A man recently wrote, "I read the Real Love book, but I knew I needed more, so I contacted a Real Love coach. He said that coaching would cost XXX dollars per month. I don't understand. I need help. I thought I found it in Real Love, but now I have to pay for it? Why should I have to pay for love that is unconditional?"
You don't have to pay for Real Love. We have made considerable efforts to provide Real Love in as many free ways as possible. You can ask your public library to order one or more of the books from the Real Love series, and you can check them out on your free library card. Then you can go to www.RealLove.com, and you can watch hundreds of videos and read hundreds of pages of materials—all for free. You can also participate in the free conference calls on the website, which happen every day of the week. You can read, listen, watch, and feel loved, all for no charge at all.
All people deserve to be loved unconditionally and without expense. Over many years, however, I have discovered that people's problems are almost uniformly rooted in lifetimes of pain and distorted perspectives. Many people therefore require two things that can't be found in a book or from free conference calls.
First, they need consistent and time-consuming coaching and follow-up. When patterns are sufficiently entrenched, brief moments of love and teaching may not be enough, and it's unreasonable to expect large commitments of time from acquaintances on free conference calls.
Second, many people need someone to understand complex problems and distill them into their simple, soluble components. They need coaches who have been professionally trained, coaches who have experience that is both wide and deep.
The people who have the time and the expertise required for difficult problems are usually professional coaches. They've all spent years attending training courses—which they paid for—as well as donating much of their time to taking phone calls, answering emails, supervising conference calls, and doing in-person counseling. Professional coaches are not paid to love—you can't pay for Real Love—but they do deserve to be paid for their time and expertise.
As I think about the graduated options available for people looking for help in Real Love, I think about the options available to me when I mail a package. I can send a package parcel post, which is quite inexpensive, but it may take a week or more to be delivered within the country, and I can't track the progress of the delivery. If I want the package to arrive in two or three days, I choose USPS Priority Mail, which usually costs more than double the rate of parcel post. Express Mail is even more expensive, but usually the package arrives the next day. If, however, I "absolutely, positively" want the package to arrive by the next morning—with reliable and almost hourly tracking—I send it by Federal Express First Overnight. For that rapid and secure delivery I pay about ten times what I pay for parcel post.
Growth in Real Love can be similar to delivery of a package. If I have time, and I'm sufficiently open to change, I may be able to accomplish my Real Love goals with no charge at all—as described earlier. If I want my pain to go away faster, and if I need help overcoming resistance, anger, addictions, and confusion, increasing levels of assistance may be necessary, and that simply costs more. If you wonder what your needs are, start off by reading a book or two. Then participate in a conference call and ask questions. If you don't get the level of response you were looking for, go to the website and ask for a free coaching call, to assess what kind of help you might need. You'll figure out the level of help you require.
