Transcript

Joe Mills: What shared experiences motivate today’s business leaders to keep growing, and how have their unique stories impacted the way they enable others to do the same? I’m Joe Mills. And I’m Reed Morris, and we’re investigating what and who it takes to build companies that foster growth in people and business.

Then we’re sharing those stories with you. This is 1,000 Stories, an original show from Element Three. Okay. Kevin Bailey.

Reid Morris: Kevin Bailey. Tell me a little bit more about Kevin. Give some context for the audience.

Joe Mills: Yeah, sure. So Kevin’s a serial entrepreneur at this point. You can say he’s launched multiple businesses.

He actually, at one point had a top 50 fastest growing company in the country when Slingshot SEO was just taking off. He and his co-founders were riding that wave really big and that we’ve crashed, and that’s a big pivotal point in Kevin’s. That we’re gonna unpack because it really leads to where he is at now, where he’s the founder and one of the coaches at Dreamfuel, which is a mindset performance coaching company that really helps you harness your mindset to perform better into the future and to realize your dreams.

One of the very cool things that they have in their mission is to realize 100,000 dreams. And it’s so interesting the way that we talk about our thousand stories of growth. They talk about impacting a hundred thousand dreams. That was like a really cool parallel when that was coming together.

Reid Morris: Okay. And obviously for anybody who’s listened to the podcast before, they would be very familiar with this idea of intuition Yeah.

And mindset that we’ve talked about. If this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. We talk a lot about intuition and mindset. Yep. So, Imagine, you know, that’s the connection here where Kevin seems like a really natural fit for us to dive a lot deeper as someone who’s really a subject matter expert in that arena of this thread that we’ve sort of followed through our other conversations.

Joe Mills: Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, and the thing that’s most cool is we didn’t know what thread we were going to find. Mm-hmm. , it kept coming up in conversation, right? Everybody kept talking about this. Oh yeah, it just felt right. It was clear to me that I needed to go that direction. I found it by looking into myself.

Some people got there through like spirituality. John mentioned. My wife and I looked at each other and we were like, It’s time to move. After going to church one day, when they always go to church, it’s a big part of their life. They get there through spirituality as part of their way. Other people don’t mention anything about it.

You know, Lindsay Picardo left. And left religion, she still finds intuition. So it’s just interesting to see how that thread kept pulling. And Kevin is genuinely an expert on how to harness that and how to get in touch with it because so many people don’t know how to trust their gut or that they should mm-hmm.

Cause it can feel really new ag sort of like hippie-ish. Oh yeah. I’m trusting my. And frankly, in a highly logical society of Western Society’s very logical, rational by nature is the way that we like to present things. Everything’s asked for. Back it up by data, back it up by why you made that decision.

Show me the logic behind it. You oftentimes cannot, and that by default makes us uncomfortable with our gut. And this is the crazy part. The bigger the decision, the more uncomfortable we get with our gut. But science has actually shown that your gut knows. Like subconsciously that you can’t put your finger on and it’s exceptionally accurate.

So the bigger the decision, the more accurate it becomes and the harder it is to listen to it. So unpacking all of that and like how do we get better at it? How do we get better at knowing when it’s a gut feeling that we should pay attention to is a lot of what I wanna unpack with Kevin. Yeah. And I feel like so

Reid Morris: far on the podcast, we’ve talked to people who are very in touch with their gut and.

Have enough experience to know how to use it, whereas there’s this massive group of people in the world, myself included, who like same, have these gut feelings but don’t quite know what to trust, what not to trust and sort of the nuance that’s required to like, cuz obviously like there’s a going with your gut with no consideration for anything else in the reckless approach versus the like very intentional, thoughtful mindset.

That sort of path of trusting your gut that. Requires coaching. That is why a business like that exists, and I think that is something that could be a very useful tool for people who maybe are not quite as far along in their journey of like understanding how to leverage that intuition that they have.

Joe Mills: So yeah, I’m pumped for the conversation. That be great. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. So Kevin, thanks for coming on. Yeah, my pleasure. Really excited for this one. You have. Very interesting and winding road to where you’re at now. Could you just give like the 30,000 foot view of how you got to where you’re at today and like your quick background?

Yeah,

Kevin Bailey: sure. I just turned 40. It’s hard to believe. I still feel pretty young, but you know, I think that’s pretty young. Yeah, I mean, I, I guess, you know, you hit 40, you start to feel like you’re like looking at a different side of your life. But yeah, so I started meditating when I was in college, so I, so like 20 years ago and I started to really enjoy that of all things.

