TL;DR: I am charging set prices now. It is working much better, and on that basis I have a suitable income to meet my current needs. There are still some challenges to overcome from not having been able to accumulate an asset base during this time of experimenting with GFRF. A few other topics also get interwoven.
Introduction
It has been three years to the day since I last posted here on the Give Freely Receive Freely blog. It might seem a bit strange to return here to write an update, particularly as it is doubtful that anyone is really reading this blog. But… from the outset of this blog, and when I first started working with GFRF, I framed it as an ‘experiment’, and in this blog I said that I would report honestly on the results of that experiment. So I feel that I should still do that. Perhaps no-one is reading this blog today, but perhaps someone will stumble over it in the future and gain some valuable insight from what I write here. Maybe even for myself looking back at this in the future I might find some value in what I record of my thoughts on what I have experienced from this experiment.
As you would expect, quite a lot has occurred in the three years since I last wrote here, more than I will be able to include in this post, but I will cover the things that are most relevant in terms of assessing the progress of this GFRF experiment.
The main events which I will outline briefly are as follows
- Sold main/side business
- Delayed in pursuing my plans overseas
- Pandemic
- Pivot back to online training
And then more space will be given to discussing the results of these events, my current situation, and implications from these and how it all relates to the GFRF experiment.
Sale of business
My business partner and I did eventually sell our business which I had been running alongside my qigong teaching for a nominal sum. In financial terms it was basically like giving it away, but at least it meant that the value we had created in the business was passed on to someone else rather than lost. The sale came through right at the last moment as we were getting ready to shut the business down anyway if no buyer came through so that each of us could pursue our future plans. In many ways it was sad to make the sale in these conditions, but it also tidied things off nicely, and left the path clear to pursue new plans.
Operating the business had taken a huge amount of time and energy, and had kept me from being able to move forward with developing my qigong teaching. Selling or shutting the business down meant that I could devote myself fully to teaching qigong again, and do what I needed to both really develop the quality of the teaching I could deliver and also change the way that I was doing this so that I could receive a viable income from this to live on. As we had set a deadline by which we would either sell or shutdown the business, I had started to make plans for what I would do to develop and promote my qigong teaching. This included travelling overseas so that I could live somewhere with low cost of living for a period of time to relieve the financial stress of living somewhere with a high cost of living (New Zealand has one of the highest costs of living in the world) while transitioning between income sources, and to put myself in a better state of mind for the development work that I needed to do. Spending time overseas would also be quite important in terms of being able teach workshops and run retreats with wider audiences and generally generate awareness and interest in qigong and my teaching. From past experience I knew that simply travelling and teaching in different locations was one of the most effective ways that I could gain interest both from people living in those locations, and also from people who looked on with interest from other parts of the world as I posted about the travels and teaching on social media.
So, selling the business was the somewhat disappointing end of an era, but also a dawning of a bright new one which I had a lot of confidence would be successful – even if it did present a few challenges in getting started.
Delayed Plans
So with the business sold, I was finally ready to launch into my new plans with enthusiasm. I was greatly looking forward to being able to focus solely on developing my qigong teaching, and also all the new and interesting experiences that this new path would bring. Visiting new places, meeting new people, experiencing cultures, eating interesting food, and having the time and energy to relax and enjoy the journey as I put into action all the plans that I had made over the course of many months and start to bring them to fruition.
The plans were quite time sensitive for a couple of reasons. One being where the world was at with a developing awareness of qigong and desire for training in it. Awareness was just reaching a tipping point where it was becoming more viable to offer longer intensive training courses, and people were starting to seek for this kind of training but not many people were offering it. I needed to take advantage of this opportunity to establish myself in the market at this pivotal time. And the other reason was that I had now given up my main source of income, so I had a limited time to be able to transition over to making qigong my main source of sustainable income, beyond the minimal income I had received from teaching on a GFRF basis over the last several years.
