Offer Vs Offering: Know When to Sell & When to Give
This episode shares how to think about your work as a mix of offerings and offers. You'll learn the key distinctions that differentiate them and help you clarify your current services. This will help you:
Get more comfortable with selling because you have clear boundaries
Be more generous in your work
Create new products that support your business model
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Hello there, friend. Welcome to another solo episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond, and if it's your first time tuning in, welcome. I share this podcast as someone who quit a corporate job in 2015 to figure out how do I share my gifts, my soul with the world and how do I make a living doing it. And this podcast is some of the things that I'm sharing with what I've learned in that journey. And so I hope you find it useful and supportive for the journey that you are on. I love doing solo episodes. If you heard my interview with Darius Bashar a few weeks ago, you would have heard me talk about what is my favorite podcast to do or what do I love most about the podcast that I said solo episodes because I guess I like to hear myself talk and I just like to be creative in this way. I love the interview episodes. Don't get me wrong. They're. They're super fun. It's amazing to connect with other people and share their offerings. One of the most fulfilling things that I feel in this work is actually when I share someone else through this podcast. Someone finds that person, signs up for their offerings, and goes on their journey with them because that's the person that they needed. And that makes me so happy to be somewhat of a connector in that way. And for this, for the solo episode, I mean, I am a. I'm a speaker. I like to use my words, I like to jam, I like to have fun. And this is a way that I get to creatively do that and just see what comes when I put the mic on and try to speak something that I think will be valuable for people and get to do whatever I want. Really. That's what. When you have your own podcast, you don't have to play by anyone's rules. There's no one that's going to be telling me, hey, Lou, at three minutes in, you just start singing. And that's not accepted on our platform. No. When you have a podcast, and in so many ways, when you have a business, you get to do it in the way you want. You get to make it fun, you get to make it creative, and you don't have to listen to other people's ways of how they do it. I just came off a mastermind where there's this woman, Sally Hogshead, and a big part of her message is different is better than better. I know I'll be talking more on this topic because I love that different is better than better. And so hopefully this podcast is a little different than some others. Maybe you're hearing, at least it's a little more niche to a specific person. And let's get into today of what we're going to talk about, which is the difference between offer and offering. I'm so jazzed if I could say that word at talking about this, because I don't see anyone else really talking about this. And I kind of came at this where I'm understanding, okay, what are the things I'm putting out into the world? What is the difference between an offering and an offer? And I believe they are different. So let's talk about the differences and hopefully give you some ideas on how you can think of your offerings and offers and really honor each as what there should be. Because I think where the issue comes is when we don't know what it is, and we treat an offering like an offer or we treat an offer like an offering. So the first thing about when I think of that word offering is there is a reverence and a generosity to it. If you go to temples in India or if you go to sacred sites, often you'll be encouraged or invited to have an offering. And in that offering, there's this essence of reverence. It's like also some gratitude for being in that space, for something greater than yourself. And what I want to invite you to think about is that your offerings in your business have that same energy to it, that there is a generosity, there is a gift, there is a sense of reverence and gratitude for the opportunity to put this out there, for simply the fact that you get to bring this offering and it is rewarding in simply giving it. Right? The fulfillment is in the offering. You don't need anything back from anyone else. And that's a key distinction. When you have an offering, it has an energy of being unattached. It is released into the world, and there is no expectations. You don't need the thing to give anything back. Sometimes it does, and we'll talk about that. But there is an essence of this is fulfilling. This is something of my heart. I'm doing this in the spirit of something greater than myself. I'm doing this with reverence and gratitude, and I'm throwing it out there, and I am unattached. I am literally releasing it. To release something, to release an album, it is out in the world. And it doesn't mean that you don't get paid or you can't get paid for your offerings, but there's a different spirit to it. There's an Unexpected, unattached spirit to it. And so to give examples of what are my offerings, all of my meditations, talks and even courses are, for me, offerings that I do it with a sense of giving. And I'm often not expecting anything. I don't need anything that it was fulfilling for me to create. I'm glad it's out in the world, and I hope it's helpful for people. Now, when I talk about courses and specifically for Insight Timer, I do get paid fairly well for this, but I don't go into it as an offer, which we'll talk about the differences in a second. There really is a sense of I'm unattached. This feels like a gift to the world, and I just want to give it to the world. So that's an example. Not all of those I get paid for. Actually, all of them I do get paid for on some extent, but they're all offerings to me. My free course, Meditation Script Mastery, that was a course that I was almost gonna sell, but I wanted it to be an offering to people