S2E5: Dealing with High Stress Environments with Kevin Bailey
In this episode of Productly Speaking, we dive into the challenges of high-stress environments and how to avoid negativity and burnout. Our guest, Kevin Bailey, founder and CEO of DreamFuel Coaching, shares his journey from leading Indiana's fastest-growing tech startup to founding a company focused on mental performance coaching. Kevin discusses the importance of mental health, the concept of perceived stress, and practical tools to maintain peak performance.
Key Topics Covered:
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Introduction to Kevin Bailey
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Kevin's Entrepreneurial Journey
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Dealing with Burnout
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Understanding Perceived Stress
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Tools for Mental Performance
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Flow States and Productivity
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Managing Negative Thoughts
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Building Grit and Resilience
Quotes:
"The vast majority of our stress is perceived stress. If you're, you know, on a bench press or something trying to put up your max weight, that's going to be real stress in the moment. But the vast majority of our stress is fear of the future, rumination on the past."
"In order to be able to get into flow state, you have to be able to recognize what pulls you out of flow state."
Guest Information:
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Kevin Bailey: Founder and CEO of DreamFuel Coaching
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Website: https://www.dreamfuel.com/
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LinkedIn: Kevin Bailey
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Podcast: The DreamFuel Show
Call to Action:
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Visit DreamFuel's website to learn more about their coaching services.
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Connect with Kevin Bailey on LinkedIn for insights on mental performance.
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Subscribe to The DreamFuel Show for more discussions on mental health and performance.
On today's episode, we're going to talk about dealing with high-stress environments
and avoiding the negativity and burnout that can come from being in those environments.
To do that, I'll be speaking with Kevin Bailey, the founder and CEO of DreamFuel Coaching.
At 27, DreamFuel's founder and CEO was leading Indiana's fastest-growing tech startup,
number 58 on the Inc. 500 fastest-growing company list.
Seemingly overnight, the company of three grew to over 100 employees,
was serving major Fortune 500 companies and had achieved a three-year compound annual growth rate of over 3,000%.
What previously brought inspiration, creativity, and fulfillment now fueled stress, anxiety, and uncertainty,
making it difficult to perform at a constantly elite level.
Add a new baby, a lack of sleep, and the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline to the mix,
and you start to get the feelings of burnout.
So, to give us his take on this topic, I am pleased to welcome to Productly Speaking, Kevin Bailey.
Yeah, happy to be on. Thanks for having me.
Kevin, you started three startups.
Each are all going to be unique and have their different forms of stress.
But that said, all startups are very high-stress environments.
Tell us about each of those adventures and
what you did when you inevitably got to a stage of burnout.
Yeah. I mean, the first one was the most epic, I guess.
You know, I was very young, so I was in my mid-20s.
And me and two of my high school buddies came together to form a Martech company.
And we kind of had that hot hand, Midas Touch thing going.
And it grew really quick, real fast.
It was bootstrapped, too. We didn't even raise any capital.
We got to $12 million ARR, I think, in about, eh, four and a half years, something like that.
It was just growing really rapidly, up to, you know, 100-plus employees.
I had had a really kind of natural, youthful, abundant mindset up to that point.
Most of my life had been pretty easy, not too much struggle, very little failure.
When we got up to that point, we had strategic acquirers come around and try and buy us.
And, you know, they're talking about, oh, you're going to make $20 million before you're 30.
I was kind of blown away by it.
And it actually had a negative impact on my mindset.
We realized what we had and how precious it was.
So we started to kind of get a little nervous, get a little fearful, get a little scared,
kind of transition into more of like a scarcity mindset,
started kind of squeezing the sand so we'll tighten our hands.
And we went through some real struggles at that point.
I was lucky to meet a neuroscientist and a mindfulness coach who was a former fighter pilot in Vietnam
who coached me in some principles of mental performance that athletes normally receive.
This was a long time ago.
This was 15, 20 years ago.
This was before, you know, mental health was such a topic.
I helped found a tech community called Powderkeg with my buddy, Matt Hunkler,
a tech community for the Midwest.
