Turning Mindset into Millions: Unlocking Untapped Potential with Mental Performance Training — Kevin Bailey & David DeRam

from the crossroads of America in the hoer state of Indiana this is get in the podcast focused on the unfolding stories and extraordinary Innovations happening in the Heartland I'm Matt hunkler CEO at powderkeg and I'll be one of your hosts for today's conversation I am joined in Studio by co-host Nate spangle head of community at powderkeg and on the show today we've got Kevin Bailey co-founder and CEO of dream Fuel and David Duram CEO at Greenlight Guru and the episode kicks off with us doing a pretty incredible breathing exercise we've got six people pushing a jet and you're trying to get the jet off the ground by running and you're like just keep pushing we can get this jet off the ground everybody's I don't know coach this thing doesn't seem to be getting any altitude our first guest Kevin Bailey is the co-founder and CEO at dream fuel a mental performance platform that helps Elite teams and individuals Thrive Under Pressure our second guest David Duram is the CEO at Greenlight Guru a dynamic Medtech company that provides software solutions for Med device companies and clinical trial data collection both are incredible Tech entrepreneurs and have accumulated many wins and accolades but they also have losses and lessons along the journey that they share in this show today it is an awesome conversation we're going to dive into mental performance and how it can be a GameChanger for growing your startup your career and putting your team in a place to win Under Pressure here's Kevin Bailey and David Duram this is going to be holotropic breath work so it's a lot like Wim Hoff breathing but it's a little more intense okay we're going to do it for 10 minutes so that's like a halfway point but it'll bring us deep enough that I think our intuitions will open up quite a bit and we'll be able to have some honest conversation about this topic which is I have never done hotpic breathing for more than pretty passion minutes all that I want you to do when you're breathing is I want you to think stomach chest head you're trying to bring in as much air as possible so breathing through the mouth it's probably not going to sound really good but you hear the three kind of increments in that stomach chest head you're bringing all that energy up you're breathing in really powerfully big powerful breaths breaths in through the mouth don't breathe through the nose nose don't work I don't know I've tried it interesting nose don't work they always say breathe through your nose you just need to get as much air as humanly possible that's the whole point doesn't matter Mak sense that's you know whim I took a couple singing lessons once and they're like breathing through your mouth is the way to get the most air in your lungs yeah we're just trying to we're trying to fill the lungs up and it's it's a little bit rapid you go as fast a pace as you can handle and when you're breathing out you're just letting your lungs relax you're not like letting all the air out you're not like pushing air out you're just letting it it's a rebound it's a rebound yep as you do this it's it's basically an ab exercise or something there and cardiovascular like it's going to get difficult and you just need to breathe through that um as David said if you re you're going to you're going to feel different reactions in the body you might feel like a kind of a tingly sensation in your body different parts of your body get into what all that is at some point but you're going to start to feel just very oxygenated and just go with that if you see if you feel yourself starting to slip in and out of Consciousness stop you heard that you heard that if you're slipping in and out of Consciousness stop um not till the timer goes off Nate doesn't know the meaning of the word stop but for the most part it should just feel like a tough exercise you probably haven't breathed like this before and I I found it's really helpful to do sets of 50 you you might just go straight through but straight through is like a long run but I want more power so I do sets of 50 big breaths and then five regular breaths okay so whatever works for you cool I'm just I just want you guys to hit it all right go close your eyes I'm going to start the timer just want you to relax your stomach relax your shoulders and relax your jaw and we're going to breathe really deep again you're going to breathe deep into your stomach then you're going to breathe the air up into your chest and then you're going to try and breathe up into your head obviously the air won't go up there but the intention is to really fill the whole body with oxygen let's go ahead and start now take a deep breath in stomach chest head out stomach chest head out [Music] I was in a New York Yoga Studio One Time L side like right in the middle of everything and I go to yoga all the time so a lot of times you'll do like an Collective M at the end or just Collective breath work at the end and sometimes people like just like let an exhale out and this was like the moment I knew I never wanted to move to New York it was the yoga instructor goes just let an exhale and usually most people are like and in New York it was like this Collective like oh my God it's just everyone was so stressed out that it was just like like it sounded like a whale sound it was hilarious I am buzzing right now yeah holy I'm like where are you you buzzing what parts of your body my hands are tingling and I can feel like down into like my forearms of just like reverberations of I just the tingles like my body is buzzing that's your energy oh my God and it's there all the time but you just don't feel it because you're so still and all the breathing when you lay down it's your whole body then you can start moving it around if you have a sore back or a headache breathe into a place you just drive all that tingle into one area it's so crazy the first person who uh taught me this breath work was a DST Monk and I guess she's a nun and she was a a coach of mine back in the day and first time I did it with her my whole I was laying down my whole body felt so electrified like David's talking about and then she started to explain to me about how your inner energy works they call it Chi yeah and your ability to move it into different parts of your body and heal your body with it it she's a master at it but I remember about 10 minutes in which is we went 10 minutes and I think we went about 30 with her first time I did it cool and I remember like I was dying about 20- minute Mark and I looked at her cuz she actually through Zoom I looked at her and I saw her just be like keep going I like I can't even move my mouth my jaw like locked up oh my gosh this is wild buzzes so hard sometimes that I want someone to touch me and tell me if they can feel it mhm I'm certain like it's almost an electric Shack I'm certain that if you touched me you'd feel it but I don't know cuz no one's ever been in the room with me before and then the really amazing thing is to get in the ice after that while ice while you're buzzing then to go ice all right next podcast let's do it at the recovery room and we'll do this and then we'll all do cry or let's get four buckets of water yes and then we'll just get right in ice bucket challenge and I'm soft on the water I'd be like you see cold his balls with Kevin Hart he puts those pro athletes in the ice that's exactly what I was thinking of and they're like oh and Kevin Hart's been doing it so he's used to it's an unfair Advantage I love it he's like you good over there ooo yeah I think there was like a cold sweat type thing going on it that was wild it's still like lingering that's can you want to explain a little bit the neuros psychology of like why that's effective Neuroscience I guess yeah I can get into that a little bit happy to obviously your breath controls your physiology the thing that puts us into a flight response or a freeze response which are maladaptive