The dreaded unsubscribe.

Every single time I see my subscriber count dip, even if it’s just by one lonely little number, there is a tiny part of me that absolutely winces. It’s like a micro-dose of rejection delivered straight to my heart.

I don’t care how secure you are, how long you’ve been doing this, or how many reassuring pep talks you give yourself in the mirror. Nobody enjoys watching someone choose to hit “exit” on something you poured your literal soul, late nights, and three cups of espresso into.

For a split second, my brain immediately goes into a classic, Olympic-level spiral and starts making up wild, dramatic stories:

• “Maybe I’m being way too much.”

• “Ugh, I’m posting too often and clogging up everyone’s digital life.”

• “They think I’m boring. I’ve officially lost my spark.”

• “I should probably just delete the whole account and move to a cabin in the woods.”

Does that sound horribly familiar? Please tell me I’m not the only one who does this.

Because for a while now, that was my exact morning routine. But lately? I’ve been approaching these little drop-offs with a completely different energy. An absolute vibe shift, if you will.

Welcome to the 10K Experiment

Right now, I’m running a massive manifestation experiment on myself. For the next six months, I am actively manifesting 10,000 Substack subscribers using the Law of Assumption.

(Side note: If you’re new around here, I broke down the exact master plan and mindset framework for this in my very first article, How I Manifested 10K so definitely pause and go read that if you want the full, juicy backstory!)

Now, let’s clear something up right away: I’m not doing this by sitting on my sofa, staring at a vision board, waiting for the Universe to just magically drop 10,000 people into my lap while I watch Netflix. And I’m definitely not playing that cool, detached, “I don’t even care about the metrics” game.

We care! The numbers matter because they represent real human beings reading our words.

Instead, the experiment is about practicing one simple, radical question every single day:

If I already had 10,000 subscribers right now, how would I actually think?

Because according to the Law of Assumption, you don’t build your dream future by constantly reacting to your current, messy, chaotic circumstances. You don’t get to the finish line by obsessing over the starting blocks. You create your future by boldly stepping into the energy, the confidence, and the mindset of the version of you who already lives there.

And honestly? Changing that filter changes the entire vibe of my day.

Would “10K Soph” Panic?

This is the exact filter I am running my thoughts through now. Whenever I open my phone and notice a stat has dipped, I stop, take a breath, and ask: If I already had 10,000 subscribers right now...

• Would I spend 45 minutes over-analysing one single unsubscribe, trying to figure out which post broke the camel’s back?

• Would I decide my writing is total dogshit based on a single automated email notification?

• Would I ghost my own publication for three days because my confidence took a hit and I’m hiding from the dashboard?

Absolutely not.

10K Soph would literally shrug, wish that person a beautiful life, take a sip of her iced coffee, and get right back to typing the next post. Not because she’s a cold, heartless robot who doesn’t care about her audience, but because she deeply understands a few objective realities about the internet that I sometimes forget when I’m stuck in panic mode.

The Reality Check (What 10K Soph Knows)

When you look at your Substack dashboard through the eyes of someone running a massive, thriving, professional publication, you realize that unsubscribes are just healthy, normal internet math. In fact, they are a necessity for a growing list.

Here is the truth we need to tattoo on our brains the next time the numbers dip:

1. It’s an inbox problem, not a “you” problem

We are all absolutely drowning in digital noise. Our generations are exhausted by notifications. A reader might genuinely love your voice, think you are incredibly talented, and wish you the best, but they look at their phone and realise they have 40 unread newsletters screaming at them from their inbox, alongside 300 unread work emails. When they do a brutal Sunday night “Inbox Zero” purge, it’s an act of survival. It is about their time management and mental clarity, not your talent.

2. They are doing you a massive favour (The Deliverability Secret)

Bestie, we do not want a massive list of “ghost subscribers” who never open our emails. Why? Because the algorithm lords at Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail are constantly watching. If thousands of people are on your list but never open your emails, the email providers think, “Oh, this publication must be spam.” Then, they start sending your newsletter straight to the Promo or Spam tab for everyone, including the people who love you! Unsubscribes naturally prune your list. They keep your open rates high and your deliverability squeaky clean.

3. The “Good Girl” Filtering System

Many of us grew up with intense “Good Girl” conditioning the societal programming that tells us we need to be polite, convenient, universally liked, and agreeable at all times. We carry that trauma right onto Substack, assuming that if someone leaves, we must have failed at being “good” or “likable.”

But your goal isn’t to appeal to the entire internet. You aren’t pizza. You are a writer with a specific, unique voice. When someone unsubscribes, they are just self-selecting out of your target audience. They are quietly freeing up space for the readers who will actually value, share, buy your paid subscriptions, and champion your work. They are filtering the room so only your true community remains.

Your Brain is Just Scanning for Rejection

So why does it still feel like a punch to the stomach? Because your brain isn’t actually capable of processing a digital dashboard accurately. It isn’t seeing a data point; it is scanning for social rejection.

Thousands of years ago, getting excluded from the tribe meant literal, physical danger. If the group didn’t like you, you were cast out into the wilderness to fend for yourself. Today, someone clicking that little “unsubscribe” link triggers the exact same ancient, protective alarm system in your nervous system. Your body enters a micro-fight-or-flight response before your logical brain even gets a chance to look at the screen.

It feels deeply personal. But 99% of the time, it’s literally just digital admin. It’s someone cleaning up their digital house. It has nothing to do with your worth as a creator.

Practical Strategies to Protect Your Peace

If we’re going to build a creative empire here without losing our minds and burning out, we need some strict emotional boundaries. Here are the rules I am living by during this 10K experiment:

• Turn Off the Drama Notifications: If you have real-time email notifications turned on for unsubscribes, turn them off today. Right now. Go into your settings and kill them. You do not need a digital ping letting you know someone walked out the door while you’re trying to eat dinner or watch a movie. Check your total stats once a week, but stop letting daily fluctuations dictate your hourly mood.

• Look at the “Net,” Not the Churn: It is so easy to hyper-focus on the minus-sign. Zoom out your dashboard view from “7 days” to “90 days” or “All Time.” If you lose 3 subscribers over a weekend but gain 5 new ones, you are still growing. Stop staring at the individual drops and start looking at the beautiful, jagged, upward curve of your long-term journey.