And I noticed that many other founders were having similar struggles as I was having in my first startup.
The perceived stress that I had at that point wasn't, was pretty normal.
So I then decided to found my third company, which is DreamFuel.
I went, started my master's in applied neuroscience, met an awesome co-founder
and have been building this company ever since.
And this, this company attacks that core root cause of stress and burnout.
And we do it in kind of a unique style.
Most of our coaches have, have, have coached athletes and mental performance or been athletes
themselves.
My co-founder is a former pro athlete.
It's an All-American and neuroscience grad from Notre Dame.
We're trying to bring the same quality of mental performance coaching athletes receive over to
founders because it is this incredibly stressful environment.
And in growing DreamFuel and using these tools, it's fun to employ them on myself and kind of just
really see what it does.
Yeah.
You used some interesting language just a moment ago.
You said perceived stress as if there were a difference between actual stress and perceived
stress.
Could you kind of talk to that a little?
Yeah.
I mean, the vast majority of our stress is perceived stress.
If you're, you know, on a bench press or something trying to put up your max weight, that's going
to be real stress in the moment.
But the vast majority of our stress is fear of the future, rumination on the past.
It is all perceptual and it's all hypothetical.
Most of our stress comes from our uncertainty about our ability to handle potential future events or
outcomes.
Yeah, that's, that's absolutely what you get into in a startup, whether you're the founder
or whether you're working in the startup responsible for delivering results, you know, everybody's
got to be thinking, what's the future?
How are the things we're doing today actually going to move us forward?
Are we doing the right things?
Are we servicing the right markets, et cetera?
So you're taking some of these tips and tricks and tools of the trade that you've learned now
from a neuroscientist who helped work with athletes and people that are at top of their game.
How have you applied that into that startup world to kind of help move through and to
push through that stress and to get to a point where you can perform quite well?
I want to answer that question.
I do want to, I want to reel back a little bit to what you just brought up, you know,
as founders, typically visionary founders, you know, we're staking our identity on a possible
future.
You have to be a little crazy to do it.
Yeah.
Well, you're saying, I believe this is going to happen.
And if we meet this with this product at this time, investor who's going to give me a,
you know, a million dollars, I'm going to make you rich.
And I tell my wife and my kids and my friends and my family the same story.
So think about, you talk about perceived stress.
You had to put a lot of confidence into that, knowing that it may not play out that way.
So you're, you're kind of putting yourself into a high stress environment by making the
claims in the first place and taking the money and you're betting on the future and the
future is unknown.
It's kind of like a game of Russian roulette.
You're sort of like opting for.
And truthfully, it's a pretty bad game of Russian roulette.
You know, Russian roulette, well, you got six, six, six, I think the odds are a founder.
It's almost like four in a thousand get to 10 million, four in 10,000 get to 50 million
ARR.
Your odds of, of crushing it are not super high.
You know, a lot of, a lot of bullets in the chamber there.
So, so yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a high, really high stress environment.
You were kind of asking me how, how, what the tools I use and we can certainly dive into
those.
There's a lot at Dreamfield.
We teach 52 different neuroscience based evidence-based tools.
You know, some of my favorite, I'd say are visualization and breath work, which are becoming
more popular, but there are specific ways to apply those.
And then I think, you know, the most difficult one that takes the most time and takes the most
work is unpacking your belief system from start to finish, finding which ones are in conflict
with what you want to build and then kind of pruning and pulling the weeds out, so to
speak, to clear the field.
So you're not sabotaging yourself.
So basically where we may have some preconceived notion that we've gotten from some experience
in the past, but now it's blocking us from being able to unlock what we want to get done.
Yeah, exactly.
We are, we are often, um, our, our own worst enemy.
I think there was, I forget what his name, Marimoto, a samurai and he, you know, he's
I think he was the most successful samurai, you know, killed the most people in sword fights.
He wrote a whole book about it.
I think it's called an awesome OKR, right?
Objective.
Yeah, there you go.
Killed the most people in sword fights.
