Speaker 1you'll see anybody who can handle high stakes situations consistently at a high level is trained in this stuff. I think Michael Jordan is a fantastic example.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, Kobe was the first one that came to mind when you mentioned it, but I mean, Kobe, Jordan, they're synonymous almost. And it's interesting because it's, it's, those guys were already great and they still sought this out to become even better,
Speaker 1which is, yeah, I mean, I think with AI, everybody needs every edge they can get. And this is an edge, at least in the executive arena that most people don't know. So you have this opportunity to get that little extra.
Speaker 2You're listening to Unchurned brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Subscribe to our sub stack at unchurned.gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode, like how one post-sales team at CloudBeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I'm your host, Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Market Development at Gainsight. And I'm thrilled to be here today with Kevin Bailey. Kevin is a multi-time tech founder. He now is the founder and runs DreamFuel, where he's helping tech leaders and folks in the tech community get a little bit more mindfulness, which is something that we all need today. Kevin, welcome so much to the show. Thank you so much, Josh. Great to be here, man. Yeah. This is important. You're not a typical, post-sales leader, so to speak. But I think that what we're going to talk about today is very important. It's certainly something that affects lots of folks in post-sales on a daily basis, which is just the mental wear and tear and fatigue that we're all feeling these days. It was before AI and probably for all the virtues of AI, it's amplified and accelerated and worsened by AI. First of all, tell us about DreamFuel. And then I want to talk about what you're seeing out there in the landscape that you work in from practitioners like that. Great question. So
Speaker 1DreamFuel is a mental performance coaching company that works mostly with executives. Our industry really got its start in professional athletics, in the military, places like that, where there are operators and athletes that have to perform consistently at a really high level. And when they don't perform, either their sports team is getting slaughtered or potentially people are putting themselves in harm's way in a bad situation. So they can't perform consistently at a really high level. And when they don't perform, they can't have bad days. And that's tough. And there are mental tools, call them mindset tools, mental tools, mental performance tools that leaders can learn so that they also can consistently perform at a high level. So basically, my company hires people who work with professional athletes or military who are trained in either performance psychology or neuroscience, and then kind of brings them up to speed on executive responsibilities, which, by the way, don't have an off season. So it's kind of like high pressure all the time. And then, you know, I've been coaching them, helping them perform great in their roles, you know, but their founders get great exits, whatever, whatever they may be doing. And then hopefully not kind of destroy everything they care about as they're going after their goals. You know, it's not just about getting the outcome. It's about having a good life along the way. And when you're done actually being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor rather than kind of be like a mental patient. So that's a dream fuel. Sorry, what was your second question?
Speaker 2You have education, right? You are, you're getting your master's. Is that right?
Speaker 1That's finished. Yeah. I have my master's in
Speaker 2applied neuroscience. Congratulations on that. I think that's a fairly recent win. So that's awesome. Uh, so we want to share a little bit of that knowledge and get into, um, the neuroscience behind this types of stuff. Um, before we do that, at some point you must've been inspired yourself to take up that degree and to build this business. You had previous tech startups and tech businesses, businesses that you had built and scaled. How did you experience the, the cost of, um, the, the mental costs of leadership when you were coming up in your
Speaker 1earlier career? I can kind of remember my first tech company, I was high growth and it was gosh, it was over 20 years ago at this point, my first one, and I was in my twenties and I can remember sitting in my computer one day and I was just kind of staring blankly at my computer screen. I had a bunch of tasks I did. I used to put post-it notes all over my desk, cause I'd have like a hundred post-it notes I was looking at. I was just staring at my computer screen. I just, I mean, I might've, I'll put it this way. I was extremely inefficient. So, um, and what, what I noticed was some self-awareness at the moment. I was like, I was like, man, yesterday I was on fire. I felt like a genius and I got a ton done. Like I couldn't do anything wrong. And then today I'm sitting here and I, I can barely function and maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but it was palpable, the difference. Yeah. And, and it just kind of through happenstance, I was working with a neuroscientist at the time, uh, cause, uh, relevance in the MarTech space. I was working with a neuroscientist at the time who worked with autistic children, um, nonverbal autistic children, super fascinating. Her name's Diane Powell. She actually, um, is a popular podcaster, um, telepathy tapes. So she's a researcher also on kind of special skills, autistic children had. So I was, I was working with her, helping her on the marketing side. And, um, and I told her about this and she was like, Kevin, she's like, you were just in a freeze response. I was like, well, what the hell is that? You know, she's like, well, we run ample acetylcholine and cortisol. That cocktail kind of puts you in a place where your heart rate's dampened a little bit. So you're, you're, you're low energy and a freeze response is like playing dead. Like for some reason, you know, you thought you were in a dangerous situation. I was like, well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a tough quarter. There's a lot going on and I feel a ton of pressure. And she's like, well, pretty easy to get yourself out of that. And I was like, well, I just want you to do this breathing pattern. I want you to kind of visualize this thing. And, um, I did that like the next time I was and noticed this and I just turned my whole day around and I was, I was totally effective. And that was kind of the aha for me. I was like, whoa, I was like, there are little exercises and mental skills we can learn that completely changed the way we show up. So I started basically as to the trade for her. Like I was helping her with marketing. She was helping me with my mental performance as a leader. And I just started to kind of like learn this stuff and teach it to our team. So like our sales team, our sales leader, our CS people, I would just be like helping them with a little mental skills. So I kind of got known for that at my company. Um, and then I got known for that, uh, throughout my community or tech community. So like a max Yoder of lesson, Lee, um, worked with Kyle Lacey, uh, got, uh, the green light guru, just different tech startups, exact target in Indianapolis started to recognize me as like this, this guy, and this was before like, I don't know, like Wim Hof and some of this stuff became a little more popular. Yeah. I was just this weird guy. He was like, teaching mental skills. And then they would hire me to work with their teams. And a lot of them had nice exits. And then they kind of were like, cool. Like, thanks for helping us, Kevin. Um, I exited my company, started the tech community. They gave me some money and that's kind of how dream fuel came.