• Ignore the “Exit Surveys” (Mostly): Substack allows people to leave a reason why they left. If 20 people all leave the exact same constructive feedback, like, “The font colour is impossible to read” or “The emails are formatting weird on mobile” that is useful data. But if one random person leaves a note saying, “I don’t like your tone” or “Too political,” delete it instantly. You cannot write anything compelling or authentic if you are constantly trying to please the lowest common denominator.

  ---

What Evidence Are You Looking For?

Whether you are building a Substack, launching a business, unlearning your people-pleasing habits, or trying to design a life that looks completely different from everyone else’s, your brain will always find evidence that it’s not working if it looks hard enough. If you look for failure, your brain will gladly serve up a confirmation bias buffet.

Or... you can deliberately, aggressively choose to look for evidence that it is working.

That is what I’m practicing right now. Not blind, toxic positivity. Not ignoring the reality of hard weeks or quiet launches. But actively choosing the empowering interpretation that keeps me creating instead of quitting.

Because I have a sneaky feeling that the woman with 10,000 subscribers isn’t someone who never doubted herself. She isn’t someone who never felt the sting of a drop in numbers. She’s simply the woman who kept hitting publish while doubt sat quietly in the passenger seat.

Let’s do some collective mindset work in the comments today. Be honest with me:

1. What story are you currently telling yourself because of one tiny piece of “negative” evidence (an unsubscribe, a quiet launch, a post with low likes)?

2. If you were already successfully living the 10k-subscriber life you’re trying to manifest, what would you choose to believe about that evidence instead?

   ---

About the Author

Hi, I’m Soph.

I’m a psychospiritual coach, astrologer, and the creator of The Ex Good Girl.

I help women understand why they people-please, overthink, over-give and abandon themselves, so they can stop performing for love and start building lives that actually belong to them.

Around here you’ll find psychology, nervous system tools, astrology, Practical Magic, and the occasional Cinderella analogy. Think of me as your Fairy Godmother, just with less glitter and more boundaries.

I’m so glad you’re here.

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There was no lightning bolt. There was no mysterious stranger reading my chart in a crowded market, telling me my exact future. There was no single, dramatic night where everything suddenly clicked and I woke up as a completely different person.

What actually happened was much smaller, much quieter, and far more useful.

Astrology simply became the thing I reach for on an ordinary day. It’s the tool that steadies me when the week feels overwhelming, and the reason I remember to check in with myself before the noise of the world swallows me whole.

Let me explain how it actually happened.

The Version of Me Before

For a long time, I was running on empty and calling it "fine."

I had the job, the house, the kids, and a calendar so packed it almost passed for a life. But underneath all of it, I felt strangely detached from myself. It felt like I was watching someone else do a decent impression of me and getting most of the details right, but I was tired in a way that sleep couldn't touch. I kept waiting to feel like I’d finally "arrived" somewhere, but I never did.

I’d love to give you a tidy, poetic origin story about how I found my way out of that rut, but the truth is much messier. I got into astrology by complete accident. You could say it found me.

One night, a friend pulled up my birth chart and started reading it out loud. It felt like she was reading directly from my private diary. At first, it was purely a laugh, a silly way to explain why a friend was being "quite so much" that week (love you, Leo).

I wasn't looking for deeper meaning, and I definitely wasn't looking for a spiritual practice. I just liked that it handed me a specific language for things I already felt inside but had never been able to name.

The Moment It Stopped Being a Joke

There is a massive difference between reading your horoscope for a giggle and actually leaning on astrology as a tool. The shift snuck up on me before I even realized it was happening.

It landed during a particularly brutal stretch where I had completely burned myself out. I was saying yes to everything, meaning none of it, and running entirely on coffee and adrenaline. I wasn't coping, I was just performing the shape of a functioning person and hoping nobody looked closely enough to see the cracks.

Then, one morning, I looked at what was happening in the sky and it just matched my internal reality. Not in a spooky, magical way, but in a very practical way: “Oh, so I’m not just losing my mind. There is a genuine, structural reason this week feels like wading through wet cement.”

That was the turning point.

The Realisation

Astrology stopped being about prediction and started being about permission.

Permission to feel exactly what I was feeling instead of constantly arguing with it.

Permission to slow down when every voice in my head was screaming at me to push through.

Permission to trust that a hard patch was just a temporary season, not a permanent flaw stitched into who I am.

Nobody had ever handed me that kind of permission before. So, I started handing it to myself, and I used the cosmos as my excuse to do it.

What It Actually Looks Like Day-to-Day

Here is the main thing people get wrong about astrology: they think it’s all about the future. They think it’s about big reveals, finding out when they’ll meet someone, if they’ll get the job, or whether Mercury is about to ruin their life again.

For me, it is almost never about the future. It’s about the present, and it is gloriously mundane.

Most mornings, I’ll make a coffee, sit on the sofa for five quiet minutes before the day properly starts, and open my chart app to see what’s going on. I don't do this to find out what is going to happen to me. I do it to ask a better question about the day I am already standing in.

If the moon has drifted into a tender water sign, I clock that I might be more sensitive or easily overwhelmed than usual, and I give myself a wider margin before taking things to heart.

If there’s a massive surge of fire energy in the sky, I ride that wave and use it to send the scary email I’ve been avoiding before I lose my nerve.

The planets aren't bossing me around or forcing my hand. They are simply giving me a pause, a single beat to check in with myself before I react to the world. In a culture engineered to keep us constantly scrolling, reacting, and rushing, that five-minute pause is everything.

Astrology made me a person who actually checks in with herself. Every single good change in my life has quietly flowed out from that one daily habit.

For the Skeptics (Because I Was One, Too)

I know exactly how this sounds. I know there is a version of you reading this right now with one eyebrow raised halfway up your forehead. Honestly, I get it, because a part of me still has that eyebrow raised too.

So let’s say the quiet bit out loud: I don’t think Mars is beaming literal instructions into my brain. I am not claiming that a giant lump of rock millions of miles away is puppeteering my Tuesday afternoon.

