I don’t care if you’ve been teaching guitar for 30 years or if you are just getting started teaching lessons – either way, you have the same awesome potential to achieve success and make insane money teaching guitar. Guitar teachers who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year are neither smarter nor more talented than you ...and they have all had to face the same (if not tougher) obstacles in their teaching.

That being said, what is the main difference between massively successful guitar teachers and everyone else? If you think that the top guitar teachers simply know something that others don’t or do things in a different way – you’re partially correct. Yes, incredibly successful teachers get specialized guitar teacher training…but that is only a single part of what enables them to dominate their competitors. The other piece of the puzzle involves having the same principle characteristics and mindsets as other champions (in other fields). When these characteristics are combined with effective / proven guitar teaching strategies, the results become very predictable.

Here are the five critical qualities required for becoming a massively successful guitar teacher:

Quality #1. Unfaltering Patience

Growing a small-time guitar teaching business into a hundred thousand dollar per year + earning level will take much time and effort. At times, this work will seem unending, discouraging and overwhelming. This initial challenge is what weeds out the great teachers from the mediocre ones. Here is the reason why the greatest guitar teachers succeed in the face of this adversity:

1. They can see the big picture and are aware that the early difficulties are just a small price to pay for the massive results that will eventually come.

2. They are aware that the biggest challenges occur in the beginning. The more successful you become, the “easier” it is to attain a higher level of success. This is the truth both for earning a lot of money teaching guitar and helping your guitar students become killer players.

3. They are resourceful enough to find and work with an experienced guitar teacher trainer in order to skyrocket their guitar teaching businesses to the highest level of success in very little time.

Quality #2. A “Sink Or Swim” Attitude

The greatest guitar teachers grow their teaching businesses with incredible intensity and urgency. They believe that they will succeed or die trying

This type of attitude causes teachers to take consistent, MASSIVE action – resulting in the achievement of equally massive results. Massive action has to do with both working “harder” and working SMARTER – this means seeking out specialized guitar teacher training to cut out the wasted time that comes from a trial and error approach.

Note: this kind of urgency comes only from having the same frame of mind as a true champion - having total confidence in your power to achieve success.

Quality #3. The Highest Standards For Success

Unsuccessful guitar teachers treat their business like a side-job or a hobby... successful ones treat it like a BUSINESS! To do this, you need to:

*Create and actively enforce a STRONG lesson policy that explains your serious expectations to your students (find out more about this subject in this article about earning great money as a guitar teacher).

*Expect true greatness from all of your guitar students. Every student doesn’t need to become a master, however they MUST achieve whatever goals they created for themselves. This level of expectation will help your students achieve better results because:

a. To get your students to achieve their musical goals, you are forced to be the best teacher you can be.

b. You will lose mediocre students and start gaining more and more serious students – these are students who will practice everything at home and take progress seriously. This will quickly advance a positive reputation for you in your city.

Quality #4. Relentless Work Ethic & Dedication

Being a great guitar teacher, earning huge amounts of money and understanding how to get the biggest results for your students requires an incredible amount of dedication. To grow your guitar teaching business to astronomical levels, you must be ready to do “anything” to reach your goal. Most importantly, you must live by the code that all champions live by:

“The cost of success is ALWAYS paid in advance”.

A strong work ethic refers to the power to maintain a heightened sense of urgency for a long time until you finally achieve success.

This is NOT something that you either have or you don’t - you can develop a strong work ethic by doing the following:

*Knowing how to teach guitar for a living.

*Being part of a gathering of other similar guitar instructors who are either already HUGELY successful or are on the cusp of building their businesses in their local areas. Such a gathering is phenomenally elusive, since most guitar instructors are not making a decent living fiscally, have a cynical outlook and lack desire to achieve genuine progress. Then again, when you fit in with a system of champion guitar educators, you will discover it is much more easy to achieve the same status yourself.

Quality #5. A Virtuoso Mindset Of Complete Confidence

Successful guitar teachers who make $100k+ annually and produce the most skilled students NEVER contemplate the following:

*Are my guitar playing skills good enough to teach guitar for a living?

*Can I truly make good money (6-figures+) from guitar teaching?

*When can I finally work full-time to make a living teaching guitar?

*Can I really become a successful guitar teacher and leave my day job to teach guitar for a living?

The above questions are built on insecurity, self-doubt and fear – a recipe for total failure.

The best guitar teachers in the world have eliminated these types of low-quality questions and replaced them with high-quality questions that prepare them for success. For example:

*What can I do to teach guitar effectively and outperform everybody else in my area?

*What are the specific steps I must take leave my job and teach guitar full-time?

*What are the greatest strategies I can use to earn 6-figures teaching guitar?

*How can I guarantee that my guitar teaching business continues growing regardless of the economy, where I live or the number of other teachers in my area?

These are the type of high quality questions you must ask yourself to become successful. When you ask yourself questions like this, you will eventually be lead to the specific goals you seek to achieve.

Now that you know the five things needed to become a super successful guitar teacher, use them by getting specialized guitar teacher training so you can take your teaching business to the highest level.

Author's Bio: 

Tom Hess is a professional guitar teacher, composer, and the guitarist. He shows guitar teachers how to become highly successful with his guitar teaching program. Visit tomhess.net to take free guitar teaching business assessments to learn how to teach guitar more effectively and find new guitar students.