Life

Growing up neglected, isolated, and very traumatized, I began my young adulthood completely delusional. My thinking was not grounded in reality, lost in grand ideas of my own greatness, and completely lacking empathy; this all caused me a great deal of suffering.

I did not know what relaxation was, and my mind never stopped racing with new ideas I didn’t have any confidence to execute on. I was angry at many aspects of my life that were out of my control, including myself for not meeting unrealistic expectations, effectively wasting my own energy.

I didn’t take care of myself and created health conditions for myself that destroyed my own physical and mental health slowly over time, eventually leading to a point of complete disability. My entire nervous system had been damaged, and in turn my muscles and ligaments, all because I didn’t know how to care about myself.

Constantly tired, always finding reasons to be unhappy, and justified in my grandiosity, my saving grace was that I was obsessively focused on being the best I could be. It eventually led to deconstructing my identity and building someone new.

Someone who fixed the problems with his mind and body, created healthier relationships with other people, stopped abusing substances, reorganized their life to feed their goals of having more energy, and building ownership of their authenticity instead of rejecting the truth that was required to create change.

After finally finding stability within myself and my life, I feel obligated to use what I’ve learned to create change for other people. I see others suffering in ways they don’t have to if they only understood certain principles and adopted new behaviors.

Sales

Getting my first sales job at 19, I was so poor at communicating I wouldn’t be able to get a dehydrated person to drink a bottle of water, even if I paid them. I probably would have thrown the bottle at the side of the person’s head and called them an idiot for not catching it.

Now 29, I work in customer facing sales setting record numbers in my company’s history and being over 2000% to goal (yes, 2000%). In my prior sales career as a Retail Store Manager, I was a slow foot traffic location ranking in the top 10 stores of a company that comprised of over 2000 locations nationwide, and took an employee from being misunderstood for lazy to being the top performing seller in the company.

In both of these companies, I went on to make efforts to train others to be successful. I created videos to teach how my store was 450% to goal in certain categories. In the next phase of my sales career, I spearheaded a training program that successfully trained other locations to exceed their goals. It completely restructured their sales dynamics, and taught teams cohesive, individualized sales behaviors.

I started out in sales blaming customers for my lack of success and hiding from my failures. I had every reason to completely fail.

Over 10 years, I worked on healing pain in my personal life that allowed my sales to skyrocket. I doubled down on my health, and the stress reduction shot my selling consistency through the roof. I studied and taught myself unique communication skills that allowed me to transform my interactions into entire experiences, rather than keeping interactions transactional.

It all starts with you. The greatest investment you can make is in yourself; your values and principals guide your success. Invest some commission in honing yourself, and you’ll get a great return on your investment.

I’ve been through it…

These two photos illustrate the difference I’ve made in my life.

The left is having solved my major identity problems, found peace, faced the consequences of 8 years of substance abuse, moving into a place of healing and having conquered my circumstances. Brimming with confidence, living in peace with gratuity, and not expecting myself to be perfect.

The right is dead inside. Suffering from a lack of self worth, in constant physical agony, never coming down from a terrible high that was numbing my potential. I hated myself, my actions, and how I spent my time. I was hurting other people to better myself. I was constantly broke from overspending on marijuana, I wasn’t taking care of myself, and was faking being happy all the time because I couldn’t acknowledge how terrible I felt. I was 20 pounds under weight from unaddressed health conditions and was constantly suffering from fatigue.

Life might be very difficult, painful, downright unfair, and confusing… but it isn’t supposed to be that way all the time.

It does get better.

Sometimes all we need is a little help.