What I am saying is that astrology is a language for paying attention, and paying attention is the entire game. It’s a mirror held up at a useful angle. It’s a framework for noticing the natural patterns in my own moods, energy, and cycles that I would otherwise just steamroll straight past on my way to the next task.

You can call that psychological projection. You can call it a placebo effect. I genuinely don’t care what you call it, because the practical effect is entirely real.

Since starting this practice, I am calmer. I am significantly kinder to myself. I ride the hard weeks with a bit more grace, and I actually let myself enjoy the good ones instead of constantly bracing for them to end. If a "made-up" system can do all of that for my mental health, then it is the most useful tool I’ve ever stumbled into. (And if we're being honest, half the things we build our entire modern lives around are just stories we've collectively agreed to believe anyway.)

How It Became My Whole Life

I never, ever planned for this to become my actual job.

It originally started as a cheap birthday present. I couldn't stretch my budget to buy a fancy gift for a mate, so I offered to write out a full reading of her birth chart instead. When I gave it to her, she actually cried, the good kind of tears. Then her sister wanted one. Then a colleague wanted one. Then a total stranger slid into my messages asking what my rates were.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, it quietly stopped being a favor and started being a business.

Once astrology became the thing that grounded me, I simply couldn't shut up about it. That is how I started including it in my coaching . It didn't come from a calculated corporate business plan or a five-year corporate projection. It came from the plain, simple fact that this tool did something profound for me, and I wanted other people to have access to that same feeling.

Every chart reading I deliver for a client now is really just me handing them that exact same sense of permission. Permission to feel what they feel, to move at their own natural pace, and to trust that whatever difficult season they are currently navigating has a distinct shape and, eventually, an ending.

I get to do that for a living now. To be completely honest, I still can’t quite believe it.

The True Gift of the Practice

If you strip away all the planets, the complex placements, and the ancient terminology, here is what astrology actually changed for me:

It gave me a ritual in a life that desperately needed structure. It’s something small, quiet, and completely mine that answers to absolutely nobody else.

It gave me a vocabulary for my own internal weather. I used to just feel randomly "off" and then immediately beat myself up for feeling off, which is a miserable spiral. Now, I can name the feeling, locate it, and allow it to move through me.

It gave me patience. With the world, with the people I love, and mostly with myself. I finally stopped expecting myself to feel identical every single day like a machine. Turns out, humans have seasons. Turns out, that is completely allowed.

Astrology didn't give me a map of my future. It gave me a way back to myself, over and over again, on the days I drift too far out. That is the real magic of the whole thing. Not the big fortune-telling prediction, but the small, repeated act of turning inward and asking yourself, softly: How are you actually doing today?

That single question changed my life. Astrology is just the beautiful, ancient, slightly ridiculous excuse I use to keep asking it.

If You’re Astro-Curious

You don't need to go all in right away. You don’t need to memorize your entire chart, buy expensive crystals, or learn what a "quincunx" is (I'll save you the search: it basically means an itch you can't quite scratch, and that's about as scientific as we need to get today).

If you want to explore it, start small:

1. Learn your "Big Three": Look up your Sun sign, your Moon sign, and your Rising sign.

2. Sit with them: Just read about those three placements and see how they feel.

3. Track your weeks: Notice your moods and energy across a single month. See if the patterns start to connect with what's happening around you.

Treat the practice less like a set-in-stone fortune, and more like a standing invitation to look inward.

Worst-case scenario? You’ve spent a month paying slightly closer attention to your own internal life, which is hardly a tragic outcome for any of us.

Best-case scenario? You find exactly what I found: a small, steadying daily ritual that meets you every morning on the sofa and quietly asks you to come home to yourself.

Soph x

About the Author

Hi, I’m Soph.

I’m a psychospiritual coach, astrologer, and the creator of The Ex Good Girl.

I help women understand why they people-please, overthink, over-give and abandon themselves, so they can stop performing for love and start building lives that actually belong to them.

Around here you’ll find psychology, nervous system tools, astrology, Practical Magic, and the occasional Cinderella analogy. Think of me as your Fairy Godmother, just with less glitter and more boundaries.

I’m so glad you’re here.

✨ Ways to keep exploring

🩷 Subscribe so you never miss a newsletter, new resource, or Unbothered Notes.

📝 Take the Good Girl Quiz Discover which Good Girl pattern has been running the show and where to start.

🪄 Book a Fairy Godmother A 60-minute 1:1 where we get to the root of your patterns and send you home with practical tools to stop abandoning yourself.

🌙 Share this newsletter with the woman who keeps apologising for taking up space. Share

Welcome to my very public, slightly delulu, but fun little experiment.

Even though the numbers don’t match yet, this headline is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. For the next six months, I am choosing to write, breathe, and make decisions as if the version of me with 10k subscribers is already here. And I don’t mean that in a toxic “fake-it-until-you-make-it” way, and definitely not in a superficial “just think positive thoughts and everything will fix itself” way.

It’s just a gentle shift in perspective. What if the future version of you isn’t someone you have to completely break your back to build through exhausting hustle, but someone you are just slowly catching up with?

According to the Law of Assumption, the reality we consistently identify with, the internal state we choose to vibe with as our default, is what shapes the experiences we create. Whether you think that’s spiritual magic, basic psychology, or just a fun way to look at goals honestly doesn’t matter. This isn’t a lecture or a sales pitch. It’s just an invitation to watch me try it out in real-time. In exactly two weeks, the very first update drops.But can we be honest for a second? Trying to live from that mindset is deeply, profoundly uncomfortable when you are a recovering people-pleaser.

If you grew up with that “good girl” conditioning, you were probably taught that safety means being modest, agreeable, and keeping your head down. Your brain tells you that claiming a big goal before you have the physical proof to show the world is just setting yourself up to be embarrassed.

When I sat down to type that headline, I had a total nervous system wobble. My heart rate spiked, my chest tightened, and my brain immediately started whispering: “Who do you think you are? Everyone is going to think you’re a fraud. Stay quiet, stay humble, and wait until you’re formally invited.”

