The Hidden Performance Drug Every Entrepreneur Ignores (No Prescription Needed)

You know that rare moment when a room softens—everyone exhales, the tension breaks, and your mind finally stops sprinting?
It’s your nervous system shifting gears.
And most entrepreneurs only feel it by accident.

This episode explores why a single moment of real gratitude can regulate your system. And how missing that switch quietly drains decision quality, team morale, and profit margins.

You’ll uncover:

• The Five Forces That Make Gratitude Hard to Access
Why your mindset isn't the issue—and how modern entrepreneurial environments block the very state that would help you lead better.

• The 10-Second Behaviors That Immediately Improve Team Dynamics
Simple, specific actions that lower defensiveness, strengthen trust, and turn reactive meetings into productive ones.

• How Gratitude Becomes a Strategic Advantage in the Transformation Age
Because as AI accelerates everything, the leaders who can stay regulated think clearer, move faster, and build stronger cultures.

If pressure has become your baseline, this episode gives you a practical way to shift into presence, clarity, and Flow.

Listen in—and discover the smallest habit that creates the biggest upgrade in how you run your business. 

🧠 Want profits that grow stronger as AI gets smarter? Every Friday morning, FlowCode delivers you a GPT-powered profit prompt rooted in flow science — the same edge Navy SEALs, elite althletes, and top founders use to outperform. Subscribe for free: FlowCode.news