to help them create their art, to help them create meditations that really inspire and evoke and are different. Remember, different is better than better. And this podcast is an offering in that same spirit. That I don't get paid for this. That me ranting here alone in my office to a microphone and having fun is fulfilling. And I'm hoping some people get some value out of it. But it's released. I'm not attached to it. Right. People respond and say it's great. People say, hey, Lou, I really, you really resonate with this and you're going to be my coach and I'm going to sign up with you and I'm going to go into your offers then. Great. Amazing. That's obviously would be awesome. But really the essence of why this podcast started was an offering to up and coming meditation teachers and coaches. Because this is a podcast that I wish I had. And then my newsletter is another offering that I so enjoy doing it. It's a gift. When I share an article, I don't expect much. I don't expect anything. I love when I receive feedback from people, but there's an unattachment to it. And as I alluded to just earlier, offerings can lead to offers, but offerings are just fulfilling to do them. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna intermingle. I'm gonna kind of try and make sense of this as we go along. So I hope I'm doing an okay job. We'll get back to how These two can relate. But first I need to talk about offers. And so the biggest distinction when I think of an offer is that for the offer to happen, a response is needed. There is something that you have, your knowledge, your wisdom, your energy that you've put together, you've made an offer. Now, this can be in the spirit of service, but it asks for a yes or no from someone or a group of people. Offer has clear boundaries. Do you want this? Yes. No. My intention is to find the people that want that thing. And so I spend money or time marketing, growing, so that I can get my offers in front of people. Because for the offer to actually be a thing and exist, it needs a yes. It needs someone to enroll for it. And so there's clear expectations and there's often a clear financial transaction. An offer is transactional, not in the way that can be used negatively, like it's superficial. That's not what I'm talking about when I'm saying transactional. But in this very simple definition of we have a good or service, someone else wants our good or service, and there's a transaction, right? We. We interact together, we transact together, where someone gives us their energy in the form of money for us to give them our service or our offer of what it is. So that exchange, right? Something needs to change hands. Something needs to go from one person to the other to other to one person. And so having offers is really important. If you're actually building a business and not a hobby, you need to align your offers because you need to make money. If you're building a business, if you want to just make this a service and not make it your business and making it a hobby sounds like you're doing it to get away from life in some ways. But if it can be a hobby, what it can be a thing that you do on your free time, for sure. And if that's you, amazing and keep doing that. But if you want to build a business, you got to have offers because you have to have an expectation that money is going to come in each month through the things that you are creating. And so I hope that distinction is helpful. Offering verse offer. So here's where there can be some blurry lines. And this is all my opinion, of course, please, if you disagree, that's totally okay too. But when I think of Insight Timer and I had this conversation with Prashanti Paz, whose interview is up on the show, but I had this conversation with Prashanti and that Insight Timer at its birth was always an offering it was, at its birth, a free meditation app offering to the world, a gift to the world. And that's how I approached it. And that's how a lot of teachers that are doing really, really well right now on the app approached it. What an opportunity to share our offerings on this app and these meditations. And I've always had this sense of deep reverence and gratitude for the opportunity to share. And that that hasn't gone away. But what's happening now is a lot of newer teachers are on the app, and I think some of the issues that they're having is they're seeing it as offers as opposed to offerings. They have expectations. Right. Biggest, remember the big distinction offering no expectations. Offer has expectations. And they're coming on the app with expectations that it needs to do something for them. I have this course. I should get paid for this. I should get paid this much. I should get paid this much for that thing. Just on and on and on. And there's an energy of extraction, there's an energy of trying to get something from it. And that's okay. I understand totally. But what I'm posing or positing is that Insight Timer works best when you see it as an offering and when you come at it as sharing your offerings without attachment, hoping that it helps someone and what you find, or what I find and what a lot of people that are, I know, who are doing very well on the app, they have always come at it with that spirit of offering on attachment, reverence, gratitude. And they don't depend. Once we depend on something to give us our income, there's an energy that we have to make things feel like an offer because we are dependent on it. So it makes sense. And so that's why I'm a big believer that, yes, if you're on Insta Timer, do your best. Share your gifts, but also make sure you're building off of it. Make sure you're building your email list, make sure you're building your offers, make sure you're building a business that's going to sustain. Because like any media that we don't control, Insight Timer could be gone next week or things can completely change. And so any dependency we have on an app or a platform is not the solid foundation that's going to be there 20, 40. I hope it is. I hope it's there 20, 40 years. So I invite you to. Maybe you are already