But I think he had a, he wrote the six, six rings, I think is what it's called.
But his whole thing was, you know, before you're ever going to be defeat somebody in battle,
you have to be able to defeat yourself.
The belief system you have, that's, that's sabotaging you.
So those are kind of my, my big three is visualization, mindfulness, and then mindset work,
which really is just identifying, limiting, and fixed beliefs and pruning them for your
mindset and replacing them with some, with a more abundant mentality.
So you don't block yourself.
Yeah.
So you've also, in a lot of your articles and things online, you've talked about flow states
and how understanding how to get into a flow state can help people become five times more
productive.
I said, could you tell me, uh, what is a flow state?
How do I get that?
And why does it work?
Yeah.
I mean, flow state is, uh, is the, is the output or the outcome of, of mental performance.
And it is a, it's a wonderful place to be from a lay perspective.
It's often referred to as being in the zone.
And there's been research by, I believe McKinsey and MIT collaborated to observe executives in
flow.
They're about five times more productive.
You think about if you're in flow state Monday, you're going to get done what most people get
done in a week.
And to really understand how to get into flow state, you got to kind of know the things that
knock you out.
So you've probably heard the terms fight and flight, right?
So there's actually four kind of zones of performance.
You're always in one of them freeze, which is play dead response.
So this is like, you're a, a grizzly bear walks in through the door and you just go into fetal
position automatically.
It's all spectrum.
So that's like way down the spectrum.
Yeah.
But procrastination is also freeze response.
You've got flight response, which is like running away from a predator, running away from
a big meeting, running away from, you know, having a converse, difficult conversation with
your team member.
Then you've got fight, which is engage, typically powered by like dopamine, a little bit of
noradrenaline.
It's like kind of an active, like, let's go take the mountain thing.
People characterize it as negative.
It is in the sympathetic nervous system, which is a kind of a heightened response, high heart
rate.
That one can be adaptive, you know, to rally the team.
And then the other one, um, it's, it's called many different things in a, in a conflict situation.
It's called fawn, but in a good situation, we call it focus.
It's also called rest and digest.
It's kind of a nice state sort of powered by serotonin and acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine slows the heart down.
Serotonin, you know, it's obviously, it's like the happiness molecule.
If you think of it as quadrants freeze in the lower right flight in the upper right fight
in the upper left focus in the lower left, the ones on the right are really not associated
with flow state.
So flight and freeze IQ goes down, you know, in those states quite a bit, sometimes with 20
points in flight, your blood's going to your hands and feet to run away, you know, it's
not going to your brain and freezes.
Obviously, I mean, you're getting hijacked.
This is where you get stage fright or you lose your words.
Those are not flow state.
They're not productive and you're not getting much done.
You know, if you've got to get away from a predator, if you really got to quit what you're
doing, I mean, they're adaptive in that function, but not for most business contexts, certainly
not going and crushing a meeting or something.
And then you have on the left there, you got focus and you got fight.
Those two are more associated with flow state.
So in order to be able to get into flow state, you have to be able to recognize what pulls
you out of flow state.
Okay.
What events, circumstances, behaviors pull you out of flow state, put you into flight or
freeze, and then build adaptive coping mechanisms and tools and strategies that help you avoid
those situations or go through them with more equanimity, more centeredness.
That's kind of what it's all about.
The 52 different tools we teach are ways to identify those things.
We call it act, awareness, choose, transition.
Be aware that something's pulling you out of flow state and then choose to use a tool to
get you out of it and then transition your state.
Yeah.
So if you find yourself in fight or flight, I mean, obviously it's a very natural response
and it's very easy to get into that state.
It can be hard to slow down and stop and go, wait a minute.
I'm reacting in a way that I probably shouldn't be.
I'm going over what I should be.
How would you recommend that people kind of approach that or to stop once they've gotten
kind of that awareness that I'm in the wrong state?
Yeah.
I mean, like I said, I think the first thing you got to do is identify that these states
are not productive.
So fight can be productive.
Flight and freeze are the big ones that are challenging.
