Being a successful life coach begins and ends with mastering sales. You can’t attract clients without talking to people, without enrolling them in your programs. And that happens once you’ve mastered the sales aspect of life coaching.

There are six general steps to master in this process. The first step was about the space you come from as a life coach, a space of being a trusted advisor, friend and servant. The second step is about being in the cockpit. The cockpit is defined as the number of hours you spend actually talking to people about coaching in a sales conversation. In other words, when you are directly selling to someone.

If you want to become a master piano player, the only way to do that is by sitting down and practicing the piano for hours a day. If you don’t do that, you will never become a successful piano player. It doesn’t matter how much you think about it, how much you visualize it, how much you want to do it, you can only become successful by spending hours and hours doing the same thing over and over, becoming successful by practicing one step at a time.

You aren’t perfect at first either. In fact, you’re usually awkward, clumsy, and slow when you start out at anything. All masters were once disasters at one point in time. So success is a habit of mastering your craft one step at a time religiously with committed dedication.

Why do I even bother saying this? Because most life coaches spend most of their time NOT in the cockpit. And it’s because most of them are too scared to get in, won’t get in, might get in tomorrow, visualize about getting in, will get in when they feel comfortable, when they’re not afraid of being rejected, when they know they can be successful, they don’t think they can do it and on and on. Either that, or they spend their time doing lots of other things that they delude themselves into thinking is sales. They delude themselves into thinking they’re in the cockpit, when they aren’t. What they’re actually doing is anything to avoid being in the cockpit. They do things like Facebooking, making brochures, building a website, getting graphic design work, getting business cards and an and on. They’ll do anything but talk to people in a sales conversation. So my job is to throw you in the cockpit and lock the door.

Now the question is this: can you be OK with being awkward and clumsy at first? Can you be OK with lots of rejection, with lots of people questioning why you’re even a life coach? Can you be OK with mastering your fears step by step and knowing that it’s just part of the process of mastery? Can you be committed to mastering sales?

Mastering the sales aspect of life coaching is what life coaches struggle with and fear the most. But if you take it one step at a time, you can master it. And you have to be OK with not getting clients at first. Because it’s not about earning $100,000 next month and attracting bucket loads of clients right now. In mastering anything, you have to be OK with failure first and going from there.