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Shine On Success
Shine on Success is a dynamic, story-driven podcast where extraordinary entrepreneurs, visionary leaders, and resilient change-makers share their journeys to success, revealing both the challenges and the strategies that led to their breakthroughs. Each episode offers a unique blend of inspiring personal stories, practical business insights, and actionable advice, allowing our guests to connect with an engaged, growth-oriented audience ready to be motivated and uplifted. By joining us, you’ll not only have the opportunity to showcase your expertise and inspire listeners but also to be part of a powerful platform that celebrates ambition, innovation, and the courage to turn dreams into reality.
Shine On Success
Mastering Pressure and Reclaiming Your Mind with Karina Baldwin
What if the biggest barrier to your success isn’t the world around you, but the thoughts inside your head? In this powerful episode, host Dionne Malush sits down with Karina Baldwin, a mental performance coach with a master’s in performance psychology and years of experience working with elite athletes and U.S. Army soldiers. Karina now dedicates her work to helping high-achieving women calm their minds, master pressure, and stop letting stress run the show.
From stories of Division I athletics to the science of performance psychology, Karina shares practical tools, powerful metaphors, and a raw look at how our brains are wired to keep us “safe,” not successful. Whether you’re a founder, leader, or dreamer, this conversation will shift how you see your own mind and show you how to ride the waves of your thoughts toward growth, resilience, and freedom.
Connect with Karina here:
Website: https://trueadventurecollective.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karina-baldwin-m-s-778ba5ab/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trueadventureco
Connect with Dionne Malush
- Instagram: @dionnerealtyonepgh
- LinkedIN: /in/dionnemalush
- Website: www.dionnemalush.com
- Facebook: /dmalush
- LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/dionnemalush
You're about to meet the woman who teaches female founders how to outsmart their own brains. Karina Baldwin is not your average coach. She's a mental performance coach with a master's in performance psychology and a decade of experience working with elite performers from college athletes to US Army soldiers. Her mission To help high-achieving women calm the F down and perform better because of it. Through her company, true Adventure Collective, karina equips ambitious women with science-backed strategies to handle pressure, master their mind and finally stop letting stress run the show. If you ever felt like your mind is working against you, this episode is going to flip the script and give you the tools to take back control. Welcome, karina. It's so nice to meet you. How are you?
Speaker 2:today. I am good. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm so excited to get all into the conversation.
Speaker 1:I love this, and so I always start with what's one thing that you want people to know about you that may not be on social media or on your website.
Speaker 2:About me, I would say, is that I don't even know. I feel like I have so much of my life on social media that I think that's a really hard question to answer. But I would say that, like, what most people think about me is that I'm a huge extrovert, and I would say I am not. I would say I definitely like present as an extrovert. I lead a bunch of conversations, I own a networking group, I network all the time. I love presenting in front of people but overall, like I am an introvert and I recharge by myself and I like being by myself, I love presenting in front of people but overall, like I am an introvert and I recharge by myself and I like being by myself, I like going shopping by myself or going to the movies by myself or going and getting lunch by myself, and it's like I'm very much a introvert at heart but present as extrovert in my life.
Speaker 1:Which is, for all of us, right. That you do because that's important, because you have this approach and you coach women to calm the F down. Where does that bold approach come from? Someone that's really an introvert, yeah.
Speaker 2:I would say like one. I got it from the classy cussing is what my copywriter calls it. I got that originally from one. I just naturally just kind of curse a lot, to be completely honest, I think it just. I just kind of like drop things in there without necessarily meaning to, or like they don't. It all makes sense. Whenever I say it I don't just like F-bomb this and F-bomb that and whatnot, but it's always like for dramatic effect type of feeling and I think like originally that came from when I was an athlete back in college.
Speaker 2:I was division one rower for an NCAA team and actually my coach used to say all the time, do the dot dot dot work?
Speaker 2:And he would write it and like we would post it everywhere and we would like have it and like embed it or like, uh, embroidered on a bunch of our gear and the dot dot dot stood for fuck and it was like do the effing work. And his whole thing was just like if you do the work, like you're going to be rewarded with, you know, obviously, obviously in division one, you know athleticism winning right. He's like you do the work, you're gonna win, and that like I kind of adopted that mentality and like, continue to bring it through the rest of my life, of like, if you just continue to do the work, and like, do the really hard work. And that's what kind of the curse word is there? For it's not just like, oh, let's be soft, let's do the shadow work, let's do this or that side of things, but like also the you know the difficult things as well, the really really tough things as well.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. I can remember one time I had a contest where I didn't say it for an entire year.