But unfortunately some issues within a personal relationship lead to repeated delays in my being able to travel overseas. These issues ended up delaying my plans by a full year – and it was a very stressful time for me dealing with the high cost of living in New Zealand, now without a suitable income to support myself having sold my business, as well as dealing with those specific relationship issues. Eventually I simply had to move forward if there was any chance of being able to execute the plan. The length of the delays made things much more difficult, even questionable if it would now be viable, but perhaps there was a way that I could sneak through the last gap in the window of opportunity before it closed, and somehow get the plans back on track.
Because of the length of the delays at such a critical time, I knew it would likely take me years to get things back on track to be able to make the plan work as well as it would have if I had just left immediately after selling the business. But I had to at least try.
Pandemic
There were several parts to the plan, now greatly compressed. The first was to go somewhere to establish a base which would provide me with a low cost of living and a relaxed environment to live and work from, and also to be able to travel easily to deliver workshops, retreats, and residential trainings in different parts of the world. So I was relocating to Europe first, and then had several retreats and trainings lined up for the following months spotted around different parts of the world that I would travel to from that base.
I had begun promoting these events and had a little bit of time before I needed to be in Europe to get myself established there before travelling to the first of the trainings. So I decided to spend a couple of weeks in Bali on my way to Europe as I found a flight itinerary that would cost me about the same to stop off in Bali as it would for me to just travel directly to Europe (remember at that point I had no substantial income for over a year – so doing everything as cheaply as I possibly could was still very important as I was trying to make a new start). I had never been to Bali before, and I thought that spending some time there would serve several useful purposes. For a start, Bali is a destination that has become very popular for people seeking out different types of health and wellness retreats and training. I thought it would be useful to research how things operate there, and to check out some possible venues for future retreats and trainings that I might offer. Spending some time in the tropical environment of Bali could also provide me with some great content to start to bring my social media back to life and start to generate some interest in the Qigong teaching that I would be offering in the future (again – always trying to find a way to make the plan work). And lastly, I thought it would be a good opportunity to clear my head, to help myself to let go of all the stress and challenges from the past year, so that I could arrive in Europe in a better state of mind, able to think more clearly, and make better decisions as I looked at how I could set myself up there and finally start to move forward with the plan.
I enjoyed my time in Bali, and largely accomplished all that I set out to do there. I visited a couple of possible retreat locations and talked to the managers there. I recorded a few vlogs. I didn’t quite get to taking photos of myself – my headspace wasn’t quite ready for that yet. But I also took time to relax, I ate good food. I swam in warm water, and I did start to feel the stress reduce and become a little more prepared for the next steps in my plan.
And then on the day that I was due to fly on from Bali to Europe, borders of countries all around the world closed like dominos falling one after the other. I had a bit of an anxious time trying to get hold of airlines and official information, eventually needing to just go to the airport with my bags to sort out exactly what was going on and if I would be able to travel to my intended destination. I couldn’t, and I also couldn’t stay in Bali indefinitely, so I had to quickly look at what options were available to me. New Zealand had implemented self isolation requirements for people returning there, and as I was in the process of relocating I had nowhere to return to. Fortunately one of my sisters had space at her house where I could come to and stay almost completely separate from the rest of her family – meeting the requirements for self isolation. So I did that. And I am very grateful to her and her family for allowing me to do that and taking me in at short notice under challenging circumstances.
I was in a spare room that at that time was filled with big racks of wedding dresses – it was a spare room after all. My sister had taken on the task of selling the left over wedding dresses after a friend of hers business had closed, and that was the place she had available to store them.
So, I was back in New Zealand. On a small bed in the corner of a room filled with wedding dresses. Nothing for me in New Zealand – I had given away most of my possessions other than what I had in a couple of bags. I had sold my car, so I had no transportation – something that is quite important in New Zealand. I had no source of income. I didn’t have a business that would provide me with a livable income – that was long gone over a year ago at this point. I was in the process of shutting down all of the online qigong courses I had been running previously, so even the small amount of donation based income I received from those was coming to an end. I had been shutting down the online teaching in favour of offering more live training and retreats, and plans for those had been looking good. I had enough people booked in for a three week training in Thailand to make that viable, and other retreats planned as well, but with the new restrictions to travel these could not run, so I refunded all of the deposits that people had paid.
