E70: Manufacture Motivation, Sell More | Kevin Bailey, CEO @ Dreamfuel

5 times faster, 5 times more productive, 5 times better. That's the difference in productivity when you're in flow state.

That's Kevin Bailey, CEO of DreamFuel, whose team has coached over 1,000 executives at companies like Smartsheet, Greenlight Guru, and Owner.com. And today's conversation is all about how leaders can cascade superior mental performance through their entire revenue org.

If you learn how to control the dopamine of your team, you can push through the hard parts where your competitors will falter.

But executing this properly isn't about corporate wellness retreats. It's about understanding neurochemistry. And Kevin says most leaders are leaving their teams completely exposed.

Once you've deployed the effort molecule noradrenaline for long enough and there's no dopamine coming in, the brain goes, all right, we need to quit. We're done.

So we get tactical covering specific pre-call routines that directly translate into larger commission checks, why every executive needs a serotonin day, and the reason why typical manifestation advice is completely backwards. If you want a clear path to higher levels of performance for yourself and your team, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. A quick PSA, there's a change coming to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. I've moved my show to a new YouTube account. So if you enjoy the show, I recommend you go subscribe so you don't miss any upcoming episodes and a bunch of other content that will be on there. And you can find the new channel at youtube.com/@Kyle-Norton. The channel name is Kyle Norton, the Revenue Leadership Podcast, and that's where we're going to be posting all the future episodes. Clips and a bunch of new stuff as well. And, uh, if you're wondering, the audio podcast will still be in all of the same places that it's always been, uh, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Snips, and so on. So if you listen in audio-only form, no need to do anything. But if you watch on YouTube, now you know where to find future episodes. And while I'm at it, I would love if everybody could support the show by liking, subscribing, reviewing, leaving a comment, on whatever platform they listen on. It helps new viewers find the podcast. It's really helpful for us. And I always forget to mention it. If you love the pod or even like it a little bit, do us a solid and go review it, comment, share it with a friend, and that would be most appreciated. And now let's get back to the show. All right. Welcome back to the pod. You will see a familiar face in front of you, Kevin Bailey for a second time in about as many months. So, Kevin and I recorded the pod about 2 months ago on mental performance and psychology and thinking about our physiology in a different way. And it was the single most popular episode I've ever recorded by a pretty good shot if I'm just going off of the number of text messages and Slacks and emails that I got. Given the nature of the conversation, we only got halfway through my docket. I had like 2 things I wanted to cover with Kevin, which was one, how do executives think about mental performance and their own physiology? And then how can we bring this to our teams? And we basically barely got through how we can think of this as executives for ourself. And so I wanted to bring Kevin back to have the second part of the conversation, which is now we are more bought into and starting to build our own practice. How do we cascade this through our organization? What, what are some of those, some of the benefits that we can expect? So I'm excited for this one. You have, uh, your own large shoes to fill, so I'm excited and appreciate you coming back on.

I'm pumped. Thank you for having me again, Kyle Norton.

If you haven't already listened to the first episode, go start there. I think that's like, uh, important context setting to, to get the most value out of this one. And in episode 1, we talked about how as business people and as humans, we can understand our physiology different. We talked about the default mode network, the amygdala, these four states of the nervous system. And then, we unpack some tools to use to modify our own physiology with intention to show up better, more calm, more focused, all of these things in not just a work environment, obviously, that's the framing here, but throughout our lives. And so today we're gonna talk about how to bring some of these practices to the teams, to our teams, because it is like a bit of a tightrope to walk. And this is probably the part of the owner culture that on the outside I get the most critical feedback about. People, you know, if you do it, if you do this the wrong way, it can be overstepping. That, that is the commentary I see. Sometimes on like LinkedIn or Reddit, although I don't go there personally, I've heard this, heard the stories that people feel like this is not a leader or a business's place to have an opinion with their employees, which I agree. Like you can't force this upon anybody, but the reason that I have become so passionate about this myself and why I've wanted to bring these tools to my team and why it's such a big part of the Owner Revenue culture is because, you in retrospect, just desperately wish I was exposed to these things earlier in my career. I didn't come across some of this stuff until my late 20s, early 30s. I was almost 10 years into my career when I really started to develop a gratitude practice and meditation and cold plunging only in the last 4 or 5 years. And so, I'm passionate about bringing this to the team, but you have to do it in the right way. So, we're going to unpack that today. Set up some of the core pillars and principles for how leaders should think about bringing mental performance to their organization and the like dos and do nots, and then we'll get into some of the specifics.

I think you do a really good job with it, Kyle Norton, as the leader does need to embody the practices and they do sort of cascade down to the team naturally when the leader embodies the practices and prioritizes them. So I think that's like the first place to start is this isn't something you just like deploy on a team, like, cool, you guys do this, I'm gonna do my thing. If the leader gets jazzed about it and he gets really involved, the team will, uh, follow. The feedback you gave, um, that maybe people get sometimes about mental performance training is recovery often happens outside the office. So when you're trying to train a team on how to optimize their performance, You do have to at least educate them on how to recover effectively. So you're bridging into talking about hours that, you know, you don't own, hours that are, that are off the clock. And I think that's where, where people get a little, little concerned with overstepping. But again, there are ways to work this into a team so that they love it, have a great experience with it, become better humans through it, and, and increase performance. The first people who will adopt this is gonna be your A players who are trying to squeeze out an extra 5 to 10% of performance.

Mm-hmm.

So same with professional athletes. You know, the reason why this is deployed with professional athletes is because they care the most. They want to win. They're edging out other super high performers, and that extra 5, 10% means a whole lot to them. The players who maybe are young and inexperienced, but realize that this is a way to catapult them into being an A player and probably gain more like 10-20% performance, they'll also embrace it. C players who are more or less punching the clock is where you'll have your skeptics and where you'll get your pushback. Um, you know, they're looking to do the bare minimum and get by. So you do have to— and every team has some people like that on it. Um, not that we hire for that, it's just, just a reality. So you'll, you'll want to be mindful about that. As you deploy.

And so principle one there is it's gotta start with you basically. Like if you're not sort of living this day to day, then it's gonna be hard to just like bring in a system. And if anybody wants that playbook, go back to episode one with Kevin. And so say I'm convinced, you know, like I have these practices myself, where are the best starting points? Like where are the entryways that don't feel like they're encroaching, that give people the most bang for their buck and are the places that would help get somebody along this journey with the least friction possible.

I mentioned before the call, a good case study to go through as we're kind of unpacking all this is Greenlight Guru, who's one of our earlier clients. Nick Tippmann, who founded Tip Top Ventures and his team with co-founders David Durham and John Speer. Excellent.

Who introduced me to you as well. Yeah.