I got my degrees and like market finance. I kind of wanted to be an investment banker and I went into management consulting outta college, strategic IP stuff, intellectual, proper. And then I kind of started to, and this is no disparagement on the industry, but I just started to see that the partners were making a lot of money at that company, but it didn’t quite seem like I wanted to be them

I couldn’t get my vision around that. Mm-hmm. . So I chosen my own to leave that company after two years and I kind of set my boat. A drift. And I ended up bumping into some of my high school friends, Jeremy, Darren Orators, and we used to do website construction and search engine optimization and marketing when we were in high school.

Made some money that way. And we decided to launch a startup called Slingshot, which is a technology enabled services business. You know, we were just, Pretty much straight outta college. Super ambitious, super like excited, and we ended up having a pretty good growth trajectory for a while. Actually. We’re the fastest grown company in the state of Indiana in 2011, and I was the CEO of that company.

We were over a hundred employees at that point. It happened kind of overnight. And I remember that was the point when I had my first child, which was a little bit unexpected. Just something about the pressure of being like 27, having a hundred employees, having my first kid. And I knew nothing about mindset at that point while I meditated a little bit and my mindset kind of tanked.

I didn’t really know it at the time. It took me running into a neuropsychologist friend and. She kind of woke me up to what was going on, and then I met a true meditation coach. His name was Rich, Neat. He was a former fighter pilot in Vietnam and had cured PTSD with meditation, and they both kind of took me under their wing and sort of taught me all their tools together.

So I got to learn from Rich, the awareness side of the puzzle, and I gotta learn from Diane, the neuroscience side of the puzzle, and sort of resurrected me as a leader. At that point, we were having some trouble in the business partially. I, my partners were starting to hit a little bit burnout, all of us.

And you know, I kind of had to go in and resurrect our sales team at that point and I ended up setting a big sales record. I think I sold close to $2 million that year to some very large brands like Intel and I using the tools and I was starting to get back into my leadership by using the tools I was being taught by Diane and Rich.

And then some of my friends in the technology community, other CEO. Tech companies were like, Hey dude, like what happened to you? Mm-hmm. like you were really in a weird place and all of a sudden you’re in a great place and you know what happened? And I just told ’em, you know, just honestly Openheartedly, I was like, Hey, you know, I met these two people and they really taught me some practical tools to kind of get my mental performance back under control.

And I’ve really evolved a lot. And they’re like, Could you do that for me? So I started to kind of work with a few entrepreneurs and then they’re like, Could you do it for our sales team? Cuz it seems to really help with sales. And I went ahead and did with some sales teams. After kind of doing that for fun for a little while, I went and worked with Matt Hunkler to turn verge into Powderkeg.

We kind of co-founded Powderkeg together, and then some of those companies that I was kind of having fun coaching with before were like, Hey, You’re really good at this. We’d love to have you do this with our teams. We need you back. Name your price. And then I kind of had a decision point of mm-hmm.

whether I wanted to make what now, call Dreamfuel something real. And I decided to trust my gut and do it. And it’s just been a blast ever

Joe Mills: since. I mean, and I will say it’s been a blessing to those of us who have been able to partake. And the thing you were doing is, Wonderful. I want to back up real quick cuz this is an observation from watching you.

So those who are just listening won’t have seen it. They might have heard it though. When you describe your slingshot days, you actually had a smile on the entire time you were talking about it, and I think that’s interesting because a lot of people would look back. And you went through some challenging moments with that business.

How do you look back on it? What’s your mindset around that?

Kevin Bailey: Yeah. First of two, really important car vocational heroes journeys. That one was my preparation. This one is the one I’ll take all the way home. But it was a blast, you know, worked to work with so many great people. Got to learn how to be a ceo.

Got to learn how to cultivate talent, got to learn mindset, got to learn a bunch of money, you know, and have some amazing things. We almost sold the company for $60 million, which would’ve made me $20 million before I was 30. That was a big part of that hero’s journey. The image

Joe Mills: that pops into my head is, you know, you’re the guy sitting at the bar talking about what should have been, I should have made 20 million before 30 off of this sale, and then all this stuff happened and this person failed, and that person failed.

Or even with the person you are now, or you identify that experience as the preparatory heroes journey for the one that you’re on now. When did that switch happen? Like. Did you go through that phase of like blame and pushing it out or did you like immediately internalize that and be like, I’m gonna grow from this.

