is something we don’t all like. I get very little through social media, but people come and find it and they get to know you and your voice. That’s what people want. The relationship is about trust. People need to be able to trust who they’re working with, especially doing this kind of work.
Just being available as much as possible and keeping your intention that you want to be out there. You don’t know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. I go to an online networking group here, and I was interviewed for a podcast there. Two people I’ve gone into one-to-ones with have both said, “I saw your podcast.” It’s really special that people have access. We didn’t have this years ago. The internet is a wonderful thing for growth and sharing. The relationship is key. It’s the basis of life. We’re here to have relationships.
Christine: I meet a lot of folks who have a lot of conversations around this notion of hiding behind the internet. As much as it can be of value, obviously it has its downsides. One of the things I see that hinders service providers is when they’ve been taught or have adopted beliefs that they can just post on social media or have a fancy website and that’s supposed to grow their business. What advice would you have to somebody who is newer to marketing about how to leverage real relationships to actually grow their business?
Jemima: This is the thing common to every marketing course and everything I’ve ever read. People talk about your ideal client and talking to that one person. It really does work when you have one person in mind, real or imaginary, who has the pain that you’re able to help heal. When you talk to them, everyone listening will feel that authenticity, whether or not it’s them you’re talking to. They’ll feel the truth.
That word “authentic” gets bandied around, but it’s so important. Speaking the truth, people hear it and they take what they need from it. If you can see marketing as a way to connect, that’s all it is. You can do as much or as little as you want, as long as you’re using what you believe to be the right reason. Your intention behind it is everything.
Christine: For you, one of the avenues to build real relationships and speak authentically and share about yourself and your journey has been through speaking. What are some of the other platforms or ways that you’ve found really helpful to build real relationships?
Jemima: Like I mentioned, when I first started out, I spoke at a local hotel. It was a hotel spa, and I spoke every month for six years.
Christine: Six years. Wow.
Jemima: It was great. It led to a practice in London because most of the clients came from London. I had a room in Harley Street for a while, and that all ended with lockdown. Interestingly, the same team have moved to another hotel closer to me here, a place called Goodwood. They’re starting up wellness retreats and they have a huge emphasis on wellness and emotional learning. So we’re working on the retreats there. The wellness industry is huge now because we need it. Everybody needs it. Everybody needs therapy.
People will say, “I didn’t know what to bring today.” I’m like, “Brilliant. Now we’re really getting to the good stuff. You’re about to surrender.” Actually, we’re waiting for this moment.
Christine: I’m curious to hear your perspective on how leveraging real relationships goes such a long way in building your business.
Jemima: Absolutely. All of my work pretty much comes through referrals, because you have the relationship with someone, you have the connection, they want their friends to share in the same experience. That speaks for itself. We’re all here to be happy. If we’re not happy, we need to heal, and we heal in relationship. If we don’t care, stuff doesn’t come up. If it’s the bus driver and you, hey, but if it’s someone else and you really have a chemical, physical reaction, that’s the gold that’s going to take you to the trauma that’s going to resolve, that’s going to heal your life.
Christine: Shifting gears a little to the ways you’re going to continue to support your clients in the future. I can ask this and I’m sure you’ll be excited to answer because you’re like me, you’re a future-oriented person. When you look at the evolution of your business and the things you want to grow into and create over the next few years, what do you see your business becoming? What do you want to create more of, do more of?
Jemima: It’s interesting because I’m currently rebranding my website. I created the Stress Free Life Academy because I wanted courses, I want self-help, so that when you’re 19 and looking on the internet in the middle of the night, you’ve got something that will help you. That was my driver, because that’s what I needed when I was 19.
What’s turned out is that one-to-ones are what I love doing and where it’s most effective. People don’t really want to do my courses. They want to come and work with me, which is wonderful. So I’m focusing more on one-to-ones. I’m writing a second book. My first book was 100 Stress-Free Days, where I did a video every day on Instagram for 100 days. It was a tip on how to feel better each day. It could be a breathing technique, journaling, something. I turned that into a book. So you’ve got 100 tips.
My second book is a bit of a mixture. There are six case studies, a kind of characterization of someone with anxiety. The next section is like a recipe book for anxiety. How to deal with anxiety as if it was a recipe. For breakfast you do a breathing technique. For lunch you do something else. So it’s half fictional and half practical. What I want to do is give people the tools so they can help themselves as far as possible.
Christine: I love this balance between giving through your books, through your talks. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of content online as well. The real bread and butter for you, both in terms of your business and impact for clients, is the one-to-one. You mentioned you’ve explored groups and programs. There’s a hotel that’s doing retreats. What are your thoughts about offering anything like that in the future?
Jemima: I do that still. As I say, I’m working on the retreats. I’ll go and give a talk on EFT, and then people can book, similar to how I did before. I’m doing a collaboration later this year with a personal trainer in Australia. He’s doing the PT and I’m doing the emotional stuff. That’s a six-week course. I’m looking for more collaborations as well this year, so we can reach as many people in as many ways as possible. With that core of one-to-one underneath all of that. I’m giving more talks and getting out there more in person as well, as well as online.
