Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak

Sales can be intimidating—especially when you're chasing a passion that doesn't come with a natural knack for selling. For many, mindset is the missing piece, not just in business but in life. But what happens when you combine strategy with psychology to unlock real growth? In this episode, I have Christopher Philippi, a seasoned sales consultant and coach for CEOs. He helps people overcome the fear of selling and client acquisition by blending both coaching and consulting to support real growth. In our conversation, Christopher shares how mindset shapes our actions, why clarity and consistency matter, and how to shift your thoughts to get better results in business and life. Tune in to learn how the right strategy and mindset can change everything. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us have ideas, a lot of us have passions, and a lot of us have the impact that we want to make onto the world and maybe you’re listening and you’re thinking about it a little bit, thinking, okay, should I get serious about this? It’s springtime, there’s a new energy going on, maybe it’s time to actually get serious. But we have a series of things that oftentimes trip us up, make us a little bit intimidated, make us kind of question whether or not we want to hit that proverbial Start button. And one of the things that can really intimidate a lot of people is sales or kind of building a client base/audience, how do you actually connect your product to the market that you’re trying to connect it to, i.e., how do you actually sell the thing? Is someone going to ever pay me for this? Today, to talk about that subject, I would like to bring on my guest, Christopher Filipiak, who is a sales consultant and a coach for CEOs. --- Christopher, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. It’s so good to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, thank you for popping on. So not kind of a normal combination, sales consultant and coach for CEOs. What does that mean in tandem? Yeah, sure. It’s a good question because consulting is its own unique thing and coaching is its own unique thing so when I think of consulting, you kind of think of three buckets, strategy, planning, and implementation of something, and a consultant is really someone who provides expert advice and a proven process, meaning, know how to get something done and they’re there to be an expert and go, “Hey, this is how you do that.” A coach is more there to help you create clarity on what you want and help you discover your own truths. So a coach isn’t there to tell you how to do it, a coach is really there to help you figure out how you want to do it and provide you some support and some challenge and a container for you to do that. So, when it comes to sales, I think both things are important, because my clients need someone who can help them set up a sales system, a sales process, the skills around the strategy and tactics of building a business that’s competent and making sales, and so much of sales deals with what’s going on in your own head and your own confidence and your own leadership and your own material around money and strangers that having coaching is also really supportive so that’s why I do both. And are your clients often the same for both the coaching and the consulting or is it usually separate endeavors based on what someone at a certain time? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, they tend to be the same. When I work with my clients, what happens is we’ll have calls that are focused on building skill sets or implementation work around the strategies and tactics around sales and then we’ll have separate calls that are coaching-only calls. And so most of my engagements with my clients, I do both things, but they’re in –– I kind of play a different role dependent on the intention of what we’re doing together. And then is there an order in the process? Can someone usually say, “I need a coach or a coaching service before I need the sales consultant,” because you have to understand where you’re going before, okay, I’m going to implement a way to sell this product to these people? It’s a good question. So, I have plenty of engagements that are coaching only, where someone is just looking for coaching so coaching is really the starting point with me. If you want to do just consulting, I probably wouldn’t do it with you because I don’t think it is really serving you, and the reason that is and you and your audience will understand this is we live in a human body and we have a mind, which means we have a mindset, and so much about sales, most of my clients want a different result. Primarily, the clients that come to me are looking for a different result, and I know that that result is going to start or that transformation is really going to happen when that person decides that they want to make a change that requires coaching. And the reason that is, Stephen, is because how we think determines how we feel and feeling is what drives action for humans. If you want a different result, we have to work on what’s going on in your mind and we have to work on the feelings in your body.Share on X And then once those two things are willing to change and grow, then we can start to bring in the different strategies and tactics that’ll enable sales to happen really, really quickly and really easily for people. So I would say that the order of operations there is coaching either by itself or coaching plus consulting is how I would do that. Now, a lot of people are familiar with that term, “Thought creates form,” kind of the general idea being that it all starts with your thoughts and then those thoughts somehow become a reality and there’s probably eight to ten different paths depending on if someone’s more spiritually inclined, practically inclined, and stuff like that. Do you believe in that adage of thought creates form or is there more complexity based on how you approach it? Yeah, I think it’s a belief but I also think whether you look at a science perspective or spiritual perspective or a psychological perspective, it’s how humans create. It’s how humans have always created. And I know that some people think the whole manifestation, law of vibration, law of attraction stuff is like bullshit and then some people are like the –– All about it, right? Yeah, just full of it. I think if you get yourself too polarized on one side or the other side, you can get confused about what it actually takes to be a creative and create the thing that you want. I would go a step further and say that, at the moment you have the thought, it’s real. That thing starts to be real the moment that you have the thought, and then you have to start holding the image or thinking is a skill set on to its own, like understanding how to operate your mind and your body is its own skill set so that’s one skill set and then the skill set that has to follow that is you have to understand the strategies and tactics or the activity, the actions that you need to do to complete the creation of whatever you want, but both things are real, and when you have the thought in your mind, that means it exists, right? That’s kind of the first stage and I think that’s where people can start to think like, “Oh, it doesn’t really exist until I have it on my desk or I have it in my hand, physically happen,” but that’s not actually true. The moment you start to think about it, you have it. That can be difficult. That can be a new thought and a new way of operating. Whether you can get yourself there or not determines whether you’re going to be able to create it or not because if you start to think that that’s not true, you’re going to operate your body and your mind in such a way that makes it difficult to actually create that. What I think this intersects with a little bit is that you described yourself as a coach for CEOs and one of the things that I’m wanting to clarify a little bit is that, let’s say someone out there listening just registered for an LLC with their bank, registered with their state, registered a website domain, and just started doing a few things on their own. They don’t have any customers yet, they don’t have any clients yet, they’re just there. Can that person think of themselves as a CEO at that point in time? I think you can think of yourself however you want to think about yourself. It’s not on me to tell you who to be or how to think about yourself, and it’s not on other people. I think that comes down to, you know, we were talking about names as we started the podcast and asked you, “Hey, do you go by Steve or Stephen?” and you’re like you go by Stephen. Names are really important, and you get to think about yourself however you want to think about yourself. And if you want to think of yourself as a CEO of yourself, we are sovereign entities as humans and if we want to think of ourselves as CEOs of ourselves, CEOs of our lives, CEOs of our family, all that title really means is you’re the leader for that group of things. Now, in the business community, people will say that you’re not actually a CEO until you have team and other people that you’re leading. Again, it is a mindset thing, and stepping into your own leadership and power and if you see yourself leading a company or leading team or building a business, you want to start to think of yourself as a CEO. Not from an ego perspective, I think, but from a place of truth that, yeah, I’m a leader and a creator of my life and of this business and I’m here to help people and build something beautiful that helps people. Yeah, so I’m wondering how that intersects with what is the real mindset battle? Because when I think of mindset,...