Because on a purely human level, having 57 subscribers feels so safe. It’s like a cosy little group chat. I know exactly how to handle a group chat. I can make sure everyone feels heard, keep the peace, and manage the vibe so nobody gets upset with me.

But a massive audience? That triggers all the old childhood fears of being “too much” or getting criticized. When you share your voice with a huge crowd, you can’t make everyone happy. Someone is inevitably going to disagree with you or misinterpret your heart. To a subconscious system that was wired to keep everyone comfortable, that feels like an actual crisis.

So, what do we do to protect ourselves? We unconsciously stay small. We don’t post the edgy essay. We hide behind “perfectionism” and endless editing loops.

Having 57 subscribers isn’t a failure at all; it’s a beautiful, gentle safety mechanism. This entire experiment is just me training my nervous system to feel safe taking up a bit more space, without wanting to hide under the duvet.

Subscribe

The Rules

For the next six months, I am pulling back the curtain completely. No curated success stories, no gatekeeping, and no leaving out the messy days where I’m doubting everything. You are getting the completely honest diary of the middle.

I’m tracking the whole journey, but I’ve set some gentle boundaries for myself to make sure I don’t burn out:

• No Performance: I’m not going to write things just to please an algorithm or act like someone I’m not. If the writing doesn’t feel warm, real, and true to me, it stays in my drafts.

• Leaning into Rest: I am absolutely not sacrificing my sleep, my time with my kids, or my sanity to chase a metric. The growth has to feel spacious and aligned, or the experiment fails. I’m not grinding for this.

• Total Honesty: I’m sharing the actual truth. The sweet wins, the strategies I’m trying out, and the funny mini-meltdowns that happen when things feel a bit overwhelming.

If I hit 10,000 subscribers, you will have a complete, honest roadmap to use for your own life and business. If I don’t, we will still have learned something really beautiful about what happens when we refuse to keep ourselves small.

To keep myself grounded, I am holding onto a few sweet, non-negotiable assumptions:

• I am the creator of a thriving Substack.

• My writing spreads because it resonates.

• Every day, new women find my work and feel like they’ve finally found their corner of the internet.

• I have 10,000 engaged subscribers and over 100 paid members because my work changes the way people see themselves.

Every two weeks I'll come back here and tell you exactly what's happening. I'll share the subscriber count, what's working, what's falling flat, the practical things I'm trying, the manifestation experiments I'm playing with, the mindset wobbles that inevitably show up, and the moments that make me stop and think, "Well... that was a bit weird."

So, let’s see what happens.

Maybe in six months we’ll all be laughing at this article because it was wildly optimistic. Or maybe we’ll be reading it as the first chapter in the story of how a slightly delusional headline became completely true.

Either way, I hope you’ll stick around for the experiment.

About the author

Hi, I’m Soph.

I’m a psychospiritual coach, astrologer, and the creator of The Ex Good Girl.

I help women understand why they people-please, overthink, over-give and abandon themselves, so they can stop performing for love and start building lives that actually belong to them.

Around here you’ll find psychology, nervous system tools, astrology, Practical Magic, and the occasional Cinderella analogy. Think of me as your Fairy Godmother, just with less glitter and more boundaries.

I’m so glad you’re here.

✨ Ways to keep exploring

🩷 Subscribe so you never miss a newsletter, new resource, or Unbothered Notes.

📝 Take the Good Girl Quiz Discover which Good Girl pattern has been running the show and where to start.

🪄 Book a Fairy Godmother Session A 60-minute deep dive into your patterns, with practical tools to help you stop abandoning yourself and start trusting yourself.

🌙 Share this newsletter with the woman who keeps apologising for taking up space. She deserves to know she’s not broken.

Share

I literally backspaced the number, dropped it by fifty quid, and then wrote a three-paragraph email apologising for the cost, offering a payment plan nobody asked for, and promising to throw in two weeks of unlimited voice-note support for free.

I told myself I was being flexible. I told myself I cared about access.

The truth? I was terrified she’d look at the bill, decide I wasn’t worth it, and leave.

The first time someone told me my prices were too low, I argued with them. Not out loud, of course, out loud I said something incredibly gracious and polite. But inside, I had a whole defence case ready. They didn’t understand my world. They didn’t get that I cared about people. They didn’t realize some of my clients couldn’t afford more, and what kind of person would I be if I priced them out?

I had a beautiful, virtuous reason for every single pound I wasn’t charging. And every reason sounded like pure kindness.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the kindness only ever flowed in one direction. Out of me. Never back toward me. I was being incredibly generous with everyone in the room except the woman actually doing the work.

Generosity Has a Tell

Here is the thing nobody wants to admit out loud about undercharging: It feels good.

Not the bank balance. The bank balance feels terrible and stressful. But the act itself, the giving, the discounting, the throwing in of just one more thing for free, gives you a little hit of validation. A flush of feeling like a “good person.” The comforting belief that you are the sort of person who isn’t in it for the money.

And that cosy, righteous feeling is exactly the thing we need to be suspicious of.

Because real generosity leaves you feeling steady and balanced. You give from a full cup, you feel complete, and that’s the end of the exchange.

Protection dressed up as generosity leaves you with a quiet, lingering hum of resentment you can’t quite explain, mixed with a very specific type of relief:

• Relief that you won’t be seen as greedy.

• Relief that nobody can accuse you of asking for too much.

• Relief that you’ve stayed small enough to keep everyone else comfortable.

That relief is the tell. That’s not your soul giving from abundance. That’s just your anxiety buying insurance.

The Good Girl Doesn’t Undercharge by Accident

Your pricing isn’t an accident. It’s an old safety habit dressed up as kindness. And the disguise it wears to keep you from catching it in the act is “generosity.”

Specifically, it’s the urge to people-please wearing an apron and holding out a plate. It’s the voice that says: I will keep you happy so you will keep me safe. As a child, that radar kept the peace. As an adult with a business to run, it shows up as three distinct faces. You’ll definitely recognize at least one of these:

There’s a free calculator at the bottom of this essay that shows you exactly which face you run, and what it’s been quietly costing your business. It takes about three minutes, and most women are genuinely shocked by the final number.