states that we don't want to get into as in Executives is actually by holding your breath MH if we sat here and we held our breath for a long period of time we would all go into a flight response we obviously all want to get out of the situation but we don't recognize and realize that this is happening to us all the time in boardrooms on sales calls Etc we're getting our breath taken away that's called glal stops and the breath has the ability basically to synchronize the whole body so when it's when breath is uncoordinated when breath is short and sharp or various holds rhythmic breath patterns it causes us to go into these maladaptive States and when we harmonize our breath and when we breathe uh deeply in certain increment there's about eight different variables you can adjust with breath work rhythmicity and smoothness is one of the most important and depth is important and when you do it basically it causes the heart to entrain with the breath and it's a the heart's a biological oscillator so are all the other organs in your body but the heart is the most powerful gives the biggest electromagnetic pulse so when your heart starts beating at a systematic pattern then all the other biological oscillators in your whole body start to tune to the heart and your body goes from being caffin to a symphony and once all these organs are beating together with the heart driven by the breathing pattern now you have mental Clarity that you would never have otherwise when everything's in tune when your body's a symphony your brain waves and train with that Symphony and that's your intuition comes online that's that's the what's happening there biologically when we do that super helpful that's really cool like to me I think it's one thing to experience it which there's no comparison to but it's another thing to understand what's going on and like I can as you're explaining I'm like yep that happened yep that happened and if you're really in tune with your body like you can feel that happening and the difference like I can immediately feel the difference yep and I do breath work every morning but for three to five minutes yep I don't do 10 minutes is I might switch that up we just like Dave and I start coaching sessions off with that breath work so that we can have the most honest and vulnerable conversations about what he's going through in the moment on the coaching call so we don't jump right into the coaching we spend 20 minutes breathing up then yeah yeah definitely that's why the coach I first did it was she's we need to have the most honest raw vulnerable conversation we can have to day I'm going to start you off with 30 minutes of breath work then we'll talk yeah is there a difference between like I feel energized and like ready to go and get deep in this conversation is there a difference in what what would need to be done in the morning versus at night if you're trying to like decompress I feel like if I was trying to go to bed right now I wouldn't be able to yeah yeah this one amps you up a little bit but opens the intuition up there's breathing patterns for almost any different state of consciousness you want to get into if you're trying to calm down what you want to do is you want to do long exhales and shorter inhales not whm Hof but this is It's called paste breathing but a smooth breath in and then a longer exhale smooth shorter breath in longer exhale if you want to amp up you do long exhale in shorter breath exhale so if you're like getting ready for a lift you would do long breath in short exhale like I'm running the marathon at the end of October and I'm 100% going to bring this in the morning before that I'm going to PR we'll report back on how it goes we've done this with David and with the rowing challenge you top 50 what is it top 10 in the top 10 in the world for your age group it was the most most incredible validation of mindset coaching so Kevin and I decided to try this thing and he coached me through not a business challenge but an actual physical what a lot of people call the most grueling thing ever invented is the 2k row so we decided to go after this to be and the goal was top 10 in the world and we can get into that we probably want to wait right till we're live yeah let's just go into it and we'll do intro at the end yeah we can come back and do intro and all that the end and I think L is Rong yeah okay tell us tell us about the 2k row yeah I think why and what when I had already been working with Kevin from a business perspective solving business challenges but when we dove into this physical challenge to be top 10 in the world this was like the ultimate proof because there's immediate feedback in every workout you're going to get a time you're going to get a heart rate and everything and that kind of training is all heart rate based so many things went into that too and and just talking to different trainers they're like oh you're training like a professional athlete you're going to need this supplementation you're going to need this kind of recovery that you're everything has changed now but then the mindset coaching that came in was a visualization a breathing pattern and an autohypnosis that you listen to while you're sleeping so just all in a mindset using every everything that we could use from a uh mindset coaching perspective but the hypnosis the autohypnosis which is the same thing they taught Mike Tyson before he would go into the ring that's the cool thing about this is all everything we're doing is coming from professional Athletics every professional athlete has a mental performance REM mindset coach it's just it's not proliferated in business yet it was beautiful when you did the row because it's you know your executive kpis we can talk about those sales kpis are easy to measure which is great you can use mindset coaching there but when you did a physical feed it was like okay now we know exactly how this is working we can really measure it so go on I to and it was a lot on it was a lot of pressure on me because I'm the alligator blood guy and I'm the guy that you don't quit you do hard things and we can do hard things and so I really wanted to manifest that and prove that in a very concrete solid way so Kevin coached me we did the same autohypnosis that Mike Tyson did I would listen to that before I would go to bed and we the the coolest part of it was we trained my belief system that as the race went on it would get easier and so sure enough you might like this in your Marathon running but sure enough I had about 700 meters to go and this is where everybody wants to quit like you got nothing left you're done you've been sprinting just on the edge of sprinting for five plus minutes and you're just all you want to do is quit every organ in your body is screaming for you to set that handle down which is the ultimate embarrassment in R is you set the handle down like you just can't do it anymore and this little voice came to me during the middle of the world championships this little voice came to me that said man this is getting easier yes and we had hypnotized that that's awesome and there you can see there's a video of this you can see a little smile on my face or I'm like oh we hypnotize that that's pretty cool it is getting easier I do feel stronger because no one would argue that you're this this is one of my favorite things in the world please argue with me that how you feel doesn't impact your performance please argue because because no one could ever argue that so I started to feel a little bit better and I was in 11th place with about 200 meters to go and Kevin's this was virtual normally everybody goes to the same place but it was coid so Kevin's in my basement he's screaming at me I got to pass this boat and I passed this boat with about 200 meters left to finish 10th in the world and it it just all locked in exactly how we had trained it exactly how we had we probably should have gone for number one world record or something you were competing with Navy Seals and professional rowers and yeah