This is gonna be a

Kevin Bailey: positive? I mean, it was obviously tough cuz I already kind of footnoted how I was gonna spend all that money and you know, I’d already kind of, I was like, oh, be a professor at iu and I had all these plans but I started to realize it was preparation during, It was actually funny enough during Sandler sales training.

Cause I was like, I didn. Really want to go sell for my company. I was already starting to realize that my purpose was neuroscience, mental performance training, and I was already starting to look at master’s programs and all that kind of stuff, but I had to go sell this product that I wasn’t that passionate about and I started to, I remember talking to my sales trainer and Tim Roberts really good dude.

I was like, I think I’m being prepared for something. I don’t think this is about me selling for my. Like, I think this is about me learning sales for something else and we kind of laughed about it. Again, intuition, I knew, I knew it wasn’t about my company at the time. I was, I was learning sales at that level for something else.

So

Joe Mills: these like trigger points where change happens and where growth happens, or areas that I find really interesting, particularly trying to unpack like the motivation around them. So as Slingshot was ending for you and you were looking out. You’re like, What am I gonna do with my life at this point?

Mm-hmm. , it sounds like you already had identified that neuroscience was gonna be the next focus.

Kevin Bailey: I mean, yeah, it was funny. Like I said, we got a very minimal exit on that company. I mean, we got to basically sell our assets to a buyer, and I chose to do that. Instead of leading the company, and I was working for Green Light at the time as a consultant, and I remember walking with David down the hallway and I said, Do you wanna know how committed I am to what we’re doing?

I’m going to basically tell me at that point, that was Smarty Muse, who’s our CEO at the time, and I was like, I’m just, I’m just gonna tell him I’m not doing this anymore and I know it’ll probably be then end at the company. At least to us being like, you know, something of a growing concern. Yeah. You know, we’ll salvage what we can from it.

And I remember just like being like, I got this little consulting gig that I’m really excited about. I knew I could go in and stabilize the company at that point and turn it into something decent. Like I knew I had the ability to do it, I just didn’t have the passion. So I remember like choosing again, I was walking down the hallway, David Duran, the ceo, Greenlight, and I was like, Hey dude, I’m thinking about doing this.

Like I could go and I could probably, I mean, I know how to sell and I remember I just stopped selling. That was the first step I moved and then I just decided once I started to see that the company couldn’t really sustain itself very well without me selling. I had to make the decision of whether I go step back in as CEO with a team that was ready and like really them back to their former glory or something, or just let go, and I just was like, I’m letting go, even if it means millions of dollars to me.

Was that

Joe Mills: largely passion driven? That decision sounded like you were saying. I knew it wasn’t where my future was from like a passion standpoint, It

was

Kevin Bailey: definitely a decision of passion over money. Okay. Because at that point I knew how to sell our services really well and I had to stop doing that cuz I was not passionate about it.

With

Joe Mills: Slingshot. You like wrote the story before you lived it. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: Physically wrote the story. I didn’t finish it though, right? did keep writing it. I never wrote the end. That’s what I was gonna ask. Prologue you didn’t right at the end. Yeah. So for what Joe’s referencing is, so visualization’s a big technique that we use and Dreamfuel, and sometimes you can do it through writing instead of closed eyes.

Visualization, just a certain form of visualization. And I had written the story of Slingshot, which was miraculous in the way it was written, but I never put an ending on it. We live in duality. , sometimes you’re holding paradoxes. Do I know or I wanna be in five years? Yeah. Am I open to forks in the road?

Certainly, you know, it’s, hold on loosely. It becomes more and more clear by the day where I wanna be five years from now. Mm-hmm. , I just put down a three year visualization, but I haven’t gone out much further than that at this point.

Joe Mills: The duality point is really well taken. It’s like being comfortable in the unknown.

Because you really can’t control it. It’s co-creation. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: Can you break that? What does that mean? So, okay, you have two mindsets. You have the creator mentality, the victim mentality. We talk about that abundance scarcity, Two sides of a coin. It’s much better to be in the creator mindset as far as if you’re trying to be an entrepreneur for sure.

But for most things, and you as a creator, you realize you. Big ability to impact the environment. And some people, you know, some great entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs, take that to the utmost of extremes where they have a massive impact on the environment, but the environment also has an impact on us. And you’re constantly in a dance with the environment, you know, co-creating with the environment.

Now you can also say that environment includes higher power, things like that source. Um, but at a very practical level, you can just understand that you’re creating with your environment and big environmental shifts and that you’re dancing with it and as strong of a creator as you are. And again, the more power that you cultivate, you can lean into the environment a little

Joe Mills: bit more.