Face One: The Over-Deliverer

You sold them a sixty-minute session. You gave them two hours, a follow-up summary, three extra resources you stayed up until midnight creating, and a text the next day to check in on them.

You’ll call this excellence. And the care is completely real. But look at the actual math. You were paid for one thing and you delivered four. Somewhere underneath that devotion is a calculation you’d never say out loud: If I give them more than enough, they can’t be disappointed. If they can’t be disappointed, they won’t leave me.

Over-delivery isn’t high quality; high quality has clear edges. Over-delivery is just trying to earn the right to be paid by making sure you’ve given way more than the money was ever worth, so no one can ever accuse you of taking.

Face Two: The Discounter

This is the immediate flinch.

You name your price, you watch their face, and before they’ve even had a split second to reply, you’re already discounting your own work. Sometimes you do it out loud: “But I can do a payment plan, or actually for you I could do a special rate” Sometimes you just do it in your body. The price drops in your throat before it ever reaches your mouth, so the number that actually comes out of your face is smaller than the one you wrote down this morning.

You’ll call this being accommodating, or reading the room. But you weren’t reading the room, you were managing a perceived threat. The number felt dangerous, so you defused it before anyone could react badly to it. You discounted to avoid an uncomfortable feeling, not to make a good sale.

Most of the time, they weren’t even going to flinch. You flinched on their behalf and called it kindness.

Face Three: The Healer Tax

This one goes the deepest because it dresses itself up as spiritual values.

The healer tax is the old story that money and meaning cannot coexist in the same room. The belief that if you truly cared about helping people, you wouldn’t charge a premium for it. That charging well for soul work, body work, or deep coaching is somehow dirty.

You’ll call this integrity.

It isn’t. It’s an inherited script about what good women are allowed to want, handed down through generations of women who were praised for self-sacrifice and shamed for asking for what they needed. The healer tax is the price you pay to keep belonging to that lineage. It just happens to come directly out of your savings account.

There is absolutely nothing pure or helpful about being broke. Your overdraft has never once made you a better practitioner.

Why It Was Smart

I want to be incredibly gentle here, because we are never going to call your safety patterns stupid.

The undercharging was incredibly smart. Every face of it was. At some point in your life, taking up less space genuinely kept you safer. At some point, giving more than was asked genuinely earned you the connection that didn’t come freely. At some point, wanting less than you needed was the only way to avoid being “too much.”

The pattern isn’t broken. It worked flawlessly. That’s the whole problem. It worked so well that your system filed it under survival and kept running it long after the danger left the room.

So you don’t get to bully yourself out of this one. You cannot shame an old habit into retirement. It only softens when it finally feels safe enough to stop.

The Soul or Role Question

Here’s the simple gut-check I always come back to, and it’s the exact tool I teach my clients. Before the next time you drop a price, throw in an extra, or talk yourself out of charging properly, pause and ask yourself one question:

“Is this generosity coming from my Soul, or from my Role?”

• Soul generosity feels full, clean, and spacious. It gives from a genuine overflow, it has a clear “yes” and an equally clear “no,” and it never requires you to go without.

• Role generosity is just the Good Girl on shift. It gives to stay safe, to be liked, and to avoid the terrifying feeling of being seen wanting something for yourself. It completely empties you out and calls it a virtue.

Same gesture. Completely different engine.

You are allowed to be deeply generous. Some of your generosity is the truest, most beautiful thing about you. But until you can tell which engine is running it, you can’t trust it, and you definitely can’t price your business around it.

So What Now?

You don’t fix this by just picking a bigger number tomorrow and white-knuckling your way through saying it aloud. That is just slapping a strategy over an open wound, and the wound will always win.

You start simply by catching the disguise.

• By noticing that tiny little hit of relief when you give too much away.

• By feeling the physical flinch right before you offer an unasked-for discount.

• By questioning the old story that says caring and charging can’t share a room.

You start by recognizing that your generosity was never the problem. The fear underneath it was. And fear is something we can absolutely work with.

That’s the real work. The rest of this series is exactly how we do it.

The Good Girl’s Guide to Money

A flagship series on why women undercharge, and how to stop.

1. Your Rates Were Set by a Seven-Year-Old

2. Where She Learned It

3. Undercharging Isn’t Generosity (It’s Protection) ← you are here

4. The Real Cost (And Why You Can’t See It) (coming soon)

5. The Success Wound (coming soon)

6. Can You Hold What You Call In? (coming soon)

7. The Throat (On Saying the Number) (coming soon)

If this piece landed with you, the kindest thing you can do today is forward it to a woman in your life who constantly over-delivers, undercharges, and calls it caring. She needs to read this. Share this essay.

Before you go

This whole essay made a case that the cost of undercharging is invisible. So here’s the part where it stops being invisible.

I built a free calculator that shows you your actual hourly rate, the version with the discounts and the over-delivery and the unpaid hours baked in. It takes about three minutes. At the end it gives you the real number, the annual figure you’ve been leaving on the table, and your Good Girl pricing diagnosis. Healer Tax, Soft Touch, The Whole Package. You’ll know yours when you see it.

It’s not here to shame you. It’s here to show you what changes when you do the work.

Run the Undercharging Calculator →

The Good Girl’s Guide to Money

A flagship series on why women undercharge, and how to stop.

1. Your Rates Were Set by a Seven-Year-Old

2. Where She Learned It

3. Undercharging Isn’t Generosity (It’s Protection) ← you are here

4. The Real Cost (And Why You Can’t See It) (coming soon)

5. The Success Wound (coming soon)

6. Can You Hold What You Call In? (coming soon)

7. The Throat (On Saying the Number) (coming soon)

If this one landed, the kindest thing you can do is forward it to the woman in your life who over-delivers, undercharges, and calls it caring. She’ll know.

Share

Reclaim Your Magic

• 💌 Stay in the Loop: Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss a weekly transmission on clearing the conditioning.

• 📖 What kind of Good Girl are you: Take the quiz to find out

• 🧬 The Next Step: Ready to stop reading the theory and start changing your nervous system? Book a 1:1 Why Am I Like This Session

About Soph

I’m a psychospiritual therapist, an astrologer with receipts, and the founder of Moon & Soul.