Transcript

Starts in the smallest moment. You're sitting at the Thanksgiving table, the kind of chaotic, cozy mess you've seen 100 times, kids negotiating for extra roles, someone asking where the good knives went, half finished, conversations overlapping like poorly tuned radio stations. And even though you're physically at the table, your mind is still sprinting. Your responsibilities didn't get the memo that this is a holiday, the mental tabs are still open, the team issue you haven't solved, the decision you've been putting off the email you shouldn't have checked before dinner. Then someone says, Before we eat, can we all go around and share one thing we're grateful for this year? Nobody objects. There's this tiny, almost imperceptible pause, the kind that only happens when a whole room quietly agrees to shift its attention at the same time your niece speaks first, then your sister, then Your dad. Nothing Instagrammable, nothing profound, just honest, simple gratitude and something inside you changes. It's subtle at first, the way your shoulders drop half an inch without you telling them to your jaw unclenches, your breath slows down, your heart rate shifts into a gear you forgot you had and you noticed it. This is the calmest you felt in months, not because you solved a problem, not because you finally caught up, not because someone handed you a breakthrough, but because of a few sentences spoken around a table, and as the room softens, a question rises in you. If a moment of gratitude can reset me this quickly, why don't I intentionally use it when I'm under pressure? Why do I wait for holidays to feel this way? And then a deeper question hits, if gratitude can shift me in seconds, what could it do for my team, my culture, my business? Welcome to flow driven. The number one problem in business today is flow, Deficit Disorder. You see the symptoms everywhere. Burned out. Teams, high turnover, employees, sleepwalking through their work and profits that never rise to match the effort proof the old way of work isn't working at all. For a century, business ran on industrial age rules, efficiency, consistency, compliance. Then came the information age, where knowledge processes and titles defined value. But those rules no longer apply, because we've entered the transformation age, an era of relentless change fueled by AI. And if you're still using the old playbook, you're experiencing a very bumpy ride. The Cure, of course, is flow. Flow is the state where high performance and deep enjoyment collide, where human flourishing meets business excellence, and it's the only way to keep up in the transformation age. Your host and coach is Dr Dave Maloley, former Army officer, retired dentist and now a flow obsessed performance coach. And let's be clear, if you're an entrepreneur who's okay wasting your team's potential, this show isn't for you. But if you're committed to unleashing genius and building a business that wins in the transformation age, you're in the right place. Each week, Dr Dave shares strategies, stories and science to help you beat flow deficit disorder, grow profits and reclaim your time freedom. Want to go deeper. Go to flow. Code, dot news and subscribe to flow. Code, your weekly prescription for flow deficit disorder, one sharp idea, one strategy and one GPT prompt to help you build a high profit business that makes people better, all at no charge. The link is also in the episode description. Most people don't realize this, but gratitude is essentially a legal performance enhancing drug, no side effects, no withdrawal, no prescription needed. Yet, entrepreneurs usually treat it like a birthday card. It's nice when it happens irrelevant to performance, but the science says otherwise. Stanford researchers found that genuine appreciation activates the prefrontal cortex, the region of your brain responsible for emotional regulation, strategic thinking and staying steady under pressure, exactly what business. Miss owners need most. Gratitude lights up the reward pathways. It increases motivation. It sharpens focus and regular practice is associated with better serotonin function, the chemistry that steadies your mind When Everything Feels chaotic, it also strengthens the neuro biologic foundations of trust and connection, the invisible forces that determine whether teams perform or just pretend, but simply less reactive, more intentional, less scattered, more grounded, less defensive, more connected gratitude gives you access to a level of mental clarity that pressure alone never will. If this came in a bottle, entrepreneurs would camp outside pharmacies, but because it's quiet, internal and free, we ignore it. Here's the real issue, we built our operating systems on the wrong assumption that high performance comes from intensity, urgency and pushing harder. But in the transformation age where complexity keeps rising and your nervous system is the bottleneck, gratitude isn't just a nice feeling, it's capacity, it's resilience, it's a competitive advantage. So today, I wanted to turn gratitude from something that happens to you on the holidays into something that you can deploy inside your business. A discussion that I've had with many coaching clients is why does gratitude feel so hard to access? Well, I believe it feels hard to access because you're an entrepreneur, you're operating inside a perfect storm of forces that pull you away from the very state that would help you lead at your best. The first blocker here is negativity bias. Your brain is built to scan for threats, not gifts, not blessings. In entrepreneurship, that wiring goes into overdrive because you've got payroll, you've got pressure, decisions and uncertainty at all times, a brain stuck in threat detection, can't access gratitude easily. So let's begin with this isn't a character flaw. Locker number two would be chronic speed. This is your behavior. Your days move fast. You have meetings, messages, pivots, fires to put out people that want your input, and speed numbs you. Gratitude requires presence. If your pace outruns your awareness, gratitude never has a moment to land. The third blocker here is comparison. This would be your psychology. Entrepreneurs live in a constant measurement loop. It might be metrics, competitors, milestones and social media just amplifies it. You're not just comparing yourself to the market. You're comparing yourself to everyone's highlight reel, regardless of industry. And the moment you measure your progress against someone else's projection, gratitude collapses, and lack will take over. Locker number four, skepticism. This is where I want to point out your belief system. Deep down. You don't believe that gratitude matters. You might think of it as decoration and not business infrastructure, that belief alone will block the state shift that your brain desperately needs. And finally, we have the fifth blocker, inconsistency. This is where I want to talk about your rhythm. Gratitude only works when it becomes a practice, and most entrepreneurs experience it accidentally the holidays, like we just spoke about, wins, rare, quiet moments without repetition, you never get the psychological and physiological benefits. You put all five of these together, and it becomes really clear, your wiring, your pace, your habits and your beliefs all pull you away from the state that would really help you. That's why we don't want gratitude to just be this feeling that we wait for. We want it to be a discipline that we deploy now, if gratitude can help you, lead at your best and these blockers are biological, psychological and structural. I think the question becomes, how do you access it on purpose when you're wiring and your workload make it so hard to feel these five practices that I'm about to talk about are the answer. They're small, they're practical shifts you can we. Into real business days, no journaling required, no extra time to carve out just habits that change how you think, connect and perform. Let's get into them. The first practice I'd like to talk about is daily specific appreciation. Most entrepreneurs underestimate the power of one sentence spoken with intention once a day, take 10 seconds to tell one team member something specific you appreciate about how they showed up. I'm not talking about good job or thanks for the help, something real, like I appreciate how steady you stayed in that conversation today, or thank you for catching that detail before it became a problem. Or maybe I notice how reliably you support the rest of the team. This kind of appreciation lowers defensiveness, increases trust and strengthens the emotional architecture your culture rests on. This is how loyalty is built. This is how people start taking ownership before you ask 10 seconds, you get a massive return. The second practice is the wind scan at the start of every meeting, before you dive into agendas, issues or metrics, ask one question, what's one thing that's working? Not force positivity, not a highlight reel, just one point of genuine progress. This interrupts negativity bias and shifts the whole room into a calmer, more regulated state. When people feel steadier, they think better, and when they think better, your meetings stop being firefights and start becoming strategy sessions. A wind scan doesn't make problems disappear, it simply puts your people in the mental gear required to solve the problems. The third practice is handwritten. Thank You cards to customers once a week, write a handful of handwritten thank you notes to customers or clients. Keep them short and specific. Thank you for trusting us with this project. I appreciate how collaborative you were this month, your patience last week didn't go unnoticed. Handwritten notes stand out in a world of automation and surface level communication. They create emotional memory, deepen loyalty and generate referrals without asking. And here's the hidden truth. Here, when you express gratitude outward, your nervous system shifts inward. You get grounded. You get clear and connected again. This is gratitude as a retention strategy and as a leadership practice. Practice number four, I call this opportunity seeing. Entrepreneurs are surrounded by opportunity, yet we rarely feel it. It's because our threat detection drowns it out. Opportunity seeing is the daily habit of naming one real opportunity available today? Is it a relationship, a resource, a skill you now have a door that cracked open a conversation waiting to happen? This gratitude in its most strategic form is not I'm grateful for what I have, but I'm grateful for what's available. Opportunity seeing pulls you out of scarcity, out of comparison, and back into agency. It brings your focus into the possibility beyond the pressure. Practice number five is bright spots. Bright spots is the practice of catching the small, unexpected moments in your day that didn't need to happen, but it did. Maybe it's a smooth interaction, a moment of ease, someone holding the door, a meeting that went better than expected, a small laugh that cut the tension, a quiet second where you actually exhaled the photo of your child sitting on your desk. These micro moments regulate your nervous system. They remind you that your whole day isn't a blur of urgency. Bright spots is really presence training. The more you notice these bright spots, the easier gratitude becomes, because your brain stops racing past the very moments that would restore you at its core, gratitude is just perspective. It's the moment your system pauses and goes, Wait, I'm all right. So. Things are actually going well, and I'm not fighting this battle solo. From there, you lead differently. Your thinking sharpens, your presence deepens, and the opportunities you've been too stressed to see finally come into focus. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured it beautifully. He said, cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you and give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude. That's the perspective that we're practicing here. Here's my coaching challenge for you today, send three specific messages of appreciation before the day ends, one to somebody on your team, one to a customer, and one to someone in your life who rarely gets acknowledged. Name exactly what you appreciate? Specific, honest human give it five minutes and feel the shift when gratitude clears your mind. Every excuse you've been carrying loses its power and the next right move becomes obvious. Steve, thank you for being a part of flow driven the movement to build high profit businesses that make people better. If this episode brought you value, share it. It's an act of generosity helping other ambitious entrepreneurs navigate AI disruption and thrive in the transformation age. If you want the upgraded experience, make sure you're subscribed to flow code. At flow code, dot news until next time, stay focused and flow driven.