You mentioned, I’m doing this one on intuition. What’s that look like? I guess when I ask that question, what I mean is how are you practically living it or building this one through? Intuition.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah. Deep meditation, lots of listening every day. I meditate a lot. Way more than I used to because Dreamfuel is my dream.

Like this is everything I’ve ever wanted. I love it. Like I love this industry. It is my favorite. I love coaching. I love building technology in this space. I love seeing the lives of changes. I love how , it’s even hypocritical for me to have a company that’s out of alignment with work life balance. I love that.

It’s just set up perfectly and I also. I love my family. I love where I’m at. I love everything about what I’m doing right now, and I love the future that I see. So everything to me at this point with this company is align. And therefore, I wanna make sure that I’m building what the environment needs right now.

And I also wanna make sure that my ego doesn’t come in and cause me not to listen and not to pay attention.

Joe Mills: Let’s dig on that a little bit. Obviously there’s different levels of ego for different kinds of people that I do find. My own experience says a lot of highly ambitious people typically have high ego as well.

Mm-hmm. sort of feeding that

Kevin Bailey: beast. You gotta have some, It’s just, Yeah. Does it shut your ears off? So humility becomes a practice. How does one

train

Joe Mills: that humility? Like, Like, okay, because I, I can have an imagination where I can imagine this scenario. I can’t put my finger on when it’s happened to me, but I know it’s happened before where something’s telling me like, you are about to do the wrong thing, but my ego wants everybody to see me do that thing.

And so even though I, my deep level, I’m like, this is probably wrong, but like, I want the recognition for doing that. Oh. And then I do it. It’s a big one.

Kevin Bailey: Almost always. It’s a big one. Yeah. I mean, we want that. We wanna be validated by our peers and stuff like that. And again, that’s why I’m building this on intuition, being vulnerable.

We were the Cinderella story of Indianapolis in 2011. Everybody wanted to invest in us, Everybody wanted to work at our company. And I was the 28, 29 year old CEO who was doing. And I loved it. I loved what they did for my ego. I loved the recognition, you know, And then when we went through those struggles, it was a huge hit to my ego.

And that was the hardest part of the whole thing. Those conversations with all the people in the community. Oh, what happened to Slingshot? Oh yeah. You know, went through these problems, had a kid, blah, blah, blah. It really hurt my ego, you know? So there’s this part of me that’s pretty fiery that’s like, mm-hmm.

Oh, I’m dream view is gonna be, Every, you know, thing, Slingshot never ended up becoming, and it’s gonna be this jugg or nod. There’s a part of me that wants to like do that, to be like, Look at me. I did it. And then there’s a big part of me that says, Be careful. This is your dream. It’s delicate, It’s a child.

You want to have work life balance. You want to build something that’s amazing for your team and you, There were a lot of mistakes you made at Slingshot. Be mindful, be humble. And at the end of the day, who cares what they. , you’re building your dream right now. Don’t let your ego cause you to trap yourself.

And I get that mentorship. I have some great people who run unicorns that mentor me and they’re like, Watch it. And some of them have put themselves in some pretty rough positions, building companies that are looked at as amazing. Mm-hmm. that, Check me on that. The slingshot thing gave me humility more than anything, and I don’t wanna lose.

And I wanna build something that’s not just a great company, not just something that makes a bunch of money, but something that truly enriches my life the way that I want. It truly enriches our team the way that we want.

Joe Mills: So tactically speaking, let’s say I’m somebody who really wants to get more in touch with my intuition, or even, let’s take a step further.

Like I’m just being introduced to the concept of being in touch with my intuition. Like, where do you start?

Kevin Bailey: Well, first you gotta understand what’s your intuition and what’s not. So instinctual reactions aren’t intuition. That’s instinct. It’s different. So if all of a sudden, I don’t know, you hear gunshots out your window and you hit the floor, that’s instinct.

You sense that there’s a predator around you and you’re walking the forest a bear. That’s whatever you do. There is instinct, you know, fight, flight, freeze, focus, different states, the nervous system. If you’re in one of the negative states, you got the four states you got. Flight, freeze, and then what we call focus, which is also called rest and digest.

The four states, the auto autonom nervous system. If you’re in flight, which is run away from an attacking predator, you’re in freeze, which is play dead. Either of those two states, your intuition is not on, you can’t hear it. You’ll hear instinct, but often instinct is only gonna back up the state you’re in.