I spent the first half of my life winning gold stars, managing everyone else’s emotional climate, and perfecting the art of self-abandonment until my nervous system finally staged a full-blown revolution.

Now, my job is to help you stop treating your survival patterns like a personality flaw. Using a mix of somatic nervous system safety, subconscious belief work, and birth chart mapping, I help recovering Good Girls drop the armour and learn how to feel safe enough to be real.

When I’m not untangling subconscious codes or mapping planetary transits, I’m in the trenches of motherhood, building this business, and practicing the exact unbothered babe boundary work I preach.

New around here? Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss a weekly transmission straight to your inbox.

Let’s hang out on the daily: 📸 Come find me on Instagram @moonandsoul_coach for daily somatic reminders, unfiltered reality checks, and a front-row seat to what retiring the Good Girl role looks like in real life.

I can tell you the exact moment I learned that money was something you didn’t talk about.

I was small. Young enough that I don’t have the edges of the memory, just the middle of it. There was a bill on the kitchen table and a particular quietness in the room, the kind of quiet that isn’t peaceful, the kind a child reads instantly even when she can’t name it. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody had to. I understood, the way kids understand things long before they have the words, that money was a thing that made the people I loved go tense. And tense people were people I needed to manage.

So I got good at not adding to the pile. Not asking. Not wanting things out loud. Being the easy one.

I didn’t decide any of that. A little girl doesn’t sit down and form a money philosophy. She just learns the weather of her house and adjusts.

Here is the thing almost nobody tells you about your relationship with money.

You did not choose it. You inherited it. And you inherited it before you could read, before you could argue, before you had a single tool to question whether any of it was true.

By the time most of us are seven, the nervous system has already written its first draft on money. Not a belief in the way we usually mean the word, something you could debate or change your mind about. Something older than that. Something that lives in the body. A felt sense of whether there is enough, whether wanting is safe, whether asking gets you closer to people or further away.

And we absorbed all of it through the women who came before us.

The mother who said “we can’t afford it” in a voice that closed the conversation. Or the one who bought you the thing and then carried it like a debt you somehow owed her. The grandmother who saved every elastic band and washed out the cling film and made you feel, without ever saying it, that taking up resources was a kind of greed. The aunt who married for security and called it love. The women who worked themselves grey and called it devotion. The women who never once, in your whole childhood, said the words “I want” without immediately apologising for them.

You watched all of that. You were a tiny anthropologist studying the only culture you had access to. And you learned the rules of money the way you learned everything else at that age, by watching what kept the people you needed close, and what made them pull away.

For a lot of us, what kept them close was being good. Being easy. Not needing too much. Making yourself cheap to keep.

That is where it starts. Not in a money mindset course. In a kitchen.

I want to be really clear about something, because this is the part the industry gets wrong.

This was not a flaw in you. It was not a lack of discipline, or a bad attitude, or a limiting belief you should have been smart enough to override by now. It was a child’s nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, which is keep her safe in the conditions she was actually living in.

If money made the room go tense, then a part of you decided money was dangerous, and that part was not wrong. It was responding to something real that was actually happening in your world. It found a strategy that worked. Stay small around money. Don’t ask. Don’t want too loudly. Be the one who needs the least.

It worked. That is why it stayed.

The problem is that the strategy never got the memo that you grew up. That you run a business now. That the room you are in is not the room you learned in. So the same nervous system that kept you safe at six is quietly setting your prices at thirty-six, and it is setting them low, because low is what felt safe, and safe is the only thing it was ever trying to give you.

You are not bad with money. You are loyal to a little girl’s solution to a problem that is no longer yours.

This is the work I do, and it is so much gentler than the money mindset world wants you to believe.

We do not need to bully you into “abundance.” We do not need to drag you across hot coals or get you to repeat affirmations your body doesn’t believe. We need to go back to the kitchen. We need to find the moment she learned it. And we need to help that part of you understand, slowly and kindly, that the danger has passed. That wanting is allowed now. That she is safe to set the thing down.

She has been carrying it for so long. She deserves to know she can stop.

If this landed somewhere tender, that’s the work starting

I built a free tool for exactly this moment. It’s called the Money Story Generator, and it does the thing this essay is really about. It helps you name your money archetype, find where it came from, and gently rewrite the belief you didn’t choose. It takes a few minutes and it tends to make people go very quiet in a good way.

👉 Try the Money Story Generator, free

No performing. No fixing yourself. Just finally seeing her clearly, so she doesn’t have to work so hard anymore.

Next in the series: Undercharging Isn’t Generosity (It’s Protection). The thing that looks like kindness, and what it’s really protecting you from.

Reclaim Your Magic

• 💌 Stay in the Loop: Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss a weekly transmission on clearing the conditioning.

• 📖 What kind of Good Girl are you: Take the quiz to find out

• 🧬 The Next Step: Ready to stop reading the theory and start changing your nervous system? Book a 1:1 Why Am I Like This Session

About Me

I’m a psychospiritual therapist, an astrologer with receipts, and the founder of Moon & Soul.

I spent the first half of my life winning gold stars, managing everyone else’s emotional climate, and perfecting the art of self-abandonment until my nervous system finally staged a full-blown revolution.

Now, my job is to help you stop treating your survival patterns like a personality flaw. Using a mix of somatic nervous system safety, subconscious belief work, and birth chart mapping, I help recovering Good Girls drop the armour and learn how to feel safe enough to be real.

When I’m not untangling subconscious codes or mapping planetary transits, I’m in the trenches of motherhood, building this business, and practicing the exact unbothered babe boundary work I preach.

New around here? Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss a weekly transmission straight to your inbox.

Let’s hang out on the daily: 📸 Come find me on Instagram @moonandsoul_coach for daily somatic reminders, unfiltered reality checks, and a front-row seat to what retiring the Good Girl role looks like in real life.

I once gave a client three months of free coaching because she said the work was “really helping” and I didn’t know how to say that’ll be £1500, please.

I told myself it was generosity. I told myself I was building goodwill. I told myself a lot of things, the way you do when the real reason is too tender to look at directly.

