E66: Win More (by Losing Less) | Kevin Bailey, CEO @ Dreamfuel

Somebody who consistently performs at a high level, rain or shine, good day, bad day, they show up the exact same every single time. Those are your elite performers.

Today's guest is Kevin Bailey, the CEO of DreamFuel, and he's coached over 1,000 executives at companies like Smartsheet, Greenlight Guru, and Owner.com on the hard science of elite mental performance.

Physiology impacts emotions, emotions impact feelings, feelings impact thoughts, thoughts impact behaviors. So if we can fix your physiology, then we can fix your results.

And Kevin knows what he's talking about. He's completing his master's in applied neuroscience from King's College London. He's a 3-time Inc. 500 founder, and his team includes coaches who have trained fighter pilots, Green Berets, and hedge fund managers. And now they bring those high-performance modalities to executives like you. And if you're skeptical about performance coaches, you should definitely give this episode a listen.

I was a skeptic too, long before I learned all this stuff, and the neuroscience is clear, and that's what got me over it. It's like, yes, you can rewire your entire nervous system to show up differently.

Welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. Momentum is a powerful tool for turning sales and customer conversations into go-to-market intelligence. Using GenAI, it extracts, analyzes, and automates customer intelligence across your GTM org. The best part, it's not a new platform for your team to adopt. It integrates seamlessly with your existing stack, or it can straight up replace your conversational intelligence tool. At Owner, we ripped out Gong and went all in on Momentum. It writes back to our Salesforce directly. Captures forecast and churn risk, autofills CRM fields, shares product signals, and tracks sentiment. Companies like Cursor, Zscaler, Ramp, and ElevenLabs use it every day. Check it out with a free trial at momentum.io. Today's guest is Kevin Bailey, who is the co-founder and CEO of DreamFuel, where he and his team coach founders, executives, and sales teams on mental performance using applied neuroscience. Uh, Kevin is a 3-time Inc. 500 founder, He built his first company to $12 million ARR and 100 employees by age 27, nearly burned out doing it, and then went and got a master's in applied neuroscience from King's College London to understand why. And he has coached over 1,000 leaders at companies like Greenlight Guru, LinkSquare, Smartsheet, Owner.com as well. He's done a bunch with us and he's got some fascinating data on what happens when you can treat mental performance and mental fitness like a real business investment. And any of my listeners know it is a topic of of great interest for me personally. And so we're going to dig into the science of executive performance and how you can take those skills from you as a leader, scale them across an entire organization, do it in a scalable manner, make it a part of your identity. So this is going to be a fun one. I am particularly excited for this because it is a topic I care a lot about. So Kevin, thanks for joining and excited for it.

I'm excited to be on, Kyle.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So what did I miss in your background that's important for folks to know?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a pretty straightforward story. I was a, a young founder, founded a company with a couple of my buddies. You know, we hit lightning in a bottle, it grew really fast, and by the time we got to 100+ employees, like, you know, I got into the business to buy fast cars and be a kid and have fun and realized there's a hell of a lot of pressure involved at that level, a lot of money involved. And I mean, when I started to understand, you know, I had like 100 families depending on this. At 27, the pressure got really high. I was lucky enough to run into a neuroscientist at the time who coached athletes, and she gave me some skills that I first started to execute with our sales team. This is like when, I don't know, breathwork was considered weird and unknown, you know, for like, you know, like Wim Hof, you know, this is like early days of this.

We started to do like breathwork before important meetings and things like that.

I started to notice that their performances changed. We eventually hired a CEO for the company and I moved into just doing kind of enterprise sales on the West Coast. And I started implementing these tactics seriously as an AE at that point, doubled my own close rate. And then my friends back in Indianapolis, when I came home, started asking me if I could start working with their sales teams. And that was those companies like, you know, Max Yoder from Less and Lee. You mentioned David Duran from Greenlight Guru. Santiago from Amplify. Some of those companies had nice exits and that was kind of the genesis. And then I met Anna, Anna Rohr, who's now Anna Heiney. She's a Notre Dame neuroscience grad from Notre Dame, Hall of Fame runner, elite performer in all regards. And then we really built the curriculum in the company.

Very cool. Quite a co-founder, 8-time All-American athlete. Not too shabby.

Coolest person, man.

Yeah, yeah. And your whole team is, is like former high-level athletes that have gone through this similar journey. And I know the, the guy that we worked with was great and has exposure to, you know, UFC fighters and all sorts of stuff. So it's a fascinating group.

Yeah, at this point that's our job is just we try and find people who work with high performers in other arenas. So one of them like trains fighter pilots, you know, one of them You know, Alex worked with UFC. He was actually— did hedge fund managers for a long time, like Wendy from Billions, the guy that you guys worked with. We have a bunch that have coached different professional sports. One, we just hired Special Forces, trained Green Berets, and we take them and bring them through our curriculum to take those high-performance modalities through performance psychology and neuroscience and then adapt them for the executive function, which really has no off-season.

Yeah, that's cool. So, um, I want to start by just laying out a framework for executives to think about this topic. So, you know, many, if not most people in these jobs, um, get consumed by their work. It becomes everything. Uh, a bunch of this other stuff falls by the wayside and, and there's story after story of people either burning out or like having physical, like, health challenges. And so I'm wondering if you could give us a framework to think about, all right, like, I want to treat myself as a high-performance corporate athlete. What is the structure? What is my mental model to try to view that through personally?

Well, let's first talk about the goal and the outcome, the goal of any elite performer. So I guess the question you ask yourself is what's the difference between a high performer and an elite performer? The very best performers, like what's the hallmark of an elite performer? And when I think about it and, you know, you think about the research around it, it's consistency. Somebody who consistently performs at a high level, rain, sun, or shine, good day, bad day, they show up the exact same every single time. Those are your elite performers. Those are your Michael Jordans who played phenomenally when he had the flu. For example, and the question is like, how do you become an elite performer? Anybody who pursues mental performance, that's their goal. So maybe we could start there. I can, I can, I can, we can unpack that a little bit, then maybe get into some of the frameworks we use.

Yeah, that is a really interesting framework and actually sort of surprising because, and when I reflect on it, yeah, there are actually a lot of leaders who can have good weeks, good months, have a good quarter, but, but it's a little too much up and down and there's a little too many other inputs that can take somebody off of their game. Or even, you know, like going back to my MMA days, like when I was at my super ultimate best, I was a very different athlete than when I was like only okay and maybe in my head a little bit or, you know, had a nagging injury. So the, the difference between peak and valley like certainly is is significant. So, all right, so we want the outcome to be consistently have some of your best days, eliminate the downs. And so what's the approach? Like, how should I think about it?

Raise that floor. Yeah, just a tight bound of performance, you know. And the reason why I think people like us are employed with professional athletes so much is because there's an audience all the time, you know. There isn't much of an audience in your boardroom when you, when you get the yips, so to speak, psychologically and start breaking down. You just have a couple maybe investors that are like, oh, this guy probably needs to get out. But you know, when you have an entire audience of 40,000 fans, you know, booing, it becomes very obvious to everyone. So I think that's why people like us work with athletes so much. But yeah, I mean, they want to win the championship. They got to show consistently their best. So I think that the first— so I think about when I think of frameworks, I think of like, let's start, you know, think of like physiology, emotions, your interpretation of those emotions, which I call feelings. Then you have cognitive, where your thoughts that really spawn off your physiology and emotions. You change your physiology and emotions. You know this with breathwork, you change the way you think. Rolling off your thoughts come your behaviors, and off your behaviors come your results. So if I think of that as the performance chain, I like to start with physiology.

Okay, so physiology, emotions, feelings, cognitive, behaviors, results.

Yeah. Okay.

And maybe just before we unpack each, why are behaviors downstream of emotions and physiology? Maybe just unpack some of the neuroscience there, because I think that's a good foundation.

Yeah. Think of this like a chain. It goes up and down. So if you have great results, obviously that's going to impact your thinking. It's going to impact your behaviors. It's going to impact your emotions, the way you feel about those emotions, your physiology, and then all the way up. You change your physiology, you can change your emotions, your thoughts about those emotions, your feelings. You can change the way you think and then you can change the way you behave and the way you perform your results. So I think it is a chain that goes up and down. This is backed up in performance psychology. But yeah, I mean, think about it like this. Let's just start with a really basic example. So there's a lot, there's a big study on this. It's like, if I, if we were sitting next to each other and I just happened to have like a syringe and in that syringe was cortisol and adrenaline. And Kyle, you're having the best day of your life and you're like, all right, buddy, give me a shot of cortisol and adrenaline. And then you got a big shot of cortisol and adrenaline, loaded up with cortisol and adrenaline. It doesn't matter if you're having the best day of your life, you will automatically go into the fight response— or sorry, flight response. Yeah, cortisol and adrenaline will be a flight response, and you're going to be thinking of all the reasons why this day sucks and why you want the hell out of this situation. Doesn't matter, it was the best day of your life, you're going to find everything wrong with it. A human in the flight response, physiologically, their thoughts are pinned down by their feelings, their emotions, and their physiology.

Because their brain is seeking, their brain is like actively looking for threat.