So if you’re in flight, It’s gonna do everything it can to get you to run away. If you’re in freeze, it’s gonna do everything it can to get you to play dead, basically hijacking your intelligence and stuff like that. So if you’re in either one of those states and your brain, call it neighborhoods of the brain, if you’re in one of those bad neighborhoods, your brain’s going to just chatter at you.

Anything will get you to run away or play dead. And if you’re in any of those states, Do not trust what your brain is telling you. It’s kinda like having the devil on your shoulder. It’s not gonna steer you right. In order to hear you intuition, the deeper faculties of your mind, you have to know how to get yourself into a parasympathetic, decent state of consciousness.

And then at that point you can start to. Receive often messages from the body, but you can hear it. Some people, you know, you can hear things, see things. Again, visions in your brain as well as most people, somatic responses. It’s very well studied in academia. This is not woo woo, like, Yeah, yeah. There’s like thousands of studies.

It

Joe Mills: starts to sound that way though, right? Like it does when you’re like, you’re gonna hear it and feel it. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: People like, that’s not true. That’s, that’s just where we’re at in science right now. Like a lot of things that are considered mystical right now is just science of the future, like, They’re proving it right now.

Somatic responses go into the genome, so you have epigenetics, so fears that are inside of you get passed on genetically. They did an experiment where they took mice, they fed them this cherry blossom smelling cheese, very unique smelling cheese, and the mice ate it. For a while, and then they started shocking their feet when they would eat it, a little shock to the foot, then they became traumatized to the cheese.

They wouldn’t need it anymore. And then that fear, so then they use artificial insemination to make three future generations of mice. Every generation had the phobia of that cheese and they never met, so they, they never introduced the two, the generations. They just carried that so epigenetically, they pass that fear of that specific cheese.

So how many fears do you have that pass on from your ancestors? Now that stuff is not understood by the conscious mind, but the subconscious mind, which controls 95% of your thoughts, all the ways you feel behaviors, emotions has that level of knowledge. Subconscious mind is also incredibly faster than the conscious mind.

So the subconscious mind works at a speed of like, think. Broadband internet conscious mind. Think of it like 56 k aol dialup, Internet real slow. It’s also more observant. Subconscious mind can look at thousands and thousands, actually millions of variables internally and externally. Conscious mind can maybe hold a hundred ish variables that you’re observing in your environment internally and externally.

Subconscious mind brings important things to the conscious mind, like if it’s getting too cold and maybe your survival’s getting compromised and the subconscious mind will rise that information up so you’re like, Oh, it’s cold. But you weren’t paying attention to the temperature the entire time Subconscious mind was mm, observing that variable the whole time.

So when you tap into your intuition, you’re tapping into a more powerful part of your being than your conscious mind. As much as you might think, your logical mind is powerful and intelligent, subconscious mind. Is exponentially more powerful. And the only way you can get into it is by getting very quiet, deep meditative states and listening.

You know, the realm of theta brainwaves, alpha brainwaves is where you really will start to understand your intuition. And the intuition, like I said, mostly speaks somatically through the body. So you could ask your intuition a question like, you know, Should I found this company? And if your body starts to feel a little bit lighter, a little bit looser, starts to relax a little bit, that’s like a yes.

If the body starts to tighten up, that’s an indication that maybe there’ll be. Problems. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t found the company though. Mm-hmm. . So you might ask a follow up question. Could be, am I going to experience lots of struggle at this company? And then maybe at that point the body starts to loosen enough.

That’s a yes. Okay. Okay. Will it make me a stronger person, you know, body, You can continue to ask questions. But normally what I do is yes and no. And I look at somatic response in the body opening versus contraction, loosening versus tightening.

Joe Mills: Um, that’s really interesting. I love that framework. Cause I’m even, as you’re saying, I’m going back through like major decision points and I’m like, Oh yeah,

Kevin Bailey: I was feeling that.

Yeah, we, and you do this. Most stuff that we teach is like how to practically use these tools. But you do it all. We visualize constantly. Most of us visualize negative outcomes and we create these quote, self-fulfilling prophecies. Most of us use our intuition all the time, but sometimes we confuse it for instinct.

If you’re in a flight response, you may think you’re following your intuition, but what it’s gonna tell you to do is do something that sabotages whatever you’re doing, cuz it’s trying to get you out of it. So you’re like, Oh, I’m trying to help my company grow and I’m in the flight response, Cortisol and adrenaline.

Fueled by that and oh, I got this brilliant idea to like fire soandso and hire Soandso. And it’s like you did in the flight response. Good luck. Like you are trying to self sabotage. Even though you think your conscious mind’s trying to win, your subconscious mind is sabotaging you. So when you find

Joe Mills: yourself in flight, how do you get out of it?