the one guy that beat me was the world record holder and then there were three Navy Seals from Great Britain the English version of the Navy Seals like these were the people that were ahead of me on the leaderboard that's awesome I I coach a high school wrestling team and I always like preach like third period And I can't wait to take a few tips from what we use here to get to the third period and that's when you're going to it's going to get easier there because it's going to be harder for everybody else yeah but I'd like to go back right so you're a lifelong entrepreneur we're talking about how big of a changed mindset in in Kevin has in these strategies have affected your rowing your company where were you at before you met Kevin tell us and where you're at today is like you're top 100 Health tech company in the world operating at like the top Echelon of software entrepreneurship you're in a top 10 rower for your age group Kevin you're running the business of your dreams are growing like crazy and I I think just understanding the journey to get there cuz I I know because I know both of you the journey wasn't easy and I know our listeners I know our listeners want to hear the struggle mhm yeah it's interesting because Kevin's teaching me that you don't have to struggle but my experience has always been that there's been a lot of struggle and when I actually Matt has connected so many people in Indianapolis I'm sure Beyond but so many early stage companies so many powerful connections that Matt's made but I saw Matt in a coffee shop and Matt asked me hey I got this conference and I was in between I was moving from progyny to Green Light Guru we were putting the company together you're working 20 hours a day and I was like yeah I'd be happy to speak whatever you want and it turns out he wanted me to be an attendee at this conference which I scratched my head I I went home and I talked to my wife our wives are the best version of All of Us absolutely and she said okay so he wants you to be an attendee I was like yeah I thought he he wanted me to speak she's like why don't you just go and just see what you can learn and so I I love this term I like okay I'm going to go with an empty cup I'm going to go with no expectations and just see beginner's mindset novice mindset growth mindset what could I learn there and that was where I met Kevin and that set us on a journey where at Green Light Guru it's getting the plane off the ground it always feels to me like you've got six people pushing a jet and you're trying to get the jet off the ground by running and you're like just keep pushing we can get this jet off the ground everybody's I don't know coach this thing doesn't seem to be getting any altitude but and it's hard and so Kevin came in and he talked to our sales team a little bit and he was working with me and I said this stuff is powerful you're changing our results you're changing the way we think you're changing the way we feel and again please argue with me that how you feel doesn't impact your performance and that was the beginning of what I started to understand is this thing can be used for much more than playing scary movies about our future I believe 99.

9% of people use this the most powerful computer the most powerful weapon the most powerful machine ever created they use it to play scary movies about I do it all the time play scary movies about what the future might hold as opposed to man what can we unlock we did a breathing session and we found out what your body's capable of we're all capable of pretty much anything I think we've proven that as a species it's just a matter of when will you lay it down when will you put the handle down how far will you go before you quit and what these mindset coaching techniques can do is push you hundreds of times beyond what you thought you could do into these entirely new different states of being places where your mind goes I think that's one of your secrets to success like you are not afraid to be a beginner again and you weren't a beginner when you were in that coffee shop and I knew you weren't a beginner you'd have already spoken at a powder cake event at that point when you were running progeny yeah but we had several other entrepreneurs who were beginning too Max Yoda was in that room Santiago was in that room people who were starting again all of them on their second or third company and it was maybe a dozen entrepreneurs and the fact that you were like hey some of you people are younger than me but like I'm open and same thing with rowing hey I'm a basketball player but I I'm gonna go be an elite rower it's a bad idea and Kevin I I know when you came into that room to share part of why I brought you in was your experience running slingshot you and I work together during the fastest growth Year we're Inc 58 on the Inc 500 list I was running marketing you were the CEO of the company and I I know at the time that I brought you in I had already left the company so it was a huge favor for you to come in and work with these entrepreneurs but I know you going through your own Journey at that time you mind sharing a little bit about where you were when you and David met yeah I guess that's an important part of the story I was a CEO of slingshot and we were rapid growth I was in my when I met David I was probably like in my early 30s but most of the growth of the company that I had was in my 20s and it's my first first startup i' done something with my buddies in high school we're actually my business partners at slingshot and it was really my first I found that company I was like wanted to buy fast cars pretty much and I thought it was going to be was yours the Dodge Viper I wanted a Dodge Viper that's right yeah I could I could never remember you Jer me in Aaron each wanted your own dream car yeah we get into that journey and I did not know that you go in wanting cars and it ends up transforming your soul or at least my experience I think entrepreneurship is the greatest teacher of almost any profession you can do you learn about yourself you learn about other people you learn about everything your limits and I was not trained in this stuff so once we got over 100 employees and the pressure started to go real high I actually had my first child and kind of we always say babies break mindsets but we had all this stuff coming together at the same time for perfect storm we had some industry issues we were facing headwinds all this kind of stuff coming at the same time and and it just kind of I guess I I transitioned into a scarcity mindset way I like to explain it but started to see how everything could go wrong instead of how things could go right and I didn't know at that point I used visualization and certain techniques unknowingly I was starting to dabble with meditation and stuff but I was lucky enough to run into a neuroscientist at that point who started teaching me the tools of mental performance she worked with some athletes and stuff like that and then I also met a mindfulness coach who was a former fighter pilot in Vietnam who' use it to cure PTSD and those two things together the neuroscience and the mindfulness I started to just realize great changes in myself and those I was working with taught some of the sales team at slingshot and then started teaching my friends like David and the results spoke for themselves I was when I started working with green light I believe the first we did two big runs with you guys and we're currently in the second one but the first run how much did sales go up when we started coaching the sales team the number is I want to say 79% it was important to you to actually measure it it was a massive jump I know in the second run it's 46% two quarters over two quarters mindset coaching with mindset coaching without no other variables changed wow but I think the first one was even greater I remember that the first time we sat down and like I could just tell like you could cut the tension in the room with a knife you were running the sales team at that point