Yeah, it's get me out of this situation. So the thoughts, and remember, your thoughts bubble up from the subconscious mind. Conscious thoughts are like 5%. 95% of your thoughts are happening reflexively, automatically in the nervous system. So they're kind of popping up and you're like, oh boy. Yeah, I really got to get out of this situation. This sucks. You're not actually thinking that. Those thoughts are being fed to you. Like if you ever meditate, you sit there and you notice like, okay, there are all these thoughts. You're not trying to think. Those thoughts are spawned off of your emotionality and your physiology. But physiology is at the very bottom of the chain. Physiology impacts emotions. Emotions impact feelings. Feelings impact thoughts. Thoughts impact behaviors. So if we can fix your physiology, then we can fix your results.

Yeah. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is you can practice your physiology. You can, you, there, your, your brain is plastic. Like neuroplasticity is, is like a, one of the most important concepts I learned in the last, like, I don't know, decade plus where you can practice these things, change your— the patterns that your brain operates in, and then change everything that's downstream of it or connected in that chain. Change your feelings, change your cognition and behaviors, and then— and ultimately results through stuff like meditation, gratitude, like things that were very woo-woo— I consider to be very, very woo-woo 15 years ago, but now have certainly changed my tune on. Yeah.

And it's an infinite continuum, you know, like a lot of people, I think about mental health, it's like, okay, what is average mental? I'm mentally healthy. Okay. I'm okay. You know, I mean, I'm in okay shape, but the question is, you know, that continuum. Okay. In our society, we only think about mental disorders.

Okay.

You don't have a mental disorder. Well, then you're mentally healthy. The mental performance coach goes, okay, from the point of mentally healthy to elite performance, like what is elite mental health? Like what is true mental fitness? And it's a continuum. And I think I told you at the beginning of the call, like, I do study in my neuroscience master's. My dissertation is on non-duality, which is kind of like the furthest extent of mental health, where, like you were talking about, a feeling of okayness just sort of pervades in all situations. And that is trained in the nervous system of somebody who meditates a lot and does other techniques because they're rewiring the way their default mode network of their brain works. To where like mind wandering isn't always about the self, which, you know, we could go deeper on that. But the main point I'm trying to make is, is a continuum and you can train the nervous system to show up a lot differently over time. It's like working out. It's like building a big squat or bench press. It takes time. But yes, you can rewire your entire nervous system to show up differently.

Yeah. Can you just explain what the default mode network is and maybe, maybe like, so let's transition into understanding in this chain. We'll unpack physiology, but like, what are the key parts of your brain or physiology that people need to understand that they might not? Like the default mode network, the reticular activating system, like some of these things that tend to crop up a lot and inform, like, I'd love to explain like how the brain, how the brain, uh, in a way that is not, not conscious. Affects everything downstream and maybe just like give us some of those concepts.

Yeah. So default mode network's a really good thing to understand. So the default mode network is the part of your brain that really flips on when you're at rest. Okay. So in between calls, when you're sitting there, it's the part of your brain that's just firing, mind wandering, firing off thoughts. Okay. Those 95% of thoughts. And in somebody who maybe has somewhat poor mental health, that default mode network is going to be firing a lot of self-reflective thoughts at them. Okay, on that last call, like, what did I do wrong there? Oh, I must have said something wrong to, you know, my team member Johnny. He's treating me differently. Like, it's just constantly asking you questions about yourself. It's having you question yourself constantly. The default mode network is important, but it certainly can be hyperactive, and that is one thing that meditation has been shown to calm down. Meditation over time lowers the default mode network activity in mind wandering, self-reflective thinking. Now, think about when you're in flow state, you know, if you're doing something where you're really tuned in, are you thinking about yourself the entire time? No.

Yeah.

So like people in non-dual states or people who have high mental health are actually thinking about themselves a lot less. They're much more in tune to their environment. They're playing to win. They're not asking themselves every little thing they did wrong. So yeah, default mode network is responsible for self-reflective thinking. The other part that's really important to understand as far as performance goes is the amygdala, you know, threat detection center. So when that mind wandering turns into really bad negative thinking, it's going to turn on the amygdala. I think this is maybe a really good transition to talk about physiology, the four states of the nervous system. If we're talking about the bottom of the chain, you know, you're really only in 4 states. We just talked about the flight response. So cortisol and adrenaline, you know, 2 of the primary hormones and neurotransmitters associated with the flight response.

Okay.

It's a quadrant. So if you want to understand your physiology, there's 2 things you want to think about. You want to think about your heart rate.

Okay.

And you want to think about emotional tonality. So it's either a high heart rate, a neutral heart rate, or a low heart rate. Acetylcholine, sorry, acetylcholine slows the heart down. Adrenaline and noradrenaline speed the heart up. Okay. So you think about this as like the Y-axis. Yeah. right? So if, if you were like doing science experiments as a kid and you put acetylcholine on a frog heart, that, that heart's gonna beat a little slower. So slow, slow heart rate, high heart rate. And then on the x-axis, emotional tonality. So think of on one side you got cortisol.

Yeah.

And on the other side you got neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. So you got these, these four areas, you got So if you have high heart rate and negative emotional tonality, cortisol, you got the flight response. Run from an attacking predator. Okay. Executives spend a ton of time in that place. All right. I mean, if people are honest with themselves, like how often do you think executives are in a flight response?

110% of the time.

Yeah.

A lot.

And it's not a great place to be, you know, like your, your blood's running out to your appendages to run away from a, from a sabertooth tiger or whatever, it's not trying to think of the next best thing to say in a meeting. Yeah, your IQ dips a little bit.

You're not— significantly, I saw.

Yeah, like you're burning a ton of energy. It's just a bad place. And also it's deteriorating your physical health over time, you know, and your mental health. You know, it's, it's terrible on the hippocampus, hippocampus, on memory, on really important brain functions if you're sitting there in the flight response all the time. So that's a, that's a maladaptive state for an executive for the most part. I mean, 99% of the time. So let's go down. So the heart rate's a little slower. All right. You still have cortisol running. That's freeze.

You got to lock in word. That's low heart rate, negative, negative emotion.

Yes. Negative emotional tonality. So cortisol and acetylcholine freeze response.

Okay.

And it, like everything, it's a continuum. So like if a polar bear happened to walk through my door right now, I would go into the fetal position, but I would do nothing. My nervous system would totally shut down. Too much acetylcholine and cortisol. You're playing dead, play dead response. But procrastination, feeling like I just don't want to get out of bed in the morning, also a freeze response. Okay.

Interesting.

Also a really bad place for an executive to be. Yeah. You know, and frankly, how often do executives get in a freeze response? How often do you not want to go to the next meeting? Not talking to you specifically, but it's like, it happens.

Yeah. Not wanting to sit down and do that really hard thing that you know is going to have, you know, like a, is going to be a negative experience.

Exactly.

Difficult experience.

Yes. You know, that's why, you know, cold plunges and stuff like that are helpful. Uh, so getting out of a freeze response. So, so think about that, literally freezing yourself. So, so, so think about that. The first step of this is like awareness. It's like, okay, my heart rate's a little low. I'm really not feeling this. Okay. I'm in a freeze response. If you can identify you're in a freeze response, now we're talking. Now you have the agency to move out of that because most people aren't aware of it. They go into their next meeting, whether it's a sales call or a leadership meeting, they're in a freeze response, they botch the thing. It's like, why did that happen? Because my physiology was off, which impacted my emotions, which impacted my thinking, which impacted my behaviors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And so how can people start to build that awareness? And we'll loop back to the 4 states. I want to keep going there, but like, where do I What can I do in practice to start to become more aware of these states and where I'm actually at?

Yeah. So one is obviously the most obvious place, the biological oscillator that's most— we're most aware of is the heart. That's where it comes in. Start there. If your heart's racing and you want to get out of a situation, you're in a flight response. You know, if it— you know, think about like heartache, like a breakup. That's kind of a, that's kind of like an obvious freeze response in those cases. It's like, I don't even want to get out of bed, you know, like heart rate's low, emotional tonality is really negative. So it, there's some somatic awareness there is what we call it. So, breathwork is a great way to get somatic awareness. So somatic breathwork specifically is breathwork that helps you get awareness of your physiology. That's one of the things we do before that we did before the visualization with you guys.

Right. I want to come back to that because that was a wild experience. I've done a lot of breathwork and meditation, but the one we did together, I was like, that was, that was a whole new thing. So somatic breathwork is, it's that rapid breathing that we were doing, and that gives you more— just explain like how that helps you, like you're practicing the awareness, or at the time that you're trying to gauge your state, you do that?

Something like somatic breathwork or cold plunges helps you get in touch with your body. State is better understood by having awareness of how your body's reacting than it is by really the mental chatter because the mental chatter is not going to tell you you're in a freeze response.

Yeah.

It's going to try and keep you running from the predator or playing dead. So it's going to kind of fight against you, but your body always tells the story. So when you go into a cold plunge, you're like, damn, that hurts. You know, maybe the first time all week you got out of your executive head and you got into a situation where you had to like actually feel your body.

Hmm. And so you're practicing feeling your body so that at a later point, when you're going into a big meeting and you want to understand, be like, am I freezing? Am I fighting? Am I focused? Like that, you'll, you'll have done the work to have more awareness. Is that, is that fair to say?