Okay. Let’s say that you’ve actually developed the awareness to be able to point, Oh, I’m in that state. And that’s so

Kevin Bailey: critical. You have to become aware of it. It takes, it’s hard. That’s why we teach. We teach something called the ACT framework, which is awareness. Choose transition. It is hard. It is. Cause when you’re in flight, the last thing your being wants is for you to recognize it and hack out of it.

The subconscious thinks it’s gonna get kill. Yeah, so it’s think survival’s on the line. So it’s gonna do everything it can. And once you kind of hack it and like, Oh, I’m in flight. And it’s gonna be like, You don’t wanna do that exercise. You don’t wanna take five minutes to breathe, you know, get pissed. Do that thing you need out of this.

You know? Lean into your emotional response. Yeah, lean into your

Joe Mills: emotions. So you figured it out. You’re at the point where you can actually be aware. And then what was the C?

Kevin Bailey: Choose You. Choose now. Become aware, I’m in flight. I’d like to be energized. So you choose then to shift into energize, which is a form of fight, which is just an emotion within fight.

Mm-hmm. . And then you have to have a tool to transition you into it. Is that where you had like a whim off? I’ll give you an example. Okay. I was in flight response like a few. Quarters ago it was gonna be pitched to a very large private equity to basically coach their partners. And I was just, so many things going on and I didn’t have time to prepare and like I could feel physiologically like I was short circuiting.

I was like, yeah, these people are really powerful and you know, they could be a huge win and you’re not ready. But I’m like, I know this stuff. I could do this in my sleep and these people are gonna eat this up. Like they got recommended from one of their portfolio companies and then my wife came up. I was trying to get myself in a better state of mind.

I was trying to transition. My wife came up and. I don’t know. She was talking about something that happened with my daughter. It was kind of a fire drill, and I’m like, I, I got 10 minutes to get ready for this meeting. It’s big. Ashley, like, I’m in a bad state. I’ll talk to you about it afterward. Is that cool?

She’s like, Yeah. And so I got 10 minutes to go from pretty deep flight into a good state of mind, so I used every hack I could. In that moment, I decided I would eat a cold. Totally short circuit the physiology with, I call it mental reset breathing, just a deep breathing pattern. And then as the water’s cold, you hit that point where you turn it warm.

So I lined that up, my physiology, I turn it to warm, and as I turn it to warm, I started to visualize the end of that meeting being amazing, like pretty much verbal high fives, like let’s go. And I did a deep visualization in that warm water as my physiology shifted from flight, in that case to an energized.

State of fight felt fantastic in that 10 minutes. Went out, crushed the meeting. So flight is cortisol and adrenaline. Mm-hmm. different than nor adrenaline. So flight, cortisol, adrenaline, stress hormone, adrenaline’s, kinda like painful energy. Super energizing, but kind of painful. Yeah. It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel good.

No. No. Adrenaline’s like the cousin of adrenaline. It’s more of a euphoric energy. And then dopamine is obviously the motivation molecule. So when I did that visualization, the subconscious mind. By the way, can’t tell the difference between what is real and what you imagine. Well, so I’m pretty good at this at this point.

So I visualize that positive meeting. All of a sudden my subconscious mind goes, Oh, he won the meeting. Cool. Starts running a bunch of dopamine for the win, for the motivation. Start to get that chain reaction of good feelings. And then the nice thing is a dopamine is the precursor to no adrenaline. That euphoric energy.

So the dopamine starts getting converted into nor adrenaline. All of a sudden, I got all this energy, this go power. It’s like, let’s effing go. That’s the feeling I’m going for. And that comes from dopamine and neuro adrenaline. Two keys in fight. That’s why you gotta give your team small wins along the way and they get a small win.

Celebrate the small win. They pull some dopamine, gives ’em more motivation. That motivation gets turned into our adrenaline. They get more energy. Let’s.

Joe Mills: I’ll present this as like a problem I run into. And I’m curious what your perspective would be that the bigger the decision point, the harder time I have trust in my intuition.

Do you see that with other people and is that like common?

Kevin Bailey: Sure. I mean, as a pressure goes up, it’s gonna push you into flight a lot more. What we do is coach people in high pressure situations. How do you perform your best in our high pressure? That’s why mindset stuff and neuroscience is most in professional sports, where the pressure’s super high.

