217. Why CSMs Need Equanimity, Not Positivity ft. Kevin Bailey (Dreamfuel)

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 an interesting piece.

Kevin Bailey:
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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Subscribe to our Substack 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
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.

Kevin Bailey:
Thank you so much, Josh. Great to be here, man.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, this is important. You, 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 like what you’re seeing out there in the landscape that you work in from practitioners like the folks listening on this podcast.

Kevin Bailey:
Great question. So Dream Fuel 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 who, and then 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 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.

Kevin Bailey:
So it’s kind of like high pressure all the time. And then yeah, coaches them, helps them perform great in their roles, but their founders get great exits, whatever they may be doing. And then hopefully not kind of destroy everything they care about as they’re going after their goals. 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 dream fuel. Sorry, what was your second question? Go

Josh Schachter [Host]:
ahead. You have education, right? You’re getting your master’s, is that right?

Kevin Bailey:
That’s finished. Yeah, I have my master’s in applied neuroscience.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Congratulations on that. I think that’s a fairly recent win, so that’s awesome. So we want to share a little bit of that knowledge and get into the neuroscience behind this type of stuff. Before we do that, at some point you must have been inspired yourself to take up that degree and to build this business. You had previous tech startups and tech businesses that you had built and scaled. How did you experience the cost of the mental cost of leadership when you were coming up in your earlier career?

Kevin Bailey:
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, I was in my 20s and I can remember sitting at 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 because I’d have 100 Post-it notes I was looking at. I was just staring at my computer screen. I mean, I might have— I’ll put it this way. I was extremely inefficient.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. And what I noticed was some self-awareness at the moment. I was like, man, yesterday I was on fire. I felt like a genius and I got a ton done. I couldn’t do anything wrong. And then today I’m sitting here and I can barely function. And maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but it was palpable, the difference.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Kevin Bailey:
And it just kind of through happenstance, I was working with a neuroscientist at the time, uh, because, uh, relevance is in the, 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 working with her, helping her on the marketing side, 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? She’s like, well, when you 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 low energy.

Kevin Bailey:
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 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 a freeze response. I just want you to do this breathing pattern, and I want you to kind of visualize this thing. And I did that, like, the next time I was— I noticed this, and it just turned my whole day around. And I was totally effective.

Kevin Bailey:
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 change the way we show up. So I started basically, I did a trade for her. I was helping with marketing, she was helping me with my mental performance as a leader. And I just started to kind of learn this stuff and teach it to our team. So our sales team, our sales leader, our CS people, I would just be helping them with little mental skills. So I kind of got known for that at my company.

Kevin Bailey:
And then I got known for that throughout my community, our tech community. So like Max Yoder of Lessonly, worked with Kyle Lacy, got the Greenlight Guru, just different tech startups. ExactTarget in Indianapolis started to recognize me as like 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 who was like teaching mental skills and 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. I exited my company, started the tech community, they gave me some money and that’s kind of how DreamFuel came about.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you were like the Indianapolis guru for tech.

Kevin Bailey:
That’s a weird word, but kind of. Yeah. I mean, like they used to, they joke around, call me that sometimes. 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I imagine that you saw the outcomes, your team saw the outcomes, you personally saw the outcomes. Kyle and all the others saw the outcomes as well.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. I mean, Greenlight 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 and a performance guy. And 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 these leaders were just having a tough time handling the pressure. We did a big survey called a 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 maybe a couple 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, we’re on a Zoom call or something, and he wrote on the whiteboard, he is like, this was when you were here and now we’re here.

Kevin Bailey:
And it was like flatlining. He is like, you gotta come back in. So I came back in and they rocket shipped all the way to a big exit. So that was kind of the first evidence. I was like, okay, with sales teams in particular, and same with CS, when you get people to be able to perform consistently at a higher level or just consistently have a good mindset, they close at a higher ratio. So we see like a 20% bump on average when salespeople learn these skills in close rates.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What 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 Gainsight. 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 the common platitude or whatever you want to say is, yeah, you know, things are good. It’s a roller coaster. It’s a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs, you know, like the elevator repair guy. Isn’t that just inevitable for it to have the ups and downs? 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?

