How To Optimize Exec Performance | Kevin Bailey, CEO @ Dreamfuel
Your Brain Is Making You Dumber When You Need It Most
I’ll be honest: I spent years thinking I was performing at my best while my nervous system was actively sabotaging me.
I was in a near-constant flight response and had no idea. My heart rate was up. Cortisol was running. And my brain, rather than helping me think clearly through high-stakes meetings, was literally routing resources away from my prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for strategic thinking, decision-making, and emotional regulation. Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten’s research calls this the stress response “taking the prefrontal cortex offline.” Your brain is making you dumber at the exact moments you need it most. And most of us are letting it happen all day, every day.
This is why I was so excited to sit down with Kevin Bailey. Kevin is the co-founder and CEO of Dreamfuel, where he and his team coach founders, executives, and sales teams on mental performance using applied neuroscience. He’s a three-time Inc 500 founder who built his first company to $12M ARR and 100 employees by age 27, nearly burned out doing it, then went and got a master’s in applied neuroscience from King’s College London to understand why. He’s coached over a thousand leaders at companies like Greenlight Guru, LinkSquare, Smartsheet, and Owner.com. His team includes former coaches of UFC fighters, fighter pilots, Green Berets, and hedge fund managers. People who understand what it takes to perform when the stakes are real.
What Kevin laid out in our conversation is a framework I think every revenue leader needs to hear: a neuroscience-backed model for understanding why you perform inconsistently, and a practical set of protocols to fix it. We covered the performance chain, the four states of your nervous system, specific warm-up and cool-down techniques for meetings, and the concept that elite performance isn’t about grinding harder. It’s about training your physiology to stop working against you.
The Performance Chain: Fix Your Physiology, Fix Your Results
Most leaders try to fix performance from the top down. They coach behaviors. They set goals. They run pipeline reviews. And when results don’t change, they coach harder.
Kevin flipped this on its head with what he calls the performance chain: physiology → emotions → feelings → cognition → behaviors → results. It’s a chain that runs in both directions, but the unlock is at the bottom. Fix your physiology, and everything above it shifts.
Here’s the study that sold me on this. Researchers found that if you injected someone with cortisol and adrenaline, even on the best day of their life, they would automatically enter a flight response. Their thoughts would turn negative. They’d start scanning for threats and looking for reasons to escape the situation. It didn’t matter how good things actually were. The physiology hijacked the cognition.
Kevin put it bluntly: “A human in the flight response, their thoughts are pinned down by their feelings, their emotions, and their physiology.”
This tracks with Amy Arnsten’s work at Yale, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, showing that even mild, uncontrollable stress rapidly impairs prefrontal cortex function while simultaneously strengthening amygdala responses. Your brain shifts from deliberate, rational thinking to reactive, habitual responding. You’re not making strategic decisions in that state. You’re surviving.
And here’s what most people miss. The vast majority of your thoughts are happening reflexively, automatically, in the nervous system. Aaron Beck, the founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, built his entire framework around the concept of automatic negative thoughts (NATs), habitual cognitive patterns that are distorted, repetitive, and largely invisible until you’re trained to notice them. Researchers estimate thousands of these fire per day, and in untrained minds, the majority skew negative. Your brain isn’t neutral. It’s actively working against you unless you intervene at the physiological level.
The implication for leaders is uncomfortable but clarifying. You can’t think your way out of a bad physiological state. Telling yourself to “calm down” in a high-stakes meeting is like telling someone who just got a shot of adrenaline to relax. The body doesn’t listen to the mind in that direction. But the mind absolutely listens to the body. Change your breathing, change your heart rate, and the thoughts follow.
Kevin’s phrase for this stuck with me: “You got to win the battle with yourself before you win the battle outside.”
The Four States: A Map of Your Nervous System
Kevin introduced a framework I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since we recorded. It’s a simple quadrant with two axes: heart rate (high vs. low) and emotional tonality (negative vs. positive, driven by the neurochemicals running your system at any given moment).