Shout out They did a great job deploying this through their org early before this stuff was even known. So they had the challenge of bringing this stuff to their team and people didn't even know what it was. Like nobody knew what breathwork was. Like Wim Hof wasn't even really on the scene at that point. So they had to deploy this to a skeptical staff that had never even tried this stuff before. So I think as we're kind of talking about how to do this, we can unpack a little their story. Their story got covered in Inc. So it's all public. Inc. Magazine did a nice, nice write-up about it called, uh, at this company, mental health comes first and results follow. If anybody wants to Google it. One co-founder, John Speer, who ended up being an investor in our company, was very skeptical about it. And he just kind of sat on the sidelines a little while and watched as we started to work with our sales team. And then he had a breakthrough moment where he was in a, a call. We were meeting in person at their, at their office. You know, this is early startup days. We went with them all the way from like early days coworking space through their exit. And he was just in one of the sales team meetings and we would start the meetings off with breathwork. So we'd be sitting there with all the AEs and their sales leader and David, and then John was sitting there too and we'd just do breathwork. And the first time I did it with the team, I kind of, I wasn't really sure how it was going to go. I knew how it worked for me and the team was under a lot of strain. A lot of expectation. People were very anxious and we just did mental reset breathing, quick 30 breaths, held our breath on the 30th, deep breaths. And then you could just feel the, like the blood pressure in the room just drop. And like we all looked at each other and kind of smiled. And then David was like, okay, here's the deal I want to talk about. And the team was just in flow state probably for the first time, maybe ever. And it was just problem solving. I was there as the mental performance coach, but I was also, I'm also savvy in sales. So I was, I was chiming in when needed, but it was just beautiful to watch the team just like, kind of like revel in the energy that just from the, the breathwork, just doing breathwork together. And at the end of that, you know, the, the team left and David just looked at me. He's like, that was a breakthrough moment for everyone. Thank you. That was awesome. Like, where do we go from here? Give them opportunities to have breakthrough moments. Once they break through, they'll embrace it and go, I mean, obviously they'll do their own research. They'll, they'll subscribe to a program that you want to put in place, whatever, whatever it is. But until they really start to understand this can be a game changer for myself or my team, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna watch and find out.

I, I think that's a really interesting concept of, of giving them an experience to have a breakthrough moment. And certainly like that, that was the experience that my team had when, when we did that visualization, you know, everybody came out of it being like, wow, like that was crazy. And I feel like I've never felt before. And there was like a halo effect for multiple days where people really felt like at, at the top of their game. And we do this sometimes, like sauna and cold plunge. We're in a month-to-month business, so we, we, we like to say it's We get 12 Super Bowls a year. The last week of the month, the last day of the month is always a crazy sprint. And so, usually, the first day of the new month, we take everybody to this place called Othership, which is a sauna cold plunge place in Toronto. And that tends to be one of those breakthrough moments where afterwards, people walk out of that experience being like, "Wow, I'm buzzing. I feel focused." It's enough to crack open the door to where they're like, all right, like, so what's Kyle talking about with all this other stuff? Because I feel great after that thing. Or, you know, we've got another group visualization with you guys coming up next week, which will be one of those things. And I think that's— that is a really cool way to think about it. Well, are there other types of like breakthrough exercises or breakthrough activities that you think can give people that that special thing.

People don't know how good they can feel and how productive they can feel at the same time. They just don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, people think, you know, just being high anxiety and just grinding through the day and being dead on weekends, and they think that's like normal. Like, if you're in flow state most of the time, you feel great. You love working. You recover well, you love your weekends, you disconnect, all that stuff. Like, you know, you're recovering every day. You don't need mental health days. And I think people, people don't understand that. So you're like opening their mind to something completely new, which is why, again, you gotta give them breakthroughs where they start to go, what, what was that? What happened there? That was different.

Yeah. Are there other types of activities that you would put in that category? Like if people were thinking about like, what are the options for them?

When we do breakthroughs with teams, and we can talk deeply about how to execute this on your own. I'm happy to go there, but we typically start with breathwork and visualization because breathwork is so powerful at shifting state to being centered in equanimity where like you have the most agency and willpower. You know, I think Sam Altman was talking about that last week or in an interview. He was like, people need agency, they need resilience, et cetera. But it's like, Breathwork zeros you out, gives you that agency, and then visualization is such a profound way to shift state any direction you want to take it. So, yeah, when you do, when you pair the two together, it, it often, I mean, you experienced it, it, it opens people wide open to these practices. So that's, that's one that we really like, and you can guide this, you know, we do teach A leader that learns how to guide a team in visualization is a powerful leader. Like if you're setting up for, say you're, you know, you're a sales manager setting up a team for a big call, you know, you got your solutions engineer, your future CS person, you know, your team lead, whatever, sitting there. If you can guide that team through a visualization of the call and like, and like dial them in before going beyond just, you know, how are we gonna handle objections to visualizing handling the objections, that's incredibly powerful.

So yeah, find, find some activity, some like challenge to do together.

Even the frameworks like we discussed on the last call, people understanding what fight, flight, focus, and freeze are and being able to sense that in themselves is incredibly empowering. There's a private equity company we work with that uses that stuff in deal rooms instead of just arguing with each other about like, well, here's my opinion on this or that. They're able to identify the state their partners are in. As they're going through and doing a deal. It helps them just be incredibly rational.

What about like, like short-term challenges? Like one of the things that I've been thinking about for our team is like getting everybody to do like a 2-week gratitude journaling streak, like challenge where, you know, like a, a group of people, optional, a group of people will like commit to doing some prac, like some single practice for some period of time. And then like checking in. Is, is that enough ti— is that like enough time or would you start somewhere else? Like, is, is that the right framing you think?

I think challenges are fantastic. Even better if you can pair those challenges up with some sort of biometric tracker. Speaking of that company in Greenlight, once they got to the later stages of this, they did just allow anybody on the team who wanted to get like a company-sponsored Loop Strap, they would have HRV percent increase competitions. They'd have recovery and strain challenges. So, they would actually, the team would be able to do a practice like gratitude journaling and see how it impacted their HRV.

Yeah. I'm addicted to my Oura Ring because you can do these tests. And now that it's hooked into my OpenCLY instance, it can do way better analysis of the data. So, I started taking glycine and theanine before bed. To sort of understand if like how that affect my sleep structure. And then like my deep sleep, which is, which is something that like I typically would struggle with comparative to all my other baseline metrics. Like every other sleep metric was so good other than deep sleep. And I'm like, what's going on with this? You know, I started doing that. I told my OpenClinic instance like this was the date I'm starting. And then 2 weeks later I had to pull, pull the data and it's like super compelling. So I think That is another interesting one. I hadn't thought about sponsoring biometrics for the team. That, that's a, that's another cool idea.