Speaker 2So you were like the Indianapolis guru for tech.
Speaker 1That's a weird word, but kind of, yeah. I mean, like they used to, they joke around, call me that sometimes. Um, I don't think myself as a guru at all, but yeah, I was just like, I was kind of the guy who was not a therapist, but could give you a little skill that would help you show up better.
Speaker 2And I imagine that you saw the outcomes. Your, your team saw the outcomes. You personally saw the outcomes, Kyle and all the others saw the outcomes as well.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, green light, uh, it had a really nice exit and I was working with their sales team and they kind of had me as both a sales trainer and a performance guy. Um, and they, they were, uh, they had this really nice run of quarters. And then I went to found this tech community powder keg. And as I was building powder keg, I started to notice that this, that these like leaders were just having a tough time handling the pressure. We did a big call to tech census. And I just found there was just a ton of data that leaders weren't adequately trained in this stuff. And it was, it was maybe a couple of years into building powder keg where their CEO, David called me and was like, Kevin, you know, we're in a tough situation with the sales team again. And I remember he ran a zoom call or something and he wrote on a whiteboard. He's like, this was when you were here and now we're here and it was like flatlining. He's like, you need to come back in. So I came back in and they rocket shipped all the way to a big exit. Um, so that was kind of the first evidence. I was like, okay, with sales teams in particular, people be able to perform consistently at a higher level, um, or just to consistently have a good mindset. They, they close at a higher ratio. So we see like a 20 to 20% bump on average when, when salespeople learn these skills and close rates.
Speaker 2What you described about the freeze and some days you felt like you were on top of the world and other days you were hiding under the covers. That's what I experienced when I was running my startup update AI, the one before and then you go to these happy hours of other founders and you're all, which is really just like group therapy, right? And, um, and, and the, the common platitude or whatever you want to say is, yeah, you know, things are good. It's, it's a rollercoaster. It's a rollercoaster. It has its ups and downs, you know, like the elevator, you know, repair guy. Isn't that just inevitable for it to have the ups and downs? Do you, do you try to solve for the ups and downs or do you try to like solve for how you react to them? What am I trying to ask you here?
Speaker 1Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're, you're asking a good question. Um, the state, that we really help people embody, uh, whether it's an athlete we're working with or a race car driver or, or an executive, um, leader or a salesperson, um, or CS CS person, it's, we call it equanimity, equanimity. Um, it's, it's a good word to, to encapsulate what it means to just always be even, always be in the center, uh, to, to not go too high to not go too low. It's the state where you have the most agency. Agency is really important. in the age of AI, it's where you're most clear headed. uh it's where you're able to weather the ups and downs a lot better ultimately equanimity is a state that you just kind of habituate meaning you make it automatic but that takes years of training to get the nervous system to stay centered again in the highs and the lows that's the that's the state we train so yeah when you learn these skills the environment your business you know your client list might have ups and downs you know might be crazy negative crazy positive 15 times up and down throughout the day that's inevitable but you are like that that's centered line cutting through all of it regardless if it's good or bad you're you're even in the middle that's kind of so that's a state you can get in for sure is
Speaker 2there somebody other than yourself perhaps that you would suggest folks to model themselves after there's somebody that you've seen do this really well naturally you'll see anybody
Speaker 1who can handle high-stakes situations consistently at a high level is training this stuff i think michael jordan is a fantastic example i'm not saying he's like the the model outside of the court but um tim grover is kind of the goat of my industry uh he wrote each i lived i grew up in chicago so i was right near michael um he wrote all the bulls letters saying i'd like to work with you on mental performance this was before this this is way before this is when it was really first getting it started in in sports and jordan was the first one to get started in sports and first the only bull to respond to him and he took on tim grover as his mental performance coach and i think the the best example of this is the flu game where jordan had the flu he played just as good as he always did even though physiologically he was a mess um that's an example of somebody who you could model after um there are other people in my field who are great to learn from andrew huberman's a great example neuroscientist who does long-form podcasts on on various topics within this but yeah i mean look at jordan look at look at people who have to have to perform well rain sun or shine you'll find people who know these skills typically and so you could ask yourself like what was jordan was one of the reasons jordan is so great is because you learn this stuff grover also taught kobe bryant um so it's like obviously jordan had this inherent talent or whatever but like tim grover stepped him up a level by teaching this stuff yeah
Speaker 2i mean kobe was the first one that came to mind uh when you mentioned it but i mean kobe jordan yeah synonymous almost and it's interesting because it's it's those guys were already great and they still sought this out to become even better which is
Speaker 1yeah i mean i think with ai and and everybody needs every edge they can get and this is an edge at least in the executive arena that most people don't know so you have this opportunity to get that little extra you know i want to
Speaker 2go into the science and i want to go into the the actual practices in a moment and get to some you know tangible value for folks that are listening of how they might be able to to do this stuff on their own or at least understand it as a first stepping stone before we do that what are you seeing out there around hey how ai is changing the game i would assume for the worse um but one way or another what's changing with the proliferation of ai in the workplace