You're practicing. Okay. You're practicing being able to be aware. Being aware is really hard. The, the mind does not really, it's not invested in helping you figure this stuff out. The mind wants to be able to control the states you're in. So you trying to learn how to take control of the mind to be like, all right, I don't want to be in a freeze response right now. I'm going to push myself into a fight response, which by the way, it's mischaracterized a lot. It can be a very adaptive place to be. You know, the leader is like, we're gonna go take that hill. That's, you know, a fight response. We're gonna win this quarter. That's a fight response. Yeah. So, so yeah, the brain will sabotage this a little bit. So it's very hard to be self-aware in a really intense situation. You know, say a special forces operator who goes into a freeze response, go on the field, like they train to be aware of that. You know, they do not want to be in a freeze response going out into the field. So yeah, the breathwork. So you'll, I mean, I think they've, there's been articles written on this and stuff, but SEAL teams will do breathwork going out into a situation to get them fully in so they understand where they're at physiologically. Yeah.

Like box breath, I think came out of the SEALs.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, which is, which is really interesting. You wouldn't think that they would like be the pioneers of, of a breathwork and meditation technique.

Yeah. So they're going into a tough situation where they have to perform.

Yeah.

And instead of being up in their head thinking about every little detail, they use visualization, by the way, but instead of being up in their head, they're in their bodies working on their breath, focusing on their in-breath, focusing on holding, focusing on their out-breath. They're sitting in their bodies regulating their emotional state, regulating their physiological state before they go into battle. You know, their heart rate gets up too high, they're going to bring it back down.

Because that will allow them to have better cognition, better behaviors, better results if we go back to your chain. Because of the chain. What is the evolutionary biology behind us being so poor at controlling these things? Like, it seems like a misconfiguration.

Well, gosh, I mean, we're built to survive. And we came out of terribly intense environments where you did have predators who were stalking you every day. Like, the brain was built so that if you needed to run away, you were going to run away. If you needed to play dead, you were going to play dead. You know, we— whatever happens biologically, but we gave our nervous system the opportunity to completely control us.

So these were, these were adaptive traits for a very different world. And now those are maladaptive traits in the modern world because we can't turn it off. And we interpret, you know, cortisol and adrenaline being chased by tiger, but really it's coming when like we're getting uncomfortable questions in a, in a board meeting. And, and so we're like triggering the, that, that like more ancient network that we don't really want today. Is that fair?

Bingo.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. That's negativity bias, basically. Like our ability, like, so the evolutionary origins would be we're good at spotting negativity and spotting danger and spotting things that are bad because we're, it's adaptive to spot predators. But now our brain seeks out the worst crap on the internet. Because like your brain craves it, even though it is purely maladaptive for us today.

Yeah, precisely. And I think it's the studies I've seen, approximately 70% of your automatic thinking. Again, this is the 95%, 70% of that is negative on your average person. So it's like most people are fighting with themselves.

You know, 70% of the 95%. Yeah, that's a lot of, a lot of negative thoughts.

Yeah. So if 95% of your thoughts are automatic, And then 70% of those are negative. They call those NATs, negative automatic thinking. And default mode network just firing negative stuff at you. You know, most people, you got to win the battle with yourself before you can win the battle outside.

Okay, interesting. And something else that I read, like, not too long ago that I thought was really informative was when you're in a flight response, your body is actually recruiting blood and oxygen to its like physical, like to your legs and arms and things that help you physically and away from your brain. Hence that you mentioned that your IQ goes down, but it makes sense. It's like, okay, I need to recruit every amount of energy, blood, oxygen to the parts of my body that will help me physically survive my legs. And therefore it's coming out of your cognitive system, which I think is fascinating. So if you think about it, like, oh, you going into that meeting being scared and overwhelmed, it's, it's not just a brain thing. Like, your body is physically making it more challenging.

Yeah, that's why people clench their fists when they get mad.

Oh, yeah. Interesting. Okay, so then awareness is that is the first part we've talked about, like somatic breathwork. Plunge, I think, is like one of the things, one of the takeaways that I think people should take from this. I have a cold plunge at my house. I bought it like Plunge. I highly recommend Plunge. They're awesome. And like, could not recommend this as like as highly as possible. You go from trying to sit in a plunge for like 45 seconds at 45 degrees or whatever to 2 minutes to 3 minutes and you force yourself through that. You just learn to understand. It's like I, my body was screaming to end this experience. And now I can sit in a plunge. I could sit in the plunge for way longer than 3 or 5 minutes if I needed to, but it's just like purely a cognitive exercise for me to learn to like power through that. And you take that everywhere with you and you do build that awareness. And also like an, I feel like an understanding of like, this is just a choice. Like it's literally a choice to be overwhelmed and plunge, I think is Cold exposure is such a good example for that. You need to get a—

physiological resilience or physical resilience is going to be correlated with psychological resilience. I think it's worth mentioning too that for awareness, it's obvious, but it's worth saying the biggest investment I've made in my life is my meditation practice. I've spent the most time of any hobby meditating. I think if I told somebody the total hours, they'd probably like roll their eyes. It's a lot, but it's given me the ability to observe my thoughts. And for most people, that is not an automatic ability. Like, yeah, it is a cultivated ability. And if you are able to become aware of your thoughts and you're able to kind of laugh at yourself and watch them, that is the ultimate level of awareness. And that's where you can really start to have fun with this. Cool.

I'm going to come back to protocols. I want to make sure we close off. So, 4 states of the nervous system: flight, high heart rate, negative emotion, uh, fight, uh, fight we talked about but we haven't unpacked, freeze, low heart rate, negative emotional tonality. So let's get into fight, fight and focus.

Yeah, yeah. So fight, and one thing I want to mention is I'm dumbing everything down as much as I can, and it's such a— these are such complex topics. I do not have my PhD. I am finishing my master's in applied neuroscience, so I do my very best with this. but I want to be humble in the fact that like these are complex things. And we are, we are using simple models so that people can wrap their heads around them. But if I think about a fight response, I'm thinking about noradrenaline, which is like the cousin of adrenaline. So adrenaline is like almost like they're both energy molecules to give you energy. Adrenaline is kind of like uncomfortable energy. Noradrenaline is more like a little more comfortable energy.

Okay.

So I think, so when I think of fight response, I think of I think of dopamine, the molecule of motivation, and I think of noradrenaline. And noradrenaline is actually derived from dopamine. So when you're running a lot of dopamine, getting motivated, and noradrenaline comes in and gives you the energy to go do it. Okay. So when you're in a fight response, again, a continuum, you know, you're in the UFC, you know, the great fighters are in a fight response, obviously, and that's good for them. Yeah, like I said, it's a continuum, you know, at the lower levels, that is a leader who's inspired, who wants to go do something big. They're in a fight response. They're running on dopamine. It's, you know, they feel a little elevated, you know, heart rate's a little up, you know, and they're, and they got a lot of energy, a lot of passion. Okay. So you don't want to be there all the time. It is a sympathetic nervous system response and can be maladaptive over time. You don't want to live there. But highly adaptive in certain situations, much more adaptive than a flight response. So when people say fight or flight response, flight response is the one to avoid.

Mm-hmm.

Fight response is the one to use mindfully.

Use mindfully. Okay. And that would be high heart rate, positive emotional tonality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like dopamine, which is associated with pleasure. Dopamine is not actually a pleasure molecule, but it's associated with pleasure. And then you have, yeah, adrenaline, noradrenaline for the energy, which is derived.

It's a seeking, it's a seeking hormone.

Yes. The reason why humans have been so successful is because, you know, yeah, we're great dopamine reward system.

Okay.

Your top AEs are highly motivated by the dopamine reward system. It is a hedonic treadmill that never ends, but yeah, it's, yeah, it's why we get, it's why, why we're out where we are.

We can definitely talk about the hedonic treadmill and maladaptive dopamine seeking because I think that is an important conversation.

Well, it's about balance. You know, Herman talks about it a lot, serotonin and dopamine, which is I think a subject we should get into. But just to cover the last one, I like to call it focus. Some people call it rest and digest. It's pretty chill. You think about like a steady or slower heart rate, and then you think about serotonin, which is really a molecule most associated with happiness. If dopamine's associated with pleasure, serotonin is associated with like the steady happiness. Those two molecules, you know, focus response, you know, nice kind of flowy, sometimes you lose track of time, relaxation, you know, could also be boring, could also be associated with like a fawn response where like you just don't, don't go after something. But yeah, so fight, freeze, flight, focus.

Okay. And dictated by heart rate and emotional tonality. And so let's talk about— so the, the states we want to be in to do high leverage activity, is it always focus? Is it sometimes fight? Like, how do you think about the ideal states for— is it different tasks? Maybe, maybe just unpack that and then we'll talk about protocols to start to like develop your ability to stay in the states we want.