I remember like Zach and Jay Jason and all those guys and I just said guys this was a long time ago breathing and stuff breath work and whatnot is is is in the in the mass awareness now wasn't at that point and and I sat down and we didn't do holotropic like we just did some mental reset breathing but some deep breathing and I remember just on the exhale the last thing you do is exhale and hold for a little while and I just remember like almost that experience you had in New York yeah the whole sales team just breathed out and he could feel all the tension just lift off and then I remember we had a super productive strategy session I wasn't there as as much as a sales coach as I was a mindset coach in the beginning and we had this super strategic conversation about sales Y and I could feel the team was really starting to connect and click and you Rose to your best as their leader and I feel like from that point on it was like go time what are the three biggest mistakes that sales teams make that they don't even realize is a mindset mistake da we have stories about this stuff remember the the story of the objections issue yeah should I tell that yeah go ahead so I would always list out so you have a big call it's a closing call and you're going to try to bring on a new customer I would always list out all of the possible objections so that all your rebuttal are ready and for me that just it seemed like the conscientious thing to do be prepared the discipline consistent thing to do is to be prepared and Kevin said I I don't like what you're doing there because you're just bringing up all this stuff into the the world of possibility let's go into a call with no prep I told you one thing to prep what was that I said what did I tell you can't remember what did I tell you to visualize a win yeah so I had been on with this customer and it was a different type of customer it was a different segment for us for months I want to say six months and I come in with no prep other than just the right expectations and I'm I am not kidding you the guy picks up the phone and he says hey good news we're in we've decided to do this and I just stared at him we were on speaker phone and I just stared of him like that did not just happen it felt almost like magical it was it just didn't make any sense to me because my experiences inform form my belief so my experiences are if you're disciplined and consistent high performance you you do your work you work hard and this was just something completely new to me so I think that would probably be number one mistake to break that down just so to give it some clarity what David was doing is he was priming himself priming is a big part of of mindset mental performance just like an athlete going on the field getting excited he was priming himself for a disaster so that's what I identified is he's sitting down and he's basically all he's doing is flooding himself with cortisol he's putting himself into a stress response right before the call this could go wrong this is going to go wrong this so I know that even if he prepared really well with the objections when he jumped on the sales call he was going to be in such a Negative state that the other person on the other on the line through a mechanism called mirror neurons was going to pick up on David's basically fear and anxiety and start to question greenl as a solution just because David's showing up in such a high anxiety state so instead of trying to to go through and say okay we need to breathe we do need to do objection handling but we need to do it with absolutely no emotional tone to it we need to look do it like robotically and go through all that we didn't have time so I just said David put that aside and let's just sit down and visualize success for a minute I want you to jump on that call the most confident version of yourself you've ever been and it was just beautiful that after that little coaching session David jumps on and the dude says we're in and David thought there was a chance in a million years he was going to do that it just that's amazing but that so mistake number one is priming themselves priming yourself for a high anxiety state before you jump on a call yeah yeah and it was what's another big mistake that sales professionals frequently make I would say another one that's that's really important is they don't uh fix their state after tough calls so we have and this is true of of Founders and Executives as well we're doing calls constantly we're sales people everyone's in sales exactly and and or leadership meeting like you have a really really tough uh meeting and then you just go straight into the next one without resetting your state again getting yourself into a better state of mind so that you can when your neurons kick in they're going to feel energized by speaking with you instead of anxious so what they do is they they carry the state forward from the one meeting to the next to the end to the week to the quarter to the Mis number it's just a chain reaction yes yeah that's great any other big mistakes that you see leaders and Executives or salespeople frequently making yeah a lot of mental performance is obviously knowing how to manage your state of being so your physiology your emotions your feelings your thoughts people normally only talk about positive thinking but you can't really think positively if your physiology and your emotions and everything else is off and you don't always need to think positively talk about toxic positivity or whatever but but what I can tell you is a lot of people in the moment when you're in a call and somebody says something you weren't expecting maybe they say like to talk to my board and we're going to push this out a couple quarters sorry or whatever the next thing you say is so important in that moment and what happens is a lot of people immediately go into a stress response right there so they themselves go into a flight response MH so you got anxiety bumped up against anxiety what's that going to do that that that deal is definitely getting pushed so if you what happens in a flight response your IQ goes down sometimes around like 20 points that's significant and you're burning a bunch of energy and you're not that relational exchange is happening between you and the other person goes dark mhm and so you don't want that to happen if you're a salesperson no so we call this holding form you have priming and then you have holding form just like you're working out like on a tough squat how do you hold your form while you're doing that and so there are uh cognitive reframes and stuff we teach for executives and sales people alike that in that moment when somebody says that thing you don't want to hear you're cool as a cucumber mhm so the mistake is they let an action somebody else takes influence how they feel so that then they reflect that back to them with more anxiety instead of keeping their intelligence up keeping their energy in the right place and coming in with the perfect thing to say next because they're in their intuitive mind instead of in their inner critic Their Fear state do you have a few tips for how to take that inventory right of you get off a tough call and it's you don't want it to snowball it's like how do you even some people don't even I don't even know right where you get tough news and you're like how do I take a pulse check on how my energy is doing you have to develop awareness and awareness is best cultivated through a breathing practice or meditation practice if Step One is becoming aware we have an act framework which starts with awareness but if if you can't become aware that you're in a terrible State as a leader as a salesperson you are very vulnerable to problems what are Key signs for leaders to know that they might be in that negative state if you want to interject on this David but I'll say a few things you can say a few things but there's something I do want to say but go ahead I was going to say the first thing you want to notice is what I told you in the beginning of