Speaker 1yeah um i think we were both at gtm last week and we saw sam jacobs keynote where he talked about that ai is basically making us our judgment is the most important factor our ability to make decisions our ability to stay clear-headed so what i see ai doing is it's taking away a lot of the busy work a lot of kind of i'd actually say a lot of the deep flow work you know spreadsheet work and stuff like that where we kind of lose ourselves but it's not super demanding it's kind of it's flowy and it's calm it's taking a lot of that stuff away and since we're moving so fast it's making leaders have to make decisions incredibly rapidly so on my side on the coaching side what i'm seeing is lots of decision fatigue um people struggling with mental agility the ability to kind of like switch from task to task rapidly um without carrying what happened in the last meeting to the next meeting for example mental fatigue uh similar to decision fatigue but like they're they're dropping out at 2 p.m they're just you know zombies that kind of stuff i think ai is making our jobs a lot more difficult because these are high cognitive demand exercises that our days are getting flooded with and the low cognitive demand stuff is being taken by ai
Speaker 2i mean i couldn't agree anymore i i feel that entirely because you're not in the float you're not i mean for somebody like myself i think all of us are creators in some way or another i i really love building i love creating i don't like sitting there and doing deck work i was at boss consulting group for five years and oh my god if i had to do one more deck by the time i left that place but when you can get into the flow mode and you can really think about the narrative and the imagery and have pride in that work that you've done and feel like you've gotten like you you you've grown as a result of that really tough steering committee presentation that you had to give and you had to redo the narrative 20 times over you've built the muscle you you you feel better you know whereas i mean i'll take ai and and claude sync to figma slides any day of the week over that like most of us will and effectively we have to now if we want to keep our value to our organizations but knowing that that itself i don't want to say it's an evil but like we know what the trade-off is let's just put it that way so yeah
Speaker 1it's hard it's made people a lot more anxious what
Speaker 2do we do what what do we do and what's the science behind the scenes here let's
Speaker 1cover the science a little bit and then we can talk about some tools and techniques mental performance skills or the performance skills gap or whatever you want to call it uh the basics of it are the ability to have a enough self-awareness to know what state you're in in a given moment and then to have the capability suite of tools to shift into a more ideal state so it's really learning how to do state change there are four basic states the nervous system gets into um you're always in one of these four uh centeredness or equanimity would kind of be at the center of these but um we probably most people prior to fight or flight um response fight response uh focus response which is also called rest and digest which is called focus and then you have freeze i talked about what freeze is like at the beginning of this podcast so these are these are actually you can put them on a grid so if you think about x and y axis you get your y axis is your autonomic nervous system at the top would be a high heart rate powered by adrenaline or adrenaline at the bottom a low heart rate powered by uh acetylcholine i'm gonna talk to physiology just for a moment so people kind of get this so you think you have a high up on the y-axis high heart rate low low heart rate and then the x-axis kind of cutting through that you can think of it as your emotional tonality on one side you think of it as like dopamine and serotonin um neurotransmitters that of performance and on the other side you could think of uh like cortisol the stress hormone so if you're running a lot of serotonin dopamine you're probably in a better emotional tone you run a lot of cortisol you're in a more negative one so if you look at the x-axis you're probably in a better emotional tone you're probably in a better emotional tone you're probably in a more negative one so if you look at that you have four different points so if you go to the top right so you got adrenaline going and then you got cortisol going that's a flight response so the heart's heart's racing and it's trying to get you out of a situation executives spend a whole lot of time in a flight response um in the surveys we did like i talked about for powder keg a while ago we asked questions that were indicative of this and yeah and i knew for myself but i was in a flight response a lot um high adrenaline sorry it was
Speaker 2high adrenaline and high adrenaline and cortisol and cortisol which is which is a more negative uh stress hormone hormone yeah okay yeah the primary the primary stress hormone so this is uh an executive having to make a key decision with their peers and inside of a tough meeting yeah and all they want to do is get the hell out
Speaker 1of the meeting
Speaker 2and all they want to do is get
Speaker 1that yeah they're they're they know they need to they need to say something but everything in them was like run like they don't want to say anything
Speaker 2or a customer success manager or a leader inside a qbr their customer is when that's not going so well
Speaker 1the customer's going off on you giving you 100 reasons why they're gonna not renew or whatever and you know you have to you have to be strong and respond confidently and be kind compassionate empathetic but you just want to get the hell out of the meeting that's a flight response okay unfortunately in those situations your iq dips can dip like 20 points because blood's not in your in your brain it's racing out to your hands and feet to run away from a predator um so iq dips energy burn goes way up it's exhausting people state um are not not healthy mentally or physically is that why when i come off stage
Speaker 2and and i used to have like just just debilitating stage fright lesser now but is that why when i would present and then in a big meeting or on stage whatever even in this podcast potentially and then you come off and then you're just like i gotta go take a nap i'm just exhausted yeah
Speaker 1yeah totally spent you burned it you burned a ton of energy you were either in a you're there either a flight response or a fight response both of them high heart rate um by response people say fight or flight like they're both bad a fight response is actually a little better um this is this is where you are um you know revving a team up to go do something hard you're revving yourself up to go do something difficult uh adrenaline and dopamine dope means the molecule of motivation so you're actually motivated to go take the hill motivated to go do the presentation you could have done the gibson
