Summary

• Sales coasting is a silent career killer: it feels fine on the inside, but slowly drains the skills you’ve built.
• The “expert trap” convinces experienced reps there’s nothing left to learn. It’s wrong, and it’s dangerous.
• Picking up a humbling new hobby rewires your brain into beginner’s mind, and brings that hunger back to your pipeline.
• Jeb Blount Jr. strapped on ice skates at 28, fell in front of a room full of six-year-olds, and closed his best quarter ever because of it.
• Progress, not the commission check, is what makes sales fun again.

I spend my weekends on an ice rink. I have never been a competitive ice skater, not even close. But every Saturday morning, I’m out there at 5 a.m., ankles screaming, pride perpetually bruised, getting absolutely schooled by people a fraction of my age.

Here’s the question I want to ask you before we go any further: When was the last time you were truly, embarrassingly bad at something? The kind of bad where you have to look over your shoulder to see if anyone caught that.

Most of us in sales spend our entire careers trying to be the expert — the one with all the answers, the one who closes the big deals, the one who has arrived. But today I want to talk about the danger of arriving. I want to talk about sales coasting — the quiet career killer nobody warns you about — and why a room full of six-year-olds in frilly dresses may have saved my professional life.

The Athlete Who Stopped Competing

Like a lot of kids, I grew up defined by the jersey I was wearing. Baseball, soccer, basketball, football — if there was a ball and a scorekeeper, I was on the field. By high school, I was on the state championship track team, the MVP of our baseball team, and I even did the spring musical, because apparently, I had no sense of limits.

Competition was my identity. I took that fire to a Division III track team in college and found my niche in pole vaulting. There’s a specific kind of rush when you’re suspended fifteen feet in the air, upside down, held up by nothing but a carbon fiber pole, waiting for momentum to launch you over the bar. But gravity always wins.

During my freshman season, I took a massive fall — landed straight on my upper back, just below my neck. It was bad. Between that injury and years of redlining my body, my lower legs and my back gave out. I went from a guy who defined himself by how fast he was to a guy who struggled to walk to class.

The competitive fire went out. I stopped competing. I started building Legos and reading books. I studied political science, played guitar, dove into economics. None of that is bad. I still love all of it. But for nearly a decade, that competitive drive was a ghost.

The Coasting Trap — and Why It’s So Hard to See

When I moved into sales, I was good at it. I’d been doing it since I was sixteen. In the beginning, there was real excitement. I was learning, growing, getting sharper every day. But at some point, I started coasting on the talent I’d already built. I wasn’t actually growing anymore. I was just there.

The dangerous thing about sales coasting is that it doesn’t feel like failure. Failure is loud — it gets your attention, it feels bad. But coasting is quiet. It looks like competence from the outside and feels fine on the inside.

Nobody calls you out. You’re hitting acceptable numbers. You know all the scripts, you’ve seen every objection, you’ve hit your quota and missed it. You tell yourself you’ve earned the right to cruise. But somewhere underneath it all, you know that you’re not sharpening anything. You’re spending down the balance of the skills you already built.

I remember sitting in a room with Jeb Sr. and a few of our senior trainers, talking about students who show up to sales training with their arms crossed, sitting in the back, looking at us like we’re wasting their time. I was frustrated with those people and probably even asked out loud: why would anyone be so closed off to new ideas?

And then I ended up flat on the ice with six-year-olds skating circles around me, and I realized something uncomfortable: I had become that student. I wasn’t closed to new ideas, exactly. I just wasn’t convinced there were any new ideas left for me. I was tweaking a finished product. Arrogance dressed up as boredom.

Arrogance in sales doesn’t always look like a big ego. Sometimes it looks like boredom, or learning by osmosis — assuming you’ll just get better by being around the game long enough.

My Wife Handed Me a Pair of Skates and a Dare

Every Saturday for a couple of years, I sat in the stands at the rink as a rink dad with a lukewarm coffee, watching my wife, Ashley, and my daughter train. Ashley has been figure skating for over twenty years. She’s a senior-level skater. When she’s on the ice, the blade and her foot are the same thing. It’s effortless.

One morning, that old athlete woke up inside me and whispered: I hate sitting here. I hate feeling useless.

I told Ashley I wanted to get out there. She looked at me exactly the way wives look at husbands when they already know what’s going to happen. She said, “All right — but you have to promise me something. I’m signing you up for a competition in August.”

In my head, I was still that state championship track athlete. I was 28, in decent shape. How hard can it be? It’s just sliding around on ice.