Flight. High heart rate, negative emotional tonality. Cortisol and adrenaline. This is the “I need to get out of here” state. Your blood is routing to your limbs, away from your prefrontal cortex. Your cognitive capacity drops. You’re scanning for threats. Kevin’s estimate of how often executives live here? “A lot.” Mine is closer to 110% of the time. This is the default state of a stressed-out leader with back-to-back meetings and a number to hit.
Freeze. Low heart rate, negative emotional tonality. Cortisol and acetylcholine. This is the “I don’t want to get out of bed” state. Procrastination. Avoidance. Not wanting to sit down and do the hard thing you know will be painful. Kevin connected this to everything from avoiding a tough conversation to a polar bear walking through your door. The continuum matters. You don’t have to be catatonic to be in a freeze response. You just have to be dragging.
Fight. High heart rate, positive emotional tonality. Dopamine and noradrenaline. This one gets mischaracterized. Kevin was clear: a fight response can be highly adaptive. “The leader who says ‘we’re going to go take that hill,’ that’s a fight response.” It’s the inspired, energized, dopamine-fueled state where you want to go win. The catch is you can’t live there. It’s still sympathetic nervous system activation, and it burns energy.
Focus. Low heart rate, positive emotional tonality. Serotonin. This is the flow state. Deep work. Losing track of time on a spreadsheet or a piece of writing. The default mode network quiets down, self-referential thinking drops off, and you’re just locked in. Judson Brewer’s research at Brown, published in PNAS, showed that experienced meditators have measurably lower default mode network activity. Less mind-wandering, less self-critical chatter. That’s what focus feels like when you can access it consistently.
The goal Kevin’s team coaches toward isn’t permanently parking in one quadrant. It’s equanimity. Dead center of the map. A zeroed-out, neutral state from which you can intentionally move into fight (rallying a team) or focus (deep solo work) depending on what the moment requires. The problem is most executives don’t even know which quadrant they’re in. They walk into meetings in a flight response and wonder why they botched it.
Kevin’s point: “My physiology was off, which impacted my emotions, which impacted my thinking, which impacted my behaviors.” The chain again. Always the chain.
Warm Up, Hold Form, Cool Down: Treat Every Meeting Like a Game
Kevin reframed something that should be obvious but somehow isn’t: for executives, meetings are the performance arena. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Whether you’re closing a deal, kicking off a quarter, or having a difficult conversation with a direct report, the meeting is the game. And yet almost nobody warms up for it.
Kevin breaks meeting performance into three phases.
Warming up. Two tools, five minutes. First, mental reset breathing: 30 of the deepest breaths you can take (fast, forceful, belly relaxed like a gorilla), then on the 30th breath, exhale completely and hold for 15 seconds. You’ll feel your nervous system shift. Kevin calls it mental reset breathing and it works on the Y-axis of the quadrant, bringing your heart rate down and pulling you out of whatever flight or freeze state you walked in with.
Then, visualization. And I know how that sounds. But the academic term is rehearsal imagery, and the evidence is staggering. Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s 1995 study at Harvard found that people who mentally practiced a piano exercise for five days showed nearly identical cortical motor map expansion as those who physically practiced. Ranganathan et al. found that mental imagery of muscle contractions increased finger strength by 35% over 12 weeks. Your nervous system genuinely struggles to distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one.
Kevin uses two flavors of visualization. Creative visualization: imagine the best possible outcome. He used to picture clients giving glowing case studies before hopping on sales calls. The confidence was real because, to his nervous system, the success was already a memory. Rehearsal visualization: imagine everything that could go wrong and see yourself responding well. This is the Michael Phelps approach. Phelps visualized his goggles breaking, his cap ripping, every disaster scenario, then mentally rehearsed staying composed through all of it.
I experienced this firsthand. Kevin’s team put me through a session that combined 20 minutes of somatic breathwork (way more intense than the 30-breath warmup) followed by a deeply personalized creative visualization. My whole body was vibrating. My hands tingled for hours. My wife came downstairs to check if I was okay. And the vision they installed stuck with me for weeks. It carried me through a grind period where we needed every ounce of resilience the team could find. I sent the team through the same session and got messages like “the Kyle number isn’t a question of if, but how soon.” That momentum was real and it lasted.