Yeah. As a mental performance coach, I think if you talk to a lot of other mental performance coaches, we're often trying to get athletes into equanimity or executives in equanimity. Equanimity is a pretty zeroed out state, pretty neutral. So if you think about it as like, you know, you got the Y-axis and X-axis, think about like the dead center of that. That's a pretty nice place to be. Executing anything. If you want to be highly motivating to get a team to go do something great, then yeah, move yourself a little bit into the fight continuum. If you want to be spreadsheet punching and enjoy yourself, lose track of time, get into a little bit of flow, that focus response is kind of nice. Not burning much energy, you're very focused in, not much of that self-reflective default mode network stuff going on, you're tuned in. Nice serotonin, just kind of chilling, doing your thing. So I think of fight response probably more like when you're with a team doing something hard. Focus response, more like deep work, you know, trying to get something done, writing a book or something.

Okay.

Don't want to burn much energy.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's funny, as you explain these things, I just like can't help for my brain to think about how I am as a podcast host because I'm like, trying to make sure we can, that I have like the architecture for the podcast and I'm coming back to here, what about this? But, but like ideally I just want to be tuned in and be able to listen fully. So it's, it's interesting to hear you talk about these concepts as I flip back between like a self-awareness, self-critical default mode network, and then just like a very like attentive listening, listening mode. I can like experience my body doing it as you're explaining these things.

That task switching is hard. I, I run a podcast too. I know.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So you're, you're trying to get people to equanimity. So let's talk about the protocols. So we talked about, you know, the benefits of cold plunging, but like, why maybe like is cold— what category of experience is cold plunge? That's a practice exercise for awareness or like how would you How would you categorize that different than like going out for a hard run or like doing something physically demanding? Are there buckets of protocols that we should think about?

I think it's a great warmup. So I think of mental performance exercises as warmup, hold form, cool down. Cold plunge to me, as much as it kind of sounds like a cool down, I think it's a warmup. Joe Rogan, a lot of people do a cold plunge in the morning.

Same. Yeah, that's my protocol.

Because you kind of wake up, you know, you might be in a flight response. You know, we actually, the nervous system uses cortisol to wake us up. So you get a nice spike of cortisol to start your day, you know? Yeah. So it's like cold plunge resets everything. Yes, it teaches you some somatic awareness, but it also increases dopamine. So it's like that, that drive to get out there and go do it might put you into a fight response. Yeah, I think it's, it's just a great warmup. And again, it kill— it does a lot. One technique covers many bases.

Hmm. So what other basis would a cold plunge cover?

Resilience, certainly. We talked about that a little bit. So you think about the, your ability to psychologically bounce back from adversity, I think critical executive skill, cold plunge every morning, it's definitely working on that. So it's working on you at a psychological level. It's working on you at an energy level, again, releasing dopamine, which then turns into noradrenaline so you can get your day started. Further, it's teaching you somatic awareness to be more in your body, be able to notice maybe my heart rate's about to explode, maybe I'm in a flight response, probably should do something about that. Yeah, I'd say those 3 main things.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting as you learn to do it properly. This is the thing I would encourage is like, don't just do a cold plunge and then suffer with like a, the fast breath. Like that's actually not helping you too much. You have to like actually learn the, the like a plunging technique because what you're trying to do is fight your body's urge to panic and have that rapid shallow breath and you're trying to fight your way to a very smooth calm way of breathing. And, you can see this, the Plunge that I use has an app, it's just the Plunge app. And so, you can see your heart rate for that session and watch yourself over time. It's like your first bunch of plunges, you your heart rate's going to spike to 100. And then, over time, you learn to slow the exhale and then force yourself to breathe in through your nose. And eventually, you can get your heart rate down into the low 60s. And that's not a slow heart rate compared to resting, but when your body's going through that exposure, certainly it is.

And so, you're talking about moving on that continuum. You use your breath to move yourself down the y-axis. Yeah, to bring your heart rate— yeah, okay, so you're more centered, more zeroed out, more in equanimity using your breath. Hence why the SEALs are doing box breathing going into a situation, keeping their heart rate regulated.

Yeah, so what are the other like great warm-up exercises? So it's warm-up, hold form, cool down in terms of your performance events. What are the other things we should, protocols that we should think about when it comes to warming up?

I mean, Kyle, you let me know if you think differently. When I think about executives, I feel like our performances are always meetings. Yeah. So, I like to think of that as we're high performers at meetings. You know, yes, we do a lot of prep work and things like that, but at the end of the day, whether we're a sales executive or a CEO or whatever, like rubber meets the road in our meetings where we're actually working with people and getting things done. So I would say, if we think of that as the performance arena, how am I performing in the meeting? Then I think it's a good context to think about warmups, holding form, and cooling down. Want to maybe do it from that perspective?

Yeah, that's great. I think.

Okay, so, um, yeah, we just talk about a few simple tools at each stage. So warming up for a meeting, uh, what do we do to get ourselves warmed up to crush a meeting, whether it's a leadership meeting or, or if it's you're an AE listening to this and want to crush a call? Like, let's ask ourselves that question. What do you think about?

Well, certainly breathwork. Like, we've already touched on box breath and, and the seals. So for me personally, like, if I'm going into a high-stakes environment that's the thing I always come back to is, is like checking in with my body, feeling where I'm at, and then being able to like use breath to change that state to regulate either up or most of the time down, I would say.

Yeah, perfect example. Okay, so breathwork is great for warming up. Now let's think about— so you're moving yourself on the y-axis there, right? You're bringing your heart rate down a little bit so the blood's not rushing to your appendages to run away, right? So you're getting yourself centered with breathwork. Now how do we move ourselves on the x-axis? How do we bring positive emotional tonality. Yeah, that's a great opportunity for— go ahead. Sorry.

It's funny, like what I used to do here, which is not really like a proper technique I used to learn, but like I would listen to standup comedy going into work if I was like not in the best of mind space. 'Cause you can't help but be like in a better affect if you've like just laughed a bunch on your 20-minute walk in.

That's a great technique to move yourself on the x-axis. You gotta find what works for you. I would say the most studied and most reliable to move yourself quickly is visualization.

Yeah.

Which you can pair with music if you want. Hmm. Okay.

So, so like explain, people are going to hear visualization and they'll think of like a million different things and be like, wow, that's like either woo woo or that's for like athletics. How does that apply for, how do you do that for meetings or like being an exec?

Yeah. Great, great question. Yeah. Visualization in academia is called imagery. Rehearsal imagery is typically what athletes do. And if you watch, like, there's so many Netflix specials where they feature it. F1 drivers, Blue Angels, quarterbacks talks about it a lot. Jordan and Michael Jordan, Olympians, they all talk about it.

Yeah.

Michael Phelps did it like every day of his life when he'd go to bed.

Wait, what was the academic term for it again?

Imagery. Rehearsal imagery. Rehearsal imagery.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it's rehearsing a scene before it happens.

Okay.

And why does it work?

Yeah.

Okay. So we talked about the subconscious mind, 95% of your thoughts, 70% of them negative, right?

Yeah.

Okay. That subconscious mind that's doing all the mind-wandering, self-reflective thinking, okay, has a difficult time really distinguishing between what's really happening and what's well imagined.

Hmm.

Okay. So probably some of the people listening to this have heard of this before, but if you imagine yourself biting into a lemon really vividly, all your saliva glands will go off. You'll feel your mouth kind of pucker up a little bit. When you imagine something well, the whole nervous system reacts like it's happening. Tons of evidence on this. You know, there's stuff like the whole, the central nervous system will actually build muscle if you imagine working out. Like, that's how intense it is.

Yeah, I've seen a bunch of those studies. And if you pair it, if you pair actually lifting weights with also imagining like your, your muscles getting bigger, it works. Like, this was the thing Schwarzenegger did. Yes, I guess it's in that Pumping Iron documentary. And I never, I never connected the two things until like much, much later. But he would, he would talk about, he would like, he would like put his mind into the muscle he was working out so he could like feel it. He probably didn't even know that that was like he was doing this thing. It was just sort of natural. But yeah, it's fascinating.

But so let's talk about you getting ready for a big meeting. We're going to use these two modalities. We're going to use breathwork and we use visualization. I'll talk about two different types of visualization. I'll talk about kind of how I apply them and, and how the leaders on this, on this podcast can apply them. So got a big meeting coming up. Let's just say it's a big sales call. Okay. You know, closing a multimillion dollar deal or something. You got your AE on, you're coming in as a closer or something. You got it. You got to come as your very best self. You want to be in a, in a perfect, in a perfect state. So I might use creative visualization in this case. In fact, I did that when I first learned this stuff. I used creative visualization all the time with breathwork. So I would do a little breathwork. Okay. Maybe I would do like, we call it mental reset breathing with 30 deep breaths followed by a little breath hold, Wim Hof breathing pretty much. I would do that. And then I would imagine, and I was a founder of this company, I would imagine the case study. I'm jumping on a call. I'm not thinking about closing the deal. I'm thinking about that person on the call giving us an incredible case study.

Mm-hmm.

So by the time I jump on that call, so there's mirror neurons that we're mirroring each other constantly. They're like, boy, this dude's got a lot of confidence, you know, not arrogance, just deep-seated confidence in his product and this partnership.

Yeah.