The real reason was this: somewhere very young, I learned that being chosen meant being useful. That asking for too much made you difficult. That the safest way to be loved was to be easy, low-maintenance, and never, ever a burden.

And then I grew up, got good at my craft, started a business, and that same little girl walked into the building with me. She’s the one who set my prices. She’s the one who discounted before anyone asked. She’s the one who couldn’t bear to send the invoice.

She was running the spreadsheet. And she was running it on thirty-year-old out of date information.

You can read every book on value-based pricing. You can do the affirmations. You can write your rates on a Post-it and stick them to your mirror. And the moment a real human is on the other end of a real conversation, your body will do what it has always done. It will protect you. It will reach for the discount, the over-delivery, the apology, because some part of you decided, a long time ago, that this is how you stay safe.

This is not a discipline problem. You are not lazy, or unprofessional, or “just bad at the business side.”

You are well protected. There’s a difference.

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Let me tell you about her. The one who actually sets your prices.

She’s about seven. Maybe younger. She’s standing in a room, reading the vibe, working out what version of herself gets her through this without anyone going quiet on her, or sharp with her, or absent. And she’s good at it. Frighteningly good. She’s worked out that if she’s helpful, easy, undemanding, the energy in the room stays survivable.

That wasn’t a flaw in her. That was genius. She did the most important job there is, she kept you safe with the only tools a small body has. Smallness. Sweetness. Usefulness. Not needing much.

The trouble is nobody ever told her she could stop.

So when you sit down thirty years later to set your prices, she’s still in the chair. Still reading the room. Still deciding that the safest number is the one least likely to make someone uncomfortable. She doesn’t know you’ve grown. She doesn’t know the danger has passed. She’s working off twenty-year-old information, and she’s protecting you from a threat that isn’t in the room anymore.

She was seven. And she’s still setting the prices.

This is the part the industry gets wrong, and I want you to really hear it, because it changes everything about how you treat yourself from here.

When you undercharge, you are not failing.

You are succeeding, at an old job. The job of staying safe. The job of not being too much. The discount, the freebie, the “oh, whatever feels right to you” when someone asks your rate, those aren’t bad habits. They’re protection patterns. Strategies your nervous system built when being agreeable was the difference between connection and abandonment.

Patterns are protection. Not pathology.

Which means you cannot mindset your way out of this. You can’t shame the seven-year-old into charging more. She’s not responding to logic. She’s responding to safety. And until the body that’s running your pricing actually feels safe to want, to ask, to receive, the number on the invoice will keep sliding back down to wherever it learned to hide.

That’s why your affirmations didn’t stick. Not because you didn’t believe them hard enough. Because you were trying to install a new belief on top of an old survival response, and the survival response always wins. It’s older. It’s louder. It’s literally built to override the thinking part of you in the moment that matters.

You don’t have a worthiness problem. You have a protective belief, and it has a price tag attached.

So this is the series.

Over the next nine essays, I’m going to walk you through the whole thing. Where she learned it. Why undercharging feels like generosity when it’s actually fear in a nicer outfit. What it’s costing you, in money and in the slow burnout you’ve been calling devotion. Why being seen feels dangerous. Why receiving is so much harder than giving. Why the word “just” keeps sneaking into your rates. And eventually, how to raise your prices without quietly rolling them back two weeks later when your body panics.

We’re not going to kill the Good Girl. I don’t believe in that. She saved you. You don’t fire the person who kept you alive.

We’re going to thank her, understand her, and very gently retire her from a job she never should have had to do in the first place, setting prices for a grown woman who is safe now, even if her body hasn’t fully got the memo.

If something in this is landing, that low, slightly winded feeling of “oh fuck, that’s me” you’re not alone in it.

Next essay: Where She Learned It the origin story of the woman who’s been running your spreadsheet.

Soph

If you’ve found your way here, I’m going to make a guess about you.

You’re good at what you do. Genuinely good. People tell you so. And yet, when it comes to charging for it, something happens. You discount before anyone asks. You over-deliver until the price stops making sense. You add the “just” and the “sorry” and the nervous little laugh before the number’s even left your mouth. You’ve thought about raising your rates roughly four hundred times and done it maybe once, reluctantly, with your stomach in your throat.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place. And I want to tell you something before we even begin:

You are not bad at money. You are not lazy, or unprofessional, or missing some business gene everyone else got. You learned, somewhere very young, that money had social consequences. That wanting too much made you difficult. That being easy and useful and small was how you stayed safe and stayed loved.

And then you grew up and built a business, and that wiring came with you.

This series is about that wiring. Where it came from, what it’s costing you, and how to gently, slowly, rewire it. Not through affirmations. Not by white-knuckling your way to confidence. By understanding the part of you that’s been protecting you all this time, and showing her she doesn’t have to do it anymore.

What this series is

Over the coming weeks, I’m publishing nine essays (plus a bonus interlude) that together form the most complete thing I’ve ever written about why women undercharge and how to stop.

Here’s the path we’ll walk:

1. The Good Girl Runs the Spreadsheet - why your pricing was never a strategy problem

2. Where She Learned It - the money story you didn’t choose

3. Undercharging Isn’t Generosity (It’s Protection) - the reframe at the heart of everything

4. The Real Cost (And Why You Can’t See It) = what undercharging actually takes from you

5. The Success Wound - why being seen feels dangerous

6. Can You Hold What You Call In? - on receiving, the hardest part

7. The Throat - why saying the number out loud is so hard

8. Raising Your Prices Without Rolling Them Back - the practical one

9. Retiring Her (With Love) - what it looks like to relate to money from a body that feels safe

Plus a bonus interlude on astrology, used the way I actually use it: as a map, not an excuse.

How to read it

You can read these in order, or dip into whichever title pulls you. Each essay stands alone, but together they build a whole world.

I’d gently suggest reading them slowly. One a week, the way I’m publishing them, is plenty. This isn’t information to consume and tick off. It’s a re-education, and re-education takes time. The reader who sits with one essay for a week will get more than the one who binges all nine in a night and feels briefly inspired.

Subscribe if you’d like them to land in your inbox as they go out. That’s the easiest way to follow along.