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think you’re asking a good question. The state that we really help people embody, whether it’s an athlete we’re working with or a race car driver or an executive leader or a salesperson or CS person, it’s— we call it equanimity. Equanimity. It’s a good word to encapsulate what it means to just always be even, always be in the center, to not go too high, to not go too low. It’s the state where you have the most agency. Agency’s really important in the age of AI. It’s where you’re most clearheaded. It’s where you’re able to weather the ups and downs a lot better.

Kevin Bailey:
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 state we train. So yeah, when you learn these skills, the environment, your business, your client list might have ups and downs, might be crazy negative, crazy positive, 15 times up and down throughout the day. That’s inevitable. That’s inevitable. But you are like that centered line cutting through all of it. Regardless if it’s good or bad, you’re even in the middle. That’s kind of So that’s a state you can get in for sure.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is there 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.

Kevin Bailey:
You’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. I’m not saying he’s like the model outside of the court, but Tim Grover is kind of the GOAT of my industry. 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, the only Bull to respond to him. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey:
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. That’s an example of somebody who you could model after. 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 various topics within this. But yeah, I mean, look at Jordan, look at people who have to perform well, rain, sun, or shine. You’ll find people who know these skills typically.

Kevin Bailey:
And so you could ask yourself, like, what was Jordan— was one of the reasons Jordan was so great is because he learned this stuff. Grover also taught Kobe Bryant. So it’s like, obviously Jordan had this inherent talent or whatever, but like Tim Grover stepped him up a level by teaching him this stuff.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. I mean, Kobe was the first one that came to mind when you mentioned it, but I mean, Kobe, Jordan, Black Mamba, 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, which is an interesting piece.

Kevin Bailey:
I think with AI 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want to go into the science and I want to go into the actual practices in a moment and get to some tangible value for folks that are listening of how they might be able 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, But one way or another, what’s changing with the proliferation of AI in the workplace?

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, 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 busywork. A lot of the kind of, I’d actually say a lot of the deep flow work, 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, people struggling with mental agility, the ability to kind of like switch from task to task rapidly without carrying what happened in the last meeting to the next meeting, for example. Mental fatigue, similar to decision fatigue, but like they’re dropping out at 2:00 PM.

Kevin Bailey:
They’re just 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean, I couldn’t agree anymore. I feel that entirely because you’re not in the flow. You’re not, I mean, for somebody like myself, I think all of us are creators in some way or another. I really love building. I love creating. I don’t like sitting there and doing deck work. I was at Boston Consulting Group for 5 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’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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’ve built the muscle, you feel better, you know, whereas, I mean, I’ll take AI 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 in 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. Yeah. So

Kevin Bailey:
yeah, it’s hard. It’s made people a lot more anxious.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What do we do? What do we do? And what’s the science behind the scenes here?

Kevin Bailey:
Let’s cover the science a little bit, and then we could talk about some tools and techniques. Mental performance skills or the performance skills gap or whatever you want to call it. The basics of it are the ability to have 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 4 basic states the nervous system gets into. You’re always in one of these 4. Centeredness or equanimity would kind of be at the center of these, but we probably— most people probably heard of fight or flight. Flight response, fight response, focus response, which is also called rest and digest.

Kevin Bailey:
We just call it focus. And then you have freeze. I talked about what freeze is like at the beginning of this podcast. So 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. noradrenaline. At the bottom, a low heart rate powered by acetylcholine.

Kevin Bailey:
I’m going to talk physiology just for a moment so people kind of get this. Yeah. So, you think you got 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 can think of it as dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitters of performance. And then, on the other side, you could think of Like cortisol, the stress hormone. So if you’re running a lot of serotonin and dopamine, you’re probably in a better emotional tone. You run a lot of cortisol, you’re in a more negative one.