Speaker 2:That's impressive, I do have to say. I would say I would not survive that contest.
Speaker 1:But I did it and you know, then, after a while I started saying like I'm 57 now, it doesn't sound as good coming out of my mouth as it did, maybe when I was younger. So I've been, I've been trying harder, but you know I've definitely heard that word a couple of times, yeah, yeah. So why then do you think high-performing women struggle so much with their own thoughts? I think that's something that, as a you know, as an entrepreneur myself and constantly I've been in business a rollercoaster ride of life, everything happening to me your own thoughts sometimes get in the way. So why do you think that happens?
Speaker 2:I think it kind of is twofold the women that are out there I mean, this is not gender specific, but women that are out there that are out achieving and wanting to do these massive goals or be successful in, whether it's their career, it's their personal life, it's, you know, recreational sport achievements as well. You know, run an ultra marathon, build a business, you know, be the best mom. They can be like anything from personal to professional life. Our brain is wired to keep us safe, not successful, and so it is so, so easy for us to get stuck in these traps. Our brain doing what our brain is literally built to do, which is to keep us safe. Why risk, you know, social pariah, when you can be safe and you can be loved by the people that are already in your comfort zone? Why put yourself out there and risk? You know someone not liking something or someone rejecting something, or someone rejecting your ideas. Why do that? And so your brain keeps you in this comfort zone and it's really good at it, right, it convinces you that it's supposed to do this, or it convinces you that the easier way is, you know, kind of like, pulls you in and is like this is nice, like if we don't have to grow, we don't have to get bigger, we don't have to take risks, we don't have to do any of these things. And so our brain is literally built to do that, and it is comfort over, you know, chaos and a familiar. You know, I'm sure we've all heard this the like. We'll choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar. You know heaven, and or like a version of that right, it's so easy for us to, you know, choose that comfortability.
Speaker 2:And I think the other thing, the like, second part of that is just the idea that our brain cannot handle uncertainty. It does not know what to do with it and it just fills it in with whatever details it possibly can. Right, so, like again, it's trying to keep us safe. So why fill it in with what if? Sighting, like if, like, what if that works? What if that's successful? What if this, you know, like, your brain is like no, we're not going to do that. I'm going to keep you safe, I'm going to keep you in the zone, I'm going to keep you exactly where you're supposed to be, or where you are right now. So I'm going to fill it with if you risk this, you know, risk being exiled from the social population Like, and so it fills in all this uncertainty with these terrible ideas of I'm going to wind up broke, I'm going to wind up moving back in with my parents, and if I don't have that option, I'm going to be on the streets, like all of these things.
Speaker 2:And the reality is this is something that I do with my clients all the time. I'm like let's let our brain run. What's actually worst case scenario? And often what I, what I hear my clients say is they describe their current situation. The worst thing that happens is I have to go back to my nine to five. The worst thing that happens is I have to go back to my nine to five.
Speaker 2:The worst thing that happens is I don't have any money. Okay, don't we already have no money? Isn't that our problem right now? Aren't we already in a nine to five? Isn't that our problem right now? And so, like that's a really great way to like get us out of it. It's like let your brain run, fill in the gaps with what you can of what is actually worst case scenario, instead of letting your brain be like I'm going to end up on the street. You probably are not going to end up on the streets. You know like there may be certain situations, then we need to have a different conversation. But if you're looking to start a business, you're probably not going to end up on the streets if worst case scenario ends up happening, right.
Speaker 1:Worst case scenario, you know, you fall on your face and you get back up and do it again, right, yeah, exactly In that space. You know for my own life what's the worst thing that could happen? Exactly, and we're all going to die. So there's that Period, yeah, happening. No one gets away from that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so live. And that's something that's so interesting is, you know, I was chatting with a colleague earlier today actually. So I think it's so funny that, like you know, we're all going to die one day own happiness, but also the idea that we are hurrying to get somewhere, to achieve something, to get to a, you know, end result, instead of enjoying the journey. But the reality is is all we're doing is hurrying to the end, which is death side of things. Like, why would we want to do that? That sounds like a terrible experience I don't want. I enjoy the life that I live and I want to live it as long as I possibly can. So let's focus on how we can enjoy the journey side of things instead of trying to arrive at this place that we don't actually want to be anyway. Right, so really focusing on that side.