The first time I stepped onto the rink, I looked like a newborn giraffe on roller skates. I was surrounded by six-year-olds in frilly dresses and hair bows who were literally skating circles around me. I fell three times before I finished a single lap. I could hear the kids snickering. I am a grown man. A respected professional. I have conducted world-class interviews with world-class thought leaders.

I was, by a significant margin, the worst person in that room.

When I finally crawled off the ice, ankles screaming, my pride was bruised, but I was weirdly at peace. For the first time in ten years, I had nowhere to go but up.

What the Ice Taught Me About Sales Coasting

The ice doesn’t care about your resume. It didn’t care that I’d recorded nearly a hundred podcast episodes the year before. If your center of gravity is off, you go down. Period.

That’s actually the gift of picking up something brand new as an adult: there’s no previous reputation you can hide behind. You either learn or you don’t, and the ice tells you the truth immediately.

When you’re skilled enough to explain away your failures, you start depriving yourself of honest feedback. Lost a deal? Wrong fit. Didn’t get the appointment? That prospect wasn’t ready anyway. Rationalizing every negative outcome makes it easy to avoid confronting real skill gaps.

The beginner doesn’t have that luxury. When a six-year-old laps you, there’s no spin on it. You just have to get better.

Because I was a beginner on the ice, my brain started to rewire itself, and it carried over into my career in ways I didn’t expect. I started reviewing my sales calls the same way I analyzed my skating posture. I started listening to my colleagues with actual curiosity instead of thinking I already know what you’re going to say. I started treating every podcast interview as a lesson for me, not just content for the audience. I started chasing one percent better every single day again.

And because of this competition coming up in August, my whole life got a little more structured. I looked at my nutrition: proteins, carbs, and fueling an athlete. I got back in the gym, started stretching, and started sleeping more.

The punchline? I closed more deals at a higher value this quarter than the quarter before.

When you’re a beginner, every small win feels like a miracle. That feeling of progress is addictive, and when you bring it into the office on Monday morning, you stop obsessing over the commission check and start falling in love with the craft again.

Stop Coasting. Find Something That Humbles You.

The first time I landed a right-foot crossover without falling on my face, I skated straight over to Ashley with the excitement of a ten-year-old who had just turned his first double play in Little League. That feeling of progress is so addictive.

When you bring that mindset back to the office, everything shifts. I stopped staring at my quota and started getting excited about the process. How did that discovery call go? Did I stick the landing on that objection? Did I skate through that negotiation with grace, or was I clumsy?

The deal you close is just a point on a scoreboard. The process — the art of learning your craft — is the game. And I love the game again.

So here’s my message to you: If you feel stuck, if you feel like you’re coasting in sales, or if you’ve lost the love of the process, go find something that humbles you.

Take that pottery class. Learn jiu-jitsu. Join a community theater. Put on a pair of skates and try not to fall in front of a bunch of six-year-olds.

When you’re at the very bottom of a skill, you’re forced into beginner’s mind. You have to listen. You have to be patient. You have to have grace for yourself — because there’s no other choice. Take that humility and that hunger for one percent better every day, and bring it with you to work.

If you only put yourself in competitive situations in your sales role from nine to five, you’re not giving yourself enough at-bats, and you’re probably not having as much fun as you could be.

Check your ego at the gate. Fall down, get up. Your sales career will start to glide in ways you never thought possible.

And go get one percent better today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “sales coasting” mean and why is it dangerous? Sales coasting is when an experienced rep stops actively growing and relies on skills they’ve already built. It’s dangerous because it feels like competence — no one calls you out, numbers stay acceptable — while your skills quietly erode underneath.

How do I know if I’m coasting in my sales career? You’re probably coasting if you rationalize lost deals instead of examining them, sit through training without curiosity, or feel bored rather than challenged. The clearest sign: your skills feel like a finished product instead of something you’re still sharpening.

What is “beginner’s mind” and how does it help salespeople? Beginner’s mind means approaching your work without assumptions; staying open, curious, and hungry regardless of how experienced you are. For salespeople, it means treating every call as a learning opportunity and seeking honest feedback instead of explaining away bad outcomes.

Can a hobby outside of work actually improve your sales performance? Yes. When you become a beginner at something new, your brain rewires itself around effort, feedback, and small wins, and that mindset carries directly into your sales process. Jeb Blount Jr. credits ice skating with his best-performing quarter, because learning to skate brought his hunger and focus back to the job.

Ready to stop coasting and start closing? Download the free Sales Gravy Goal Planning Guide and build the plan that gets you one percent better every single day.