Kevin Bailey:
So if you look at that, you have 4 different points. So if you go to the top right, so you got adrenaline going and then you’ve got cortisol going, that’s a flight response. So the 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. 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sorry, it was high adrenaline and high—

Kevin Bailey:
Adrenaline and cortisol.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And cortisol, which is a more negative—

Kevin Bailey:
Stress hormone.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Hormone. Yeah. Okay.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. The primary stress hormone.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So this is an executive having to make a key decision with their peers inside of a tough meeting. Yep.

Kevin Bailey:
And all they want to do is get the hell out of the meeting.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And all they want to do is get the out.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, they’re, they’re, they know they need to, they need to say something, but everything in them is like, run. Like they don’t want to say anything.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Or a customer success manager or a leader inside a QBR with their customers when that’s not going so well.

Kevin Bailey:
The customer’s going off on you, giving you 100 reasons why they’re going to 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. Um, unfortunately in those situations, your IQ dips, can dip like 20 points. Because blood’s not in your brain, it’s racing out to your hands and feet to run away from a predator. So IQ dips, energy burn goes way up. It’s exhausting.

Kevin Bailey:
People who spend a lot of time in that state are not healthy mentally or physically.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is that why when I come off stage and I used to have 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.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, yeah. Totally spent. You burned a ton of energy. You were either in a flight response or a fight response. Both of ’em high heart rate. Fight response, which people say fight or flight, like they’re both bad. A fight response is actually a little better. This is where you are revving a team up to go do something hard.

Kevin Bailey:
You’re revving yourself up to go do something difficult. Adrenaline and dopamine. Dopamine’s the molecule of motivation. So you’re actually motivated to go take the hill, motivated to go do the presentation. You could—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’re Mel Gibson in Braveheart here going, you know—

Kevin Bailey:
Exactly. Like, let’s go, we got this. You know that whole thing where people are like, let’s go! That’s a fight response. So, and emotions underlie each of these states. So fight response, you 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.

Kevin Bailey:
And a fight response is on the other side. So 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 is 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.

Kevin Bailey:
That’s emotions like, um, glum, mopey, heartache, heartbreak, um, even procrastination sits in there. And that’s like the— that’s not like, get me out of this. This is, I’m not gonna do anything. I’m just gonna sit here. A light freeze response is called a fawn response. Executives get 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’re just, I’m just gonna agree to like get through this meeting. That’s a freeze response.

Kevin Bailey:
Also, like I said, it’s normally called fawn, but it’s like, yeah, also a really bad place for it to be as an executive. This is like if you’re in a presentation, you start to get at a loss for words. That’s more like a freeze response. Yeah. hurts the IQ even more. An extreme of a freeze response is like you’re in a fetal position playing dead as a polar bear walks by or something. So, 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 kind of the molecule of happiness and presence.

Kevin Bailey:
Got that stuff going, that’s a great kind of flowy state for you to do spreadsheet work and things like that. So, yeah, go

Josh Schachter [Host]:
ahead. What’s the What’s the marketing mix here? What’s the right balance of all of them? Or do you want to just be in fight the whole time?

Kevin Bailey:
No. Yeah, so that’s a really good question. And I know previously, so the first thing is identify where you’re at. Okay? Kind of like you’re alluding to here, you got to pick the right weapon for whatever situation you’re in. And different states link up with different types of performances. 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 in equanimity right at the middle of there.

Kevin Bailey:
Again, that’s where you’re the highest agency. That’s where you can actually be most rational, most logical, make the best decisions. Even an athlete wants to be there. I mean, this is what we coach with athletes is to be in equanimity. They don’t always want to be in a fight response. You think of like a— so you would say a fight response would be a good place to be as an athlete, but like a golfer in a fight response, They walk up to a lie. It’s not a great lie. There’s a water hazard up front.

