iMindShift with Steve Chandler: You have to be TAUGHT!

"You have to be taught to hate and fear.
It has to be drummed in your dear little ear."
~SOUTH PACIFIC

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Do you hate selling yourself?

The great adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Everyone lives by selling something." But the sad truth is that only sales people know that they live by selling something. Everyone else is unaware. Unless you count Stevenson.

A mother at home sells the rules of the house to her children. An accountant sells his reports and figures to his boss and clients. Religious leaders sell the attraction of the faith to their followers. A teenager sells his father on the idea of a car.

When you know you live by selling something you can really put life into your day. In fact, you can feel like you've put your whole life into a single day. First thing in the morning you can rise up smiling and getting ready to sell. You know you become masterful when you learn to enjoy the process. The whole process.

Selling makes the world go around. Other people say that "Love makes the world go round," but great sales people know that it's the same thing. Pump enough love into your sales pitch and you will succeed.

As a sales person you get to become a psychologist, a dramatic actor and a business entrepreneur all at once. All in the course of enjoying your day.

Yet, the overt power of the position of sales seems to threaten others. Because you are out there exchanging value for money, right up front with it, no apologies, you threaten others who are more covert in their work. People who hide out from life don't like people who are so up front.

So you get movies like Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross and plays like Death of a Salesman that attempt to denigrate the profession and make free enterprise itself look demeaning. (Ironically, most sales people I know get a big kick out of these movies and plays and laugh at the caricatures in them. Most sales people are not sensitive at all about what they do because they know it's what makes the world go round.)

Today you will see most of the popular culture demeaning the sales process and profession. You see most of society viewing corporations and businesses as evil. Sometimes, when taken to extremes, an entire society will try to wipe out enterprise and sales altogether. Socialist and communist countries that have tried this have found out the hard way that they were killing the human spirit in the process. They were killing ambition and the joy of living when they tried to kill sales. The Soviet Union's prison walls of no-free-enterprise came tumbling down after many years of trying to create a sales-free lifestyle for everyone. It killed the soul of the people. It stopped innovation and adventure. It led to tremendous poverty and addiction.

The human spirit was replaced by vodka on a rainy morning.

China, the largest nation in the world, is also waking up to free market participation. In a wild attempt to cure so many years of propaganda against financial freedom and personal achievement, China has now adopted a new slogan for its people: "MONEY IS A GOOD THING."

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"600 baseball books are published every year and 599 of them
are not worth the paper they never should have been printed on.
Two Guys Read the Box Scores is the other one. It is splendid."

~George Will

George Will is a U.S. newspaper columnist,journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Will is also a news analyst for ABC since the early 1980s and was a founding member on the panel of ABC's This Week on which he still appears weekly. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including two critically acclaimed bestsellers on baseball, Men at Work and Bunts.

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My new coaching prosperity school opens August 20 and 21 and each school allows for nine coaches to attend...we focus on only one thing: how to get clients and build prosperity by transformative coaching:

Email me if you want to know how to attend or to ask about payment plans to attend...... stephendchandler@cs.com. Or ask anything. Like who some of the rather prosperous grads are.
Here's something we learn in the school:

Coaching is about transformation.

Change.

It's not about advice. Or tips. Or chatting with people. It's not just a sympathetic ear, either, that's just a tiny part of it.

Coaching is transformation.

If you are really into it, you will change your client's life. So act accordingly when you "sell" coaching. Most coaches I know sell coaching as if they were selling carpet cleaning...."Here's what it is per hour"...etc.

If you are really into it, you will be there for your client more than their parents were, more than their business partner or even spouse is. Their parents and spouse have agendas. They have something they want back from your client. You don't ……(you've been paid up front, even if you're paid monthly you don't let a client get in debt to you.) So you can truly be the first person in that client's life to ever be there 100% for them. A wholly committed, fearless truth-telling commitment to them who wants nothing more than their success. It's a first for a client to have someone like you in their lives.

Then why do we "sell" coaching as if it were less than that? Why don't we DEMONSTRATE that full commitment ahead of time? When a prospective client has a website or an ebook why do we sometimes not even read it? (Because we've locked ourselves into spamalot and hint-hint flirtatious selling! ...a carpet cleaner's approach to selling coaching.)

Let your prospects know what coaching with you would be like by having your intake conversations be long, extremely real and truthful… extremely lengthy!...... It is the joy of creating. This one INTAKE conversation is wading into your client's life, languishing in it, rolling in it, embracing it, living it.

…….because you are selling coaching, you don't want to mince words or do the dance of money-fear wherein you are flattering them, chatting them up and acting in ways that disgust you when the day is done.

Instead, be willing to listen deeply and then be the FIRST PERSON in their lives in many a year to tell them the truth. Be real and tell the truth about how you REALLY see their problems. Coaching is truth-telling.

Notice how fearless and direct Steve Hardison is with everyone. That truthfulness.

More than anything, that is why the check gets written for $150,000.

Truth is beauty for a client.