Who’s writing this

I’m Soph. I’m a psychospiritual coach and the creator of a trauma-informed framework I use with clients every week. I’m trained in schema therapy, EFT, NLP, somatic work, and evolutionary astrology, and this series pulls from all of it.

But really, I’m just a recovering Good Girl who once gave away three months of free coaching because I couldn’t say “that’ll be £900.” I learned how to retire her the long way. This series is the map I wish I’d had.

One thing before we start

This series has a home beyond these essays.

I’ve built a free community where the ideas here become interactive tools, a money story generator, a calculator that shows your real hourly rate, a whole workflow for raising your prices without rolling them back, alongside a private space full of women doing exactly this work together. It’s called Money & The Good Girl, and it’s completely free to join.

You don’t need it to follow the series. But if you want somewhere to actually do the work as you read, that’s where it lives. [Come in here.]

For now, all I want you to do is read Essay One, coming soon.

It’s called The Good Girl Runs the Spreadsheet. And it starts with the £900 I couldn’t ask for.

Let’s begin.

Soph x

That was the first part of it. I decided it was an experiment. Not a desperate, kind of experiment. More like, okay then, let’s see what happens if I actually do this properly. Let’s see what happens if I stop speaking about the thing I want like it’s distant, unlikely, or reserved for other women.

But underneath all of that, the real foundation was this: I believed I deserved it.

Not in an entitled way. Not in a performative “I’m just claiming my power” way. I mean I genuinely believed I was allowed to want it, allowed to be seen, and allowed to receive something that big without immediately talking myself out of it.

And I think that part matters more than most people realise.

Because a lot of women do the visualising, say the affirmations, write the list, light the candle, do the ritual… and still don’t let the thing fully land because underneath it all, they’re not actually sure they get to have it.

They still feel like they need more proof. More credentials. More permission. More reason to take up that kind of space.

I didn’t want to do that.

I wanted to see what would happen if I let myself fully believe this was available to me.

So I picked the award. And then I started talking like it was already happening.

I said to Jake and the kids that I’d be going to collect up my award. Not “if I win.” Not “imagine if.” Just, I’m going to pick up my award. I said it every time it came up. I said it to my nail lady too, which feels important for some reason. Because once you start saying something in normal places, in everyday conversation, it stops being some private little fantasy you only visit when you’re in a journalling mood. It starts becoming part of your reality. Part of your language. Part of how you see yourself.

And I think that matters more than people realise. A lot of women say they want something, but they still speak about it like it belongs to somebody else. Like they’re trying not to get caught wanting it too much. Like if they stay casual enough, it won’t sting if it doesn’t happen. I didn’t do that. I was like, no, I’m going all in on this one.

I cleared a space on the shelf for the award too. Which, yes, sounds slightly unhinged written down like that. But I did. I made room for it. A physical space. And I think that did something to me, because it wasn’t just, I’d like this to happen. It was, this has somewhere to go when it gets here. That changes your energy. It changes how seriously you take your own desire. It tells your brain, your body, your whole system, we are not flirting with this. We are expecting it.

I drafted the winner’s post as well. Same energy. Same decision. Not because I thought a caption draft was going to bully the universe into compliance, but because I wanted to get familiar with the version of me who had already received it. What would she say? How would she hold it? How would she speak once it was already done? I wanted to step into that version before I had external proof.

That’s the bit people miss, I think. Manifestation, for me, is not just wishful thinking with nicer lighting. It’s identity work. It’s repetition. It’s making the desired reality feel normal enough that your body stops treating it like some outrageous fantasy. It’s not just wanting the thing. It’s getting familiar with being the woman who has it.

I also did an incognito walk every day. That was my little ritual with it. I walked as the woman who had already won. I let myself move around as if it was done. I wasn’t walking as the woman who hoped she might get it. I was walking as the woman who was going to collect her award. That’s a very different energy. One is reaching. One is rooted.

And then there was the visualising as I fell asleep. That dreamy half-in, half-out state where things seem to land a bit deeper. I’d see it. Feel it. Let myself drop into the scene of it being real. Going to collect it. Having won. It being mine. Nothing dramatic. Nothing forced. Just steady. Quiet. Repeated.

At first, it felt audacious as fuck. That was definitely part of it. There was absolutely a voice in me going, who even are you to decide this? Who do you think you are, clearing shelf space and casually telling people you’re going to pick up your award? That voice had thoughts. But I kept going.

And I think I could keep going because underneath the wobble, underneath the “who do you think you are?” of it all, there was still this deeper decision: I deserve this. I’m allowed to go for this. I’m allowed to receive this. I don’t have to make myself smaller just because the desire is big.

Because that’s usually the exact point where most women pull back. The point where it starts to feel too bold. Too much. Too full of yourself. Too embarrassing if it doesn’t happen. So they make it smaller. They water it down. They laugh it off. They pretend they were joking. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to see what would happen if I stayed with it. If I let it feel bold. If I let it feel slightly exposing. If I let myself want it without trying to act chill about it.

And I think that’s what this taught me more than anything. Sometimes manifestation is not about “calling something in” in the way people talk about it online. Sometimes it’s about becoming unavailable for the version of you who keeps hedging, shrinking, and speaking about what she wants like she needs to apologise for wanting it. Sometimes it’s about deciding. Deciding so fully that your words change. Your body changes. Your expectations change. The way you move changes.

That’s what happened for me. I stopped relating to this award like it was some distant possibility and started relating to it like it was already on its way. And then it was.

I won.

And honestly, I still laugh a bit thinking about how casually I said it to people like it was already sorted. But maybe that was the point. Maybe the magic is not always in making the desire bigger, shinier, or more dramatic. Maybe it’s in making it normal. Making it familiar. Making it expected. Making it feel like something that belongs in your life.

Not someday. Not for other women. Not if you get lucky.

Yours.

That’s what this taught me. That sometimes the boldest move is not chasing harder. It’s believing you deserve the thing in the first place. Speaking like it’s already yours. Making room for it. Walking like it’s done. And not backing off just because it feels audacious at first.

Because sometimes the thing you want is waiting for you to stop talking about it like a maybe.

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