Profit = Self Image

We’ve all had that moment where someone hears a price and instantly freezes. It doesn’t matter whether you say 90000, 60000 or 45000 — the reaction is the same. The eyebrows lift, the breath tightens, and the familiar line appears: “I’ll think about it… maybe after two months.”

And for a long time, we assume the number is the problem. We think if we had said a smaller amount, the person would have felt different. But if you watch closely, the size of the number rarely changes the size of the reaction. Because the truth is uncomfortable but liberating: a price feels like a bomb only when it arrives without context.

I’ve seen this play out with PCOD cases, IVF journeys, even something as simple as stubborn acne. A couple tries for years, visits doctor after doctor, and finally reaches the word nobody wants to hear — IVF. One cycle costs around 2.5 lakhs, and there’s no guarantee the first cycle works. Or the second. Or the third. The emotional toll alone is heavy, but the financial cost? Lakh after lakh, often with nothing to show for it except more fear and more fatigue.

Now imagine someone already carrying that weight. Already spending that much. Already hurting that much. For them, is ninety thousand really a bomb? Or was it a bomb only because we dropped it without showing them the landscape they’re actually standing in?

We forget that people are already paying a price. For the girl with hormonal acne, it’s fifteen or twenty thousand scattered across dermatologists, tests, creams, treatments she had to throw away because her skin reacted badly. For the woman with PCOD, it’s years of medication, missed cycles, emotional breakdowns, and the slow erosion of hope. When you look at that honestly, the program fee — whatever it is — isn’t the real expense. The real expense is the life they’re living right now.

That’s why context matters. Not as a sales trick, but as a kind of compassion. When we ask what they’ve tried, what they’ve spent, what they’re afraid of, we’re not interrogating them — we’re helping them see the full picture. Most people don’t make decisions based on information; they make decisions based on clarity. And clarity only comes when someone slows the moment down enough to say, “Let’s look at what’s actually happening.”

There’s a deeper layer too. When we rush to the price, we’re often revealing our own self-image. One coach quotes ninety, another quotes sixty, a third quotes forty-five — not because the value changed, but because their confidence did. Meanwhile the client, regardless of the number, still feels the same confusion because they still don’t understand the context.

Context is oxygen. In conversations, in relationships, in health, in selling anything that can genuinely help someone. When the story is clear, the price becomes grounding instead of frightening.

And maybe the quiet lesson beneath all of this is simple:

People aren’t scared of the cost.

They’re scared of paying for the wrong thing… again.