They're both heavily dependent on cortisol.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, catabolic, bad for the body over time, going to create bad
physical states, going to create disease, decay.
It's good for short bursts.
It's like nitrous oxide in a car, but going to damage the engine over time.
You have to be able to realize and recognize and know that it's not good for you.
Performance-wise and physically, health-wise.
These states are kind of alluring, meaning like feeling sorry for ourselves and stuff like
that, and there are states we like to sometimes, unfortunately, we like to get into, there's
actually a resistance, a psychological resistance from the subconscious mind that will not want
you to counter the state and get out of it.
The way to first deal with this is be able to recognize the state's coming in.
And the best way to do that is develop a good open monitoring meditation practice to be able
to observe your thoughts, to witness your thoughts, to not be your thoughts, to be able to witness
your thoughts, if you can notice your thoughts, and you can go, oh, I'm having this thought
that's pulling me into a flight response, and from there, you can work on it.
But if you don't have the awareness to notice you're having the thought that's pulling you
into it, you're going to stay in it.
And when you get into it, cortisol cascades, and it's kind of like it's a process that sort
of fulfills itself.
It'll keep growing and growing.
You'll fill yourself up with cortisol, and you're not going to be, it's going to be very
hard to hack out of it.
So if you catch it early, then you can work your way out of it pretty easily.
And if you don't, you've got a chore ahead of you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you don't, then you've got a big grease set.
It's going to take a lot of time.
But I mean, it can be as simple as a reframe.
Reappraisal is what it's called in psychology, but it's like something bad happens.
Let's say you get pulled over, okay?
You see the cherries and berries in your rear view mirror, and you know, you got to get to
a meeting, and this is going to ruin your day, so to speak.
If you can just tell yourself when you see the flashing lights very quickly, best thing
could happen.
You say it with a little bit of passion.
And emotion is what kind of really gets the mind reprogrammed, creates neuroplasticity.
So you go, best thing that could have happened.
There's some reason for this.
I don't know what it is.
There's something I'm here to learn.
That's like the opposite of what we want to think, because that is not usually the best
thing that could have happened.
But those lights are going to turn in the spigot of cortisol on, and when you do that, you turn
it off.
And the police officer will come to the car.
You're going to be in good mood.
You'll be nice.
You'll probably get off with a warning rather than frustrating him and getting a ticket.
So I mean, you'll be in the most pleasant mood of anybody he pulled over that day, because
you won't be full of cortisol, because you knew how to hack out of that.
So if you catch it early, it can be as simple as that.
If you let it go on for a while, and we know that these events can affect our consciousness
for hours, days, sometimes weeks, can lead to depression.
So if you don't catch it, you don't work on it early, then it takes more and more tools
to kind of reset, and they can get more detailed, more thorough, more complex, more challenging
to pull off 40 minutes of breath work, so to speak, a full day off.
Yeah, well, that gets kind of to another question that I wanted to talk about, and that is that
one thing that can happen in the workplace on the way to burnout is negativity, which
this is really what we're talking about right now, getting into a negative state, having
negative thoughts, you get pulled over, you're going to have a negative mindset right off
the bat.
Yeah, it's going to be like neighborhoods of your mind.
The ruining of the day is started if you let it.
How would you recommend that we manage those negative thoughts in the workplace setting?
Negative thoughts are a byproduct of normally negative emotions, which is the byproduct
of a negative physiology.
So that's the first thing to come aware of.
We call it the performance chain.
You know, it's physiology at the bottom, then you have your emotions, then your feelings about
those emotions, and then your thoughts.
So they all work together.
So you went out drinking last night, and you're really hungover.
You're not going to be probably in a great neighborhood of your mind, or you're really sick.
You're going to be a bad neighborhood of your mind, and you're going to automatically
have negative thoughts.
I think a lot of people don't realize that our thoughts are automatic.
Ninety-five percent of our thoughts bubble up from the subconscious mind.
They are pre-installed programs, meaning they're things we learned in the past.
They're phrases our mom said, something like that.
And they just bubble up automatically, depending on where you are emotionally and physiologically.