Yeah. Opt in on their own. I mean, obviously it's, it's gonna help them understand recovery. It's a, it's a great tool to implement if you're doing this on your own. And even if we are involved, like, you know, we, we ask, you know, can you do this? It's, it's just to see the metric and understand when you're doing mental performance, you're optimizing for flow state. And flow state's associated with HRV. So if you materially increase your HRV like 20%, you've materially increased the time you're in flow state. So that's, that's like you're talking about measuring this. Like, how do you measure this? You know, there's, there's tools that are built to measure like pillars of mental performance, like resilience and confidence are questionnaire based. But if you have, you, if you're tracking HRV, you can, you can look at that because that's associated with flow state. And that is the key number one metric you're going for. How do you raise the percent of your team in flow state for longer periods of time?

What are the other metrics that we should be trying to move?

I mean, I said HRV is the best correlate. We did, did build an app that measures the pillars that you want to look at. Resilience, you know, how fast does a team bounce back from adversity? When there's a call that goes sideways, do they jump on the next call strong or are they carrying the energy from the last call into the next call? So obviously the only way to measure that is with questionnaire at this point. When I have brain scans going on, we can look at to see how the networks are responding. But the ability to zero yourself back out after a tough call, really important to track and measure in whatever ways you can, even if just anecdotally. So look at resilience.

No office fMRI machine is necessary.

No, no. But I mean, pro sports teams are doing stuff like that. They're looking at when they measure group flow by looking at the dynamics of different brains working together. So we're obviously not there yet. I don't know if we ever will be, but, but yeah, I mean, resilience is a big one. Confidence is, is associated with resilience, obviously, but that's a, that's a big one to look at and try and measure anecdotally. Like you could build questionnaires for your team looking at confidence, discipline. So it's like the ability to stay on task when it's boring, to understand the triggers of dopamine that allow you to stay on task is a topic we could talk about. Some people just can't hack that. But that can be learned.

Like, would you encourage the, the team to just like keep a journal of these things on their own? Because that— because you're not going to get people giving you very honest answers about their own discipline to you as like the leader. And so would you basically say, hey, you know, like build yourself a journal for this one thing and track it every day over a period of time? Is that the right experience?

Yeah, and that's basically how we, how we've done it with our own app. Is we just, we text them questions, you know, just short questions to, to, to look at the pillars.

And do you aggregate that data or is that's all just for the rep's own like understanding?

The leader will have aggregate of all the reps. Obviously they can't look at it individually, that would cross a line. But yeah, the reps have their own personal data where they can dive in and kind of see how they're ebbing and flowing. It's really interesting to look at how those metrics change, like when you put a new leader in place or go through some sort of challenge. Super, super, super fascinating to see that, that stuff move.

Shifting gears a little bit. So part of this is like, okay, so breakthrough moment, encourage people to start to track some of this data or track it at an organizational level. If you have the tools like your app, for example, how do you think about shifting the culture? Because that's what it's going to take for, for it to be sustained. So what are the things that, that, uh, make the biggest, longest standing impact there?

Yeah, it takes time is the first thing that's important because it is an organic thing, you know, that the team's going to adopt this as you go. Look for where your A-players are and then deploy techniques and tools to those A-players. So I always like to start with the direct managers. So if the company's of a certain size, your frontline managers that have a bunch of reports and are sometimes jumping on deals, their schedules are just totally overloaded, tend to be, tends to be one of the highest stress positions on a sales team. That's the people who, if you're going to give them coaching or to work with them directly, you're going to to really lean in, get them to embrace it, and then they'll start to be able to performance coach their team members. So it's like you're not just doing deal review and, you know, they're asking questions about recovery. They're asking questions about, you know, okay, you seem a little off, are you maybe in a flight response? Quarterly visualizations is a great way to keep giving the breakthrough moments. So getting your team together, doing breathwork and doing visualization to kick off quarters or kick off months. 'Cause like I said, that's the biggest opportunity to get breakthroughs. Once they get the breakthrough, then there's, you know, we look at 50 different tools, but there's more than that. And that's kind of where people start to dive in. You give access to everything and they start to really understand, you know, what do you need to do to be in flow state constantly? Or at least as much of the time as possible. And it's a lot to learn.

Yeah. Yeah. And advice that I would give to folks is just pick one thing. Like don't try to, don't try to bring multiple things to your team at one time. Start with one practice or another. Start with meditation or gratitude or like sleep hygiene. Just pick one thing and try to, try to make that a part of the zeitgeist in the organization. And you can, you know, deploy it as training and then do like a contest around it or like bring that as, as part of your weekly team meetings. But one thing at a time. Like, it's super hard to get to, to change your sleep habits. That feels to me like one of the best starting points if you wanted to like really change how your team operates, just like help them learn to sleep better. And I like Matt Walker's 3-2-1, like don't eat 3 hours before bed, don't drink 2 hours before bed, and no phone an hour before. The phone is where people will, will struggle, but, or even if you do like the blue light blocker glasses, like the proper, like really orange ones, I think are the only ones that really work. But if you can teach people to start going to bed at the same time every night, getting 8 full hours, doing, doing like a, the right routine, the best practice there is like do a sleep meditation before you go to bed. Like that just brings your heart rate way down. And, and what you, what you notice is you're like, your sleep structure changes so much. Doesn't just help you get to sleep, but you like your structure changes.

Yeah, you're trying to build habits. Habits take 30 to 90 to 120 days sometimes to, to put in place. If you try and put 7 habits in place at the exact same time, you're going to fail all 7. If you pick one and you get real serious about it, you'll shift. The brain never wants to rewire. It doesn't want to embrace these new practices. You know, it doesn't want to learn to be better. The brain goes, we've survived this long, why would we do anything different? You know, like, you're doing great, why would you change anything? Think about it like your brain is a giant interstate. You know, and it's like, oh, we should blow up that lane over there and move that on-ramp over there. You think the brain wants to do any of that restructuring? It's like, no. So it will fight you on these things. So you have to be very disciplined about sticking on the one thing until it becomes reflexive and habitual or automatic, and then move on to the next thing. So really becoming great at mental performance is a— it's kind of like a lifelong journey, and it's something that, that you'll get benefits quickly. And your team will see benefits quickly. But it's like the human operating system, like you said, is just not something that's taught to people. It's not something you learn in elementary school, even though you should be taught it. We don't. So you give your, you give your team the gift of teaching them the human operating system, you know, when they're at your company. Great. It's going to help them be better parents. It's going to help them perform better at work. It's going to help them enjoy their lives more. They're going to learn what flow state is, what it's not, and it changes everything. But yeah, it's one thing at a time.

Yeah. My kids go to Montessori and they actually like weave some of this stuff in into it and they come home and they'll like just mention something. I was like, where did you learn that? They're like, oh, you know, Miss Jessica taught, taught us. And it's like, I'm so, so happy cuz it's, it is so badly needed.

So I went to Montessori, they didn't talk about any of this. So I'm glad, I'm glad things, I'm glad things are changing.