Kevin Bailey:
They’re too arrogant, too cocky. They take the shot and they hit it in the water. They want to be centered. 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.

Kevin Bailey:
And if you’re too deep in one of those states, it could be a really bad decision for what you’re doing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So now I’m thinking of, um, from Mel Gibson to Kevin Costner in Tin Cup when he keeps on going. He should be laying up, but he just keeps going for it. Exactly. 20 shots later.

Kevin Bailey:
It’s a great scene. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. How do we get to equanimity? What’s some of the practice?

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. 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? Just to be really practical for people listening to this show, and this is a great thing to do before tough calls, different breathwork is kind of the go-to for getting yourself into equanimity. You can layer things onto the breathwork. You can use visualization and other tools to kind of pull yourself into different states, but My favorite breathwork for getting into equanimity before a call is just to do 30 deep breaths. And on the 30th one, hold my breath for about 15 seconds.

Kevin Bailey:
And I mean real deep breaths, and I don’t mean meditative. I mean you’re breathing in and out through your mouth like an air pump, trying to get as much oxygen in and out. Yeah. About a 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 for centering that takes a little bit longer but works really well is box breathing. breathing was famously developed by the Navy SEALs.

Kevin Bailey:
They would do this breathing exercise kind of going into combat. So you think of these guys sitting on a helicopter breathing in sync, kind of funny. But yeah, so that’s just basically where you take the 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 3 or 4 seconds, 3-count in, 3-count hold, 3-count out, 3-count hold. And that will regulate your nervous system because the Your heart regulates to your breath and all the other organs in your body regulate to the heart. So, they call them biological oscillators. So, you want to get the whole body as a symphony where everything’s beating together. Use your heart.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It just slows things down.

Kevin Bailey:
Gets everything synced rather than your body trying to keep up.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How long does the effect last? I mean, we’re talking about doing this 2 minutes before your big meeting or will this last up to 2 hours or the whole day?

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. So, different types of breathwork have different durations. So, what I just talked about, my go-to, which is just 30 deep breaths and then a breath hold. That one is going to probably keep you regulated. Say you’re having a really bad day, probably going to keep you regulated for up to an hour. Yeah. And then it’s going to make it better after that, but you might find that if you have some cognitive distortions going, like your brain’s pulling a bunch of— playing a little bit with you, it might throw some negative thoughts back on that then recloud your physiology, your nervous system. But there’s other breathwork that can regulate you for an entire day.

Kevin Bailey:
You know, it takes a little bit longer though.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. So that’s it. That’s the 101. That’s the, that’s the crawl before we, we, we run for the mindfulness.

Kevin Bailey:
Learning. Yeah. Learning to regulate your breath is the number one thing to do to get in equanimity. Also just, just for your listeners to 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 in a situation that we perceive to be dangerous or high stakes, we hold our breath.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Hmm.

Kevin Bailey:
You ever see like cartoons where people like clench their fists and steam comes outta their head or whatever? Um, that’s, that’s the initiation of, of a flight response or a fight response. Um, just holding your breath, it’s called a glottal stop. So if you wanna stay regulated, stay in equanimity, once a negative thing happens and you’re like, oh, this is bad. Say a, you know, client says, yeah, we’re, we’re definitely not renewing. because you guys did X, Y, or Z, and it’s so frustrating, and I wish we could get our money back. That’s going to throw you into a flight response or a freeze response, but if you— because you’ll hold your breath. But if you could just manage to, in that moment, this is hard to do because the nervous system is really powerful. You have to overpower your nervous system.

Kevin Bailey:
Go breathe right now. Breathe. Yeah. And then 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. Kind of, you 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.

Kevin Bailey:
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 something 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 they question themselves. Okay.