this you start holding your breath if you notice you're holding your breath you your body is forcing you into a flight response It's a Jungle response to get away from a predator you don't want to be in that state on on a call or in a leadership meeting you notice your breath starts getting erratic or shallow that's step one keep breathing that's the point where you need to tell yourself you're not in the jungle this is a tough meeting keep breathing that'll again keep you there's four there's quadrants we talk about fight flight freeze and focus but you become a a judo master of moving between these states who's great at this are B baseball players oh yeah when they're in the box they're like glove like every single baseball player you see now has been taught these breathing techniques because they're under massive pressure with 100 mph fast ball coming at them and in pictures too you'll see them go through a breathing so make sure that they're still breathing because they are under tremendous pressure what I wanted to say was when we went to do the cryo together years ago you said something to me that has not stopped bouncing around in my brain oh wow is that and it was it's dangerously connected Ed to what Kevin is saying the the words were almost exactly I've talked to hundreds which is probably now thousands of Founders and you said what I found is the most successful Founders have the ability to control their emotions that was what you said do you remember saying that no I don't tell expand on that or tell me what you think about so you've talked to all these Founders you've seen lots and lots of successful you've seen probably 10 times more than that unsuccessful do you believe that is it emotions that does it come from leadership does it come down to emotions yeah it absolutely is it's it is mental state and managing your emotional state and it is what Kevin is saying is it's awareness and I think it's a human nature to think that we are our emotions and to just ride that wave it's a it's like a very human thing to just be in your emotions our tions to your point it's like a think about what we evolve from being in the jungle not that long ago being in the wild west we're going on the Oregon Trail like that's not that long that's not that many generations for humans to evolve and so emotions have served us really well as a species but humans really have not evolved to I it sounds like the word I use was take control but I think that was probably three four years ago I work with is a good word I think today I would probably use the language more like work with and practicing mindfulness because mindfulness to me is the tool to be able to be like Oh I'm feeling anxious and rather than being like Oh I'm anxious I need to stop being anxious instead be like I'm curious huh why am I anxious that's interesting and observe the emotion rather than it letting it consume me and become me MH be like I have this feeling that is anxious that is not me and it's an okay thing to have being comfortable in the the fear yeah I think the threat in leadership is an emotional Rea an emotional reaction that undermines your leadership and I'll give you an example I do this thing called daily design where I will actually live the entire day before I do it so the actual experience of the day is the second time you've done it and at the end after I map out the day and how it's going to go and the winds I'll do a SWAT on it so I always do the threats and the opportunities and almost every day the threats are becoming emotionally caught up in this which causes you to do this y so the great thing about daily design is you see that danger before it happens but I will say the the danger out there for leaders are emotional ones yeah it's funny some people are naturally more gifted at this than others and some have had enough experience over time to learn how to regulate their emotions just on the Fly and obviously there's an easy framework we teach on this but it's funny our startup advisor at dream fuel his name is Bob Gleason really good dude he's brought a company public I think he's been part of some major startup runs and it's funny he's just all we call him Obi-Wan but he's just cool as a cucumber yeah it doesn't matter What's happen happening he's always the same he's always got the same confidence been there done that mentality nothing shakes him and that's that leadership that's magnetic that people look to and it's beautiful that I think a long time ago we used to think that wasn't it couldn't be trained or taught it couldn't be learned just some people had it some people didn't choke Under Pressure some people choked and we learn that in sports right uh the beautiful thing is that you can learn how to stay cool as a cucumber in the store storm through learning these techniques and tools so you're talking about staying cool as a cucumber in the bad times does that also like on the flip side does that mean not getting too high on the like good times so this is equinity which is there's so many facets to this it's nobody's favorite to regulate their emotions during the highs but those who are masters of mental performance do you don't want to run that much dopamine because what's going to happen is on the back end of that you're going to have a response it's basically uh prolactin which is just a hormone that basically dos you out and you'll get that on the back end so maybe you had this High big surg you ever like people sell their company they're like I'm lost and that's all that prolactin that comes in it was most known for after you have a baby women have prolactin and and it can contribute to postpartum depression but we get that too when you're at the high moment be grateful but maybe don't go over the top yeah I have a controversial take on this oh okay it's don't make the highs too high don't make the lows too low y let's make the highs really high and let's just cut the lows out I like that how about that I'm a doam mean junkie so if I get a chance like if my kids win a game we're going to Dairy Queen period like I want as much dopamine as I can possibly get and I will accept the crash what's it called on the the prolactin crash I'll take the crash and you take vitamin B to help with that but Kevin calls it loathing like you you do enter some loathing yeah but why not celebrate the quarter why not celebrate the month why not celebrate the biggest deal we've ever closed in the biggest way we can and to continue to drive good energy good feelings dopamine if you get a PR for a run let's celebrate that I like to take the highs as high as I can take them I know that's not the it's it's not the best it's not the best practice do I've developed a hybrid approach to this which is one thing I didn't realize I was doing is like ruining my after afternoons and it was because I was waking up I was doing breath work right before I did sunlight direct sunlight into my eyeballs as I was working out after drinking a pre-workout drink while listening to my favorite music it was just like dopamine I was starting my day with just like dopamine and then what inevitably happens right every Yin has its Yang so my afternoons I'm like I don't know why I'm crashing cortisol there's a little bit more Neuroscience on this worth talking about we naturally have a dopamine dominant and serotonin dominant cycle throughout the day so your mornings through about 2 p.

m. are going to be dopamine dominant then after 2 p. m. it goes serotonin doin dominant serotonin is the happiness molecule uh dopamine is the motivation molecule so it's natural to have a little bit of like a crash mhm what you're talking about can moderate a little bit exacerbating but if you understand what serotonin is and how to work with that neurotransmitter you can just basically tune your day a little differently and do serotonin based activities after 2 p. m. and it can feel very smooth it won't feel like a crash just oh I get into another state of consciousness I can do different types of work after 2 p.