Speaker 2and braveheart here going you
Speaker 1know exactly like let's go we got this you know the whole thing let's go that's a that's a fight response um so and and emotions underlie each of these states so if i respond she might be like you know excited you know amped up ready to go flight response nervous anxious there's spectrums so flight response could be nervous or anxious all the way up to terrified um and a fight response is on the other side so those are those are the high heart rate ones and again the thoughts that come off of these like i said in fight response is like let's go and a flight response like get me out of here and then like i said low heart rate you're talking about um on the with cortisol and acetylcholine acetylcholine slows the heart down cortisol again a stress hormone now you're talking freeze response that's uh emotions like um glum mopey heartache heartbreak um even procrastination sits in there and that's like that's not to get me out of this this is i'm not going to do anything i'm just going to sit here um a light freeze response is called a fawn response executive getting fawn responses all the time especially with their leaders where it's like you just agree with everything even though you don't you don't agree you just i'm just going to agree to like get through this meeting that's a freeze response also like i said it's normally called fawn but it's like um yeah also really bad place for it to be as an executive this is like if you're in a presentation you start to get a loss for words that's more like a freeze response hurts the even more um you know at an extreme of a freeze response is like you're you're in a fetal position playing dead you know as a polar bear walks by or something um so it's it's just a giant spectrum on that and then focus is on the other side acetylcholine so a slower heart rate serotonin which is uh kind of the molecule of happiness and presence got that stuff going that's a great kind of flowy state for you to do so so yeah good what what's the like what's the
Speaker 2marketing mix here what's the right balance of all of them or do you want to just be in fight the whole
Speaker 1time nope yeah so that's that's that's a really good question um and i know previously so so the first thing is identify where you're at okay um kind of like you're alluding to here it's it's you got to pick the right weapon for whatever situation you're in and different states link up with different types of performances you're your default state though is i want to be at the center of that grid so i want to be where the x-axis and the y-axis meet i want to be an equanimity right at the middle there again that's where you're the highest agency that's where you can actually be most rational most logical make the best decisions um you know even an athlete wants to be there i mean this is what we coach with athletes is to be an equanimity they don't always want to be in a fight response you think of like a so you would say a fight response be a good place to be as an athlete but like a golfer in a fight response they want to be in a fight response they want to be in a fight response they walk up to to a lie it's not a great lie there's a water hazard up front they're too arrogant too cocky they take the shot they hit it in the water you know they want to be centered they don't want to like they don't want their physiology to choose their decision for them because again freeze response flight response fight response focus they're all choosing your decision you have less agency your physiology is actually informing your cognition the thoughts that are rolling off your physiology are going to help you make a decision and if you're too deep in one of those states it could be a really bad decision for what you're what you're
Speaker 2doing so now i'm thinking of um from mel gibson to kevin costner in tin cup when he keeps going he should be late laying up but he just keeps going for it exactly 20 shots later
Speaker 1it's a great scene that's exactly what i'm
Speaker 2talking about yeah how do we get to equanimity what's some of the practice
Speaker 1yeah okay so like i said so what you're going to do is you want to figure out what state you're in and then you want to choose or center yourself and then bring yourself into another state so the first step is the ability to bring yourself to equanimity okay how do you do that the just to be really practical for people listening to this show and this is a great thing to do before tough calls um different breath work is is kind of the go-to for getting yourself into equanimity you can you can layer things onto the breath work you can use visualization to other tools to like kind of pull yourself into different states but um you know my favorite breath work for getting into equanimity before a call is just do 30 deep breaths and then you're on the 30th one hold my breath for about 15 seconds um and i mean like real deep breaths and i don't mean meditative i mean i mean like you're breathing in and out through your mouth like an air pump trying to get as much oxygen in and out about a second uh second on the inhale second on the exhale do 30 of those hold your breath that will completely regulate your nervous system get you centered to go in for a call another technique uh for for centering that takes a little bit longer but works really well is box breathing box breathing was famously developed by the navy seals they would do this breathing exercise kind of going into um going into combat you think these guys sit on a helicopter breathing in sync kind of funny um but yeah so that's just basically where you take the same same duration on the inhale and then you hold at the same duration then you exhale the same duration and hold for the same duration so typical is like three or four seconds three count in three count hold three count out three count hold and that will regulate your nervous system because the um your heart regulates to your breath and all the other organs in your body in your body regulate to the heart so they call them biological oscillators so you want to get the whole body it's like a symphony where everything's beating
Speaker 2together use your heart it just slows things
Speaker 1down gets everything synced rather than how long does the effect
Speaker 2last i mean we're talking about doing this two minutes before your big meeting or will this last up to two hours or the whole day
