S2E5: Dealing with High Stress Environments with Kevin Bailey

Carl Abbott: Welcome to Productly Speaking, the podcast that dives deep into the fascinating world of product management. I'm your host, Carl Abbott. In each episode, I'll be bringing you conversations with some of the most innovative and inspiring minds in the industry. Together, we'll uncover their stories, insights and the secrets behind their success. So whether you're a seasoned product manager or just curious about the field, join us for an entertaining and informative journey through the art and science of creating great products. Let's give it a go Foreign. Today's episode we're going to talk about dealing with high stress environments and avoiding the negativity and burnout that can come from m 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.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, happy to be on.

Carl Abbott: Thanks for having me, Kevin. Uh, 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. Uh, tell us about each of those adventures and what you did when you inevitably got to a stage of burnout.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, I mean, the first one was the most epic, I guess. 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 uh, 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 four and a half years, something like that. It was just growing really rapidly, up to, uh, 100 plus employees. I'd had a really 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, 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. Uh, 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 a little tight in our hands and we went through some real struggles at that point. I was lucky to meet a neuroscientist and a, uh, mindfulness coach who was a former fighter pilot in Vietnam who coached, uh, me in some principles of mental performance that athletes normally receive. This is a long time ago. This was 15, 20 years ago. This is before, you know, mental health was such a topic. I helped found a tech community called Powder Keg with my buddy Matt Hunkler and 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. Uh, 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 Dream Fuel. I went, uh, 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, uh, athletes and mental performance or been athletes themselves. My co founder is a former pro athlete, ASM All American and neuroscience grad from Notre. 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 Dream Fuel and using these tools, it's fun to employ them on myself and kind of just really see what it does.

Carl Abbott: 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, uh, kind of talk to that a little?

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of our stress is perceived stress. You know, 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.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, uh, 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 gotta 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, uh, 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 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?

Kevin Bailey: I want to answer that question. Uh, 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.

Carl Abbott: Sam, you have to be a little crazy to do it. Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: 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, uh, 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 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's 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 when you got six, six like I, I think the odds are a founder, it's almost like four and 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 were the tools I use and we could certainly dive into those. There's a lot. At, uh, dreamfuel we teach 52 different neuros 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 uh, 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.

Carl Abbott: 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.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, exactly. We are often, um, our own worst enemy. I think there was an African name, Marimoto, a uh, samurai. He's, I think he was the most successful samurai. Killed the most people in sword fights. He wrote a whole book about it. I think it's called.

Carl Abbott: That'd be an awesome okr. Right. Objectives.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, there you go. Kill the most people in sword fights. But I think he had, uh, he wrote the 6.6R I think is what it's called. But his whole thing was 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 sabotaging you. So those are. My big three is visualization, mindfulness and then mindset work, which really is just identifying, limiting and fixed beliefs and pruning them from your mindset and replacing them with a more abundant mentality so you don't block yourself.

Carl Abbott: 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?

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, I mean flow state is uh, the output or the outcome of mental performance. And 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? Mhm. 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, uh, 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. 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 having a difficult conversation with your team member. Then you've got fight, which is engage. Typically powered by dopamine, a little bit of noradrenaline. It's kind of an active, 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 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 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 on 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. 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. Uh, 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.

Carl Abbott: 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. Uh, I'm going over what I should be. How would you recommend that people kind of approach that or to stop, uh, once they've gotten kind of that awareness that I'm in the wrong state?

Kevin Bailey: 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, uh, heavily dependent on cortisol. Cortisol, the stress hormone. Catabolic. Bad for the body. Over time, gonna create bad physical states, gonna create disease, decay. It's good for short bursts. It's like nitrous oxide in a car, um, but over gonna damage the engine. Over time, you have to be able to realize and recognize and know that it's not good for you. Yeah, performance wise and physically health wise, these states are kind of alluring. Meaning like feeling sorry for ourselves and stuff like that. 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, the cortisol cascades. And it's kind of like it's a process that sort of fulfills itself. It'll keep growing and growing. Fill yourself up with cortisol and you're not gonna be. It's gonna be very hard to hack out of it. So if you catch it early, then you can, you can work your way out of it pretty easily.

Carl Abbott: And if you don't, you've got a chore ahead of you.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't, then you've got a big reset. It's gonna take a lot of time, but I mean, it's, 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 rearview mirror and you know you gotta get to a meeting and this is gonna ruin your day, so to speak. If you can. When you see the flashing lights very quickly, best thing that could have happened, you say a little bit of passion. Emotion is what kind of really gets, gets the mind reprogrammed, creates neuroplasticity. So you go best ain't gonna happen. Some reason for this. I don't know what it is something

Carl Abbott: 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 happen.

Kevin Bailey: Exactly.

Carl Abbott: Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: I mean, but those lights are going to get. It's like turning the spigot of cortisol on and when you do that, you turn it off and you know, a police officer come to the car, you're in a good mood, you'll be nice. You'd probably get off with, uh, a warning rather than, you know, 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 that you know 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 you, uh, know 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 and 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, uh, 40 minutes of breath work, so to speak.

Carl Abbott: Mhm.

Kevin Bailey: A full day off.

Carl Abbott: 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, uh, 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.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, it's kind of like neighborhoods of your mind.

Carl Abbott: 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?