Speaker 1:Well, that makes sense. And you know, I think about just through my own life, what I've learned about life and death has just made me different. Today, you know, I don't have it anymore. It's like I used to worry every time I had a pain, like I have a chest pain oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:I'm having like a hyperchondria comes out in you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I know that when I read a little bit about you that you had worked with some elite soldiers in the United States Army. How did that experience shape the work that you do now today with, say, business owners or founders? How did that help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think something that is so cool. Is it translated exactly? I think something that people and business owners don't realize is how much they are like elite athletes, elite soldiers, like all of these things. We are struggling with the same things, just a different flavor. Right? Like business owners, their brain is still operating as if it's life or death. It may not actually, and it likely is not life or death in their situation as business owners, but the same like stress response, the same chemicals. All of those things are happening inside the human brain as they are when a life and death experience is occurring as well. So, like being able to acknowledge that these stressors and these cortisol levels and the adrenaline that happens when you know someone says no on a sales call is the exact same chemicals that go off in the brain when the human body is threatened in real life of livelihood, right, and so when it comes to my training that I used to do with the US Army is I used to do a lot more things related to a physical performance. So they would be, you know, out for their weapons qualification. So they had to qualify and make a certain shots out of 40. And in order to like be one, you know, green lighted to continue as a soldier and be active, duty and whatnot, and not have to like one, you know, green lighted to continue as a soldier and be active, duty and whatnot, and not have to like quote, unquote, like repeat essentially, and can be up for promotions and those kinds of things. So they have a physical performance. And then, of course, they have their PT and they have their promotion boards or we would do like active shooter drills. They used to work with a lot with the MPs, which are the military, police, and so they would do active shooter drills and they would run through live scenarios and they'd have like paintball guns to simulate, you know, real weapons, and we would hook them up to all the bio responses and again, the heart rate, the adrenaline, all of those stressors that happened that we were, you know, able to collect data on and understand. We were reading and adjusting and adapting and showing them. Hey, this is where your heart rate spiked, this is where your brain took over in a not great way, this is where you made a really critical decision and it worked out. How did that happen? You know, let's analyze these different points of this particular drill. The same thing, and I do it with my clients now as business owners.
Speaker 2:So, female founders, yeah, we're not having a paintball gun aimed at us, right, as we're like having these sales conversations, but again the threat feels the same. The threat is scary, especially for those that are like I don't like sales calls, I hate sales, I don't want to feel salesy. You know, they're like whenever price comes up, I just I say I'll send them a proposal and I completely avoid it. Right, and it's like the same responses is happening internally inside the body, biologically, that you know these military police were going through with a paintball gun aimed at them. Right, like those military police going through that scenario knew their lives were not at risk. It's a paintball gun like they're going to be OK.
Speaker 2:It may be like slightly painful to get, you know, hit by one, but their lives were not at risk. It's a paintball gun, like they're going to be okay. It may be like slightly painful to get, you know, hit by one, but their lives were not at risk. And the same thing with our sales conversations. But we do have the same responses that happen, and so we need to pay attention to where did we get uncomfortable? Where did our stress spike? Where did our heart rates right? Where did we try and avoid and run away? And, you know, do whatever it is that our avoidance or fight or flight kicks in looks like for you on sales conversations or any other performance. Right, I know that's something a female funders, that they get really, really freaked out with these performances on sales calls. So I always use that as a good starting point and so the training like directly translates of everything that I was doing with the soldiers I do with my clients in regards to their sales call performances, which is very cool.
Speaker 1:It is so cool to hear it that way. So you know you've been working with people that are under a lot of pressure, right? So what's the most powerful mindset shift you've seen in someone that has been struggling?
