I Spent 20 Years Trying to Fix the Thing That Made Me Great at Sales

I have started over more times than most people know.

I started as a 911 dispatcher. Then I became a deputy sheriff. Then a police officer. Then, somehow, while still wearing a badge, I found my way into real estate. Eventually, I was doing both at the same time: police officer by profession, salesman by obsession.

Looking back, that probably should have been my first clue. I did not know it then, but my brain had been telling me something for years. I just was not listening.

Police work made sense to me. Something was always happening. A call came in. There was a problem. Somebody needed something. You assessed the situation, made a decision, and moved.

There was urgency. There was consequence. There was motion.

Then I discovered sales, and something clicked there too. A phone rings. A lead comes in. Someone has a problem. There is a negotiation. There is rejection. There is competition. There is the possibility of winning.

Motion. I loved it.

What I did not love were all the things surrounding it: the paperwork, the organization, the repetitive tasks, the follow-up I knew I needed to do but somehow kept pushing off. The administrative work that could feel ten times harder than a conversation involving thousands of dollars.

Give me a complicated negotiation and I was locked in. Ask me to update something in a system? I will get to it. Probably.

Real estate stopped being something I was doing on the side. It became a career. Then a business. Then a brokerage.

I went from selling houses to building a team and eventually helping grow an independent brokerage from two agents to eleven. We consistently closed more than 100 transactions a year. Annual production climbed beyond $50 million. Over the course of my real estate career, I was involved in roughly 1,300 closed transactions.

On paper, everything looked as if it was working. And it was. But there was another side nobody could see.

Consistency was exhausting.

There were times I could accomplish an absurd amount of work in a short period. I could lock onto a problem and stay with it until everybody else had gone home. I could walk into a conversation, read what was happening, adjust quickly, and close.

But there were other times when something ridiculously simple felt like trying to push a car uphill.

That contradiction bothered me. When you know what you are capable of, the days when you cannot seem to access it are incredibly frustrating.

This is something I do not think we talk about enough.

You are producing. You are making money. You are winning awards. You are closing deals. So what is the problem?

For years, I did not have a good answer. I just assumed I needed more discipline. A better system. A new calendar. A different CRM. A better morning routine. Another notebook. Another productivity hack.

Maybe I needed to wake up earlier. Maybe I needed to slow down. Maybe I needed to focus harder. Maybe I just needed to try harder.

That last one followed me for a long time.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Suddenly, a lot of my life made more sense.

Not because ADHD explained everything. It did not. And not because a diagnosis suddenly solved anything. It did not do that either. But it gave me a different lens through which to look at decades of behavior.

The intensity. The hyper focus. The boredom. The constant need for movement. The ability to become completely consumed by something interesting while struggling to begin something objectively simple. The ideas. The energy. The inconsistency. The periods when I felt as if I could run through a wall, followed by periods when starting the next thing felt unnecessarily difficult.

And I started asking a different question.

Instead of, What is wrong with me? I started asking, What conditions make me move?

That question changed everything.

Sales culture loves motivation. Get fired up. Want it more. Grind harder. Be more disciplined. No excuses.

There is absolutely a place for discipline. But after decades in high-pressure environments, sales, and business, I came to believe we dramatically overestimate motivation.

Motivation is a feeling. Motion is an action. And action changes the environment around you.

Make one call and the second call gets easier. Have one conversation and your energy changes. Complete one follow-up and suddenly you are working through the list. Get one small win and your brain wants another.

The hardest part is often not doing the work. It is overcoming the friction between you and the first meaningful action.

That became the idea I could not stop thinking about.

I started looking at sales differently.

Why does one salesperson know exactly what to do but still not do it? Why does someone crush Monday and disappear mentally by Thursday? Why can a salesperson spend eight hours “working” and somehow avoid the three conversations that could actually produce revenue?

Why do we keep giving people more systems when sometimes the systems themselves are creating friction? Why does a salesperson reorganize the CRM instead of making the uncomfortable call? Why do we mistake activity for movement?

And maybe most importantly: why do we keep trying to fix salespeople instead of examining what is slowing them down?

That was the beginning of Motion Wins. Not the logo. Not the website. Not the programs. The idea.

This part matters.

Motion Wins is not an ADHD coaching company. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. And I am not interested in diagnosing salespeople.

I am a salesperson who spent more than two decades learning how my own mind responds to pressure, opportunity, rejection, energy, friction, and momentum.

ADHD is part of my story. But friction is human.

You do not need ADHD to procrastinate. You do not need ADHD to overthink a call. You do not need ADHD to confuse being busy with being productive. You do not need ADHD to lose momentum. And you certainly do not need ADHD to know what you should be doing while somehow doing everything except that.

That is sales. That is business. That is being human.

I did not build this because I read a sales book and decided I should become a coach. I built it because I have lived on both sides of the conversation.

I have been the person expected to perform under pressure. I have managed risk. I have handled rejection. I have negotiated. I have recruited. I have coached. I have built a business. I have watched deals die. I have watched people quit. I have watched talented salespeople make their jobs infinitely harder than they needed to be.

And I have done some of those things myself.

Eventually I realized something remarkably simple: the answer is not always adding more. Sometimes it is removing what is getting in the way.

Remove friction. Something moves. Movement creates momentum. Momentum makes the next action easier. Repeat the right actions long enough and something else happens.

Results.

That is Motion Wins.

There is a phrase you will hear from me a lot: push the first domino.

I do not believe most salespeople wake up needing another motivational speech. They need movement.

One call. One follow-up. One conversation. One uncomfortable question. One decision they have been avoiding. One action that changes the state they are currently in.

You do not have to solve your entire career today. You do not have to become a different person. And you definitely do not have to spend your career fighting the way your mind works.

Find the friction. Remove what you can. Then push the first domino.

Because a body in motion tends to stay in motion. And I have spent enough of my life going in both directions to know which one I would rather be in.

Motion Wins is the culmination of a lot of seemingly unrelated chapters of my life: 911 dispatcher, deputy sheriff, police officer, real estate salesperson, broker, business owner, coach. And yes, a guy who eventually learned that the brain he spent years trying to control might have been one of the reasons he was able to do all of those things in the first place.

I would not erase the difficult parts. I learned too much from them.

Now I want to take what I have learned and help salespeople stop wasting energy fighting themselves. Not by lowering expectations, but by removing friction. Not by waiting for motivation, but by creating motion. Not by chasing another temporary high, but by building momentum.

Because eventually I learned something I wish I had understood twenty years ago:

— Stanley Barsch

Founder, Motion Wins