Speaker 1yeah so different types of breath work have different durations so um what i just talked about like my go-to which is 30 deep breaths and then a breath hold um that one is going to probably keep you regulated say you're having a really bad day probably going to keep you regulated for you know up to an hour um and then it's going to make it better after that but you might find that if you have like some cognitive distortions going like your brain's pulling a bunch of uh playing a little bit playing a little bit with you it might throw some negative thoughts back on that then recloud your your physiology your nervous system um but there's other breath work that can regulate you for an entire day you know it takes a little bit longer
Speaker 2though yeah so that's it that's the one-on-one that's the that's the crawl before we we we run for the mindfulness
Speaker 1learning yeah learning to regulate your breath is the number one thing to do to get an equanimity um also just just for your listeners understand you know i talked about a flight response and a freeze response well let's talk about talk about what actuates that holding your breath so normally what happens when we get high stakes we hold our breath you ever see like cartoons where people like clinch their fists and steam comes out of their head or whatever um that's that's the initiation of a flight response or a fight response um just holding your breath it's called a glottal stop so if you want to stay regulated stay in equanimity once a negative thing happens and you're like oh this is bad to say a no client says yeah we're we're definitely not renewing because you know you guys did x y or z That's going to throw you into a flight response or a freeze response because you hold your breath. But if you can just manage to, in that moment, and it's hard to do because the nervous system is really powerful. You have to overpower your nervous system. Go breathe. Right now, breathe. And just take a nice, steady breath in and out and keep breathing. As they're giving you the feedback, focus as much on your breath as you are listening and taking notes. You've got to dance between the two. And you'll stay centered. And by the time you can respond, your IQ is going to be higher. You're going to be, you're not going to make, because they're going to assume that you're going to, you're going to be in a really bad state after they give you that feedback. But if you come back in a calm and centered state, and there's some called mirror neurons, we just kind of mirror each other. They're going to be like, wow, okay. Well, I just unloaded on this person. They're still being, they're still listening. They're still compassionate and confident. Maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe they question themselves. Okay. This person didn't get all defensive and crazy. They were, they were, they were kind about it because they regulated. Same thing you do. If you got pulled over or something for speeding, you want to make sure you don't stop breathing.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. You talk about reframing as well. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1Yeah. So, and this is kind of like, I call these stackers, like you stack exercises on top of each other. So step one, negative event happens. Make sure you're breathing. Don't stop breathing. Okay. Breathe smoothly. You can use cognitive reframes. So breath works on the physiology. We have to call this performance, the performance chain, but yeah, physiology, emotions, feelings, or interpretations of those emotions, then cognition, thoughts, and then behaviors. So you want to regulate up and down that chain. So, so when, when a negative event happens, the, again, the client says, Hey, we're not renewing. You guys are terrible. Keep breathing. And then this is, this is a funny one. This is, we teach this to athletes a lot, but you tell yourself in your mind, best thing that could have happened. So that was the best thing that could have happened is the best thing, best thing that could have happened. You don't say it out loud. Obviously that would frustrate the client or sound a little weird. But you say inside your own head and you kind of got it. You got kind of got to say with verb, you want to put some emotion into it. Emotion creates neuroplasticity or at least facilitates it. So say like, you mean it best thing that could have happened in your head and the subconscious, which controls all the negative head talk you have with your head trash. It can't really. Differentiate between what's real and what's imagined or what you tell yourself. So it'll just buy in. It'll go, it'll go. Okay. It's like an LLM. It will fill in the blank. So you go, best thing that could have happened. The subconscious hears that and they go, Oh, well, initially we thought that was terrible, but Kevin says that's the best thing that could happen.
Speaker 2Well, why is that? So we'll start. Like, don't you have a better bullshit detector internally? Like that? Don't you? Doesn't your subconscious call you out on that?
Speaker 1Your conscious mind? Yes, but not your subconscious mind. Subconscious controls 95%. of your thoughts so the conscious mind might be like that's not the best isn't going to happen. That's fucking terrible. I'm sorry. Pardon my French. That's, that's terrible. You know, but the subconscious is the one that controls all your thinking. So, um, to get past the conscious mind, which is a great question. Everybody asks this question on this, this reframe in particular. Um, I have trained my conscious mind to accept that negative things are always positive. So I've done a little bit of work on my conscious mind to accept it. Why do you think a negative thing is always a positive thing? Uh, with the exception of terrible things like somebody dying, you're
Speaker 2asking me, why do I think that a negative thing is a positive thing? I don't know it. Well, it always could have been worse, but that's probably more of a negative way of thinking of things. Um, you got me.
Speaker 1Well, when, when, when we had a struggle, what does it do for us? What's the positive of going through a stronger makes us stronger. We learn, right? We're just winning when we're winning 24 seven, we're not growing at all. Like I've had periods, my company was like, ah, everything's just roses. And it's like, I'm not growing. Nothing's happening. Um, but when we go through these struggle points, when something negative happens, something that's hard, we learn and we grow. So I've just kind of accepted that truth, that truism as the reason why this reframe works is okay. Uh, client a says we're not renewing. You guys suck, blah, blah, blah. Best thing could have happened. Well, why is that the best thing that could have happened?