So yeah, wake up on the wrong side of the bed.
You're in a bad neighborhood of the mind.
You're going to be more likely to have these negative thoughts.
So what do you do?
There's also kind of a nurture versus nature going on here that we really are products
of our environments.
You talked about things that you might have heard as a child.
Yeah, these are programs.
Up to the age of eight, you are being programmed.
We are in a brainwave called Theta, for the most part.
Theta is the hypnotic brainwave.
Most of our children are in it.
Anything you say to them is going to be downloaded into their brain like they thought it themselves,
and they will hear it echoing in their head for the rest of their life.
It's a neural network, and when the energy, electrochemical energy flows through it,
it pings the thought.
The thought is some words, and they hear it, and they think it's theirs, but it's really yours.
So for anybody who has kids, they're all in hypnosis up through eight.
Just know that everything you say, they're going to pare it back, and they're going to
think it's theirs.
Phobias and stuff are passed genetically.
It's called epigenetics.
There's an experiment where they took mice, and they fed them a type of cheese that had a
certain smell to it, and they would start shocking their feet when they ate the cheese.
And those generation of mice, their kids, kids, kids of three generations had the phobia
of that cheese.
Wow.
So we passed these things down genetically as well as through nurture.
We just went a little tangential.
We're going back to the original question.
We were talking about negativity, and then we're talking about shocking mice, but that's
a fascinating point, though.
But yeah, how it happened.
So I think the original question was, how do you hack your way out of negative thinking?
And the best thing to do is to impact your physiology and emotions to get yourself out
of the bad neighborhood of the brain.
That's why meditation is such an effective tool, is because meditation can reset your nervous
system.
That's why breath and breath work is such a great tool, because it can get you centered
again.
And from a good physiological state, where you're running the right neurotransmitters and hormones,
your automatic thinking, which is 95% of your thinking, will be in a better neighborhood,
and it's going to be more supportive.
It's going to be more what they call pro-social and neuroscience, adaptive thinking.
Negative thoughts just come from negative states.
You think you're thinking, but you're not.
Like 5% of your thoughts are like actual willpower.
95% are fate.
They're pre-installed programs.
They're just going off because of the emotional and physiological state you're in.
But in that 5%, I guess we're taking our understanding of the other 95% and literally working to
create something new.
I like to say that the mindset's like the ultimate free will.
Because 95% of our thoughts are pre-installed, we have a lot of fate going on.
Our fate is going to be the programs that are installed in our brains.
It's going to lead us to outcomes based on whatever that programming is, good or bad.
If you have great parents that programmed you well and great teachers, good, you're going
to automatically flow towards something positive.
If you didn't, which is most people, most people, 70% of their thoughts are disempowering or
limiting by nature.
70% of those 95%, so the majority, you are fated to flow down a path of those pre-installed
thoughts programs and you're going to probably not produce your optimal potential.
So if you can take that 5% and use it to reprogram and influence the 95%, now you have free will.
The subconscious is automatic.
It's not sentient.
The 5% is conscious, sentient.
The 95% is just programs.
Use that 5% to fix the 95% and then flow towards something better, which flow toward means make
better decisions, do better behaviors, don't sabotage yourself.
Interesting to think about the brain in that sense.
It is a big part of what drives our day-to-day.
So you've also talked about grit.
How do you define grit?
I think about the founders and CEOs, I don't think they fail.
I think they always quit internally and then they fail.
I'm a big believer in potential.
It's like one of my primary core values, possibility.
Grit is really dicking in it with a positive attitude or at least an optimistic attitude.
I think positivity gets overblown.
Optimism means if there's a will, there's a way.
I can find a way through this.
Resilience is very close to grit.
But I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
I mean, no matter how much training you have and mental performance, these journeys can
be really, really heroing and are really, really hard.
People quit.
That freeze response, that can turn into quitting.
Grit is powering through those instincts, those emotions.
There's a part of our brain called the habenula, just like a little, very little part of our
brain, but it can put a stranglehold on our dopamine reward system.