Yeah. I mean, we're in Marin County, so they're definitely like, it's a different, Different world here. You like our school back in Toronto, didn't. And so going back to this question, how do you, how do you move the culture? So it takes time. You're deploying it with your A-players. We're thinking about like one thing at a time. What would be the one tool or area that you would tell people to take off the shelf? Like if, so say, say I, as a leader, I'm there, let's just assume like I'm doing a bunch of these practices myself. I'm living it, which is, which is step one. Where would you tell people to start? Is it meditation? Is it gratitude? Is it sleep? Is it like, what, what would be the place that has the most bang for your buck and has the chance to get people to like, you know, go down, go down that path?

We covered a little bit of this before, but when you crush a pre-call warmup, that's, that's a breakthrough because it will materially change the way you'll perform and that will impact your dollars. You know, if you can get a rep or a manager to do pre-call warmups, that's a massive moment. 'Cause you think about, okay, well I'm sleeping better. Oh, I have more energy. I just made, you know, $30,000 more in my commission check this quarter. Like which one's gonna motivate people more?

May you remind people the pre-call warmup?

You do a little bit of breathwork. Okay. So take like 30 deep breaths. And then actually we didn't get into this, I like to use journaling for rehearsal imagery or visualization. So maybe just go through this whole framework cuz we got into it a little bit, but like, yeah, I'll give a pre-call warmup that, that I think will, will be a game changer.

Cool.

For anybody who, who does this for, and it doesn't, I don't care if you're like a rep working on deals or you're a CEO trying to sell your company. If you do this before those, those big deal calls, you're gonna be, it's gonna, it should blow your mind the difference.

Cool.

First thing you gotta do is get in equanimity. You gotta center yourself, you know, before you get into a call. I mean, truth of the matter is I did this this morning for this podcast, you know? You have to get yourself centered. Like you might be thinking about all the different ways this call could go, all the different ways this performance could go. By the way, Hugh Jackman uses this for what it's worth before he does any performances. So he talks about that on the Tim Ferriss podcast, calls it daily design. Does it every single day, picks the big performances and then journals as if they're already over. So, take a journal out. So, do your breathwork, get centered, right? That's to put you in equanimity. That's to get by, get you out of flight, get you out of freeze. Maybe you're procrastinating doing some prep work or something like that. So, get yourself back centered using breathwork, 30 deep breaths, big belly breaths, about a second in between each breath, you know, fast. And then, hold your breath on the 30th, you'll feel your state start to shift into equanimity, meaning you'll be at the center of the grid we talked about last time. And then at that point, put on some music that fires you up.

And that's the cadence, like, like through the mouth. Yep.

You're Buddha bellying, your belly's going out. I like to put my hand on my stomach just to make sure I'm taking really deep breaths.

So that's a pretty like rapid pace for, for, okay. Just explain that a little more. I, I, I, I, yeah. About a, because my, I would typically do like a box breath.

Like if I'm going into something, if I do like, so box breathing is, I'm thinking when I'm thinking pre-call warmup, I'm thinking as efficient as humanly possible.

Okay.

So if I do 30 deep breaths relatively rapidly, I can shift myself into a centered state in about 2 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

If I'm using box breathing, it takes me about 5. Now box breathing's a different kind of state. There's different neurotransmitters and peptides involved. It's gonna make you feel a little bit different. But for, for my personal preference, 30 deep breaths rapidly, shift my state as quickly as I can.

And then you hold your breath for how long?

I'll hold my breath for about as long until I feel the need to breathe. So for me, that's maybe 45 seconds to a minute and a half, depending on where my nervous system is at. Like if I had a really hard day before, then I'll hold my breath for shorter periods.

Okay. So it's until you like really need to breathe.

Yeah. Until you're like, all right, I need to breathe.

Okay.

At that point, you know, you're centered. Now you're ready to start initiating some type of visualization activity. So at that point, I like to juice it up a little bit. By the way, before I did the breathwork, I might've stood up and maybe bounced around, done some pushups or just kind of like stretched just to like, you know, sitting down is not good.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So done all that. Again, this is really rapid. I'm at about 2 and a half minutes. I'll put on music that gets me going. I think there's like a song Higher and Higher. It's by, it's by Jackie Robinson. Not sure who it's by, but anyway, it's a, it was like Ghostbusters theme song or something from back in the day. Not the actual Ghostbusters theme song, but it's like the one, I can't remember the scene, but it's a big song from Ghostbusters. And it's just really good, a really good vibe. Turn on a song you really like that pumps you up, and then you take the journal and then you date it at the top that the meeting's over. So you could like date it the next day. And you're playing with yourself a little bit. You're playing with the subconscious mind. At that point, you journal like the call's already over with. So you talk about the outcome, how you showed up, journal about any potential objections, how you handled them cleanly, and just basically go— it's— this is rehearsal imagery. This is what athletes do before anything that they're going to do that's going to be really tough. And you just, you just basically journal about all the behaviors you did. If it's substantially far off from the call, then you can journal about elite, elite prep behaviors. You know, I did those hard discipline things I didn't want to do and it paid off big time. So this is called mental contrasting where you're going back and forth between the outcome, the awesome thing that happened that obviously didn't happen yet, but you want it to happen. And then the things you did to make sure that outcome happened.

Okay. So mental contrasting is, is juxtaposing the great outcome with the hard work to get it.

Exactly.

Okay, cool.

Because the great outcome, basic— so the subconscious mind, again, we may have talked about the last one, has a tough time differentiating between what's well imagined and what's really happening. So as you start to imagine a positive outcome, it's going to juice dopamine up, it's going to send serotonin in your nervous system, like you're going to start to feel all those good flow state neurotransmitters that make you feel great. Neuroplasticity starts to happen because those neurotransmitters are correlated with neuroplasticity. As you raise emotion, the brain starts to change. That's why you can remember all the best and worst things that have ever happened to you so easily, create a lot of neuroplasticity. So you have neuroplasticity going because you're actually imagining a positive outcome. So the brain's reacting like it's happening. Then you use that neuroplasticity to reinforce and set— and we talked about this last time too— the RAS, the reticular activating system, up to go do the hard things.

Cool.

So you talk about the behaviors in the journaling. If you really want to take it to the next level, I did this for an entire year when I was I basically was CEO of a, of my first startup and then hired a CEO. Then I went and sold on the West Coast for a year by myself, uh, enterprise. And I did this for every single call. My close rate about doubled. Um, but I would always visualize the case study. So in my journal, I wouldn't go out a day, I would go out like a year. It was my company, so I was really passionate about closing these deals. And I'd be like, just talking about like the case study we did with Microsoft or whatever. I'd be like, yeah, they're just, you know, my, my main prospect at the time was just singing our praises on video, just talking about change their culture, change their team, whatever. So you could also just journal about like the case study, but just doing that, rehearsing the things you need to do like that to where you're not saying, okay, I need to respond to this objection this way and you're super logical about it. You actually get emotional about it like it happened. You go, it puts, it puts elite behaviors on autopilot. Again, why all athletes do it.