Kevin Bailey: 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. I call it the performance chain. You know, it's, 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 were 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. 95% 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're, where you are emotionally and physiologically. So yeah, wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you're in a bad, bad neighborhood of the mind. You're going to be more likely to have these negative thoughts. So what do you think?

Carl Abbott: Also kind of a nurture versus nature going on here, that we really are products of our environments. You talked about, you know, things that you might have heard as a child.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, these are, these are programs, uh, up to the age of eight, you are being programmed. Um, we are in a brainwave called thet. 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, uh, the raid. 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 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. So three generations had the phobia of that cheese. So we passed these things down genetically as well as through nurture. We just went a, uh, little tangential going back to the original question.

Carl Abbott: We were talking about negativity and then we're talking about shocking mice. Uh, but that's a fascinating point though.

Kevin Bailey: Uh, but yeah, how it happens. So I think your 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 or 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. 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 actual willpower, 95% are fate. They're pre installed programs. They're just going off because of the emotional physiological state you're in. Mhm.

Carl Abbott: But in that 5%, I guess we're taking our understanding of the other 95% and literally working to create something new.

Kevin Bailey: I like to say that 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 uh, 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 uh, fix the 95 and then flow toward something better, which flow toward means make better decisions, do better behaviors, don't sabotage yourself.

Carl Abbott: Interesting to think about the brain in that sense. It is uh, a big part of what drives our day to day. So you've also talked about grit. How do you define grit?

Kevin Bailey: I think with 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. Very close to grit.

Carl Abbott: Mhm.

Kevin Bailey: 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 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, motivation and 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 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 Bendula, which is part of Lean Startup Mindse model, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

Carl Abbott: What are some of the things that we can do to get to that point of having grit as you've defined it?

Kevin Bailey: Uh, 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, the part of us that like 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.

Carl Abbott: That's the number that's typically quoted for learning any new Skill is about 10,000 hours.

Kevin Bailey: Exactly. Yeah. For mastery. So it's like 10. I've looked at monks that have meditated 40,000 hours and it gets more and more like that. 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 created a unicorn, was one of the first insuretech type companies, and he was a great meditation practitioner who studied, uh, 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 thinking about how it affects him. M Grit is equanimity. Equanimity best gained through meditation, but can be assisted with many tools.

Carl Abbott: And what are some of those other tools that could be used, uh, to help get to that?

Kevin Bailey: 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 they're called glottal holds. Little breath holds. When something happens negative that you perceive as negative, um, 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, breathe smoothly through that, you're going to avoid going into a reactive state. Therefore you're going to have more grit. It uh, 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 reason I brought up Meditation is the nice thing about meditation. It becomes automatic when you put the 10,000 hours into meditation. The 50 tools, you might use them a little bit, they're not going to be as required. When you don't have that kind of uh, brain connectivity then you have to become very good at the tools. It's kind of like step one is one of the tools. And 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 a hundred million dollars. You can visualize selling your company for a hundred million dol. 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. M so when you visualize selling your company, it's going to go. All those limiting beliefs that are trying to try and put you into, if you quit, put you into a bad state, it's going to basically reprogram those. Oh, I thought, you know, Kevin sucked and he wasn't gonna be able to do this and the market was gonna blow up on him. M or AI was gonna whatever disruption, blah blah blah, it's gonna go oh, we sold the company. Oh, it did work out okay. Our fears aren't so founded like it kind of treads over your limiting beliefs and fears. So that's a great tool to give you increased grit and resilience, confidence which can be, which can be done with visualization.

Carl Abbott: 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 thought into. What do you guys do to help people out?

Kevin Bailey: The very best mental performance coaches are in professional athletics. People Like Tim Grover, he was the 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, um, 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.

Carl Abbott: 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, uh, 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 riding 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.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, a hundred percent. We work with executive sales teams. I think the thing to recognize is mental health is a big spectrum. And you've got clinical, which is from like not very mentally healthy to clinically not healthy at all. And that's the downside. And most therapists and people work on the downside. 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 what we were Kind of that upside of mental health.

Carl Abbott: Yeah. And where would people go if they want to find out more about Dreamfuel?

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, Dreamfield, uh, dot com is our website and then I am available on LinkedIn. Just search for Kevin Bailey, produce content, release it on there. We have a podcast called the Dreamfield show that we do sometimes.

Carl Abbott: Oh, very nice.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah.

Carl Abbott: 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

Kevin Bailey: that I haven't done?

Carl Abbott: Yeah, preferably you haven't done maybe like

Kevin Bailey: improv comedy or acting.

Carl Abbott: Oh, that would be fun.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, that could be cool.

Carl Abbott: So, uh, Kevin Bailey appearing at the Improv Comedy Hour soon. There we go.

Kevin Bailey: Find me your local comedy club soon.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on Productly speaking. Kevin, we've been glad to have you here.

Kevin Bailey: Yeah, no, I really appreciate 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.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. This episode of Productly Speaking was brought to you by the letters P and M. If you enjoyed our conversation, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Share this podcast with your friends and anyone who loves a good story about product management. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Visit us at www.productlyspeaking.com, drop us an email at helloroductlyspeaking uh.com or join the discussion on matrix@productlyspeaking matrix.org. thank you for tuning in and ah, we'll catch you next time.