Christine: Fantastic. One more question, and it’s a two-parter. When you look up to the future, where your business is going, what you’re building, what’s the one thing you’re most excited about, and what’s the biggest challenge you’re anticipating?
Jemima: My picture on the wall, I’ve got a picture of the planet, and it says, “I am raising the vibration of the earth.” That is my biggest motivation.
Christine: I love that so much.
Jemima: You can say, “Well, I’ve done that because I feel a little bit better, so I’ve done it.” That is the challenge. Where, how, why do you do that? How does that show up every day?
In the past, the issues have been, I start off with loads of ideas. Brilliant. Then sometimes they fall off and don’t get finished. I’ve got lots of unfinished ideas. That’s my personal challenge. I’m having a book coach this time. There’s something about this year, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this as well, there’s a new energy around. This is the time. I was 50 a couple of weeks ago, and it’s like, okay, I’ve been building to this moment. I’m ready. It’s taking me this long to feel freer and more joyful. It just feels like things are working more easily now.
Christine: With that also comes a great sense of responsibility. In your words, you said “raising the vibration of the planet.” It sounds like a lot of the way you make decisions about how you’re going to grow your business, what you’re going to say yes to or no to, is based on that impact.
Jemima: Absolutely. Really trusting when to say yes and when to say no. So important. You can say yes to everything, and it’s not right. I’ve been down that road. I’ve been to places that haven’t worked and tried things that haven’t worked. I’ve got something within me where I need to experience something to make a decision. I’ve been about human design and all those. Do you know human design? It’s all different energy and yeah.
Christine: For me it’s like intuition, almost a felt sense. When you’re in the conversation, in the environment, you can sense the vibration of whether this is in alignment for you or not.
Jemima: Absolutely. It’s taken self-trust. When that’s there, it’s just become stronger and stronger. That’s the thing to keep coming back to. And to enjoy it. Just enjoy it.
Christine: Yes. That so lands. What do you see as the biggest challenge? What’s the thing that’s either going to get in the way or present an obstacle or a new growth edge?
Jemima: It would be getting too caught up in the ideas and not taking the action. That’s been the past. I’m kind of waiting for that to happen. As long as you keep coming back to your core intention and your core message, and you’re showing up with that wherever you are, you can’t fail.
Christine: Staying true to your vision. The image on your wall, knowing where you want to head. As you said, knowing what to say yes to and what to say no to is a part of it. The part I’m hearing that I can say you’re definitely not alone in is that there are so many of those great ideas, and there’s only one of us. There are only so many hours in a day.
Jemima: Algorithms and things that you watch online. You’d think, if you looked on mine, that everyone who was born had written a self-help book. That’s not true. There’s a small number of people who’ve done that. So it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do that because so many other people have done it. It feels like, what’s the point? There’s so much of it out there.
Christine: Exactly. So it’s using the stuff that you see to turn it around, to hone what it is that you’re interested in.
Jemima: Because we could all write a book on the same subject and it would be completely different.
Christine: Yes. And to recognize, on the flip side, just because someone else is doing something doesn’t mean we should or that we need to. The businesses and the women that I see become most successful have that vision and stay very focused on it. Not that they don’t change or shift course strategically through a decision-making process, but we don’t get pulled off course by what I call bright shiny object syndrome.
We’re going to have those ideas, but I actually have a parking lot, literally on my project management software, where my ideas go. I have a rule for myself that I only revisit my ideas every quarter. If I have an idea, amazing. I will let myself go to town writing about it, talking about it, whatever it is. But it’s parked in my parking lot so that I can give it some time to breathe. Sometimes I think, “What was I even thinking?” But if I find that idea time and time again, month after month, quarter after quarter, then I might get the insight or the nudge of, “Hmm, this is something to pay attention to.”
Jemima: That’s really the vision I had of the tapathon, as I call it, at Wembley, like 15 years ago. That was all about getting tapping and EFT, and now all the other techniques I’ve learned since then, to where it’s needed. That’s what that vision was about. I’ve sort of visited that picture many times. I’ve been on stage, I’ve been backstage, I’ve been in the front row. I’ve been all over this experience. Everybody’s working together, the community’s there together, people are healing together. That’s the essence of it. That’s the work I’m doing now.
Christine: And it sounds like the challenge for you within that is, there are so many ways to do that, and what’s the way that is best for you, best for the people you want to serve, that feels in alignment and exciting. I can imagine there’s people listening who want to know more about you, the work you do, how to connect. Where’s the best place for people to connect with you?
Jemima: As I said, I’m about to rewrite my website. My current one is StressFreeLifeAcademy.com. My new one is JemimaBlazdell.com. They’ll both be live for a while. Stress Free Life Academy, or Jemima Blazdell, you’ll find me. All my socials are @JemimaBlazdell. So Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. I have a newsletter, and a YouTube channel as well, that’s JemimaEFT.
Christine: Thank you so much, Jemima, for vulnerably sharing your story and your insights. I’m so proud to have you as a guest and to have you share your story with all of our listeners.
Thank you, listener, for tuning in to FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review. It helps more women find these conversations. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com.
Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