Steve Jobs did visualization sessions with Marc Benioff about the future of Salesforce. Navy SEALs do box breathing before operations. This isn’t woo-woo. A 2023 Stanford study (Balban, Huberman et al., published in Cell Reports Medicine) found that just five minutes of daily cyclic sighing outperformed mindfulness meditation, box breathing, and hyperventilation for reducing stress. The protocols work. The science is clear. The only barrier is the voice in your head calling it silly.
Holding form. You’re in the meeting. Someone says something that would normally throw you off. Two tools here. First, relax your stomach. Sounds too simple. Kevin explained that a tight stomach is a protective posture, and relaxing it activates the vagus nerve and shifts you toward parasympathetic dominance. Just loosening your gut can interrupt a cortisol spike.
Second, cognitive reframes. Kevin’s favorite: “Best thing that could have happened.” Say it to yourself immediately after the disruption. Your brain, wired to complete patterns (we are basically biological LLMs in this regard), will automatically start generating reasons why this is actually good news. A deal gets punted by private equity? Best thing that could have happened. Now you’re thinking “great, the PE firm knows about us, when this works we get the whole portfolio” instead of spiraling into damage control. My version of this is amor fati, the Stoic phrase meaning “love your fate.” I keep a Ryan Holiday coin on my desk. Same mechanism, different packaging.
And if the reframe doesn’t cut it, the physiological sigh: a deep inhale, a second quick inhale stacked on top, then a long exhale. That same Stanford study found it’s the most effective real-time stress reduction technique they tested. I use this one most often with my kids, honestly. They’re losing their minds, I do the double-inhale exhale, and suddenly I can be the parent I want to be instead of the one who matches their energy.
Cooling down. This one surprised me. Kevin recommends anger journaling. After a tough meeting, before you walk into the next one, take two minutes and vent into a journal. Unfiltered. Profanity encouraged. “What the hell was that?” energy. Then read it back. Some of it will be cognitive distortion you can laugh at. Some of it will be legitimate and worth acknowledging. Either way, it’s out of your system instead of suppressed.
I’m a suppressor. If something bad happens, my instinct is amor fati, move on, close that browser tab in my mind. Kevin pushed back on this: “You can block up the nervous system over time. If you want real mental freedom, you got to learn how to express the negative stuff too. Just in a healthy way.” Gratitude journaling gets all the press. Taking out the head trash deserves equal billing.
ACT: Awareness, Choose, Transition
If someone asked me “where do I start with all of this?” I’d point them to Kevin’s ACT framework.
Awareness. You have to be able to notice what state you’re in before you can change it. This is the whole game and it is genuinely hard. Your mind doesn’t want you to have this skill. It wants to stay in control. If you’re in a freeze response, your thoughts will feed you reasons to stay frozen. They won’t helpfully announce “hey, you’re in a freeze response right now.”
The body, though, always tells the truth. Your heart rate, your stomach, the tension in your shoulders. Kevin’s argument for cold plunging, breathwork, and meditation all came back to this one thing: they build somatic awareness. They get you out of your head and into your body, where the real data lives.
I want to spend some time on cold plunging because it has genuinely changed the way I operate and I think it’s the most underrated awareness tool available to executives right now.
I use a Plunge Air at my house. Most mornings. It’s become as non-negotiable as brushing my teeth. And the thing that makes it so valuable isn’t just the cold exposure itself. It’s the feedback loop.
The Plunge app tracks your heart rate during each session. And when you can actually watch your heart rate data in real time and review it after, something clicks. Your first bunch of plunges, your heart rate spikes to 100+ the second you get in. Your body panics. You do the fast, shallow breathing that feels instinctive but is actually your flight response firing on all cylinders. You white-knuckle it for 45 seconds and get out.