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But I think it's important to note there, you know, when you talk about the kind of woo-woo version versus the neuroscience version. The neuroscience version is use that great energy you cultivated to reinforce hard behaviors. Like, don't just visualize the win, use the juice from the win to reinforce all the elite behaviors you need to do to win. That's the difference between kind of the woo version and the neuroscience version. So that's, that's just a really important point. It's great to visualize the win. That's, that's great. But like, gotta reinforce the tough behaviors. Limbic friction's gonna be there. Like that's the part of our brain that pushes against, creates procrastination and stops us from like doing the tough behaviors. So use the visualization to make sure you're gonna do the hard things.

Can you define limbic friction? Like what do you, what do you mean by that? I think that's an interesting concept to unpack.

Yeah, like the, the limbic system. So the, the part of our, the emotional brain pretty much makes our decisions. Like we, we like to think we're rational decision makers, right? But The emotional brain is, is making most of our decisions, unfortunately. So when the emotional brain isn't aligned with an outcome, um, isn't, isn't aligned with a tough behavior, you have to fight that. You have to get through that. You have to learn how to basically do it anyway. And that's what— that's where all these tools can help you win. When— yeah, it's like most people are lazy. The brain doesn't want to expend energy. Particularly you think about a situation like, let's talk about why people quit real quick. So, you know, if you think about most of our neurology was wired in tribal days, a long time ago, we'd be, you know, hunting animals on the plains or something. And, you know, if you were, if you were with your, your team, you know, trying to hunt an animal for an entire day and you didn't see any animals and it gets too dark, and you decide to continue, you know, trying to get that animal, what might happen?

You're in danger because now it's dark and you're at risk.

Yeah, so you might, might get attacked by a predator. So the brain started to develop like kind of a ratio between dopamine and noradrenaline, and once you've deployed the effort molecule noradrenaline for long enough and there's no dopamine coming in, the brain goes, all right, We need to quit. We're done. Like, you didn't get any reward. Like, we're done. And to be able to fight that, you have to learn how to control dopamine on your own. So tools like visualization where you can actually give yourself dopamine, um, is key. I think it might be worth talking about dopamine triggers and like how to, how to control your team's dopamine, cuz that's a pretty important part of deploying this stuff as a team.

Well, I'm just about to go there. So, so yeah, talk more about it.

So dopamine's the molecule of motivation. It's, it's why we have a society built the way it is. Everything we've, we've figured out and the expansion of humanity is 'cause we have a great dopamine reward system. People always talk about the downside of dopamine, but you know, if you want a winning team, you better figure out the upside of dopamine and optimize for it. I know you're, you guys are what, working on office stuff right now? Is that right, Kyle Norton?

Yeah, we just moved offices for like the third time in 15 months or something.

And you're trying to optimize that environment, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we moved into like a purpose-built space that has a bunch of these habits designed into the environment as much as we can.

Yeah, exactly. So, um, thinking about how to cultivate dopamine within your team and people cultivating within themselves is, is powerful. As you're designing that new office, as you already know and are thinking about. But yeah, let's talk about some of the triggers of dopamine.

Okay. Yeah. Tell me about it.

Serotonin's worth talking about as well, because it's complementary to dopamine. But with dopamine, you're thinking about the triggers. So progress is a big dopamine trigger. Recognition is a big dopamine trigger. Achievement is a big dopamine trigger. When you think about a lot of Silicon Valley high-growth tech companies, they get dopamine on tap because there's so much stories being written about them and like TechCrunch and places like that. So when a company goes through a tough moment and they're not getting those stories, it kind of robs the team of dopamine. So a team has to know how to, or a leader has to know how to regulate their own dopamine. Um, so if you talk about those first few we talked about, so recognition, achievement. A great thing a leader can do to help a team thrive during really challenging periods is learn how to effectively recognize effort. So if you can effectively recognize effort within a team, you pulse the team dopamine iteratively, even during moments where they're not naturally getting it. You know, maybe they're having a tough quarter or something's going sideways, then you can, you can actually regulate dopamine on your own.

You should and could do this even when things are going well. So this is, this is one of the principles that, you know, I, I taught my leaders like years ago. When we do shoutouts, we don't, we'll, yeah, talk about the outcome because the, we're, we're, we're, uh, spotlighting achievement, but then talk about everything that went into it. So like in our, we've got a CX shoutouts channel. When people hit quota, when people hit a personal best. This is another thing people need to do more of on the recognition side. Recognize somebody not just being for the best in their segment, because that's only one person, but like recognize everybody who set a personal best. So like in our town, in our town halls, anybody who's had a best month ever, like a personal best month ever, they're on like a shout-out slide. So you can be number one in the segment, but if you have four other people in that segment who all did their personal best, like they deserve that as well. And so then when we do these shoutouts, like, I'll read one. So this is one of the AEs. It's like, there's a version of sales where people show up, follow the script and checkboxes. Sarah has never been that person. What's defined her path to this promotion is something that's harder to coach than any framework. It's genuine fire. Got— came into this new Sengard hungry, got knocked off her personal rhythms and habits during the one of the busiest stretches of the year. And instead of making excuses, she sat down with it. Looked at her personal life, made some hard choices, and reviewed her demos honestly, identified and took accountability where she was rushing, and chose to go deeper and lean in and learn. And then we talk about like some frameworks that we've just talked— that we've just dug into. Yeah, the slump wasn't a detour, it was part of the training and process. And, and so like, this is a rep who like crushed her segment, just got promoted, but like talking about, hey, entering in that that previous segment and the challenges and how to overcome that challenge and the mentality, like that's the thing we want to reinforce.

Beautiful. Exactly.

It's like, I don't even have to mention this anymore. This is just like a self-reinforcing thing. If, if a, if like a new manager came in and did a quota shout out that was like outcomes or, or externally based and not like about the intrinsic, um, then somebody would be like, hey, by the way, like this is how we wrote. Quota shoutouts. Um, because that's the thing that matters. And that's the thing I tell people this all the time. I was like, at some point, owner is going to have a bad stretch. And I actually thought this was going to be last year. I was like, oh, I bet some competitors are going to do some, some like stuff. And I just, we had been on this streak that I was like, the, the like slump is coming for us. And so I've been trying to prepare people for that. Inevitability, because it's easy to have a good culture and like it's easy to, to, for things to feel good when you're like smashing the number every single—

exactly.

But, and, and we had one of our harder quarters in Q1. Like it was the hardest we had, it was the deepest we had to dig. We have still never missed a quarter. I will say that, but it was, this was the deepest we had to dig to get there. But like the team was You know, the team was prepared. They were inoculated already because of all the stuff and like falling in love with the process.