We’re just bringing into business pressure’s. No smaller on, you know, executives and sales leaders and stuff, AEs out in the field trying to hit a quarter, super high pressure. But yeah, as the pressure gets higher, it does get more challenging. Mm-hmm. . So

Joe Mills: if I were somebody who’s wanting to guide this intuition, I need to learn how to identify when I’m in flight, I need to also create a practice of getting into a relax and digest nervous system, and then listening to my body.

Yeah. Asking it sounds like simple.

Kevin Bailey: Intuition was studied a lot in the military. There’s certain people, intuitive soldiers who are able to identify IEDs ahead. Interesting. Um, in combat, and they were studied a lot and they looked at it, they’re like, intuition’s a skill. You know, people are able to tap and obviously have like the savan and stuff, but you can train it.

And eventually you’re not asking yes, no questions. You learn to quickly identify if you’re in flight. If you are, then you know, like you gotta shift tapping your intuition is something moment to moment. Great executives like Tim Cook did a great thing on intuition. He’s a big practitioner and he talked about it.

It’s a CEO of Apple. He talked about intuition at some university and he talked about high. Yeah, he’d left Compact to go to Apple and he was a CEO Compact. Compact was the king at that point. And he intuitively felt that he had to go to Apple. He felt he had something to do there and everybody, all his mentors like, No, no, no, no, no.

What do you do? And you idiot. And he had to like hold onto his intuition there and ended up being obviously a really, really good

Joe Mills: decision. Well, even now, I can imagine stepping in after Steve. Yeah, That’s got some crazy pressure behind it. Yeah. He

Kevin Bailey: said everybody thought he was an, he said, everybody told me he was an idiot, but he had to, He said, Go west young man.

Like he had this pull, you know? And that was his intuition. He talks a lot about it and same kind of stuff, you know, you gotta get yourself in a deep state, Listen. Very cool.

Joe Mills: Well, I appreciate you sharing the skills with us. Like we’ve heard that over and over and over again. Yeah. You gotta

Kevin Bailey: practice it.

It’s funny, you gotta practice everything. That’s what mindset’s all about is even like when you’re in a relationship, you’re continually practicing learning how to love deeper, you know, learning how to let go more. You gotta practice all of this stuff. And I think every great yogi will say the same. Some of what we do is mindfulness is taking these great practices from, you know, long traditions, lineages, where there was no neuroscience.

Then learning the neuroscience and being like, Well, here’s the evidence. But it’s like, you gotta practice this stuff. Mm-hmm. , everything in your brain is a neural network. You know, every memory you have, every habit you have, they’re all neural networks. You can strengthen them, you can weaken them, you can strengthen the serotonin based networks in your.

they’ve been weakening since you were a child. You can weaken the dopamine networks. You can, and ultimately for somebody who’s working in their purpose in fulfillment, they have a good balance between serotonin and dopamine. Great. Neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman and they talk about that. It’s like the ticket to winning the marathon of life.

You know, you wanna win the marathon, you gotta really have a balance between dopamine and serotonin. Mm-hmm. . Um, which means for most of us high achievers, we gotta spend more time learning how to cultivate serotonin than dopamine. Cuz the dopamine stuff’s already there. And dopamine unquenchable. If you wanna understand the ultimate, the hedonic treadmill.

Look at a crack addict. Let’s say. It is a, It’s a, The addiction. Yeah, it is. Never quench. So the fact that whatever, like 50 people own, the vast majority of the world’s wealth is the hedonic treadmill. There’s never enough. You can never be rich enough, You can never be powerful enough. That’s all dopamine.

A lot of those people are suffering. You can be people that are billionaires who are suffering greatly. It’s because they’re addicted to dopamine and they dump no balance. So you gotta bring the serotonin stuff in if you wanna be a happy high achiever. . Yeah. Otherwise, Every night you go to bed and craving, which we’ve talked about plenty.

Yeah. You know, you go to bed and you’re like, What’s the one thing I did wrong today? I can’t believe I did that. And you won Totally. But you’re like stuck on the one thing you did wrong. Yeah, because dopamine is unquenchable and the more you get, the less reactive you get to it. So every hit has to be bigger and it never stops.

Joe Mills: And there’s a lot to build on. There’s a lot to build on here.

Kevin Bailey: The journey of self-actualization is never ending. It’s the

Joe Mills: best part. Well, thanks man. Thank you so much for coming on. Sure. It’s awesome conversation

Kevin Bailey: like always. Always, man.

Reid Morris: All right Joe, so really interesting conversation with Kevin Bailey.