But here’s what happens over weeks of practice. You learn to fight that panic response. You breathe in through your nose. You slow the exhale. You force yourself into a calm, controlled breathing pattern while your body is screaming at you to get out. And you watch your heart rate respond. I can now sit in the plunge and bring my heart rate down into the low 60s. During cold exposure. That’s not a slow heart rate compared to sitting on your couch, but when your body is submerged in cold water, getting your heart rate that low is a serious physiological achievement.
The science backs this up. A 2000 study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology (Srámek et al.) found that cold water immersion at 57°F increased dopamine levels by 250% and norepinephrine by 530%. That dopamine boost is why you feel like you can run through a wall afterward. It converts to noradrenaline, which is the energy molecule Kevin described in the fight response. So cold plunging doesn’t just build awareness. It resets your neurochemistry into a state that’s actually useful for performing.
But the awareness piece is what I keep coming back to. When you can watch your heart rate drop on a screen while you’re actively uncomfortable, you’re training a skill that transfers everywhere. You start to feel your heart rate in a board meeting the same way you feel it in the plunge. You recognize the tight stomach, the shallow breathing, the cortisol spike. And because you’ve practiced hundreds of times in the cold water, you know what to do about it. Slow the exhale. Relax the gut. Ride it out.
Kevin framed it as physiological resilience correlating with psychological resilience. I’d go further. The plunge is a daily laboratory for state management. Three minutes every morning where you practice exactly the skill set that makes you better in every high-stakes interaction for the rest of the day. If I had to pick one protocol to recommend to a fellow executive, it would be this one, paired with the data feedback. The app matters. Seeing the number drop is what teaches your brain that you have agency over your own physiology. Without the feedback loop, you’re just suffering in cold water. With it, you’re training.
Kevin also mentioned that cold plunging hits three bases simultaneously: resilience (you’re bouncing back from voluntary adversity every morning), energy (the dopamine and noradrenaline release kicks your day off in a fight response instead of a flight response), and somatic awareness (you’re forced out of your executive head and into your body). One practice, three returns. Hard to find a better ROI on five minutes.
Meditation is the other foundational practice for building awareness. Kevin said the biggest investment he’s made in his life is his meditation practice, and that if he told people the total hours they’d roll their eyes. The book that flipped the switch for me was Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, the engineer who built Google’s mindfulness program. He explained that every time your mind wanders during meditation and you pull it back, that’s one bicep curl. You’re not failing when your mind wanders. You’re doing a rep. Over time, you catch the wandering faster, pull back more easily, and eventually the default mode network starts to quiet on its own. Brewer’s research at Brown confirmed this neurologically: experienced meditators show measurably lower DMN activity, less self-referential chatter, even at rest.
Kevin distinguished between two types of meditation worth knowing about. Focal meditation is where you start: focus on your breath, a mantra, a word. Transcendental meditation falls into this category, and it’s what Kevin credits for his own foundation. The second type, open monitoring meditation, is the advanced practice. You focus on nothing. You let everything arise and pass without attaching to any of it. That’s where real awareness lives, and it connects to the non-duality research Kevin is doing for his master’s dissertation at King’s College London.
For someone starting from zero, my practical recommendation: get a cold plunge with biometric tracking and use it most mornings. Download Insight Timer or Calm and start with 10 minutes of breath-focused meditation. Do both for 30 days. You will feel different. You’ll start noticing your state in real time during meetings, conversations, even arguments with your kids. That noticing is everything. Because you can’t choose a different state if you don’t know which one you’re in.
Choose. Once you’re aware of your state, choose a different one. I’m in a freeze response. I need to be in a fight response for this meeting. That conscious decision is the bridge.
Transition. Use a specific technique to move. Kevin’s team teaches 52 of them (they’ve written two books on it and are launching a YouTube channel). But even the handful we covered in this conversation are enough to get started. Breathwork to move on the Y-axis. Visualization, music, or comedy (I used to listen to standup on my walk into work) to move on the X-axis. The physiological sigh for emergencies. And cold plunging as the daily full-system reset.