Yeah, that's called being Antifragile. I mean, there's a great book, but like you're trying to build out within your team and by doing what you're doing, which is recognizing the effort of individuals, not just the primary winner, you're building that in. If you can't control the dopamine of your team, you're vulnerable to these slumps. The slumps can take you over. If you learn how to control the dopamine of your team using tools like this, then you have control and you can push through the hard parts where your competitors will falter.

Yeah. The other place I see this be like so important is, you know, sales. There, there is a lot of, there are a lot of influences out of your control. There's a lot of luck involved. The luck is you can be very lucky in the short term, but generally luck is about equal in the long term. And like Jim Collins did a bunch of research to sort of show this. But the short-term swings in luck, you get like a bluebird deal out of nowhere, you're in a bad territory. Like some of that luck can sustain for months. Like if you're in a mid-market enterprise segment and you get a bad patch, like that's bad luck and that might stick with, could stick with you for a year. But in the long run, you will eventually get a great patch with too low of a quota. And you, you, Jim Collins talks about return on luck. Return on luck is basically when you get good luck, you take crazy advantage, and when you get bad luck, you're able to minimize the damage. I find that the more— if you are too much about the external validation and awards, when bad luck happens and your identity is about performance and not about progress and about the the journey, then that bad luck spirals and you can get into a place where like a bad day or a bad week becomes a bad week or a month or a quarter and it gets out of hand versus, you know, like if you can sit down with a rep and they've, you know, they had 2 deals they were counting on blow out and like just like a couple bad things have happened. If you have trained people to, to be uh, inputs-focused and journey-focused and learning and progress-focused, then you can, you can as a manager sit down and be like, well, like, are you happy with how you showed up this week? Did you do the right things? Are you happy with how you ran those deals? Like, yeah, yeah, like I ran the deals well. I like, there's no reason I should have lost this deal. Like, okay, well just like do, keep doing that and like, you know, it'll turn around. But, but you can't have that conversation if you've only beat the drum of only the top person in the segment matters and only the, the number matters, like it, it, you, you don't have that ability to like help people through the downs. And which is why like we, I, I think have shown a really interesting ability to like get people out of their slump. And like we've had tons of our best, very best performers at the company, like, uh, award-winning performers have been on what we call Get On Track plans, which is our version of a PIP.

It's beautiful to see people pull through PIPs and weather those storms, and they can. You— I mean, whether you understood the, the dopamine dynamics, and you probably did or not, the way you're doing that is perfectly aligned.

What else should people be doing to, to build this foundation, to, to give people control of their own dopamine? What can I do as a leader?

I tell leaders, you need one serotonin day at least every 2 weeks. We are constantly striving, constantly using the dopamine reward system, constantly on that treadmill. Dopamine's a molecule of motivation. It's not the molecule of presence. It's not the one that helps us show up and really pay attention to a person, you know, and really listen, you know, open our hearts and kind of just be there with them in that moment. Which is what's required to be elite at sales. And we also deplete our reserves. We deplete our dopamine or deplete noradrenaline. We run on cortisol a lot, so we tax our systems a lot. So an elite performer figures out somehow how to wedge a day into their schedule every couple weeks that is not dopamine related. So, yeah, obviously you're running dopamine all the time regardless, But, if you can wedge a day in like that outside of your sleep schedule, just a day to be practicing tools that are related to serotonin, then you give your chance— yourself a giant chance to recover. And that keeps your dopamine reserves and all the other peptides associated with it high as possible so that you can be in flow state as much as possible in the other, you know, 13 days outside of the 14. So again, I call that a serotonin day and I actually, so I have 4 kids and like my wife and I alternate on it. So one week, one weekend day out of every 2 weeks is her day and then we rotate and it's my day. So basically every other week we're rotating between days. And you think about serotonin, it's the opposite of dopamine. So it's like dopamine is everything's time-bound. You know, it's goal-bound, so it's, it's associated with goals. You think like time and goals. So if you think of like a kid just kicking a soccer ball for the pure joy of it, that's a serotonin activity. You turn, you turn kicking a ball into soccer, now you have a dopamine activity. So you spend a day like you're a kid on the first day of summer with nothing, with nothing you need to do. You wake up, whenever you wake up naturally, you do whatever would be enjoyable for you that doesn't involve dopamine-wasting activities we covered on the last episode, like looking at your phone a lot, you know, gambling, you know, shopping, binge-watching things. But you, you just do more like, you know, maybe you do a nice long workout or a nice slow-cooked meal or go on a walk or things like that, meditate, just very chill activities that aren't associated with time and aren't associated with goals. You do that for a full day, thinking a full 8 hours. That will— that's like a nervous system reset.

Okay.

To just reboot everything. And what you'll notice is the next day you'll be in a level of flow that will blow your mind.

Hmm.

And that will maintain. And the reason I say every 2 weeks is because that's about the right duration. If you can do it every week, that's great. But if you can do it every 2 weeks, it gives you something to look forward to. It gives you kind of a point to recharge and recover for people that work really hard, like I know you do. It's a great tool to keep the dopamine system fully charged.

So you do this with your kids in like around?

I would say I don't spend a ton of time with my kids on that day. I might take like, take one of my kids fishing or something like that, you know, just like do something very chill in nature. But yeah, I mean, Ashley, my wife, has the kids fully covered on that day. I have no parenting responsibilities, no, you know, nothing like that. It's literally a day where I get to feel like a child. Which is different.

I don't know if I'll get this every 2 weeks, but, well, I, yeah, like I said, my, I mean, my, my wife's pretty into this stuff too.

And once we kind of talked about it, understood that we both needed it, that was when we pulled the trigger and figured it out. And it was tough. We had to kind of, you know, shoehorn it in, but now we're in a nice rhythm with it and doing that for probably a decade.

The phone has to be gone for it. I, I, I, I've been thinking about this for like weeks now, just having a day where I like, I don't open Slack or my computer or whatever at all. But like, it— that might make me more on edge to just like not, like, not open my email or Slack. But I, like, I know I need to do it.