I was also quite socially isolated. Of course immediately I was in self isolation, and then after that the whole country went into quite a strict lockdown, so there was no immediate opportunity for live interaction with people anyway. In addition to this, the relationship issues of the previous year had disrupted many of my previous social interactions, greatly reducing my social circle.
I was in a pretty dark place, and it got even darker, as my mother who had been suffering with gradual cognitive decline deteriorated very rapidly with lack of social contact during the first lockdown in New Zealand. My father continued to do his best to take care of her, and we did our best to help him, but it quickly became too much for him to cope with, so there were now even more challenges to deal with.
Pivot back to Online
I still needed to do what I could though. The plan in shutting down my online qigong training courses had not been to shut them down forever, but rather just for a time while I focused on live teaching. And then over time I would rebuild the courses in a new format, and to a much higher standard. I knew that if I was having a hard time, many others would be as well. A lot of the world was in some kind of lockdown or another, and many people would be struggling with isolation and uncertainty.
Of course I didn’t have my new courses ready, but I decided to make use of what I had and to offer the courses in the old format one last time on a donation basis. I thought this would give people something beneficial to focus on while they were locked down, and also it meant that anyone who wanted to do the courses could afford to do them – because they would be paid for GFRF, one last time. I also realised that this would give me at least some small amount of income as all my future planned income from live events was now gone.
There was a pretty good uptake of the courses, and I also decided to try doing something that I had planned for a long time, but had not had the time or quite the right situation to do it from. I began offering regular live streaming qigong classes to whoever wanted to join in. I still didn’t really have the right environment to run them from – I did them in that room full of wedding dresses on racks. I had a small space that I could use the very wide angle camera on my cell phone to stream from, as it would only be a metre or so in front of me. I couldn’t extend my arms or legs forward or backwards fully, but I could adapt and make it work.
Eventually when lockdowns eased, I was able to get some more equipment and do the practice sessions from another space in my sister’s house which made it a bit more comfortable. In total I ended up doing over 50 free livestreaming qigong sessions during 2020, and I got lots of good feedback from people about how the courses that I ran, and the livestreaming sessions, helped them through the lockdowns.
Of course, as discussed in many of the earlier posts on this blog, running the courses on a donation basis was not sustainable though. It was a stop gap measure to help people out, and to keep me going in the short term. I still needed to continue with the transition to doing my teaching on a regular paid basis, and for me this meant reformatting and rebuilding the online courses. I was far from having the setup and circumstances that I had hoped to have to do this, but again I just needed to do the best I could with what I had, so I proceeded to work on redeveloping the qigong courses into a new format.
In that first year – 2020, I managed to put together and run a comprehensive 200 hour training course on Small Universe Qigong. It was far from what I had initially planned, but still a big step up from how the old courses were previously organized. And this year in 2021 I have been able to continue to run the Small Universe Qigong program, while also putting together and starting to run another 200 hour training program called Inner Fire Qigong. A little bit frustrating in that they are not in the final form I had planned and would like them to be, which will mean a lot of reworking at some stage in order to bring them up to that level, but still a pretty decent accomplishment in the circumstances.
It has also been interesting going from doing so much of my work on a donation/GFRF basis for so long, to finally just setting a price and charging for my work. Which leads to the next part of our discussion – the results.
Results
It was quite an adjustment coming up with the prices I would charge for my courses, having not done that for so long. In the end I used a comparative pricing approach – looking at what other people were charging for as near as possible comparable offerings. There weren’t too many comparable offerings of 200 hour online qigong instructor certification programs available at the time, but the number of such offerings is growing – part of why some aspects of my plan were quite time sensitive as mentioned earlier. There were a few that I could compare with though, so what I did was price my course at the low to mid price point compared to the others that were available, while seeking to offer a better quality and more interactive learning experience than what others were offering.