Speaker 2:I would say so. I love metaphors I'm like a huge, huge metaphor coach because I think that it really helps and allows the human brain to latch on to what these examples actually look like and what the science looks like in normal human language, instead of trying to like read these research studies that are like huge. But one of the big things that I teach my clients and I start this with every single client this is the base that I give them. This is the foundational skill that I give them and I teach them this skill that came from cognitive behavioral therapy and it came from the researcher named Albert Ellis and essentially he discovered through researching rats and human brains and how we think and how we perceive the world. And essentially, the metaphor that I always use with my clients is that we are surfers and the waves that come in are our thoughts. And no matter how incredibly strong and smart and capable human beings are, we cannot stop ocean waves. Ocean waves are going to come in. The tides, the moon, things outside of our control are going to force waves to come in and the waves are our thoughts. And so you may not always have control over the thoughts that come into your brain, but what we doers learn to choose the waves that they surf. They let some go and they let some pass, and then they hop on others, and sometimes they hop on one and it kicks them off and it churns them around and it hurts when they fall and they get smacked by a surfboard and it does not serve them, and they get smacked by a surfboard and it does not surf them. But there are other waves that they surf into shore and it was the best wave they've ever had and the most amazing experience they've ever had. They can repeat it. They can do it again and again and again.
Speaker 2:So these thoughts that come in, that we don't always have control over, they will always continue to flow in and out of our brain. What we do have control over is how much time we spend on each of those thoughts. So you can, as a surfer, sit on your surfboard, let a wave of thought go underneath you and then you experience it for 10 seconds maybe, maybe five seconds if you're even quick enough with it. Or you can choose to ride that wave and experience it for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, a whole day, even if you allow yourself to like, continue to find it again, and again, and again. And this like allows you to like, change your reality of you know the days that you come in and you had the best surf day of the week, and then other days not your day, and that's okay, right. So that analogy, and like learning that you have the ability to control how long you ride each of these thoughts, is more important than controlling if the thoughts come into your brain at all.
Speaker 1:So I love the analogy. That was great, the metaphor. So you've been talking a little bit about what you do for your clients, so let's talk about you. So have you faced moments in your career so far where you've had adversity or your own brain became your biggest enemy? If so, how did you push through it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I last year actually had a death in my family and I still have yet to like. I don't know if I'll ever share like who and whatnot, but I had a death in my family and it was someone incredibly close to me and it was the most like devastating month of my life and it was so much so that, like I, I didn't. It was my first like big death experience. I had had like extended family members pass away and whatnot, but this was the first time that I experienced death at this close to me and it was a really wild experience because the things that I thought grief was going to feel like, sound like, be like was not something I experienced. I thought I wasn't going to be able to eat, like literally eat food, but I had no problem eating. I just couldn't cook food. It was really, which was really odd, and I was like okay, so I can't cook for myself, I can eat, I have an appetite, that's no problem. I just can't. I just have-.
Speaker 2:I know you wouldn't have an appetite, right no-transcript and that is like a huge struggle and then adds even more to the physical side of things, of grief and whatnot. But moving past that was I mean. Even still today, I still find myself like noticing, and grief comes in many, many different ways. But I was in the middle of one of my biggest launches when the death occurred and it actually happened at like 6am on the day of my like client days, where all my all my workload was. They were all client facing and I emailed my clients at like 6am and I said, hey, this happened. I will not be showing up today. You know like I will make sure that you guys get. Hey, this happened, I will not be showing up today. You know like I will make sure that you guys get whatever you need. Today I will not be dealing with anything, and I do have to say like I am so incredibly blessed by the clients that I have because they were like anything you need no problem, we'll reschedule, tell us when. You know all these things and I was like so grateful that that happened.