Speaker 2Well, cause the next customer we've learned and now we'll be better for them. And then that'll help us grow our business to multiple more customers later
Speaker 1on. Bingo. You just had to, to, to face up to a challenge that your company has and figure out how to solve it. I, um, I deal with this with founders sometimes because early stage founders, like I coach a few of them, you know, where we took some equity and I just, I just coached the CEO and you know, they're the client success manager or whatever, you know, it's like, uh, some of them just hate churn so much that it drives them crazy. And like, it'll be a really analytical founder. I'll be like, get your spreadsheet out and start taking data on this. And, and understanding why people churn, like stop, stop, you know, sheltering yourself from this. Look at it, understand it. This is goal for your business.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. So you're, you're, you're, um, you're sprinkling in a little bit of growth mindset into your practice there. If that's fair to say, I don't want to, I don't want to twist your.
Speaker 1Yeah. With the cognitive. Yeah. You want to, you want to align, um, cognition reframes and stuff with a growth mindset for sure.
Speaker 2So I like it. It's very tactile. So, so this is the best thing that happened that customer churning, uh, that customer telling me off, that's the best thing that could have happened. Cause now I'm prepared for the next time and we'll be even, or I'll be even better next time. Yeah.
Speaker 1And this is holding form. The reason you tell yourself that in the moment when the customer is talking to you is so that you can respond from a centered place. So you're not responding overly defensively or not responding, you know, with attacking, you're staying really centered. So you're kind and compassionate. You continue to listen. IQ doesn't go down. So it holds you there. It's holding form like a, like a heavy squat. If you're like trying to try to do a heavy lift, um, you got to hold the wall squats. I hate the wall squat. Yeah, exactly. You can hurt yourself, you know? So it's like, this is holding form in a, in a live situation. You may get to the end of the call. And after you get off and been like, damn, that still sucks. I mean, maybe the best thing could happen. I'll help next time. But now we've got a big issue. We got to get on that or whatever, but at least during the call, you held yourself together.
Speaker 2I mean, do you, you mentioned post-its before you, when you were now you've trained yourself, but do you have a post-it up on your monitor saying this is the best thing that could have happened? Just like find cues to train yourself in this.
Speaker 1Great point. Um, so I love post-its on my screen. I have a number of them up right now. I use them to habituate, um, reframes and things like that. I don't have best thing could happen anymore, although I do have another sign up there. Um, but yeah, I mean, I, I've, that one's ingrained at this point, but I have other ones up here, you know, I'm looking at, uh, it's all coming together. So obviously, I mean, dream fuel is in a good stage right now. We're in that point where we're starting to really grow and catch market traction. Um, and obviously, but it's like, you know, things are in flux and every day is kind of crazy. So I look at that and kind of like, okay, it's all coming together. Okay. That thing might've happened. That's, um, it's all coming together. So yeah, I love exactly. So I kind of, yeah, post-its are a great way to habituate and learn cognitive reframes in particular.
Speaker 2I'm still trying to wrap my mind, my mind, Kevin, around your, your conscious self, the lying to your subconscious self and your subconscious self buying it. I don't know. I got a lot of masters to, to be able to fully comprehend that, but I'll take your word for it, I suppose. I mean, are you aware of, of how powerful
Speaker 1the subconscious is?
Speaker 2Uh, no, but I, I, I, I can sense that it's powerful because I, for instance, like when I did have my startup and to be honest with you, I still feel like there's lingering effects today, but when I was in the, the, the, you know, the heat of, of update AI and things were really, um, very tough, lots of pressure. My memory just went to shit. And I actually think it hasn't rebounded fully since, to be honest with you, actually scares me a little bit, to be totally honest with you. Sure. Um, and maybe that's also an AI thing and there's, you know,
Speaker 1when you get a really high stress memory goes down.
Speaker 2Yeah. And I think, I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying like, it's like my memory is, is bad for the rest of my life, but I think the longterm, like there was an impact of my memory of like that, that stress every single day. And I just couldn't retain information. Yep. A hundred percent. So that to me is a indication of the self-conscious, like something else is always on my mind in the self and subconscious brother. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1I mean, you were obviously in a, in a, in a, in a tough state, you were under a ton of stress. It was starting to affect your memory. That's very normal. Um, we can talk about the science of that, but that's, you can do some research on AI for the call. Um, it's, uh, pretty how is this all of our beliefs, everything that we were taught our whole life. Most of the stuff was taught when we were kids, you're in kind of a semi-hypnotic state all the way through the age of eight, uh, overlaid by intense theta brainwaves, which was like that dreamy state before you go to sleep and you just soak information in. So when we think we're, if you think you're thinking most of the time, it's just automatic thoughts rolling up to you. And in psychology called Nats, negative automatic thoughts, um, they're constantly rolling up and informing you. And your physiology is thinking of your physiology as the neighborhoods of the brain. So if you're in a flight response, all the automatic thoughts that are going to roll up are going to be negative. And they're going to try and get you out of a situation. If you're in a fight response, all the automatic thoughts that roll up the 95% are going to be kind of empowering. Let's go do that thing. And a freeze response is going to be, don't do anything, play dead. You were likely as a founder in one of those in a flight or freeze most of the time. And all the thoughts that were rolling up from the subconscious mind were going to be negative. They were going to be disempowering. They were going to be limiting. Um, I do want to make, you said lie to the subconscious. I don't think that's a good idea ever. So I don't lie to the subconscious. I truly believe that, that finding a shake in my armor is always a good thing. I'm a heavy growth mindset. Um, so, but you can, well, that's a good distinction
Speaker 2because I was taking it as you just say it, fake it till you make it, but you're not saying fake it till you make it.