I also benefited from one of my contacts that I have made over the years starting to actively promote qigong during the lockdowns. This led to her forming a business using other instructors to teach mainly my style of qigong within it – leading to a good number of referrals to my training programs from that.
Overall – from setting a reasonable market determined price, I would say that I started to earn about 5 times the income for the same amount of work as I did from teaching on a donation basis with a donation of any size required. This in turn was a big increase from the income received when it was explained that the teaching was on a GFRF basis, but there was no restriction put in place to ensure that people made a donation of any amount.
This is actually a sustainable income for me. It means that I receive enough to comfortably meet my living costs while focusing solely on my qigong teaching, and with this income I could possibly actually get ahead in life and create some financial stability and security for myself (more on that in the next section). It also gives me the opportunity scale up and continue to improve the quality of how I teach and the support that I am able to give to students.
I have been able to employ my virtual assistant full time to help out with more administrative tasks, meaning that I don’t need to spend as much time on those and can spend more time on course development, writing, and teaching. While I did employ my virtual assistant on a part time basis previously, and I had plenty of work that it would have been helpful to have her do for me, while I was not receiving enough to support even myself alone from my qigong teaching, and with the unpredictability of donation based income, it was difficult to make the move to employing her fulltime. By charging set prices I have easily been able to do this, and it came at a good time for her as well. With her previous fulltime job becoming untenable, and no realistic opportunities for other work where she lives due to the pandemic at the time, it allowed her to continue to support herself through these challenging times.
I also now employ four teaching assistants on a part-time/casual/contract basis. The work that I give them is probably only a small part of the total work that they do, and some of them probably do it more because they enjoy it than for the payment, still this is something that I could not realistically do when operating on a donation basis because I often simply did not receive enough income from the work to pay anyone else to do it.
So not only am I able to now support myself well, there is also a ripple effect outwards creating financial opportunity for others. And by being able to bring in other people to help me with my work I am able to teach more people qigong in a richer and more interactive way. There is also the possibility that under this type of model, that by bringing in more people I will be able to grow this much further and reach many more people overall. And I look forward to doing that when the time is right. I would like to hire some more people right now for some aspects of developing the business, but for now I still need to be quite careful in my spending and I am also still very much involved in taking care of every aspect of the business, so it may take some time to free myself up enough to even be able to have the time and focus to make those hiring decisions
My Current Situation
That brings us to some discussion of my current situation. It really is a big change to have a livable income from my qigong teaching. It relieves a lot of stress in many ways. It is quite an adjustment in many ways to do simple things like go grocery shopping and be a bit more relaxed about what I buy, not feeling stressed about finding the most economical option for every single purchase and what the total will be. I don’t think I’ve mentioned specific numbers previously of just how low my income has been at times due to choosing to use GFRF, but it really has been that bad a lot of the time across quite a few years. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t still shop carefully, but there is less stress in the process. It also opens up options of participating in activities that I might like to do, that I simply would not have considered doing previously due to cost. It means when some of my clothes wear out, or I need some new equipment, I can just go and buy what I need without having to deliberate for a long time, or maybe wait until something is at an amazingly low price before I can get it.
It feels good and I am still adjusting and settling into a new state of being from it, but it still doesn’t actually resolve all of my financial issues. This is because while I have a livable income – even for living in an expensive place like New Zealand – I don’t have a base of assets to also support myself.
This is one of the interesting features of a capitalist society – a large part of how it functions is based on having capital – not just income. The one place that this really stands out as being relevant is in being able to own a home, and then following on from that are things like having savings or investments for retirement etc. The situation with this is a bit different in different parts of the world, but in New Zealand without a home and without savings for retirement, your future prospects are pretty dire. There is government superannuation – but this is not really sufficient if you do not have your own house to live in and thus do not have to pay rent. For many people owning a house and paying a mortgage is essentially a form of compulsory retirement savings for them that ensures they accumulate a suitable asset base to support themselves. It also of course gives them stability in their immediate living situation, as their outgoings are stable and even reduce over time, rather than increasing on a regular basis as they do with rent. If they are renting a change in their landlord’s situation or plans can also mean that they end up having to face the disruption of moving homes and even neighbourhoods at relatively short notice.