So I do the, I do the breathwork to regulate myself. Then I do the visualization. I'm imagining a video, you know, literally I'm watching a video of this person I'm about to meet with just gushing about how effective our product was for them. Cool. So that's how I'm warming up for the call. It takes me 5 minutes, 3 minutes for the breathwork, 2 minutes for the creative visualization, jump on. The other form of visualization, rehearsal visualization, would be me going through anything that could go wrong with that and me adapting. So when Michael Phelps talks about visualization, he goes, "In the Olympics, I think about what happens if my goggles fall off." All that stuff. My daughter's a swimmer, that stuff's terrible. If it happens. But he was thinking, okay, how do I react in that situation? Not lose a millisecond. So I'm thinking, what could go wrong in this call? And I'm seeing myself, I'm not thinking, what would I do? I'm seeing myself respond to that objection. I'm seeing myself hold my nervous system steady when they say, you know, for X, Y, or Z reason, we have to punt it another quarter or whatever. Like I'm going through that stuff before the call. So rehearsal visualization, versus the creative one where I'm just trying to get myself in a really positive state by thinking about the case study. Would you do both? Can, yeah, sometimes I would, depending on how, you know, it's like how much time do you have? Like for the most important meetings, I give myself 10 minutes. I'll do more than just visualization and breathwork. There's many other practices, but I'm trying to give you the top ones. Okay.

Makes sense. And so I want to give people like a really actionable protocol to take away. So, uh, just unpack the breathwork that you would do, like, and how would somebody actually just go away and do that?

That. Yeah, let's get super practical. Okay. So again, I hate to say Wim Hof breathing because they're all trademarky about it. Take 30 deep breaths, you know, take 30 deep breaths. On the 30th one, just hold it without air. So breathe out all the way, hold your breath for like 15, 20 seconds. That'll kind of reset your nervous system. I call it mental reset breathing. The breaths need to be super deep. 30 of the deepest breaths you can take. Really push, let your stomach drop. And this deals with the vagus nerve, but it's like, let your stomach drop like Buddha belly, like a gorilla. Like, don't tighten your stomach, relax it. This relaxes the nervous system. So relax your stomach, breathe deep, 30 reps. On the 30th one, breathe out all the way, hold your breath for 15 seconds.

Does the timing matter of like how many seconds in, out, the whole time?

I wouldn't worry about that. Breathe deep as you can.

Okay.

But yeah, I mean, it's good, you know, like you, you're talking about a second. Don't do it super— yeah, that's actually—

so not a slow deep breath, like a, like a forceful deep breath.

So yeah, you're right. Great, great point. Do deep breaths, second-ish, second and a half. Let the air read out of your lungs. If you breathe in all the way, your body wants to release it. Just let it release. So it's like that for 30 breaths. Okay. On the 30th, breathe out all the way. Hold your breath for 15 seconds. You will feel your nervous system shift. You're going to feel yourself jumping into a different state of consciousness. At that point, initiate the visualization. So, so once you feel your nervous system start to calm down, now you visualize the case study video, or you visualize, uh, yourself reacting to various situations that you want to stay cool in on a meeting. Okay.

And does is that breathwork making you more receptive to that imagery? Or like, why do it first versus second?

Well, let's— so physiology first. I think, I think visualization is kind of like moving on, working on the emotions and stuff like that. So cool your physiology out, all right? Get it centered, get an equanimity on the physiology. Now work on, now work on visualization and stuff that works on the emotions, works on the thoughts, all right? So work on the chain here, the whole chain.

Right. Is that somatic breathwork or is that something different?

Wim Hof breathing? Somatic breathwork is kind of like doing a lot of Wim Hof breathing in a row. So it's like, think of it as like, we're just talking about 30 breaths. Somatic breathwork is probably 200, 300 breaths.

Yeah. So, so the, there's a good part to like sort of talk about the experience we did together. So we've had you in to do stuff with the whole team, but you and I did one or, uh, Alex and I did one that was just me and him, and he interviewed me ahead of time. And maybe you can unpack why this worked, but he interviewed me ahead of time, not just like, oh, what are your goals? What do you wanna accomplish? But he was like, he's like, well, like if you accomplish that, then like where would you celebrate? Or how would that look? I was like, well, it'd be like on an all hands and we'd like, we do a lot of stuff in Slack. Maybe we do. And he was like really trying to tease out like if this were to come, like exactly how would that show up in our, in, in the real world. And so then we did the breathwork. We did—

was wild.

I've done a lot of breathwork and like different meditations and whatever, and that was the craziest physical sensation I've had like ever. And, uh, like my whole body was vibrating like, like, like this, a very acute, like high frequency, like, like, but I could feel it everywhere, especially my hands. My hands were tingling and vibrating for like honestly hours after we did it. And, and, but that seemed long. I don't know how long we did it for, but it seemed like a really long time. Yep. And then, yeah, like, it seemed like an eternity, to the point where my, my wife came down and like opened the door to be like, are you okay? What's going on down here? And realized I was doing something like, in her mind, really, really weird, and just closed the door, uh, and, uh, and then did the visualization.

And the—

but the visualization he did was super detailed and like all of these little flourishes that, that made it seem real. But that wasn't before a meeting, that was just like a thing. And I, but I sort of carried that for days, if not weeks. It felt like I had this weird reset. And so maybe just explain how the hell that worked because, uh, it was crazy. I like, that's one of the craziest physical experiences I've had in my life for sure.

No, that's cool. Yeah, that's a fantastic technique that we did there.

And that is somatic breathwork.

Yeah, somatic breathwork mixed with visualization. So he wanted to get you very zeroed out, like he wanted to get you to where you were basically fully immersed in the breathwork, like there was not another thing on your mind. You were there. So when he dropped the visualization, he could get as much neuroplasticity as humanly possible.

Okay. It was hard. Like it was physically, I was, I, it was physically challenging for me to continue the cadence that he wanted of breathing. I was like, oh my God, this is like a difficult workout. All I'm doing is huffing and puffing in here.

Oh yeah. So, breathwork is a workout. No question. Yeah. So, when you got to the end of that, did you feel almost like a little bit of bliss come over the nervous system? You were just like there at peace, fully present.

I was vibing on a whole different like plane of existence, it felt like.

Yeah.

Okay.

And that's the perfect setup for visualization. So, What he was doing there, that's creative visualization like I talked about before the meeting. Just, you know, we're talking a very abridged version now with Alex. We're talking about a, you know, a pretty sophisticated version of it. He's narrating it. You're not doing it yourself. So it's like all the variables are set. His goal there was to drop a vision of your future in such vivid detail that your nervous system barely could tell the difference between what it was really happening and, you know, imaginary. He's using a bunch of triggers, somatic triggers, the senses, sensory detail. He probably went into a lot of detail on things like what you were seeing, feeling, touching, tasting, hearing, all that stuff. The whole point was to install a memory of the future that was so specific and so compelling that when things got really hard for you down the road, as it always does for executives, that there was a part of your subconscious mind that goes, oh yeah, whatever. I don't know exactly the visualization was, but a year from now, 2 years from now, that's going to be sweet and I'm going to keep pushing. So he was working on resilience with you, giving you a memory of the future that was so strong that when things got really tough for you, you reflected back on it subconsciously. Probably, you probably weren't even aware of it. Sometimes, you know, you become aware of it, but it's like, it's there. Building confidence, building resilience, building focus, building discipline when you need It's one technique that just like can help you for like a, like some of the ones I've done, I still think about from the beginning of Dream Fuel, beginning of my company. Like I reflect back on them as like, yeah, the nervous system thinks they're going to happen way more powerfully than if you don't do that work.

It is a very, very strong and vivid memory. Like I could like feel myself sitting in this, like lying in this position during that thing. And I like, I still have very concrete memory of, of all of the components of the visualization we did. Then we did one as a— I, I was so compelled by it that we did one across the organization. And so part of it, we like attached people to this concept of the Kyle number. At Owner, there's always like the financial target and there's always like some number beyond that. That's Kyle number. Like that's the thing that I actually think is possible and I want to push people to. And it can be like a little bit above the target or a lot above the target depending on what's going on. And one of the messages I got after was like, be like, thanks for booking that Dream Field session for our team. That was like absolutely insane. And then she said, the Kyle number isn't a question of if, but how soon. I'm so ready to get after it. And I got like 10 messages from people just being like, I feel out of my mind right now and I'm so fired up to like get after it. And it was funny that, that, that, that momentum like really carried. We did it at a point where, where things were getting tough, like for us and we had to like grit and it was like a grit and grind time where marketing had slowed down a little bit. We, the number went up and so it gave people that, that like that shot of confidence and energy and it was, it was really cool to see how, like long-lasting it was. And it feels like that is like a more macro warmup. That's not the warmup for a meeting. That was like the warmup for like a period of time. Yeah.

It's like warming up for the quarter. It's like a professional sports team getting ready for the playoffs. Like that's what a mental performance coach would do with getting ready to go in the playoffs. Yeah.

So we can think about warmup in those, in warming up for a specific thing versus warming up for like maybe a period.

Yeah, exactly. You warmed up for, I don't know, again, I don't know exactly what you visualized with Alex, but you were, you were warming up for—

It was like an hour.

It was long. Yeah. And you were, but you were warming up for a big, long, long push, you know, like something really important to your future. Yeah.

Yeah. It was, it was like shortly before a fundraise we were going into like, like leave it all out in the field. We're going to go like crank the number as high as we possibly can and we needed every ounce of it.