Kevin Bailey:
This person didn’t get all defensive and crazy. They were kind about it because they regulated themselves. Same thing you’d do if you got pulled over or something for speeding. You want to make sure you don’t stop breathing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Yeah. You talk about reframing as well.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Tell me a little bit more about that.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. So, and this is kind of like, I call these stackers, like you stack exercises on top of each other. So step 1, 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 the performance chain, but you have physiology, emotions, feelings or interpretations of those emotions, then cognition, thoughts, and then behaviors.

Kevin Bailey:
So you want to regulate up and down that chain. So when a negative event happens, 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, um, you tell yourself in your mind, best thing that could have happened.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So that— What you said was the best thing that could have happened.

Kevin Bailey:
It’s 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. Um, but you say inside your own head and you kind of gotta, you gotta kind of gotta say with verb, you wanna put some emotion into it. Emotion creates neuroplasticity. Or at least facilitates it. So say it like you mean it. Best thing could have happened in your head.

Kevin Bailey:
And the subconscious, which controls all the negative head talk you have, 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 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. Well, why is that?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So we’ll start to— Like, don’t you have a better bullshit detector internally? Like, that don’t— doesn’t your subconscious call you out on that?

Kevin Bailey:
Your 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 thing that could happen. That’s fucking terrible. Sorry, pardon my French. That’s terrible. You know? Yeah. But the subconscious is the one that controls all your thinking.

Kevin Bailey:
So to get past the conscious mind, which is a great question, everybody asks this question on this reframe in particular. 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 with the exception of terrible things like somebody dying?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re asking 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. You got me.

Kevin Bailey:
Well, when we had a struggle, what does it do for us? What’s the positive of going through a period of struggle?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It makes us stronger.

Kevin Bailey:
Makes us stronger. We learn, right?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We learn.

Kevin Bailey:
When we’re just winning, when we’re winning 24/7, we’re not growing at all. Like I’ve had periods in my company where it’s like, oh, everything’s just roses. And it’s like, I’m not growing. Like nothing’s happening. 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.

Kevin Bailey:
Well, why is that the best thing could have happened?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, because 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 on.

Kevin Bailey:
Bingo. You just had to face up to a challenge that your company has and figure out how to solve it. I deal with this with founders sometimes because early-stage founders, like I coach a few of them, you know, or 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. And it’s like 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 understanding why people churn. Like, stop Stop sheltering yourself from this. Look at it, understand it.

Kevin Bailey:
This is gold for your business.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. So 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 twist your words.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. With the cognitive, yeah, you want to align cognition, reframes and stuff with the growth mindset for sure.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So I like it. It’s very tactical. So this is the best thing that could have happened, that customer churning. That, that customer telling me off, that’s the best thing that could have happened because now I’m prepared for the next time and we’ll be even better. I’ll be even better next time.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. And 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. You’re not responding, you know, with attacking. You’re staying really centered. So you’re kind and compassionate. You continue to listen.

Kevin Bailey:
IQ doesn’t go down. So it holds you there. It’s holding form like a heavy squat. If you’re trying to do a heavy lift, you got to hold form.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. The wall squats. I hate the wall squats.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, exactly. You can hurt yourself. So it’s like, this is holding form in a live situation. You may get to the end of the call and after you get off and be like, damn, that still sucks. Maybe best thing going to happen. I’ll help next time. But now we got a big issue. We got to get— I’m mad or whatever.

Kevin Bailey:
But at least during the call, you held yourself together.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean, you mentioned Post-its before. Now you’ve trained yourself, but do you literally have a Post-it up on your monitor saying this is the best thing that could have happened? And just like find cues to train yourself in this.

Kevin Bailey:
Great point. So I love Post-its on my screen. I have a number of them up right now. I use them to habituate reframes and things like that. I don’t have best thing could happen anymore, although I do have it on the sign up there. But yeah, I mean, that one’s ingrained at this point, but I have other ones up here. You know, I’m looking at it’s all coming together. So obviously, I mean, Dream Fuel is in a good stage right now.