You might feel a little bit of that the first few times you do this. You might feel it sometimes when you come off of 13 days and you've just been pushing as hard as you possibly can. You might come into that day pretty on edge. That's the point. Is like, you know, you are giving your nervous system a chance to live not under those pressures for just a moment to replenish the system. You might find that you might, for the first few hours, just be like cycling through a bunch of thoughts that never got attention. So you think about meditation when you're like watching the thoughts, letting 'em go, you're kind of like doing that in real time at the beginning of this day. There, there'll be a, a few times where you're kind of lost in thought about things that you just needed to think about. You just kind of suppressing and pushing off. I like to tell people when I'm kind of training people on how to do this, the big pro for you, Kyle Norton, and for any other leaders or anybody else, frankly, is you're going to try not to think about work stuff and you're going to go do things you enjoy. So you're shifting your state into a nice place. You're trying not to think about work stuff, but what's naturally going to happen is creative thoughts are going to start to bubble up. So we call this bottom-up thinking versus top-down thinking. Top-down is like dopamine networks. You're pushing, you're, you know, forcing your way through life. Serotonin is a lot more easygoing, but all creative thinking comes from bottom-up. So you're those aha moments. It's basically like, and I like to talk about shower moments, you know, where you're in the shower and you have great ideas coming. You'll get that the whole, but you'll get that the whole day. Like you'll be off on a walk or something and you'll be like, oh, that's because you gave yourself a whole day without pressure. And the brain will naturally start bubbling up. Okay, this is how you solve this problem. This is how you'll solve this problem. It's a great day just for creative thinking. So whenever I'm talking to leaders, like, you have to do this because you need that creativity, you know, in the age of AI, it's about the quality of our thinking, not so much about the grind, you know, it's like, how high quality can your thinking be? These type of days are really important for that.

I struggle with this so much individually, like even when we go on vacation, like I like, want to be filling my time with either, you know, like doing activities with kids or, or like, you know, exercising or reading a book. Like, I can't just like sit. You see people sitting around a pool just like doing nothing or like reading a fiction book, and I like get so stir-crazy if I'm not making progress on something. Like, I, I gotta be reading. Like, I want to read a bio or a business book or a— like, I, I— but like, I enjoy that. Like, I like that gives me that, like making progress gives me a lot of fulfillment. And so when I'm like not making progress on—

Yeah, it's a dopamine trigger. Progress is a dopamine trigger. Yeah.

Yeah. Even like clean, like if I would rather clean than sit around, like I would rather do like on the weekends, like I have to find some activity to like fill my time. And maybe that's the whole point of this, but because I don't find myself seeking, like I don't, I'm not like, yeah, I want to. I want to chill and do nothing for a day. Like, that's sort of— well, it scares me.

Let's talk about the difference again. The kid kicking the ball is a serotonin activity. Soccer is a dopamine activity. So it is learning how to be present without striving. You can clean the house, you do it at a slow, relaxed pace without a big focus on the outcome. You— they talk about this in mindfulness, you know, like enjoy washing the dish slowly, you know, wax on, wax off, Karate Kid, whatever, you know, like immerse yourself in that exercise. Um, if you're doing, um, like I said, slow cooked meal, you know, make a great meal for your family, you know, take your time, give yourself like 3 hours to do it, and then just like do it perfectly, but not where you're trying to achieve some great outcome. Just enjoy. Maybe you're with your wife cooking with her, you know, like just enjoy the, the banter and just doing it slow. You know, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Like just give yourself that opportunity to do things at an unrushed and unhurried pace.

That's as close to, I, that's, that's like probably my serotonin activity where I like will actually shut off. Yeah. And, and lock and lock into something. Okay.

If you enjoy it and you're not, you're not, you know, sitting there gambling, you know, sports betting the entire time. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I know a lot of people— yeah, you enter sports betting into watching sports, now you're deep in dopamine, you know?

Okay.

Because surprise is a big— surprise, novelty, variety are also massive dopamine triggers. So with gambling, you get all of that.

We embed a bunch of those principles into our spiffs and contests. Like, there's always these things called wrinkles. So like, people will know, it's like, oh, we're going to do a week-long spiff. After 2 days, there's going to be some like weird change of the rules. And on the last day, there's going to be like triple the points available so that like middle of the pack could get back in it and it makes it fun and like exciting. But, you know, some of those things I took from the book Hooked. Back to vitality and recovery, serotonin day, I will endeavor. I'll text you when I do.

Yeah, give it a shot, man. I'd love to hear how it goes.

Maybe I'll do a serotonin morning and we'll start there. But, What else can we do for vitality and recovery? How, and, and specifically like how do, what are the tools we can bring to our teams?

If you, your team adopts Whoop straps or some sort of HRV tracker, you can have recovery contests. So, you know, who had the best HRV recovery and recovery scores on Whoop, things like that. So yeah, Greenlight did that. That's one of those things I wrote about in the Think article. They did both strain and recovery. So for those who volunteered to do it. Like they had a strain contest and the CEO really tried to go after it. That's why I talk about the leader embracing it. Like David was like, I don't think it was on whoop straps, it's like a 22 or something like that. There's like this like level of strain that's like impossible to get. And like he went after it as hard as he could. I think he got beat by, by one of his CS leaders or something. But like, you know, he, he, he killed himself for a day in the strain contest. And I think, but yeah, recovery is the other side of that. So you can have like little recovery contests, but yet Like you said, 3-2-1. I don't know that method myself, but that learning how to sleep well and learning how to wind yourself down, how to cool down for the evening is massive. So just giving the team some sleep training on that and make, like I said, maybe pair that up with a biometric tracker that can kind of show them how it's working. One of my favorite things about the biometric trackers and recovery is it. I drink probably a couple times a year right now, only in like family parties where I'm really just letting loose because I realize I used to drink more. I realized I was like, gosh, this impacts my HRE for like 3 or 4 days. Like as I get older, like I'm, I'm just done doing this. It's not worth the performance hijacking.

Yeah, I had like 3 drinks. I had like 3 or 4 drinks on Saturday night and my HRV was like 51 the next day compared to like today or that was— yes, today it's like 88. It's, it's just like crazy. Once you start tracking this stuff, you— the best way to get somebody to like start living healthier is just show them, show them their data, like show them how like good or not good it is. And then you start to be like, all right, so, so the funny story about back to the Matt Walker book, I used to sleep like 5 hours a night, 4, 4 a lot of the time because I was just working like a psycho and training.

Yeah.

Like training 3 hours a day and always wondering like, why am I always injured? I have such bad injury luck.

Oh gosh.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, like this is the thing that I'm like, so this is why I like want to bring it to people is because I had 2 knee surgeries, almost had to have back surgery. I was always so badly dinged up because I was training like an animal for 3 hours a day doing MMA. And then I would sleep 5 hours and I would go out and drink like Friday, Saturday night. And I was like, man, I got bad injury luck. And good luck. I know. God. And, uh, then I read the Matt Walker book and the first chapter like scared me straight. It's like, if you're not sleeping 8 hours a night, like you're giving yourself Alzheimer's and cancer and like all this stuff. I was like, Holy crap. And this was like 2015, I think. And because he went on to Rogan and I heard him talk about like all the sleep stuff, I was like, I gotta read this book. And it was like, I was one chapter in, I was like, okay, I'm gonna for two weeks try to sleep like 8 hours a night. I'm gonna, I'm gonna like do that. And after like 4 or 5 days, I woke up feeling superhuman. I was like, I never knew I could feel like this. And, uh, and once you start to like commit to some protocol that gives you some of that traction, then people get pulled in. You know, you can see now, and there was no sleep, there was no like tracking data or whatever back then, I don't think. Um, oh no, there was, because my, my, uh, my SleepWatch scores, which was like the old school app I used back then, I went from like Mid to mid 500s to 600s to like now my, my sleep scores were in the top 1 percentile of all like Sleepwatch users. And, but I just felt like I could take on the world. I was like, what was I doing? Like what the, like, I can't believe I felt like that.