seeing Site Timer as an offering, but if you were to use the distinction that I talked about today and the simple fact of an offering doesn't have expectations and an offer does. How can you shift how you're approaching what you're sharing on insight time, or to be more in the spirit of an offering? And then how can you get clear on your offers? And that's the thing. It's like we do things in this spiritual wellness world because we want to help people and we want to give, we want to serve. That's what's fulfilling. And then when we have an offer because we have that spirit, sometimes we're afraid to charge for that offer or we feel like we have to give them the most insane amount of value or we don't believe in the value that we have to offer because we're giving it in such a gift. And so that's again, the distinction is like, can you just give, give your offerings with your whole heart, unabashedly just give, give, give, give, give. And then can you charge well for the offers that you have so that you can actually build a business that makes meaningful revenue and supports your life? Okay, give, give, give, give, give, give your offering, share them to the world and then get clear on a pricing structure, whether it's for your one on one group programs or products. Get clear on that in a way that you know how much money you need to make a month and what realistically works to fill in that gap. I think we think we need to start at the same amount. If you're a newer teacher, like, oh, I need to start charging $50 a session because that's just where I need to start. And I'm gonna posit that I don't think that's necessarily true that you have a lot of value to give and there's not a rule that you have to start. I think we've been trained in the education industrial complex that we start from A to, to get to Z. But that's not true that you can find the thing that aligns for you. I'm not saying to go out there and charge an absurd amount of money, which some people sometimes do, and we'll have another episode talking more about that at some point. But I'm saying to just honor what you need to live as a human being and then own that and get clear on what those offers are and treat them as offers, treat them as, this is how I make money. And yes, if you want to give discounts and negotiate offers, have a sense of yes, there couldn't be a negotiation. But think about it, there's no negotiations in an offering. Right. I'm not going to like you know, share a meditation and then, you know, negotiate for someone to listen to it or you know, if they have feedback. Like it's not a negotiation. Offers have a negotiation. So trust that saying if people, you know, want to negotiate or you want to negotiate with someone on pricing or whatnot, that that's part of what an offer is. But I guess to come back, I know I get to rant on this podcast. I hope it's okay to come back. Just really get clear on your offerings and your offers. So what are some offers that I have? And I'm sharing this to illustrate offers, not to like offer them to you, although in some ways they do both. So my Meditation Course Creators Academy, my newest offer, and that is $297 for a course that will teach you how to create meditation courses. I think I could have charged more for that or I can charge more for that because if you just make a few courses, you should make your money back and build that out. But I wanted to make that accessible but also feel really solid to sell one of those courses because I did the work once. And I'm also offering a free coaching call a month for people in that, in that group to just really not that I'm trying to make it an offering and give so much, but it's just so much fun. It's so much fun. So that's one of my offers. And that's. So think about when you have offers, different price points. So that's just one time 297, you're gonna buy that. You're gonna have access to this course for life. And then you can have access to once a month coaching calls around building your courses. And so that's where that's at right now. And then I have a Meraki Mastermind which is for wellness teachers and meditation coaches and people who want to bring their gifts to the world, bring their creative projects to the world. And that's about three times that or maybe more than that, depending on how long you stay in the group. But it's 2 97amonth where we do 90 minute calls each week. And there's other things that are included in that group and there's just an awesome community. So you can see how I have Meditation Course Creators Academy for 297 one time. Then I have something that's 297amonth in this continual community. And then I have a personal coaching offer which is going to be the highest because it's going to take the highest amount of time and the deepest amount of intimate work that we're going to do and the most support you'll get from me, and that's four times the Meraki offer to 1200amonth. And that feels really good to have the different levels that people can work with me at. And I should say that all of these prices are at the moment price, so these prices could change. So if you're listening to this and it's five years ago, it's probably higher than it is right now. So that's an example of how I've been thinking about tiers. And this is all newer to me. Everyone, like, I hope you realize that leaning into this niche that this podcast is about. Again, this podcast is an offering that leads into these offers and they both can exist. They exist beautifully together. That's actually how I think we're supposed to be doing this work, is to have offerings and then have our offers. But you can see, and I'm actually thinking about creating another offer that's at an even lower price. Something like 40 something bucks a month around there. And so I'm kind of working out what that's going to be like. Not quite there yet, but you see how it works. Like I have something that's just 300 bucks. Someone comes to me and is like, hey, how can I work with you? Well, I have, you know, this price, which again is going to be a good amount of. Good amount for good amount of