Kevin Bailey:
We’re in that point where we’re starting to, starting to really grow and catch market traction. 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 I’m kind of like, okay, it’s all coming together. Okay. That thing might’ve happened. That’s, 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.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m still trying to wrap my mind, Kevin, around your conscious self lying to your subconscious self and your subconscious self buying it. I don’t know. I got to get my master’s to be able to fully comprehend that, but I’ll take your word for it, I suppose.

Kevin Bailey:
I mean, are you aware of how powerful the subconscious is?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No, but 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 heat of Update AI and things were really 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. It actually scares me a little bit, to be totally honest with you. And maybe that’s also an AI thing. And there’s, you know, I just don’t know.

Kevin Bailey:
When you get a really high stress, memory goes down.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. And I think, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not saying like, it’s like my memory is bad for the rest of my life, but I think the long-term, like there was an impact of my memory of like that stress every single day. And I just couldn’t retain information.

Kevin Bailey:
Yep. 100%.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So that to me is an indication of the self-conscious, like something else is always on my mind in the self and subconscious rather.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah. I 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. We could talk about the science of that, but that’s, you can do some research on AI for the call. It’s Pretty normal.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. I mean, the subconscious houses all of our beliefs, everything that we were taught our whole life. Most of this stuff was taught when we were kids. You’re in kind of a semi-hypnotic state all the way through the age of 8, overlaid by intense theta brainwaves, which is 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, we call them NATs, negative automatic thoughts. They’re constantly rolling up and informing you. And your physiology is— think of your physiology as the neighborhoods of the brain.

Kevin Bailey:
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 are 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.

Kevin Bailey:
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 finding a chink in my armor is always a good thing. I’m of a heavy growth mindset. So, but you can use—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, that’s a good distinction because 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.

Kevin Bailey:
No, no. I genuinely believe negative things are good. Or like, yeah, I mean, that’s, I have the evidence. Like my whole life is a giant growth pattern from tough situations.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. But do you truly believe, Kevin, let’s play that out, right? Like your top customer right now. Let’s say that all of a sudden they, something happens and overnight 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 gonna call bullshit. Do you believe that that is the best thing that could have happened?

Kevin Bailey:
I’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, 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 into a fight response. I go, let’s effing go.

Kevin Bailey:
I’ll do whatever I need to do to figure out how to make it better next time. And maybe it puts me into a mode where I figure out the 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 have, by necessity, to get better. And yeah, those— I mean, I can look— yeah, it happened to us. So I mean, I’ll just put it out there. Yeah. So one of our best customers, I talked about them in the beginning, the company I worked at, Greenlight Guru, they had a nice exit to JMI, grew up through us.

Kevin Bailey:
We were with them the whole run. They had me full-time for a while. Eventually I told David, I’m like, I want to make DreamFuel 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. I felt great and comfortable.

Kevin Bailey:
Once they got acquired, JMI came in and JMI was like, what’s different about your company? Why are your executives basically so resilient? And they gave us great testimonial. JMI, and then we started working with JMI’s partners and went through and started working with JMI’s portfolio. But eventually, yeah, I mean, they hired a new student, David, who we worked with. He retired basically, and then they hired a new CEO. The new CEO, you know, we didn’t see eye to eye on 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. But that never happened. Dream Fuel would be a 10th of the size it is right now.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Yeah. 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?

Kevin Bailey:
It’s definitely neuroplasticity, man.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. So talk about neuroplasticity. What is it? And let’s wrap up the show on that segment.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, no, that’s good. Yeah. I mean, basically 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 growth mindset piece by piece. I could go into a bunch of stories about that, but yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity is changing your brain. It’s rewriting patterns. It’s long-term potentiation of synapses is the underlying mechanism for it. You basically get neurons firing at a higher frequency, normally through emotion.

Kevin Bailey:
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 is like, hey, 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. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey:
And he went through some hard times and like, so I became an entrepreneur. I had that stuck in my head and I have a family of 4 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 hard on that. It was wired default, default belief. And I’ve had to do a lot of work to like reprogram that to say, I, and basically what I, what I, what I What I’ve come to, the belief that I’ve built is when I’m successful with my family, I’m successful with my company.