Dopamine's the molecule of motivation.
It's why we do these things.
Once we admit to ourselves we've failed, that habenula turns on, constrains the dopamine,
and creates a quit response.
They surmise it was installed to make sure that when we were hunting on the Sahara or
whatever, and we didn't get an animal that day, that we would go in at night, that we
would declare failure and go in at night instead of staying out and getting attacked by lions.
So it's there for a reason.
But anytime we declare that we've failed, it turns on, strangles the dopamine reward system,
takes our motivation away.
That's not a fun thing.
That's why iteration is so important.
The iterative mindset is the mindset that overcomes the habenula, which is part of Lean
Startup Model, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
What are some of the things that we can do to get to that point of having grit as you've
defined it?
Right now, I'm doing an essay for my master's in meditation, so I'm inclined to move toward
that more.
Non-judgment and non-reactivity are states that you're cultivating with open monitoring
meditation or no appraisal meditation, which is just the state of observing and noticing
things.
If you really want to have grit, you have to kind of be able to disconnect your identity
a little bit from the day-to-day events and be able to notice them without reacting to
them.
And that's what no appraisal meditation teaches.
You can actually see when you look at fMRIs, the prefrontal cortex, which is the self-reflexive
part of us that judges ourselves, starts to get somewhat disconnected from the parts of
our brain that are emotional and the observing parts of our brains, meaning it's a state of
equanimity.
To have grit, you have to have equanimity.
And the best way to get equanimity is to practice meditation for long periods of time.
And I'm talking like for the brain to rewire like that, that's 10,000-ish hours of meditation.
So it's not like you're...
That's the number that's typically quoted for learning any new skill.
It's about 10,000 hours.
Exactly.
Yeah, for mastery.
So it's like 10.
I've looked at monks that have meditated for 40,000 hours, and it gets more and more like
that.
And so if you can manage not to get yourself personally involved in this stuff, you're going
to do better.
I think Michael Singer is a good example of that.
Michael Singer has created a unicorn, was one of the first insure tech-type companies,
and he was a great meditation practitioner who studied under Yogananda, who was one of the
guys who brought meditation to the West.
He practiced no appraisal meditation, and he learned to just not react so personally to
these things, which gave him more mind space to work on the problems of his company rather
than always think about how it affects him.
Grit is equanimity.
Equanimity, best gain through meditation, but can be assisted with many tools.
And what are some of those other tools that could be used to help get to that?
Going back to those quadrants, we want to kind of avoid flight and freeze.
The thing that brings us into flight and freeze normally is tightening the body and stopping
breathing.
We go from smooth rhythmic breathing to erratic breathing, and normally little, they're called
glottal holds, little breath holds.
When something happens negative that you perceive as negative, or even in your mind, you're perceiving
something in the future, if you can make sure not to stop breathing, not to breathe erratic,
to breathe smoothly through that, you're going to avoid going into a reactive state.
Therefore, you're going to have more grit.
It does go back to managing these states.
Managing your emotions, managing your physiology, managing your feelings, managing your thoughts
can allow you to kind of stabilize there.
The reason I brought up meditation is the nice thing about meditation, it becomes automatic.
When you put the 10,000 hours in the meditation, the 50 tools, you might use them a little bit,
but they're not going to be as required.
When you don't have that kind of brain connectivity, then you have to become very good at the tools.
It's kind of like step one is learn the tools while you're meditating and developing
more of a natural state of equanimity or non-judgment.
Another tool, visualization, is one of my favorite.
Like we said, that perceived stress is going to knock us out of flow state.
Visualization is a great way to wire your mind that a positive outcome will happen in
the future.
Let's say you're trying to build and sell your company for $100 million.
You can visualize selling your company for $100 million.
You can really get into that visualization and what you're doing is you're programming
the subconscious mind, that 95%, to believe that you're going to sell it because that
95%, that subconscious, actually can't tell the difference very well between what is well
imagined and what's really happening.
When you visualize selling your company, it's going to go, all those limiting beliefs that
are going to try and put you into, make you quit, put you into a bad state, it's going
to basically reprogram those.