Pick one technique and practice it for a month. That’s the starting point.
Drop the Dopamine Wasters
Kevin saved maybe the most practical advice for the end of our conversation. If you want to upgrade your entire operating system, stop wasting dopamine on things that don’t matter.
Anna Lembke, Chief of Stanford’s Addiction Medicine Clinic, wrote about this extensively in Dopamine Nation. The brain runs on a pleasure-pain balance. Every time you get a hit of easy dopamine (scrolling Instagram, sports gambling, a third glass of wine), your brain downregulates its dopamine receptors to compensate. Over time, you need more stimulation to feel the same motivation. The hedonic treadmill speeds up. Your baseline drops. And the things that actually matter, the hard work, the deep focus sessions, the difficult conversations, feel even harder because your reward system is fried from cheap hits.
Kevin’s prescription: drop one dopamine waster. His family goes screen-free for all of Lent. He said the reset for their entire family’s nervous system is dramatic. “Most people suck at recovery,” he told me. “They stay home and look at social media all day. You didn’t recover at all.”
This connected to something I’ve been telling people for years. Delete the negative stuff from your Instagram. Unfollow the sarcastic accounts. Your brain is an LLM (I say this half-jokingly, but the parallels with neural networks are real). If you flood it with garbage content, it’ll produce garbage outputs. Negativity bias already has you seeking out the worst stuff on the internet because your ancient brain craves threat detection. You have to actively curate what goes in.
My starter list for anyone who wants to begin this journey: a daily gratitude practice (doesn’t need to be written, just three things when you wake up while your brain is still in a programmable state), a meditation practice (start with breath-focused, 10 minutes), regular physical discomfort (cold plunge, a hard run, a misogi with a 50% chance of failure), and now I’m adding Kevin’s contribution: identify your biggest dopamine waster and cut it for 30 days. See what happens to your motivation.
The Choice
Here’s the binary that Kevin’s conversation forced me to confront: you’re either training your nervous system or you’re letting it run you. There’s no neutral.
Every executive reading this has experienced the flight response in a meeting they needed to crush. The racing heart. The scattered thinking. The moment where you said something reactive instead of strategic. Most of us chalk that up to “a bad day” or “high pressure.” Kevin’s framework makes it clear that it’s a physiology problem with a physiology solution. And the solution is trainable.
The leaders who will separate themselves over the next decade aren’t the ones who grind the hardest or log the most hours. They’re the ones who develop the tightest bound of performance. Rain or shine, good quarter or bad, they show up the same. Kevin’s word for it is consistency. Michael Jordan playing lights-out with the flu. That’s the standard.
We didn’t even get to how you scale this across an organization (that’s part two with Kevin, coming soon). But Kevin made the starting point clear: it begins with you. A leader can’t prescribe mental fitness to a team while ignoring their own nervous system. You have to model it. You have to live it. And honestly, this is something I weigh heavily in hiring and promotion decisions. If someone can’t regulate their own state, I have a hard time trusting them with the states of the people who report to them.
Start with ACT. Build awareness through meditation and cold exposure. Choose your state before your next important meeting instead of walking in on autopilot. Use one transition technique, even if it’s just 30 deep breaths and a 15-second hold. See what happens.
Kevin’s team at Dreamfuel is launching a YouTube channel with more of these protocols. His co-founder Anna Rohr (now Anna Heine), a Notre Dame neuroscience grad and eight-time All-American athlete, built the curriculum alongside him. If you want to go deeper, that’s where I’d point you. And if you’re curious about non-duality (the far end of the mental performance continuum, which Kevin is researching for his master’s dissertation), pick up The Greatest Secret by Rhonda Byrne or look up David Bingham’s work on YouTube.
If this episode gave you something useful, do me a favor and leave a rating on the podcast. It helps more than you’d think. And send this to one leader in your life who needs to hear that their brain is working against them. They probably already feel it. They just don’t have the framework yet.
And the clock is already running.