If I had a similar relative level of income (allowing for inflation) as I have now all along, that would have been fine. I could have purchased a home some years ago and gradually paid off the mortgage while that house also gradually increased in nominal value. But over those years house prices in New Zealand have grown to ridiculously high levels, far out of step with people’s incomes. Over the last 20 years, the average house price has gone up by more each year than the average workers salary each year… This also draws out an interesting inequity in the New Zealand tax system. All those increases in house prices have been completely tax free to the person who owns the houses, yet all earned income is taxed, at quite high rates as that income increases.
Someone who bought a house years ago has built up a large asset base without having to pay any tax on that nominal increase in wealth. But someone like myself who was not in a position to be able to buy a house years ago, and manages to somehow get themselves into a position with a high enough income that might let them buy a house at the greatly inflated prices they are at now, will be taxed highly on every dollar that they earn due to the level of income required for this – making it much harder, or perhaps even impossible for them to catch up and make up for their lack of income in the past, despite their good income now. Especially as they also now have less working years to pay that house off within. It is very difficult for someone with even a very high income to catch up with all those years of tax free capital gains.
This situation has been developing in New Zealand for quite some time. When most of the world had declines in house prices after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, New Zealand just had a little flat period and then kept on going up. So even before the recent financial turmoil surrounding the pandemic Auckland house prices were at extraordinary levels – regularly at the top or near the top of the table of least affordable housing in the world relative to local incomes. And during the pandemic all of the financial manipulation by central banks and governments have forced them up even more – rising 25% to 30% each year over the last two years from an already extremely high base.
So even with a good income – my financial situation isn’t really stable here. I may be earning well in relation to others around me, but I don’t have the massive accumulated tax free capital base needed to truly have a stable life here. With all things considered, it looks like to be able to get ahead and create stability for myself I will still need to relocate elsewhere – to somewhere that has a favourable tax regime that will allow me to have a chance of accumulating the asset base that I need from my earnings, without being relatively penalized for not being able to purchase basic needs like a house earlier in my life.
So… I’m doing pretty well now as a result of now charging set prices for my work rather than doing it on a donation/GFRF basis. But I still have some challenges to overcome as a result of my long period (about 8 years) of inadequate income as a result of being committed to my Give Freely Receive Freely experiment for so long.
Implications for me, implications for GFRF
Even though spending so long persisting with the GFRF experiment has presented me with many difficult times over the years, and significant challenges yet to still overcome, I don’t think I would go so far as to say that I regret doing it. I followed my conscience. I did what, in a way, I felt I needed to do. To try to find a better way to interact economically with the people around me. To try to find a way to make what I have to offer available to everyone who wants or needs it.
I think I have mentioned before in this blog, but it would be reasonable to assume that most people who are reading this particular post will not have already read every other post on here, that I actually have a degree in finance from the top ranked university for finance in New Zealand. I graduated with straight A’s and received first class distinction. So I do have a fairly reasonable understanding of how our economic system works. And I see the very significant flaws, inefficiencies, and inequities in how it currently runs. In theory when implemented well and embraced, Give Freely Receive Freely would overcome all of these to produce a vastly more efficient and equitable system to the benefit of each of us as individuals and to our society as a whole. That is in theory. In application there is a lot to be overcome in terms of people’s motivations, and just their expectations and habituation to the system as it now stands – and I have written about some of these factors in previous blog posts as I have encountered and tried to address them. I have not been unaware of these issues. But in theory, GFRF should be able to overcome them, and so I persisted – because it felt right, it felt good to operate in this way, and because I wanted to.