people. I'm not saying that it's inexpensive. And then I have a group that's three times that for the initial commitment. And then I have another offer that's 3,600 for the initial commitment. So there's going to be different levels of working. And that's okay because we only have so much time. And I want to serve each group, each offer in the way that I can. For my mastermind, I show up once a week for my coaching clients, I'm there all the time for meditation course Creators Academy. I did the work once, people can go through the course and I'm still offering once a month opportunity to dig into that. I will say the mastermind, it doesn't scale because there is a limit to the amount of people that I can let in. That makes it a true mastermind. So in my, you know, if I were to talk to a business mentor, he would say, well, how can we scale it? Because I don't offer it to everyone like it is an invitation only group. But it's still in the spirit of there's another offer in there. And as I said I'm hoping to, to create a smaller offer that is really accessible for as many people just so I can have offers for a lot of people. Now I have offerings for everyone and so I hope people get so much from my free stuff. Please. I hope, I hope I can just do free stuff and that you learn everything. You take the action on your own. Like this gives you everything you need. And there's no expectation that I know that that energy is out in the world. And so I hope this is helpful. Let me know if it is. I would really love it. So to recap, offering has a sense of unattachment, gratitude, reverence. There's a releasing an offer has a transaction. There's an expectation, there's a yes or no. You were waiting for something to happen or else the offer doesn't happen. You can't do one on one coaching if someone doesn't say yes to your one on one coaching. So get clear on your offerings and your offers. Make your distinctions, make writing them down invitation to approach Insight Timer as offerings rather than an offer. Because I believe it was built for that and I think supports that most and will keep you the most sane if you do that and then own the differences, give unabashedly and charge with a clear boundary. If you're selling something at a premium, own that. And if it's not for everyone, direct people to your offerings. You're have tons of free stuff to give them anyway. And so I hope you just find balance, find the balance that's going to work for you. And if you're selling something at a premium, own it. And if it's not for that person, you might have lower priced offers or you have all of your offerings and so really letting yourself trust that you're giving all you need and then yes, for your offers you need to receive because you need to have a business that is sustainable to you. Your courses on Insight Timer, as I said that they're offerings and what a blessing if they do do well. I think of someone like a Sarah Blondin who had her offerings just explode and grow and I think Sarah is doing pretty well for herself because of that. I think a book, if you read a book, I see that as an offering, yes, there's going to be a price tag on it. It's probably not going to make a lot of money, but maybe it's the right book at the right time, finds the right people, explodes, becomes the bestseller whatnot and grows and leads to a lot of other things or opportunities. I think of people like A Michael Singer in how he talks about in the Surrender experiment, where he is doing these things out of service, out of gratitude, and they end up making a lot of money. And I think there's something there, there's something in the truth of that. And so that's why I always want to encourage people to lean on that. Keep doing your inner work and your spiritual work, your development of where you might be getting in your own way. Because as you keep doing that inner work, you're going to get clear on those offerings and the synchronicity, the aliveness of your energy is going to be a force that's unfolding new things. You're on the right path, you're in the right timing. So always trust that. Always come back to yourself. And maybe we'd be lucky that we can just do our offerings. We can just live in gratitude. We can just have that as a, as a service without needing to offer. Now, I think there's an energy that we can take into our offers too, but I hope just having some of this distinction is helpful. All right. Wow. I ranted and raved for almost a half hour on this topic and you guessed it, what a product placement for me to explain or express or invite you to an offering. Literally a thing that I was going to have you pay for. I was like, no, this is a gift. I want this in the spirit of an offering to the world, which is my one hour long free training on developing evocative, powerful, guided meditations. Meditations that not make you better, but different. Because different is better than better. Again, thanks Solly Hogshead for that. Different is better than better. And so how do you make different meditations that are unique to you, that resonate with your ideal audience? And I have a free training called Meditation Script Mastery that you can sign up for. Did I say it was free? For free as an offering in the description below. So if you haven't, go check that out and leave a review. Let me know what you think of this offering. I appreciate hearing from you. And until next time, lots of love to you, friend, and thank you for the gifts and the offerings that you are making to the world, because that is why I do this. And before you take off, if you like this episode or like this podcast, please consider taking a moment to leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow. And if you are someone wanting to use meditation to share your gifts, I have a free course called Meditation Script Mastery. You can click the link in the podcast description and get you set up with learning how to create unique meditations that you can share with your students, your clients, and you can share with your friends. So thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next time.