Kevin Bailey:
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 rewrite that and reprogram that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. I know there’s a lot, 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 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 mushrooms or ayahuasca or all that sort of stuff? Is that the piece here or are we talking the daily cold plunges? What’s the practice that gets you to that neuroplasticity?

Kevin Bailey:
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, 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, is rehearsal journaling. And it’s like you’re writing a journal entry every day. The first place I heard about this was actually on the Tim Ferriss podcast. This

Josh Schachter [Host]:
is not gratitude journaling.

Kevin Bailey:
This is not gratitude journaling, although gratitude is great and there’s tons of evidence around it, and you can put gratitude in this. Hugh Jackman talked about it. He would do this every day before his performances, the guy who played Wolverine, and 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 October 13th, it’s 8:00 PM. You write 8:00 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.

Kevin Bailey:
It is rehearsal. So think of like dress rehearsal. Yeah. How you showed up at different meetings, what you did, maybe how you felt in different meetings, how you performed. You can put outcomes in there, but I’m not going to 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 could say that stuff, but I try not to get fixated on the outcomes. But just talk about how you showed up.

Kevin Bailey:
The placebo effect is very real. You can program how you show up. So I’ve done that. I mean, gosh, when I had a situation where I had to go sell for my first company, After we were large, we had hired a CEO and I went and I sold the West Coast. And I didn’t consider myself a salesperson. So I did this every day. I was doing enterprise deals. I would just write out how the day went with all my calls.

Kevin Bailey:
And yeah, my close rate went up a lot. It was incredible. It’s a way to program how you perform. Athletes use it all the time. Rehearsal imagery is well done in athletics. This is just a super easy technique. It will create neuroplasticity. The way you do that is by journaling emotively.

Kevin Bailey:
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? Because this will get you into an elevated state. 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 into 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, did I do it reflexively instead of having to think about it? Did I automatically respond a certain way? I always use this before podcasts or before keynotes, things like that. Um, it’s a fantastic exercise. Do it for 2 weeks and then just watch how differently you show up. Um,

Josh Schachter [Host]:
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. Yes. Because that’s what you’re trying to imitate at the end of the day.

Kevin Bailey:
100%. And just 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-if journaling or rehearsal journaling after working out. So I’ve already got a nice hormonal—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh God, we got to work out too?

Kevin Bailey:
You don’t have to.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This is all starting to stack up a little too much for me.

Kevin Bailey:
If you’re not working out, then just put on a good song you like. So I like Higher and Higher and Higher by Jackie Wilson. That song, I just put it on loop and I’ll just listen to that while I’m journaling. It’s just a nice, got a lot of positive, again, subliminals going on as I’m journaling. So music really helps.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. You know, it’s a great song by the Commodores, Night Shift. It’s about Jackie Wilson.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And Martin Gaye. Oh, that song. Every time there’s like this emotional feeling that I get from that song. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah. Pick that song, the one that you feel positive emotion about and journal with that song playing on repeat.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Or maybe not, maybe just cathartic, maybe even a little bit No, sullen motion as well, or it should be positive emotion, I guess, because you want to be in a positive state.

Kevin Bailey:
Yeah, I 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 a freeze response, light freeze response, into a fight response. So I will journal with the state I want to be in. Somewhat positive, somewhat uplifted.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All right. So every morning now my wife’s going to hear me blasting Haddaway. Is it Haddaway? What Is Love? The head nodding.

Kevin Bailey:
Yes. Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Just

Kevin Bailey:
journal about how your day went.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
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. The more visionary stuff, but then even the tactics that you described. So I really appreciate it. Congratulations on what you’re doing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’ve been a successful founder now a few times, DreamFuel being the latest one. And I love 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.

Kevin Bailey:
Thank you, Josh. I really appreciate it, man.