All too often I see people talk about ideals in theory, without ever having tried to actually put them into practice, or having only done so in some minor cursory way, and then have extrapolated that out to a strongly held position of what they think to be true. Including around this same or similar principle of giving service without price and that somehow they will receive back everything that they need. I see people hold forth about their strongly held opinions that this is the only way that certain types of work should be done. But then if I look into their background further, they have often never actually tried it themselves, or if they have, they have done it very occasionally and very much as a sideline to whatever their true source of income is. They have never tried to live solely in that way, and have certainly never accomplished anything of merit that requires an extended period of focused effort on that basis. I wanted to try to put theory into practice and really give it a good honest effort to live on that basis.
It didn’t work. And while I don’t regret trying – perhaps I should have learned more quickly from what I experienced, and changed my approach sooner. In the end operating on a GFRF basis has held me back from creating stability in my own life, and as a result has held me back from giving as much benefit to as many people as I otherwise might have. And I guess that is why, even after a three year break I am back writing another update about this. I committed as part of the experiment to document and share my experiences with it as openly and honestly as I can. And perhaps that is where there may yet be some value for someone else, and maybe for society as a whole.
If someone else reading this feels inclined to pursue a similar experiment, I salute you. I wouldn’t tell you not to do it, but rather encourage you to learn as much as you can from my experiences which I have documented, and maybe do better. Maybe succeed, or at least come closer to succeeding, and someone else may be able to learn from you. But also weigh up the cost to yourself personally, and maybe set some limits on how far you will follow the experiment, or perhaps for how long, so that you avoid disadvantaging yourself in life to too great an extent.
It could be easy for me to give up completely on any idea of using the principles of Give Freely Receive Freely in my work, and to give up the deeper reason behind even trying that in the first place – a desire to reach out and help people in need, and to try to catalyse change in our society towards better ways of interacting with each other. Now more than ever the need of that is apparent, with all the crazy financial shenanigans going on in the world on a global scale. By I can’t make a positive difference effectively by sacrificing my own wellbeing. I need to find a balance and make sure that I can interact effectively with the financial world as it currently stands, so that I can be effective in sharing what I have to offer to help those around me, and maybe try to affect the system as a whole is smaller less ambitious ways.
With that in mind, I think I will probably still experiment with using GFRF in small ways from time to time – but ensuring that I do that in a manageable way that does not put my whole financial wellbeing on the line. I have in fact continued to offer a certain amount of my work on a GFRF basis even now after transitioning to working with set prices. From time to time we get approached by people asking if there is some kind of scholarship or something like that which we can offer to help them to be able to do some of the training. Ideally in the medium term that is something I would like to be able to offer – a formal scholarship program with defined parameters. This is something that I think many people would find easier to interact with than a pure GFRF exchange, and important checks and balances could be built into the parameters of how the scholarships are set up. But I have been far too busy to be able to put such a system into place yet – so in the meantime, when I have felt it is appropriate, I have offered some of those who have enquired the opportunity to do the training on a GFRF basis, but to keep that confidential between us. Sometimes that has meant that they have done the training completely for free, and other times it has meant that they have made some payment of whatever amount they have felt they are able to afford. It has been nice to be able to still do that even in somewhat of a limited way, and I think every course I have run so far has had at least one person on it on a GFRF basis.
Conclusion
Well, I think that is the end of my update. I know it’s a bit long, and maybe a bit rambling. I know I got off onto some other topics, but I think they were relevant to give a more full and true picture of what has been going on with me and my experience of the GFRF experiment.
For now the GFRF experiment is kind of over… It is certainly not the main way I will be operating in the immediate future. But I may continue to use it in some small ways as described above, and may even experiment with it more extensively at some point in the future again, but at a time and in a way that I can maintain my own wellbeing more effectively while I do it.
I think I will try to leave this blog up in the meantime though. Perhaps it will offer some value to someone along the way, and perhaps I will have some interesting things to update it with at some point in the future.