m. versus before 2 p. m. I know huberman talks about this a lot and it's just it's important to understand it's part of our normal Cycles it's not that somehow failed or something if at 2 p. m. you start to feel I think that's where I got it was from the dopamine episode of huberman was just like maybe don't do the Pre-Workout mix and your favorite jams and sunlight all at the same time while you're working out I bet it feels pretty good I know that sounds terrible it sounds like limiting your happiness like I don't want to live in a world where High Highs but I I would say I way overperform better now that I'm like okay I'm going to listen to my favorite song but like maybe I'm not going to do the direct sunlight while I do it and do the breath work right before I'm going to save those for my like afternoon session and so all all I'm doing is just moderating so that it is less yeah are you ready to transform your brand with award-winning video content that captures your vision and connects with your audience check out Alchemy the experts at building your brand using video from story-driven social media Snippets that leave a lasting impression to compelling F length documentaries they have got the expertise to take your brand to the next level Alchemy is actually our video partner here on get in they do amazing work all the videos across social across YouTube all that is done by Alchemy and there an amazing partner to work with reach out to me Nate at powderkeg or check out Alchemy film.

com to get connected with Alden and his team they will take care of all your video needs I'd love the talk for the founders out there that you know haven't thought about this like this is not top of mind for them what are a few indicators that they might be lacking in mental performance or that just can some indicators of hey there's something wrong here they're not thinking about it yeah restless nights um it's a big one uh if you're waking up a lot in the middle of the night and your heart's kind of erasing a little bit and stuff uh cortisol is actually the hormone that wakes us up in the morning you just run intoo much cortisol in general a lot of Executives we just did a big survey with you guys which is great a mental performance study on on Executives tech companies but I'd say quote this the sample cuz we're not releasing the data yet but a lot of people spend who are Executives spend they just say like half their day in low productivity high anxiety States the opposite of flow state which is the thing you're trying to cultivate with all mental performance train need to stay in Flow State but it's that's if you're noticing like you're just staring at your computer after 2 p.

m and you're not getting anything done and you're just like loathing David said you're thinking about everything that go wrong constantly that's a good indicator waking up in the middle of the night racing heart rate that kind of brain fog you get when you're just like can't even focus on things you know really low energy not showing up for your family and your friends and your personal life if you're like if you're like I'm going to be grinding and I'll you know you're losing your friends and your whole like personal life turning into a tail spin that's an indicator that in Flow State you probably could maintain your friendships and relationships you probably could have a decent personal life and build a successful tech company my God could you actually do that yes you can it's like David can you explain to us what flow state is in your own words and what it feels like to you FL magic there's no time and there's three constants in a high growth software company and those three constants are fear anxiety and pressure we choke around about that yeah so if you want to know if you're feeling some of the things that we talked about earlier if you're feeling fear anxiety and pressure but in Flow State I think you're creative there's a certain element of Joy lots of creativity like you can get Flow State in a workout you're like ah what if I just switch this to that and you're just you have great intuition time is not really a factor and I I think what Kevin is saying is we just are capable of being there most of the time and I I don't think people realize that like that state is accessible what are the things that were most helpful to you in finding flow more frequently I think the other big thing about flow before we move on to that is they call it the Superman gene or the Superman molecule yeah like I said earlier you're pretty much capable of anything and if you're going to do it you're probably going to do it in Flow State if you're going to do something that a really big milestone for you or a PR or a record quarter or closing a great deal or leading a great team meeting and and let's face it as leaders that is our job is to lead great meetings and we we have a lot of them they're on this thing called Zoom I don't know if anybody's been on that platform or not no never I definitely didn't spend 6 hours on Zoom yesterday but you your question was whether how do you access it yeah what are what are your top tips for getting in flow whether that's um sports or at home with family or in the boardroom I'll give you there's a million working out obviously driving dopamine all the sunlight piece that you mentioned and cre getting great sleep and taking care of your taking care of the equipment taking care of the mechanism all that counts but I think the one that trumps all of it is just incredible passion you can be like forget all that you could be painting and just enter Flow State you could be reading and enter Flow State but it has to be something that you really care about and that's why we like tough people that are smart and passionate when you mix those three things together I'm not going to quit I'm going to put my heart into this thing and I'm able to solve some really difficult problems because I'll engage my intellect and and be smart when you have that kind of passion and you're driving that kind of energy you're almost automatically in Flow State the other thing is you enter danger so Surfers are in Flow State all the extreme sports ski jumpers like it's hard to not be in Flow State if you're going to die if you miss yeah what about the work that you're not passionate about what have you got to do whatever the task is in the afternoon you're like son of a gun's trying to get out of hisil a yeah it's really easy yeah it's like stuff you're passionate about absolutely I love doing stuff that I love to do but sometimes I got to do I don't want to do I'm happy to take this I do want do a spin on that question though which is what knocks you out of Flow State because you know you can just sit here and breed oh yeah what are the top things that knock you out of Flow State you can sit here and breathe for 20 minutes and get in Flow State without doing anything without surfing a big wave but I want to answer your question say it again so David said have passion and and there are some things that I just like respectfully I don't want to do this right now this this is a really important topic and I'm glad you asked that question which is how do you stay discipline on mundane tasks like that's a lot of what we coach on that's very well worded have a podcast we thought a lot about it um we talked about dopamine there a minute ago the molecu motivation so you don't get much motivation when you're dopamine when you're doing a mundane task you find boring okay dopamine likes variety likes recognition all the boring things that nobody recognizes me for okay the killer app on motivation is to self-reward yourself for effort it's easy to get do me when you do big wins dude did you just give ourselves participation trophies is that that's you you have to give yourself participation trophies because nobody's going to give it to you now if you're a leader and you start rewarding on effort watch your whole culture change but for your start with yourself and watch that you can pulse yourself dopamine basically as much as you want by recognizing the effort you're putting in so when you're doing that mundane task and you're like when the hell is this going to end nobody cares about this blah blah blah and then you go hey Nate great effing job for putting your head down and getting this thing done you know that a year from now when your podcast is top 10 or whatever um it's going to be because of the work you're doing right now great job from cleaning the SD cards yep absolutely