It's crazy. Again, people don't know how good you can feel. Like people just don't know.

This, this is where like the contest or the whatever is is, I think, a good idea because you just need to give people enough, like, enough of a taste to be like, oh damn, like, yeah, I can, I can— if I do, if I make like one important change, 3-2-1, or I give up my— give up the post-11 AM coffees, or like eliminate— the best one is just like stop drinking for 2 weeks and look at what happens to the data. That, that's an easy way to get somebody going from like 20 drinks a week to 5.

Yeah, exactly. I think of this, how do we deploy this stuff in teams? I don't think it's super complicated. I mean, you've been saying it, pick a thing every quarter. I know we've covered a few things today. There's plenty of others. Roll it out to the team in a gamified fashion, you know, some sort of contest, something like that. Give people opportunities for breakthrough moments. And once you have somebody have a breakthrough moment, they're gonna take it on themselves to learn these tools. Now you can obviously deploy a program in that they can grab at that point, or they can go off and do it on their own. But yeah, it's, it's, it's just, and it, you can think about it for yourself and I can think about it for myself personally. The way I feel right now, like my life right now and the way I've felt over the last month, if I compared that to the way I felt 15 years ago when I was making my first startup, my prior self would be like, WTF, what the hell happened? Why are you so much happier? Why are you so much more in the zone? Why are you so much more productive? Like, and it happens iteratively and incrementally over years. You just slow, you just slowly implement these tools one at a time. You know, and then you, then they compound and it's like you're in flow state nearly all the time, or at least it feels that way.

I think that's one of the most important messages is just try to take on one thing. Like trying to do it all will lead you basically nowhere, but try to, try to pick like one high impact habit and, and like really commit to it for a series of weeks and see where, and see where it takes you.

30 days minimum, own the habit.

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether it's sleep or the pre-call warmup that you're talking about, or gratitude practice, or like, and start with something lightweight. That's the other, I don't know if you agree with me on this, but like start with the one that has the highest impact for the lowest effort. Because oftentimes if you're like, hey, pick up meditation, it's like 10 or 15 minutes every day and you gotta find time. And if it's like not natural for you or you like live with a, roommate or like you're on the go constantly, it's sort of awkward to like find that moment and it's difficult to fit in versus you can, you can make, you can make like a couple smaller changes that give people the taste and be like, oh, maybe, maybe there's something to this. That I think is, is like the, that's the, that's gets the ball rolling. And then I'm sure potentially that activates your dopamine system to like want to do more of it.

Yeah, that's how the reward system works.

Yeah, want to do more of it. And then, you know, like if I compare my like daily hat, like if you had told again like 10 or 15 years ago me my like daily rituals, they'd be like, you're out of your mind. Like, how do you, how do you have time for any of it? But you just like fit in the little things. It's like, oh, like, like I sleep, like I tape my mouth shut and I wear like, glass— I wear these glasses before I go to bed, and I wear an eye mask, and then I do this, and I do— then I got this Eight Sleep mattress. Like, if you did add up all of these things, it does seem like sort of wild, but you just add like one thing at a time, and, and like slowly it adds up. And I don't think about it. Like, I don't think I'm like, oh, I gotta remember to put on my glasses, or I gotta remember to take the glycine. I gotta— it's just, these are just, they just become your your baseline. And so you're not, it doesn't feel like it's cognitive overload or juggling too much.

Not at all. If you build them over time like you have. And yeah, the benefit is obvious, 5x productivity. That's the difference in productivity when you're in flow state, 5x, 5 times faster, 5 times more productive, 5 times better. Like more of that please. So you put it, you do spend a little time, maybe you spend 15 minutes meditating or you have some practices you do before bed or when you wake up. To get 5x productivity, I'll make that trade anytime.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the last question I wanted to ask about like shared language. So one of the, one of the things that's so important is, you know, building into your organization like a new shared language around these topics. Like where do you encourage people to start? To build this internally so that like it starts to become more of just like a, like a topic that is always on the go.

The shared language comes from neuroscience and performance psychology, so you don't have to like reinvent the wheel. You know, you don't gotta, there's, there's no ness, like woo woo concepts aren't needed anymore. There's things that are either validated or not validated, so you can pull everything from neuroscience. You don't need to go off and get like a degree in the field like I did. You can just watch Huberman and pull stuff down from there, however you wanna do it.

Yeah. Where, where's like the first place you'd encourage people to go? So you want to get people health pilled or, or performance psychology pilled?

I really like Huberman, man. He does a great job of taking super complex topics. They're all evidence-based and then deploying them. So I just go to YouTube and search for him and then look at this topics and start pulling, pulling stuff from his bank. He's done like 500 videos or something. Now they're, they're long and detailed, but you know, you gotta start somewhere.

But you can do the summary ones, the essential, they're called Essentials, I think. And you could, so the ones that I always tell people to go to is Dopamine, Sleep, and Alcohol. Like he did the, the alcohol episode he did a bunch of years ago was one of the, one of the episodes. Like I gotta go to, like, I don't go to zero, but I gotta get my drinking baseline to basically zero a week. And if I'm on the road or at work stuff, whatever, I don't know, that's fine. But that's, even then it's pretty limited. But are there other topics where you tell people to start, start with on top of like, I mean, alcohol?

With the team, I always start with those performance zones. So like we talked about activation on the Y-axis, emotionality on the X-axis, the four states, like give them awareness of that. That's like the starting point. It's like, oh, the way I feel today isn't I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I'm actually in a freeze response. Okay. Now I have something I can wrap my head around and I can deal with. And then you talk about the tools of how to work with that state. But yeah, shared language, those 4 zones, understanding, you know, the, the way they're structured. Like that's a, if I'm gonna give like a training or something, just one to a team, like that's the one I'm gonna do.

Okay, cool.

That's everything. Everything starts from that awareness.

Do you guys have content on that? I know we covered a bunch of it on the, uh, uh, the previous pod where people can go back to.

There, there is content on LinkedIn. Check me out at Kevin J. Bailey. That's my LinkedIn account. There is stuff on LinkedIn I post about all this.

All right, we're outta time, so we'll call it there. This was great. I'm, I'm, I feel like we gave people, uh, a place to start and some structure and, uh, some like real tools to take away. So, uh, Appreciate you joining again. Uh, I'm sure this one will be just as popular. Uh, and I'll, I'll let you know how, how the reception is.

That's great. Thank you so much, Kyle Norton.

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.