Speaker 1No, no, I, I genuinely believe negative things are good. Um, or like, yeah, I mean, that's, I, I have the evidence, like my whole life is a, is a giant growth pattern from tough situations.
Speaker 2Yeah. But do like, do you truly believe Kevin? Like, let's, let's play that. Let's play that out. Right. Like your top customer right now, let's, let's say that all of a sudden they, something happens and overnight they, they churn from you and it's not a, like it blows up, something blows up and they're gone as your top customer. You truly, cause now it's not your subconscious. Now it's Josh. That's going to call bullshit. Yeah. I love it. That is the best thing that could have happened.
Speaker 1I'll tell you what, man, I'll make it the best thing that could have happened. If something like that happens. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, I'll make it the best thing. Like I, I, we are in that phase right now. Um, I try my best to keep our revenue diversified, but we have some big ones, you know, and whenever a big one churns, you know how it is, but I go, let's, I go, let's, I go into a fight response. I go, let's F and go. I'll do whatever I need to do to figure out how to make it better next time. Um, and maybe it, it puts me into, into a mode where I figure out the next, next key model for our business going forward, but it's going to put me into a creative state. It's going to put me in a place where I, where I have by necessity to get better. And yeah, those, I mean, I can look, yeah, it happened to us. Um, so let me just, I'll just put it out there. Um, so one of our best customers, I talked about them in the beginning, the company I worked at green light guru, they had a nice exit to JMI, um, grew up through us. You know, we were within the whole run. They had me full time for a while. Eventually I told David, I'm like, I want to make dream feel bigger. And I found my co-founder and he let us basically work with other clients while we were primarily working for him. It was a safety net though. I felt really safe. They paid all my bills. Basically, you know, I felt great and comfortable once they got acquired. JMI came in and JMI was like, what's different about your company? Like, why are your executives basically so resilient? And they, they gave us great testimony to JMI. And then we started working with JMI's partners and went through and start working with JMI's portfolio. Um, but eventually, yeah, I mean, hired a new student, David, who we worked with, he tired basically. And then they hired a new CEO, the new CEO, you know, we didn't see eye to eye at everything. And eventually they churned and I lost that safety net. And that was when I had to put together a marketing machine for dream fuel and really go out there and expand and grow this company. Um, but that never happened. Dream fuel be a 10th of the size it is right now.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Uh, were you always so positive in your thinking or is that part of what you might call neuroplasticity that you've molded yourself into this? It's definitely neuroplasticity, man.
Speaker 1Okay. So talk about neuroplasticity.
Speaker 2What is it? And, uh, let's, let's wrap up the show on, on that segment.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, it's good. Yeah. I mean, basically I've, I've had to re-engineer my mindset. I come from a very anxious family with tons of mental health disorders. So I've basically had to build a, build a growth mindset piece by piece. I could go into a bunch of stories about that, but yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity is, is changing your brain. It's rewriting patterns. It's, it's, it's a long-term potentiation of synapses is the underlying mechanism for it. You basically get neurons firing at a higher frequency, normally through emotion. Once it crosses a threshold, this LTP threshold, it initiates a response that makes that memory long-term. And you can do that yourself. There's many ways to reprogram your mind, just like a computer. They're weird and different. It's not like writing a line of code, but you can take the big one I had to work on for me growing up. My dad was also an entrepreneur. My whole life, he was a great dad. And he always told me, he's like, Hey, you know, because I spend so much time with you kids, I'm not as successful as an entrepreneur as I want to be. So like I was raised on that belief. Um, and he went through some hard times and, and like, so I became an entrepreneur. I, I, I, I had that stuck in my head and I, I have a family of four kids. I want to have a great life. You know, I don't just want to be doing business. Like I want to, I want it all. So I had to basically retrain my mindset. I went hard on that. Um, there was wire default, default belief. Um, and I've had to do a lot of work to like reprogram that to say, I, um, and basically what I, what I, what I've, what I've come to the belief that I've built is, um, when I'm successful with my family, I'm successful with my company that actually having a great family that I can go home to that lifts me up, makes me better at work. So I've had to like rewrite that and reprogram that.
Speaker 2Yeah. I know there's a lot, you know, I'm right. I'm writing this book right now and talking to lots of founders and a lot of the founders that I've spoken to talk about the, you know, honoring your employees first. And then when you're, you do well by your employees, then it'll do well by your customers. And ultimately that'll benefit the company. It's a similar type of mindset. Yeah. Is now the part that you insert, you know, advertisement or pitch for, uh, for mushrooms or ayahuasca or all that sort of stuff. Is that, is that the piece here or, or do we talking with the daily cold plunges? What's the practice? That gets you to that neuroplasticity?