and if you just put a little Post-It note on your laptop that says reward yourself for effort and you do that every now and again that motivation will be continuous rewarding yourself for effort getting dopamine to be to triggered on effort rather than achievement is the killer app cuz you can do it as much as you want whenever you want you stop becoming a victim to your own success cuz I hear a lot of Founders talk about oh the first 10 million it was like party time I this happened for me too this first 10 million was party time I was recognizing the media all over the place and all of a sudden boom you hit a tough point and you stop getting dopamine constantly force-fed to you by everyone and you start to go through some real struggles and the deficit you get in dopamine is like causes the quit response which is basically you don't get dopamine long enough it triggers a circuit in the brain which is an all man animal that causes us to quit quit response so if you learn to to give yourself dopamine for effort then you can stay in the marathon when it gets really hard okay is that mostly those rewards selft talk a lot of it is selft talk CU talk about what kicks you out of Flow State selft talk kicks you out of Flow State so you give yourself the right selft talk you're going to keep yourself in Flow State wrong selft talk you're going to kick yourself out constantly you're constantly going from like a fight response to a freeze response to a flight response you want to stay wish I had a graphic to show you but you want to stay in these prime physiologies a lot of that comes down to selft talk I want to challenge that thinking too if you're on a quest there are no ordinary moments if the passion is big enough if say you're were climbing a mountain there's a ledge I got to go over I got to walk down this Trail but each one of those if the quest is big enough and you have enough passion there are no ordinary emails so I want you to think about where do you get your dopamine from and as as dopamine addicts if you're going to get it from the win you're going to quit you got to get the dopamine my son was a cross country Runner and I would yell at him we'd be at the track running like 400s and I'd yell you got to love it right now like in the worst part of the run this is the part you have to Tau your kid it feels so good David David had an affirmation he taught his kid you don't explain to D oh yeah he uh he fell out of the car one day and landed on his back on the concrete he fell out of the car just okay right he landed on his back and I looked at him he goes he's laying on his back on the concrete he goes it's so good so good but when you're running yeah do you love running do you love running when or lifting do you love the act of running the act of lifting or do you love being done if you love being done that's where your dopamine's coming from If You Love Actually lifting heavy weights then it's a completely different experience and that's scalable that's what quests are really cool and there are no ordinary moments I just read a book called chopwood carry water it was very all focused around falling in love with the process not necessarily the product and it was like he the guy wanted to train to be a Samurai and it was like it's a 10year journey 10-year Quest but nine of it was spent chopping wood carrying water like you have until you can chop wood and carry water then you can learn how to swing a sword or shoot an arrow or whatever but the biggest part was the discipline and the process and getting dopamine out of that and I okay you reframe my thinking there con yeah I love it cuz I always preach that you got to fall in love with the process you got to love the 5:30 a.

m. mornings to go run like I love it now I didn't at first but now I'm like and I'm like pumped to just be up and it's fun it's like everyone else the normal people in the world are still asleep and I'm oh yeah we're just seven miles deep already and it's 6:00 a. m. let's ride they've got to fall in love with the process but so do you yeah absolutely Ely I have a question as we're getting close on time and I think at first glance you talk about minds and once we got into this and I'm like oh my gosh it makes a ton of sense but what do you what can leaders do to bring this into their culture and not get looked at funny I think Kevin nailed it that take every single successful athlete that you've seen so your Tiger Woods your Derek jeters Muhammad Ali I Aaron Rogers even recently I heard visualized as getting out of sacks as a quarterback you probably don't want to get hit as a boxer you probably don't want to get punched those are pretty visceral right in your face but in sports we've been doing this for so long you know Drew Brees with his eyes closed going through cadences and on the field by himself how cool is that why if that drives performance then why wouldn't we translate that same level of mindfulness to our work in software in business and the best part about it is it increases the quality of each moment it increases the quality of life so if we're bringing this to our teams and we're saying hey let's introduce this mindset coaching it's not about neurot transmitters it's about the quality of life how can your team and your community affect your mindset the environment so a lot of what we've talked about has been on an individualistic level but when you think about who you're hanging out with who you're going to work with every day obviously if you're an entrepreneur you get to choose that who's on your team and who's not on your team but you also get to choose who you're grabbing a beer with after work or not grabbing a beer and going to cryotherapy instead all right so this is when we started green light Guru like you said you get to choose who's on the team my co-founder John spear he had been asking me to do this for three years and I said we're only going to hire people we like I didn't even really know what that meant but we built the entire company on the culture and the culture has been it's been studied flown out to the West Coast to speak about our culture and your culture creates an energy so your question was the people the team how do they affect your mindset your your team your energy your vibration that is the mindset of your company and Kevin's always reminded me the company will take on the energy of the leader look at any team look at a Girl Scout Troop they're going to act like their leader a college basketball team will act like their leader so the energy that the leader gives will be the energy of the team so they are linked and they do provide vibration and energy in both directions but the culture these these two things are so tightly connected between the mindset and so here's what we like to do we like to Define things like what are people's skills What is strategy what is culture so we've defined the culture as how the how the work makes you feel it's that simple how the work makes you feel so the two are definitely going to feed each other between the mindset and the culture and the people and the energy it all works together what's the Neuroscience behind that Kevin yeah it's funny the first time I really saw that before I even knew the Neuroscience of how it worked was just watching we slingshot we worked with Sears and I remember they were in a really tough spot and I remember that person that we worked with their account manager for their marketing was the most negative person we would ever interact with and I remember he would destroy the attitude of we had pods a client success team basically and and this gentleman would destroy the energy of that pod and it was rolling down from his leader and rolled down from his leader rolled down from his leader which is obviously the hedge fund guy who bought Sears and tried to turn it around or whatever I don't remember what his name was but it was interesting because we work in hierarchical organizations at least most for organization hierarchical and the energy tends to roll down through the mechanism of mere neurons so if David's in a terrible mindset and he gets with the group of Executives his exec team and he just craps on them for an hour and a half they're going to go meet with their direct reports Mir neurons they're holding the energy of the David now they're going to crap on their direct reports and then they're going to go out and speak to the customers and then they're going to bring that energy and they're going to then the customers are going to mirr on off