Speaker 2:But coming out of it was something that I still think I you know, go in and out of grief is a very crazy thing, but I would say one of the things that like, helped me kind of come back to work is just starting very, very slow and not expecting myself to perform in any particular way, which I think is very, you know, ironic, considering I'm a mental performance coach. Performance is literally in my name or in my title, and something that I tried so very deeply to remind myself of is, the more that I push myself, the harder it would be, and so there would be days that I would, you know, let myself go into what my friends and I call Netflix coma and we just like, literally I was like today's a Netflix coma day and all I did was literally sit on my butt on my couch and watch TV for eight hours a day, and that's what I could do that day. And then there's other days that I worked a 10 hour day and it felt great. I went to a networking event and I felt good, but then the next day I'd be like you know what today's a Netflix day, or today I'm not starting my day until 1 pm, and so the three or four months that followed that event was just me trying so hard to listen to myself as much as I possibly could and give myself the opportunity to be or do whatever it is that I needed for that particular day. And obviously there were some days that I was like, well, I have to do this because I have to, and I forced myself to do things that I didn't, I wasn't feeling up for and whatnot, because of commitments or whatever it was, or it was client work and it's time to fulfill my service and those kinds of things. But I made sure that I I you know, 90% of the time I was listening to myself and I was giving myself grace for the money may not come in the way that I wanted the money to come in. I was traveling and seeing a lot more, you know, friends and family in that time period, which was hard on the travel side of things but incredibly healing on the. You know, I needed my friends and family in those moments and I needed to reach out to those people that loved me. And the other thing that I learned after this, as far as someone who now gets to be there for my friends and something that I experienced one of my friends did for me, is she gave me a menu of ways that she could help me and I thought this was like the coolest thing and because people say all the time they're like let me know if you need anything.
Speaker 2:But in those moments, in those months, I still didn't feel like I could. Like, hey, I can eat, but I can't cook. Can you come over and cook for me? Can you order me food? Can you get me groceries, like can, pre made meals? Like. I didn't feel like I could ask those things even to my closest friends and that was really hard for me because I was like I need to consume food, I need calories, but I don't know how to get it.
Speaker 2:And one of my friends was like, hey, here's a menu of ways that, like, I can help you. She was like I can come over and cook food for you. She's like I can Uber Eats you food. She's like we can come and I can pick you up and we can go for a walk. I can, you know, lend you my dog and you guys can have cuddles Like you know what. She gave me this menu of how she could help me, instead of just an open ended, let me know what I can do. That is a great idea for them. I'm like here's this menu, you can choose whichever one, or if there's something not on this list you want to let me know, feel free. But like here's, here's three or four ways that I know I can help you and you can shoot, cash them in whenever you want and like, tell me when here's ways that I'm going to do this. And it was so helpful, so helpful, helpful.
Speaker 1:For me, grief was different. It forced me to fill up my mind with so much that I didn't have time to think or grieve. I just kept doing like all this stuff and honestly, to be honest with you, for the last two years, since then, I have been more creative than I've ever been in my life. I'm a creative person, but the creativity has just continually flowed. But I also met someone that was in the military and he helped me understand the difference between grieving and honoring, and he said you need to honor your dad because he wouldn't want you to be sad and crying all the time, because he loved that happy side of you.
Speaker 1:So, anyways, grief is great. If you love, you're going to grieve. That's part of life, right, the more you live. Absolutely, thank you for sharing that with me, and I have so many other questions I'd love to ask, and I know our time is short today, so let's talk about. The last thing is how can people get ahold of you? What if you know? If they need a transformation in their life? What can they do, and can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely so. I do have. Whenever this comes out, I may still have it. If not, you know, always reach out to me, but I do have one one-on-one spot that is open up.
Speaker 2:As far as one-on-one coaching goes, I also have a program that is a two-month program, a group coaching program that I run roughly once a quarter or so, called Outsmart your Brain program, and that's specifically an eight-week program for female founders and it's to help them, you know, get their marketing down, to get their evidence in their brain, to show them that they are successful, to show them that they are capable of achieving the results that they want, how to reverse engineer their goals, just essentially just as a program is named, how to outsmart their brain and use logic rather than emotion in order to run their business.
Speaker 2:So that way, every single day, they are critically thinking and able to, you know, make decisions like a real CEO, instead of sitting here and being like in the stress overwhelmed spiral. But we're going to stop that anxiety truly by using real science, and the science behind performance psychology comes from decades of research, of proven theories, so I share all of that with you. But you can find all of that on my website, which is trueadventurecollectivecom, or you can follow me on Instagram, which my handle is trueadventureco. Both of those places are great places to start out.
Speaker 1:So thank you so much for showing up today and serving hard, because I can tell that that's just who you are. You also reminded me that our minds don't have to be a war zone they don't, yeah. So let's all commit to being a little more self-aware, a little less reactive and a lot more unstoppable, and if you would like subscribe or share this episode, we would really appreciate it. Thank you, karina. I appreciate such a pleasure meeting you today.
Speaker 2:It was so nice to meet you too.