And that certainly helped. Beautiful. Real quick. So Salesforce bought ExactTarget in my hometown, Indianapolis. Benioff went on stage, talked about how, and this was like when I was just getting into this stuff. Benioff talked about how Steve Jobs would do visualization with him about the future of Salesforce. Kind of cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's these like little pockets of this stuff that have existed for a long time, for thousands of years, but it's really cool to see it now coming into the zeitgeist in this way. So I have covered so little of the docket and we've only got 20 minutes left. So I want to get through a couple things and then ask some, some like rapid fire. So now, so we got into like protocols for warmup, like let's talk about how we hold form. What are the ways that we can like best hold form in these situations?

Yeah. So you're in the meeting, it's happening, you know, They say something, so, you know, let's, let's just say in this situation, it's a, a meeting with your team, big meeting, kicking a quarter off something, you know, and you're getting everybody ready. One of your team members says something off the wall that really would throw you off typically. Okay. All right. So this is about holding form. You don't want to react and like fire back at them real hard. Like you want to be, you know, the cool, the cool head in the room, right? So let's talk about how you regulate your physiology in that. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to relax my stomach. And physiology impacts, okay, the vagus nerve is down there, which is you want to be in your parasympathetic nervous system. So when you relax your stomach, tight stomach, think of that as like protective, relaxed stomach, think of that as like loose, open. So I'm gonna relax my stomach, okay? And then I might tell myself a cognitive reframe. So a cognitive reframe is, is where you're telling yourself something that helps you turn the spigot of cortisol off. Okay, so an easy one that I coach people on sometimes is just best thing that could have happened. So best thing that could have happened.

Now immediately you're saying that about that, about the thing that they said.

Okay, they say that somebody says something crazy, something that normally would throw you off your game entirely. I relax my stomach and I say to myself, best thing that could have happened. Similar to an athlete does a bad play on the field, has to go into the next play calm. Best thing that could have happened. Leave it behind you for a minute, you know?

Right.

So I like best thing that could have happened. That's something I do if I get pulled over or whatever. I like best, so I'm, you know, nice to the police officer. But I like the reframe because it immediately forces the subconscious into thinking positively about it. It's like, okay, And why is it the best thing? Yeah, yeah, why is it the best thing? So you start immediately, you primed the brain to start thinking of positive responses.

Okay, it's like, oh, I can show my, I can show my kids how to respond in front of a police officer. I can like, you're, you're, you're, the brain is so wired to complete, to, to complete. Yeah, we are, we are just, yeah, we're like, we are LLMs the same way LLMs just predict the next thing. So if you're just saying yourself Best thing that could happen. Your brain wants to naturally complete that sentence. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. So let's say like you're on a big call, sales call, and like the buyer's like, hey, you know, we were all in on this, brought it up to my, our private equity. The private equity shot it down. We're going to have, they said we had to hit some KPI before we can do this program with you. So it's like, okay, best thing could have happened. So instead of like being like, Okay, well, like, let's, let's schedule a check-in. Okay, well, how much money are you really working with? How much money do you have under your budget? We do a pilot. Can we start with that? You know, like you're, you're thinking of positive responses rather than just going into a flight response and getting off the call. Yeah.

Yeah. And the, it's funny because like that narrative completion thing, it's the best thing that could have ever happened. It's on the PEs, it's on the PEs radar now. So when it goes well, we can get the whole PE portfolio.

And your brain just naturally—

yeah, your brain naturally goes into that. It's funny, I have my language for that is amor fati. It's the Stoic phrase. And I keep these coins, these coins from Ryan Holiday, these daily Stoic coins. And one of them is amor fati, which just means like, and I love it, or means like love your fate, basically. And so like, for me, it's like, okay, and I love that. It's like, oh, somebody just quit, somebody just did whatever this, like, we lost this deal. Okay. I love it because, and then you just have to design that kind of a goal frame. Yeah. And I find physical tokens help. Like, you know, I think a lot about environmental design because of the book Atomic Habits. And so like having these, these like visual representations, like one of the reasons I have this like caricature of my kids in the background, even though it's like not quite the best background, like for calls, it's when I see it, it's like my constant reminder of like, that's why I do this. That's why I'm committed. That's why I'm, that's why I'm, I work like I work. It's like, it's, it's always for them and the life I can give for them. And so I like, you know, having these things physically in your environment or, you know, leaders or reps can listen to this and just put a note on their computer that, that says, best thing that could have happened and what will be this, like this, this trigger.

Yeah. Two things. I, you know, notes on computer are great. I'd put up best thing could have happened to remind you to do that reframe because the subconscious actually sees it even though the conscious mind doesn't see it. And obviously you're dealing with the NATs, those negative automatic thoughts, put that up there and put your quarterly number, your stretch goal on your, see it every day, the, the, whatever the $400,000 or whatever that number is. Constantly be programming your brain that that's the number to program again to do whatever behaviors and actions need to do to get that done. So yeah, the subconscious sees everything in your environment. Those triggers or cues, as you're talking about Atomic Habits, are great.

Yeah, I got to do— we're moving into a new office in a couple weeks, and so I'm thinking a lot about like, what is the messaging I want to put in this space to be, to constantly remind people of like those triggers and cues? That are important to me. It's like, you know, the, the, it seems some of these things seem cliché, but they're, they're so not, you know, the, it's the thing I keep mind sabotaging when it's like, oh, it's cliché, it's stupid.

I'm not going to do it. It's dumb. It's woo. It's like, okay, well you'll just lose to the person who does. Mindset always wins.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now cooling down, we've talked about warming up, holding form, or unless there's any other techniques in there that you want to, want to hit on and let's talk cooling down next.

Yeah, definitely. I want to say too that, you know, that comment I just made, neuroscience is nice. I was a skeptic too, long before I learned all this stuff and the neuroscience is clear and that's what, that's what got me over it. So if you are having trouble with any of these techniques, just go, just go into Google Scholar and Google neuroscience and the technique and you can read the literature. Um, yeah, thank, thank God it's become clear.

The book Search Inside Yourself was the tipping point for me. Uh, you know, like meditation had started to become a thing in tech. This was maybe 10, 10 plus, 10-ish years ago. And so it started to be a thing, but I was like, ah, that's a little weird. And then Search Inside Yourself is the meditation book written by the guy who started the Google program for meditation and mindfulness and EQ. And it's written by an engineer for engineers.

That's—

Google's an engineering-centric organization. And so for me, like, that was the thing, that was the convincing that I needed. It's like, oh, because they talk about how practicing meditation is like lifting a weight. Like, you are— I still remember this analogy, like, because I would meditate and I'd be so frustrated. My mind was like, bing, bing, bing, bing. And I'd be like, oh my God, it was wandering. My mind was wandering again. I suck at meditation. That was my narrative. And then, uh, Chade Meng Tan, the author, he would talk about like every time your mind wanders and you pull it and you pull it back from where it was, that is like one repetition. That is like one bicep curl. And so every time your mind wanders and you pull it back, you've practiced coming back to being centered and focused on yourself. And I was like, oh yeah, that is that, like, that does make sense. And then over time you're able to see it wandering faster, bring it back more easily, and then eventually it like will stop to wander in that way.

Yeah, that's like default mode network dampening.

Yeah. And it all, it all sort of clicked. So anything else on hold form that you wanna touch on before we get to cooling down?

Physiological sigh is worth mentioning at the physiology level. So like, you know, if, if you're really like, I can't get my heart rate down, but the spic of cortisol's not turned off from the cognitive refrain, the relaxed stomach thing isn't helping. You can take a nice deep breath in. And then to breathe at the top, another, another like little fast breath and then just breathe out. Yeah. That can regulate it. It's almost like yawning, but like with a little, little inhale at the top. Yeah. That can kind of, I can feel it right now. Like I just regulated my own nervous system. Yeah.

The, the place I use this the most is my children. It's like they're just being like out of their minds doing something, whatever, not listening. And like, that's, that's the mindset.

Go, Joe.

I was like, before you do anything, it's like, oh, and then they're like, okay, now I can deal with this. It's like, now I can try to be the parent, the parent I want to be.

Yeah. So that's first aid for holding form.

First aid for holding form. I like that. That's a good saying. Uh, okay. Let's hit cooling down in a couple of minutes.

And then, and then I'm going to, uh, I want to ask one more question. Cool. This is a fun one. Um, a lot of people talk about gratitude journaling and I love gratitude journaling. This is kind of the opposite of it. You're going to have all these stressful things happen on a call, a meeting, whatever. You're going to use your free frames, you're going to do your best, but you're going to still come out with a little head trash. Good to take the trash out. Good to take the head trash out to move on to the next meeting clear. So some people will suppress. It's like, ah, I'm just going to not think about that right now.

I'm going to push it down.