Joe Mills: Yeah, I mean, I love talking to Kevin. We could have gone for at least another hour just diving into. The various ways to manipulate your brain chemistry and how that impacts your mindset and all these different techniques and tools and lessons that he gives. I just, I love the conversation. So what do you see

Reid Morris: as, as the main takeaway?

I mean, there was a lot to dive into. Mm-hmm. from, you know, we talk about like dopamine and serotonin. We talk about how you think about your past experiences and the positive negative, but like what do you see as sort of the thread that we pulled throughout that

Joe Mills: conversation? Yeah. Well, when we walked into it, one of the reasons we invited Kevin on had to do with how many people had mentioned their intuition and their.

And we went into that and he gave us some really awesome tactical advice on how to start training your intuition with simple yes no questions and how it’s a feeling, not a thought. Like that’s the big difference, right? The gut is a feeling that it gives you not, Oh, I have an answer in my head, but I really think the most.

Interesting piece to what we talked about. The takeaway is that many of us see progress as like sort of a graph that goes up into the right and Sure. You’ll see the graph that’s got the loopy loop in the middle and it’s like you think this is growth and it’s a perfect straight line and this is actually growth and it’s like down and then it comes back up and then it circles around.

Mm-hmm. , at the end of the day, we’re all saying the same thing, which is to grow, you must go up into the right. And I think what we heard from Kevin, This is more of like a seasonality, circular experience. I really started to notice that from the beginning where we were talking about his experience with the slingshot and he was smiling during it and I said to him, I said, Hey, it’s really interesting that you’re explaining this like painful season, right?

Where it was really a roller coaster for him from the highest lowest lows and you are smiling the whole time. And he is like, Yeah, it’s all part of my story. And it’s like that prepared me for my next circle. This will prepare me for my next circle. He talked about the hero’s journey, which is a circular idea where you have sort of the fall down and the call to action, and you go through this whole cycle and then it’s part of your hero’s journey.

And he’s talking about how all of his other ones lead him to this one, and this one will lead to the next one. Mm-hmm. . And I thought that was a really interesting takeaway, and it actually ties back into Tiffany’s as I think about it now in real time, how she was talking about finding. Point where she has to go learn something new again, and then like doing the cycle over where she can’t stop impacting others if she learns something new.

Again, it’s like a circle each time. There’s something really interesting there with what he talked about and how he sees them all tying together, but not in the way that we often think about it. Where it’s like, well, it’s all up into the right, It’s this was the story and this was the story, and this was the story, and they build on each other.

Mm-hmm. and prepare me for the next one.

Reid Morris: Yeah, and it’s interesting because looking back on experiences that were challenging, you know, if you ask somebody if they have regrets in their life, it’d be easy for them to say, Well, that challenging time was something that I wish I had done differently. Right?

But when you experience people and you’re around people and talk to people who have gone through those challenging things, and they recognize that it has prepared them, there’s never any regret around the negativity. It’s like, I understand that that might have been tough, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience having happened.

I think not only in those conversations that you just mentioned, but really across the board, right? Like everybody has experiences that were challenging that sort of built up to what made them take the leap towards growth or take twos to do it again, or whatever that is. And everybody looks back on the challenging things as fondly as they do the positive ones because of how important that was in that sort of, you know, building their intuition and building that mindset.

Joe Mills: Yeah, and that’s important to highlight because a lot of the way that things are presented, especially in a resume sort of society, You see it as like the list of accomplishments. Mm-hmm. , Right? Founded this company, grew it to this size, founded this company, grew it to this size, like, and even adding in the personal layer of got married, had kids, whatever your personal accomplishments are, Ran an Ironman, you know, whatever you’re into.

But that looks like sequential and. Maybe that it even happened like congruently just one after another after another. And you don’t see all the different stories that sit inside of each of those. Your, your

Reid Morris: resume, your LinkedIn profile doesn’t say Broke leg and was MIA for six months draining for that Iron Man.

Right? Or went through rifts and the organization and had to deal with that. Like any of these things that happen for everybody who’s gone through that arc. Yeah. But yeah, those stories are often not what you see at face value. And I think that also ties to the conversation you had around like dopamine and serotonin and how societally, again, we live in this world where you’re constantly seeking that next goal, that next accomplishment, seeking that resume that has all these things on it.

Yeah. And that that is striving for dopamine. But then there’s this whole other aspect that

Joe Mills: people are neglecting. It’s what we’re gonna unpack with John, which Kevin recommended to We go talk to John from Green Light and just hear his perspective on it. Somebody who’s done it really successfully.

Reid Morris: Yeah.

All right.

Joe Mills:

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