Oh, I thought Kevin sucked and he wasn't going to be able to do this and the market
was going to blow up on him or AI was going to, whatever, disruption, blah, blah, blah.
It's going to go, oh, we sold the company.
Oh, it did work out.
Okay.
Our fears aren't so founded.
Like it kind of shreds over your limiting beliefs and fears.
So that's a great tool to give you increased grit and resilience, confidence, which can be
done with visualization.
Excellent.
So tell me a little bit about what DreamFuel does, because this is now your third venture
here and it's one that you've put a lot of effort and thought into.
What do you guys do to help people out?
The very best mental performance coaches are in professional athletics.
People like Tim Grover, he was a coach of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant.
Some of these coaches, these performance coaches are like celebrities.
In the world of entrepreneurship, you're lucky if you can find maybe a therapist who has a
scant understanding of entrepreneurship.
My co-founder and I are trying to deliver a equal level of competency for founders.
So we're trying to create the same industry in the world of entrepreneurship and startups,
same quality as a professional athlete would get.
There's just, it's hard to find coaches like that in our space.
So we're bringing them over and building them.
Yeah.
So you're working with people who already know how to do that level of coaching and then
kind of teaching the rest of the, how a business is run.
And that could, I guess, apply to a lot of different types of people inside of a business
because it's, yeah, the founders got probably the most writing on them, but then there are
definitely people in the C-level suite and leaders within the organizations that find a
lot of the same challenges.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
We work with executives, sales teams, I think the thing to recognize is mental health is
a big spectrum and you've got clinical, which is from like, you know, not very mentally
healthy to clinically not healthy at all.
And that's the downside.
And most therapists and people work on the downside.
You know, a person has major depressive disorder or anxiety or something like that, but that's
half the spectrum.
The other side of the spectrum from, let's say, being not unhealthy.
So you're not overweight or something physically, you know, you're not, but you're not in great
shape from that point up to being incredibly mentally fit.
You know, that's the, that's the high side of the spectrum.
That's what we work on at that top level of mental health.
What you're capable of is well beyond what you're doing right now.
And the increase in performance is notable.
That's why every professional sports team has these people on staff is they know it's the
difference between winning and losing games.
But it's also the difference between winning and losing your fundraise, the difference between
growth of your company and stagnation.
The executives and founders and performers need to be at the very top elite mental health
they can be at.
And that's what a mental performance coach works on.
They work on the mental side of performance, not the mental side of feeling okay.
That's great.
You got to kind of be there to get here.
But yeah, so that's, that's what we were kind of that upside of mental health.
Yeah.
And where would people go if they want to find out more about DreamFuel?
Yeah.
DreamFuel.com is our website.
And then I am available on LinkedIn.
I just search for Kevin Bailey for his content and release it on there.
We have a podcast called The DreamFuel Show that we do sometimes.
Oh, very nice.
Yeah.
One final question to help our audience get to know you a little bit better.
What hobby do you think would be a lot of fun to get into?
That I haven't done?
Yeah.
Preferably what you haven't done.
Maybe like improv comedy or acting.
Oh, that would be fun.
Yeah.
That could be cool.
So Kevin Bailey appearing at the Improv Comedy Hour soon.
There we go.
Find me at a local comedy club soon.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for coming on Productly Speaking, Kevin.
We've been glad to have you here.
Yeah, no, I really appreciate you having me on and appreciate those listening.
I hope that you took something away from it.
Sorry if I went on a little bit, but I'm very passionate about this stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much.
Kevin knows pressure, and he knows performance.
He's been a co-founder of three high-growth startups, and has made Inc. 500's list of the fastest growing companies in the country three times.
During these challenging experiences "in the trenches" Kevin decided to get his masters in neuroscience, and develop mindset programs for teams and individuals at high-growth companies. The same programs he teaches at Dreamfuel today.
To date, Kevin has coached over 1000 leaders, salespeople, and other high achievers on how to cultivate and maintain a high-performance mindset.