that and and then this the situation slingshot where like the account manager is affecting a whole client success pot of my company and he doesn't even work serious as a client but that one guy was able to affect us what advice do you have for dealing with negative people when you find yourself in those situations good question we all deal with negativity from time to time and we all are negative from time to time it's not it's okay you just have to know how to handle yourself when you get in those States how to work yourself out of them what about the Iron Man oh there's a Band-Aid technique that sometimes I teach um boy you can you can play with Mir neurons a little bit there's visualization is beautiful because it impacts everything so that whole performance chain you got your uh physiology your emotions your feelings your thoughts your behaviors and then though that chain that performance chain sits in the environment which was Matt was just talking about but when you have when you have somebody you're dealing with who's super negative since the subconscious which controls all the negative thinking in you basically and 95% of your thoughts can't tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined you can use um visualization to to play with the subconscious mind so if anybody if I'm ever just like out of nowhere getting attacked by somebody verbally very negative you can do a visualization where you imagine a um an Iron Man suit closing between in front of you between you and that other person and for whatever reason the subconscious will perceive it and shut down whatever empathetic skills are are between you and that person the miror neuron effect just blanks It Off shuts it down and I have to do it as a coach sometimes CU people are basically sometimes people bring some pretty tough stories and I don't I Want to Be an Effective coach I don't want to just sit there and and resonate with them the whole time but yeah sometimes you got to put your Shield up and that's a way you can do it and that will shut down the miror effect so that's like a Band-Aid thing it doesn't really there things you can I've used this like money yeah you're staring at someone and they're telling you like what a terrible person you are and it's like the Iron Man mask is coming over the top and then the way Kevin taught it was and this is what mindset coaching does for you you have all these little Tools in Your Arsenal and I was taking the words and it was going into the suit and straight down into the ground and out I can only imagine the look on my face like as someone's yelling at me and I'm like I'm shooting this down they had to be like hello is anyone there it's it gets it it seems weird cuz the subconscious just will basically do whatever you instructed to do in the moment so the subconscious actually thinks if David's doing that visualization the words are being grounded and that he's not receiving them it's once you can play with the subconscious mind it gets really fun and I masters of this stuff eventually realize the subconscious becomes conscious and then that's when the real work begins but there's so many different Frameworks tools techniques how do teams work with dream Fuel and your team of coaches and talk a little bit if you're open to it the software side of what you're building yeah like I said before our mission is to bring the same quality of mental performance coaching and training that happens in professional Athletics bring that into high growth startups because the pressure is similar maybe not everybody's watching on TV but the pressure is definitely there as we can all attest to and we all know we've built as much Neuroscience into it as we can our coaches have advanced degrees in Neuroscience performance psychology organizational psychology and and we've built a suite of tools and Frameworks that make it easy to understand we have 52 different techniques and tools or we call them practices that we teach we'll deploy those one a week to people they're easy fast to learn little micro learnings and then I think the coach is a special thing we do have software that that teaches this stuff too it's called intrinsic and it measures mental performance which is really important but I still that something about the coach and The Human Side of mental performance coaching you know we call our company dream fuel because a long time ago when I was meditating I realized that my friends who cons who continue to pursue their dreams were much uh happier and more enjoyable to be around than those who had dropped their dreams so a dream feel we consider your dreams sacred and to have somebody a mindset coach or a mental performance coach whose job is to care about your dreams nearly as much as you do to be there as you go through the toughest moments of your life in your business and to keep helping you step back into your power step step back into your strength and Tackle whatever challeng is in front of you I think about the value of that sometimes because there are so many opportunities for us to quit on our journey I don't say I always say Founders don't fail we quit internally and then it just gets manifest throughout our team but we lose it and a mental performance coach a good one stands side by side with the founder with the executive and keeps pointing at that dream David had a dream obviously to build a wonderful software company that improved the quality of life done that he also had a dream to build a great arena for his not for profit progyny and every once in a while just reminding him why he's doing this MH when he's I can't handle this situation this person's driving me effing insane those kind of things happen to all of us I don't care how good you are at mental performance and have that other person who's in in the thick of it with you some stuff you can't talk to your business partners about there's some stuff your wife's not going to understand or your husband's not going to understand but just to have somebody in the trenches with you who's only accountable to your mindset that's the thing that that that we do and yes we know the Neuroscience based tools but it's science and its heart and what I just tried to talk to you about was the heart side of this I'm so glad you're doing it and I'm so glad you're leading your team with these tools it's been a really cool journey to see how it's all unfolded and I know all three of our Journeys are super intertwined and now Nate you too now that you're on the theme last couple years so it's really cool to see we're going link up the podcast we did on our other show from years ago so people can go back and check out some of those exercises in the early days of of what you're doing with dream Fuel and I'm sure we'll have you back on the show again to keep sharing what you're learning thank you Matt I think so many people in the community here are just so grateful for your leadership and everything that you do and obviously I'm so grateful for dream fuel so I'm just just happy to be here hanging out with you guys thanks for being here man none of this would have happened without you Matt this conversation you link up so many people in the community and powdercake does such an amazing job at that it's again very grateful for what you both do Nate and you man absolutely man really appreciate it thanks for being leaders in the community couldn't do it couldn't do it alone this has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with Elevate Ventures and we want to hear from you if you have suggestions for a guest or segment reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hub like Indiana check out our newsletter at powder.

com newsletter and to apply for membership to the powder executive Community Check out powder. com premium we'll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world get in since you just listen to this podcast you might be thinking about starting one for your company lucky for you our partners over at casted have you covered casted is the first and only podcast and video marketing platform made specifically for B2B Brands I love this about them the platform makes it possible to publish Syndicate amplify and measure the value of your podcast and video content in fact we use it for our podcast here at powderkeg and if you're a startup you should listen up because cassid for startups is definitely for you they are offering exclusive deep discounts of up to 82% off retail price for qualifying startups connect with casted at cd. us/ powderkeg