Maybe I'll never think about it. And then it'll come up in a meditation and I'll close that tab in the browser of my mind, so to speak. So what I like to do is if it was a tough call and I know I got another one coming up, like we all do, it's like, yeah, 5 minutes when you call, you know, hit the restroom and get back into it. I will do a very quick venting session into a journal. This is a journal I will burn when it's done with, but I will, and I will just let my mind just do whatever it's going to do. I will get this out of my nervous system. I'm not going to suppress. I'm not going to let it get stuck. I'm just going to vent in there. So I might write a page or two. It just like, What the hell was that? What the F was that? I can't believe that happened. You know, like, just get it on the page. And then I'm— as I'm doing it, I am— I'm letting myself get emotional a little bit, but I'm watching it almost like I'm meditating. I'm kind of watching it. That's a skill. If you don't have that skill nailed, just read it after you're done with it and be like, okay, well, that's a cognitive distortion. That's not true. Boy, that's funny. Like, and you just kind of laugh at yourself a little bit. Or maybe, you know, some of it's true and it's like, okay, I acknowledge this happened and I can move on. So like venting in a journal, sometimes I call it anger journaling. It's just a good way to clear, cool down, reset the table so you can go into the next meeting without the same energy that came in. You could also do breathwork again, that would help clear it. But I do like the just quickly journaling about the stuff that frustrated you and just getting it out of you instead of suppressing it. Suppressing it can be really rough on the nervous system over time. Executives are great at suppressing. Okay.

Um, and then just keep your paper shredder next to you and just place it directly from that thing. Like, my funny aside, my mom sent me, uh, she's like, she moved houses and found my journal from high school. She's like, I sent you your journal, like, I thought you would want to have it. I was like, I absolutely don't want to have it. And I read one page and I immediately just started ripping every page. I was like, I cannot Like, that was a venting journal. That was like, that's good.

It's not, it's not talked about enough. The gratitude is beautiful and it's so well studied, but you have to be able to get— suppression's bad. You got to be able to get it out of you. And into a journal is a lot better than, than like venting to your kids or something like that. You know, it's like, get it out in the journal, it's done, burn it. Um, you know, I, I write so sloppy nobody can read it anyway.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I, I'm, I am a suppressor for sure. Like, if something happens, I'll be like, ah, whatever. Like, I'm more fatigued. Onto the next one. But yeah, this, this might be something that I want to introduce.

It can block up the nervous system over time. You want real mental freedom and you got to learn how to express the negative stuff too.

Yeah.

Just in a healthy way.

People are going to be listening to this and be like, wow, there's a lot here. And where do they start? Like, what is like, of all the techniques, of all the things where should I go as an executive who has like okay mental health, but I want to be, or of any state, but I want to move myself from wherever I am today towards elite physiology and mental performance. Like where would I begin that journey?

Great question. So I think of a framework ACT: Awareness, Choose to be in a different state and then use a transition technique. Awareness, choose, transition. It starts with an A because that's so important— awareness. So if you want to get started, awareness is a precursor for any mental performance technique. So you start with awareness, start to develop an ability to watch your thoughts. As cliché again as it may sound, meditation practice. Yeah, um, there's apps, there's all kinds, you pick your thing. Eventually meditation becomes— so you have focal meditation, you have open monitoring meditation, or two different categories. Focal meditation is like focusing on your breath, a mantra, things like that. Open monitoring is focusing on nothing and just allowing everything to arise and not get attached to any of it. That's the second stage. And that's where real awareness comes in that's associated with like non-duality and some of the higher states of consciousness.

And that's monitoring meditation or open monitoring. Open monitoring.

And that's, again, an academic term. So you can go into Google Scholar and research open monitoring. But yeah, focal meditation is where you start. And there's so many good programs. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I got my start in meditation with Transcendental Meditation, one of the many. It's a very good form of just learning how to watch your thoughts. It's auditory, it's mantra-focused. You're just focusing on a word like over and over and over again a billion times.

But yeah, I mean, is that a good place for people to start?

Oh yeah, they've been doing it since the— gosh, I mean, the Beatles were the first people to like really introduce, and that they're the person they did it with, Maharishi, introduced meditation in the United States. Um, so it's one of those, it's been around forever.

And, um, yeah, and so if I go into, if I go into the Calm app, or I use Insight Timer, Like you just, if you search transcendental, transcendental, you'd have to like go get a teacher.

It's good to have a teacher. Again, this is old school. So this is like you actually have a teacher who holds you accountable. This isn't the app. But yeah, I think, yeah, the apps, the apps are great too. Another way to go. I like teachers. I think they're good.

But is there like a thing to search for in the app, like a type of meditation? Because there's so many different ones in, in, in all—

I don't use the apps. I'm assuming they built the protocol to first start on focal breathwork stuff where you're actually focusing on your breath. That's probably where you start. So I would start with— I would start with focusing on your breath meditations. Okay, watch your breath go in, watch your breath go out.

So awareness, choosing, and what's, what's in the choosing protocol?

So, okay, like I'm in a freeze response, I'm aware of it, I'm going to choose to be in a fight fight response, which is pretty much the opposite of a freeze response. So I'm going to choose to go into a fight response, and then I'm going to pick a tool to transition there. So we talked about a few tools. There's 52 of them that we teach.

You know, it's like, have you published any of that stuff, like the tool, the list of tools or anything?

So we've written 2 books on them. I think about publishing them more on like YouTube or something. We're actually starting a YouTube channel, so we'll get more stuff out there. But yeah, like Not public domain yet, although obviously, yeah.

Anyway, okay, on the soon, soon to be created YouTube channel. And then the—

especially launching like today, so—

oh, good timing. All right, cool. We'll, we'll link it and, and do a bunch of stuff. So awareness, choosing, and then T is transition. Oh, that— so that's part of choosing is the transition?

You choose it then you use the technique to transit. So you can think of it as technique as well. So it's like, become aware of it, be like, I can't be here for this meeting. I'm going to, I'm going to choose to go to this next place. Okay. Now I want to be in a fight response.

Okay.

I have these 5 techniques I could use. Okay. That's the right one for the situation. I'll use that technique.

Okay, cool.

All right.

I want to hit non-duality because it's a fun topic and I only have like limited exposure to it. Just sort of explain like what non-duality is and, and like what the, the per— that pursuit.

Okay. So like I said, this is, this is the topic of the dissertation I'm doing for my master's in applied neuroscience. Uh, and I'm studying the lived experience qualitatively. So there's not a ton of quantitative research done on non-duality yet. Like this is a gap in the literature, so to speak. Um, it's been worked on for millennia, but it's just something that is new to the scientific community. I want to know, because I'm a performance coach, how do people in non-duality, which by the way is the academic word for like enlightenment, which is a super loaded subject. Yeah.

I was going to ask, how do you define it?

So it's a continuum. So I want to know how does non-duality impact the way you perform at work? Your relationships, and your, basically your ability to handle stress. So those are the 3 things I'm looking into. Like, interview at this point, you gotta talk to people who are on the continuum and kind of like ask them questions about how it impacts them. There are people that are super successful that are on this spectrum. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a continuum going from the call. I like the, the, there's the researcher, Dr. Martin, talks about locations, different locations on the continuum. The first 4, like 95-ish of people are in the first 4 and like 5% go beyond it.

Is that Martin Seligman? Is that who it is?

No, no, no. Um, yeah, uh, but the best way to think about it, what is non-duality? It's somebody whose self-reflective thinking is low enough that their nervous system doesn't really distinguish between internal processes and their external environment very much to where they almost feel like maybe they are part of their environment.

Hmm.

Hard to wrap your head around. So they start to lose their sense of self, which could sound like a bad thing. They don't think about themselves very much. And down that continuum, it does get to a point where they— and even this can be studied quantitatively. They look at the way autocorrelation windows, which is like they look at how they process internal stimulus thoughts versus external, and it's the same amount of time they sit on those two things. So like there's— they don't distinguish between external and internal environment. But once that happens, The benefit is the nervous system really relaxes and almost feels like you have a light buzz, to be crude, all the time, which is just a perpetual sense of okayness. Even in hard adversity, it's kind of like, ah, You don't got to think about it. You've habituated the, basically, this situation will be fine. So pretty unflappable as far as stress goes. Flow state, you know, non-duality is most commonly experienced by people during high flow. So probably as a fighter, you'd experience it sometimes where total immersion with your environment. You're not thinking about yourself at all. You're just on the task at hand. That's being in the zone. So that, yeah, I probably should have started there. It's being in the zone all the time. Okay.

That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, of cert— that was the best part of, of martial arts and wrestling and boxing. Like you cannot be thinking about anything else. Your body just doesn't really allow for it. And it's, it's, uh, one of the few things, one of the few activities that I can do and actually like not be in my head thinking about something, anything. I have a active mind that likes to, you know, despite the meditation or whatever, cannot help but think ahead or think behind it. And, uh, that's why it was such a great sport. Um, that's cool. And so, so people pursuing non-duality, a lot— like, most of the tools that you talked about would be like a roadmap to that.