Speaker 1I, um, my favorite mental performance exercise, the one that I've used the most in client facing situations that I think would be the most helpful for your audience, um, would be rehearsal imagery, which is a form of visualization. Probably the best way to execute visualization on a daily basis to show you the power of it, to create neuroplasticity, to change the way you show up. Yeah. Is, uh, rehearsal journaling and it's like you're writing a journal entry every day. Um, the first place I heard about this was actually on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
Speaker 2Is it not gratitude journaling?
Speaker 1This is not gratitude journaling, although gratitude is great and it's tons of evidence around it and you can put gratitude in this. Um, Hugh Jackman, uh, talked about he would do this every day before his performances. The guy played Wolverine. Um, and it's, it's highly effective. What you do is you, at the beginning of the day. Open your journal up and write like it's the end of the day. The day's over. So you might open your journal up and be like, okay, it's, uh, October 13th. It's 8 PM. You're at 8 PM down there. And then you just write about your day and you want to write about specifically how you showed up in different meetings is rehearsal. So think of like dress rehearsal, how you showed up at different meetings, what you did, um, maybe how you felt in different meetings, uh, how you performed. You can put outcomes in there. I'm not gonna get into like all law of attraction kind of stuff. You can say, oh yeah, this meeting went great and we crushed it. Well, you can say that stuff, but I try not to get fixated on the outcomes, but just talk about how you showed up. You, the placebo effect is very real. You can program how you show up. So, uh, so I, I've done that. I mean, gosh, when I had a situation where I had to go sell for my first company, um, after we were like large, we had hired a CEO and I went and I sold the West coast. I didn't consider myself a salesperson. So I did this every day. I was doing enterprise deals. I would just like. Right out how the day went, all my calls and yeah, my close rate went up a lot. It was, it was incredible. It's, it's a way to program how you perform. Athletes use it all the time. Rehearsal imagery is well done in athletics. It's just, this is just a super easy technique. It will create neuroplasticity. The way you do that is by journaling emotively. And what you want to watch for is at the end of the day, do you feel the way you felt as when you were journaling? Cause this will get you into an elevated state. Rehearsal. Rehearsal imagery always does. Because again, subconscious mind can't differentiate well between what's real and what's imagined. So it's going to go in the end of the day, optimistic, thinking it's going to be a good day. And then just watch the end of the day. Do I feel the same? Did some of the things I journal out that I do it reflexively instead of having to think about it, that I automatically respond a certain way. I always use this before like podcasts or before keynotes, things like that. Um, it's a fantastic exercise. Do it for two weeks and then just watch how differently you show up.
Speaker 2Um, but I think there's one key thing that you pointed out there that you said in passing, that is like the, the night and day of this all. Which is, do you feel at the end of the day, will you feel the way that you felt when you journaled it in the morning? Be mindful in that moment and really absorb, like really go into your method acting of that energy as you're writing it, because that's what you're trying to imitate at the end of the day.
Speaker 1100%. Um, and just to, to, to trump that up a little bit or to kind of give them, I do like kind of a warmup on this. So I like to do as of journaling, um, or rehearsal journaling after working out. Um, so I've already got a nice.
Speaker 2Oh God. Work out too. You don't have to stack up a little too much.
Speaker 1If you're not working out, then just put on a good song you like. Um, so I like higher and higher and higher by Jackie Wilson. Um, that song, I just put it on loop and I'll just listen to that while I'm journaling. It's just a nice pot. We've got a lot of positive against subliminals going on as I'm journaling.
Speaker 2So music, music really helps. Yeah. You know, it's a great song, uh, by the Commodores, uh, night shift. It's about Jackie Wilson. Yeah. Oh, that song. Every time there's like this emotional feeling that I get.
Speaker 1That song, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pick that song. The one that you feel positive emotion about and journal with that song playing on repeat.
Speaker 2Yeah. Or, or maybe not, maybe just cathartic, maybe even a little bit. No sullen, sullen motion as well, or it should be positive emotion, I guess, because you want to be in a positive state.
Speaker 1I think you're so cortisol wakes you up in the morning. So you're automatically in a light stress response when you wake up. It's the thing that wakes us up. So if we're talking about shifting states, I do this in the morning. I want to go from maybe, uh, uh, freeze response, light freeze response into a fight response. So I will journal with the, with the state I want to be in somewhat positive, somewhat uplifted.
Speaker 2All right. So every morning now, my wife's going to hear me blasting, uh, had a way. Is it had a way? What is love? You know, like that, you know, the head nodding. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just journal about how your day went. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin, this was great. We were able to fold in some CS stuff in there, make it relevant to the audience here. I think they're all going to get a lot of value out of this. Uh, you know, the more, the more visionary stuff, but then even the tactics that you described. So I really appreciate it. Congratulations on what you're doing. You've been a successful founder now a few times, DreamFuel being the latest one. And I love, uh, the, the value that you're giving to all your customers and the people that you're out there talking to like this, like on this podcast. So thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 1Thank you, Josh. I really appreciate it, man. Thank you.
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