Yeah. And, and to give a real practical example of what it really is, um, when you were born, you were basically in non-duality. A baby— when you hold a baby and you look into their eyes, you can just see they're just totally immersed in their environment. They're not— it's not a whole lot of self-reflective thinking going on there. Um, we're born into kind of a non-dual state. They call it pure awareness. You're just aware of what's happening around you. That's what open monitoring meditation is. You're just aware of what's around you. And then at some point they go, oh, your name's Kevin. And by the way, here's all the traits we see in you. And here's all the societal norms we're going to dump on you. We're going to turn you into this person who operates in duality, where everything is compared. The brain does, you know, 3 things really well: compares things, chooses a preference, and then creates momentum to get the preference. So like conflict, you know, people in a non-dual state are in that pure baby awareness, more or less. And they're able to watch the mind kind of laugh at it a little bit as it compares, creates preferences, and creates conflict. They're able to kind of watch it. They engage the mind like a tool. So it's like, think of it as putting a car in drive. Most of the time they got their car in neutral. They're just open monitoring. They're just observing the things around them. They're in a state of peace, running a ton of serotonin. It feels like bliss. People explain it as like this incredible amount of bliss. And then A challenge comes up, okay, I'll put the brain in gear for a little while and I will work on that problem so they can engage their brain. Well, like Michael Singer was in non-duality. He's written a bunch of books, you know, like put his brain in gear and he built a billion-dollar company, you know, he was going to solve his problem or whatever. But then he backs it back off into neutral and he's watching again. He's in watcher. Yeah. Everybody has that baby awareness. Everybody has the capability of being a non-dual awareness. They just have to realize that the brain, you can turn it on and off. You can live in the awareness you were born with. Most people are so in their heads, they never experience pure awareness unless it's a beautiful sunset on the perfect day with their partner on the perfect beach. They're like, ah, or after an achievement, right? Okay, so right, I worked real hard, hard, hard. I hit my number. And for like one day, I'm in bliss because I let myself be in pure awareness. I didn't have anything I'm going after. No seeking. So they say non-dual— non-dual is the end of the seeking. You found it, no longer seeking. You don't— you're not spiritually seeking, you're not doing any of that, you're just resting in it. So yeah, I mean, non-duality, certainly a subject I'm passionate about and learning more about. I'd love to do more research on it, you know, in the future at some point.

But it's, it's, uh, what's the one book if people are like, I, I want to explore that? Is The Untethered Soul like singer, or what would be the first book? What's the gateway drug for people?

You know, man, this is going to sound pretty, uh, pretty silly, but, um, so The Secret is a book about law of attraction. Yeah, popular. A lot of people feel all kind of different ways about the concept. I'm not going to tell you my thoughts about it. Um, that same author went through a journey of like 20 years of research and her own experiences after writing that book, and then she wrote a book called The Greatest Secret. That book is about non-duality and it's at a level that, you know, anybody would understand it. And she did a great job. It's not even her writing much. She's compiling a lot of subject matter experts in it. And I think it puts it together really well. So Greatest Secret, probably what I would recommend. David Bingham, who is one of the primary people in that book who kind of helped her realize the early levels of continuum. He's a, he's a guy and you Google his name, David Bingham non-duality. Who you could go a step deeper with. And he's a genuine teacher of this who I would say, I interviewed him once, he's, I'd say he's certainly on that spectrum deep in it. And he's just a little, not a little, I don't know how big he is, but he's a British dude who takes care of his mom who has Alzheimer's and that's what he does. But he, that guy is certainly in non-duality and he can definitely teach a lot of people. He wrote a book I think called Effortless Being. Effortless Being.

Effortless Being. Okay, cool. And it looks like he has a YouTube channel too, mm-hmm, with some stuff. That's awesome. Um, all right, we can wrap it there. Uh, this was great. We did not get at all to how to scale this across your team, which I should have anticipated given the, the subject matter. But I think this was a really cool foundation. We'll get you back a second time to talk about how do you structure this. I think, is it fair to say that step one is If you want your team to operate with this mindset, like you got to start with yourself.

Yeah. We always start with the leader.

Yeah.

Okay. A leader can't be like, hey, I want you guys all to have great mental performance and I'm just going to continue doing my thing. You got to model the behaviors you want to see.

Yeah.

I get it. For the entire org.

Yeah. Obviously I'm like extremely passionate about this. We've woven this into like our team, all sorts of different places, like a bunch of our onboarding program when people start at Owner is, is like this type of content of how to think about structuring. There's like a lot of Atomic Habits in there. There's a lot of— they take like a gratitude journal during this onboarding program. And I get asked a lot like, oh, like, you know, how could I build that? How can I do this? I was like, dude, you like, you have to be, you have to live it every day. If you want anybody to follow you on it, you have to be the role model. And it even, like, it really impacts how I think about hiring and promotion. Like, I don't— I can't really trust somebody to manage the career, which is like the livelihoods of others, if they don't prioritize and practice these things. Like, if they're a total mess and, you know, like, can't control their own emotions and inner state. Like, it's really difficult to trust you with the state of others.

Well, yeah, you're a high-growth company. Like, yeah, you hire every day.

Big time.

Big time. You're off your game, you know, that's not a person you could trust.

Yeah. And so, and there's so much internal, like, and then you just start to develop this internal language and like things that you always say. So like we have rituals like chop wood, carry water. So it's like the first 3 hours of the day where like nobody's allowed to have any internal meetings. There's no BS. Us. It's just like managers with their teams coaching, ripping calls. And like that language is obviously borrowed from the book Chop Wood, Carry Water, but there's like so much Atomic Habits, so much Ryan Holiday, so many of these things that are woven in that like it just, it won't, you won't really get traction unless you can live it on your own. I think like, I think bringing in companies like GreenFuel helps, but like the leader has to be on that same journey. Maybe you can concurrently do it. You know, the leader can be like learning these things at the same time.

Yeah, that's a fun thing to do, to concurrently do it because you're learning together and it shows that you care about it and you're on the journey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that the feedback for people listening is like, you know, start to, you know, go down this path and the basics. Give me some feedback here. The basics I tell people to start with is like gratitude and it doesn't need to be written. You don't have to journal for an hour every day. You can like literally just do a gratitude practice when you wake up in the morning or whatever.

You're in a state of brainwaves. It's easy to program. It's a great time to do gratitude.

Yeah, just like lying down, think of it going through some like set list of things that you like to think about. It's like, what am I grateful for, proud of, excited about? Like, what do I want to accomplish? That's like the 4 things for me. And then meditation, like building a meditation practice and then something physical. Like I find myself recommending more and more cold plunge. As like a, as a practice thing or just like, you know, challenging yourself every week physically going on a hard run, doing a hard workout, getting uncomfortable. Cause like we don't really spend the time being uncomfortable in our bodies. Would that be like a decent baseline or, and, and like, and what would you add?

Yeah, I, first of all, I applaud you. That's a great list. And I think physical, it's a lab. Physical challenges are a lab for your mindset at work. So it's like, go do something really, we call 'em, we call 'em masogis where it's like you got a 50% chance of failure. Go do something.

We talk about masogis a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But go do like half of my BDR team is apparently doing a, a not just the like normal 10K Spartan race. They all signed up for the Beast, which is 20K. What? No, I did the 10K version of this and I was like, it was really tough and I was in, in great shape. So I, I, I was, and this is their misogyny, because my director of BDR is like a big Michael Eastman guy.

The Comfort Crisis is the book for anybody who wants to read it. But yeah, I think, yeah, so give yourself a misogyny. That's your lab to work on your mindset. All of that will translate back over to work. So I'd say, yeah, that's a huge one. Meditation, definitely for the awareness aspects. Gratitude is a great way to learn how to program. Program. So you become a programmer of your mind.

Yeah.

It's not like writing code. It's a lot more biological, but yeah, I think gratitude, you start to re-optimize.

It's a lot like training an LLM. Like now, like the, the, yeah, that's actually a good analogy. The corollary between the brain and LLMs and obviously like they're, they build LLMs to try to mimic the brain in many ways with neural networks. But like this, if you give a whole bunch of content to an LLM, just like flood it with a certain type of thing, the LLM will spit that out like unannounced, unintentionally. And that, that's the same as your brain. Oh, the other advice I give is delete all the negative stuff on your Instagram. Unfollow the sarcastic, like, well, yeah, no, I mean, I—

so we're on—

or just don't use Instagram.

That might be like every land we just do no devices. Um, oh. If you want to really recover, drop your devices, drop social media, rebuild. You'll notice your motivation will go up because you're actually not wasting dopamine on your devices. So you want to upgrade your whole mindset, just drop all the stuff that wastes dopamine. This is my thing, I guess. Drop dopamine wasters. Like, drop social media, drop gambling. Yeah, I do some of these things. Drop drinking for a little while. Like, uh, the things that, that anything that's like gives you high pleasure and it's super easy to do is a dopamine waster. So drop the things that like you just love doing that like take no effort and then you'll be able to take all that motivation and apply it toward your job and you'll be elite. Like, so I'd say like take one thing and drop it. We dropped screens for all of Lent. It's a great reset for the entire family's nervous system. So I would say, uh, yeah, that'd be like one addition I'd add. Learn how to recover well.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Most people suck at recovery. Like, oh, I'm going to stay home and look at social media all day. You didn't recover at all.

Huh. That's a good one.

You got to rebuild these neurotransmitters.

I'm adding this to my initial recommendation list. The dopamine waster feedback. That's awesome. Okay. Let's call it there. I think we've given people a bunch of stuff to start with. Get on the journey. We'll do part 2 and we'll talk about how to scale this across, across an organization. But, uh, I knew this would be a good one. I had very high, uh, high expectations and it's— I feel like this lived up to it. So thanks for doing it, Kevin. This, this was a blast.

I love it. I really appreciate you inviting me on, man. It's, it's an honor. Cool.

Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes. And be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.