Dr. Michael Gervais on How You Unlock the Science of Success EP 511
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Coming up next on Passion Struck. So efficacy is a fancy psychological term for power. And when you can see or others can point out to you more aptly that you are making a difference in the greater whole, it does something primal and ancient to your brain. Safety is kind of what the brain is designed to do. Our ancestors gave us this powerful brain and this radical computer, if you will, to

And it's really orientated for just a few things, one of them being safety. And so we're constantly scanning the world to see where to assess safety or danger and belonging is one of the most primal ways to know safety.

Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the

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I had two amazing conversations that you need to check out. First, I sat down with mindfulness master Corey Allen, and we explored how to create deeper awareness and presence in our fast-paced lives. If you're looking to sharpen your mental clarity, reduce stress, and truly live in the moment, this episode is for you. Corey's practical tools will help you take control of your day-to-day like never before. And if you want to hear Corey and me talk in person, then I'm coming to Austin on November 3rd,

and Corey's moderating a book talk that we're doing about my book, Passion Struck. It's at 4.30 at Book People. Next, I had the honor of speaking with Nosim Rochette, a true embodiment of resilience and strength. Her life changed forever on May 21st, 2018, when she was involved in a horrific accident that left her run over multiple

times. Miraculously, she emerged without broken bones or internal injuries and instead of being defeated by the experience, she found a new sense of purpose. Now, she celebrates Unbreakable Day each year, a powerful symbol of thriving in the face of adversity.

Her story is one that will inspire you to face your own challenges head on and come out stronger on the other side. Now, let's get in today's episode because it's going to be a game changer. I'm beyond excited to introduce today's guest, Dr. Michael Gervais. He's a high-performance psychologist, a national bestselling author, and one of the world's foremost experts on the mind and human performance. His reach extends from the NFL Super Bowl champions to

like the Seattle Seahawks, to Olympians, Fortune 50 CEOs, and globally recognized artists. Dr. Gervais has helped Team USA in multiple Olympic games, most recently with USA Surfing at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics. His ability to guide individuals and teams to thrive under intense pressure is unparalleled.

He's also the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, which is in the top 1% globally, where he explores the minds of extraordinary thinkers and high performers. Today, we're diving into his groundbreaking new book, The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What People Think of You. Dr. Gervais will break down how the fear of other people's opinions, or FOPO, holds us back

and how we can overcome it to unlock our true potential. We'll learn how the top performers in sports, business and beyond shift their focus from external validation to internal mastery and how you can apply these same principles to live a more authentic high performing life. We're also going to explore Dr. Gervais personal journey working with Team USA and top athletes giving you actionable strategies to take control of your mindset, push through fear and stop playing small. This episode is packed with life changing insights that you can start

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and we love hearing your thoughts. All it takes is you introducing it to one person. Now, let's dive in to today's episode with Dr. Michael Gervais. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. We all have plans in life, maybe to take a cross-country road trip or simply get through this workout without any back pain.

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I am absolutely so thrilled and honored to have Dr. Michael Gervais on PassionStruck. Welcome, Mike.

I am so happy to be here with you. Congratulations on the efforts that you've made to make a difference in people's lives. It's really impressive. Well, you are such a requested guest from our communities. So I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. And so I've been looking forward to this day for a few months since we scheduled this. Oh, great. Thank you for that. Started out like this. We all have moments or things in our life that end up defining who we become.

You grew up, as I understand it, on a farm until you were around second grade and then you moved to California where you developed a deep passion for free surfing. Can you tell us how those early experiences both on the farm and my grandfather grew up on a farm? So I love his stories about it.

as well as in the waves help define who you are today. Oh, very cool. That's fun for me to talk about. And then I'll just do a quick preamble, which is my story is unique to me. And I think the depth of the opportunity when you're listening to other people is to say, wait, how does my story, meaning maybe the listener, viewer, my early experiences inform my life. And so almost like asking the question to yourself as you go. So

Easily. I grew up on a farm and it was a choice my parents made to drop out. So this was in the 70s and they were both city folk and they said, "We're going for a different way of life," which I have radical respect for when people make those types of altering decisions. So from city people to a town that had dirt roads, no street lights, nearest neighbor was really far away.

I think we sat on 30 acres of land. It was not a working farm. It was just a lot of land. And my parents in that kind of dropout hippie mentality,

had a very laissez-faire approach to parenting. And laissez-faire has a bit of a bad rap. There's three, according to the research, three types of parenting: laissez-faire, authoritarian, and authoritative. Where authoritarian is, "I will tell you how to breathe, how to eat, how to sit, how to talk," very top-down heavy. And then authoritative is like firm, strong boundaries.

What we'd imagine what in today's time would be good parenting. And then laissez-faire is like very different. It's like, I hope you get home tonight. So this is, I'm like a, I don't know, seven year old kid with 30 acres of land. And I remember the big lesson for me is pay attention.

Because when you're out in the wild as a young kid and you get some things wrong, it gets really scary trying to figure your way back to the house that you've wandered away from at night. No, let me be more specific. During the daytime, I've wandered away playing in the creek, as we called it, the creek,

And then when it started to get dark out, the house got further away, it seemed like, and it was harder to navigate back. So I remember, pay attention, know how you fit in mother nature, be aware of the rhythms of the world. And I will be forever grateful of that lesson that mother nature and my parents accidentally taught me. And then early on, it was like second or third grade, like you mentioned, my folks said, hey, we're moving to the city.

I was such a fish. It was the suburbs of California. And I basically moved into an environment where I wouldn't say it was bullied, but I was punked pretty aggressively. I didn't fit in. And then my parents were trying to find their footing. They were young parents.

And I ended up moving a lot. We moved a lot for my dad to find opportunities and moved in like fourth grade, moved again in seventh grade, moved again to a new school middle of my ninth grade year. And so there was this tension that I had to continually figure out the social way as a young kid, which has served me well now to better understand how groups of people work.

And the cost of it though, is I was desperately trying to fit in as opposed to, I know who I am and I'm going to just arrive and show up and be me. I figured out how to fit in at the compromise of like my fullness. And I think many kids end up doing that anyway.

And it led me to, at some point, a bit of a mini crisis, which is, wait, who am I? I know how to fit in. I know how to get on. I know how to be part of something, but who am I? And I also...

I've come to understand that I'm not alone in that adult question and come to find out it's one of the most ancient questions in the Zen traditions. It's one of the primary meditations in Buddhism and Zen traditions, just entertaining the question, who am I? It's a beautiful process. And what the waves taught me when I moved to California was again, a reinforcement that there's no written rules.

There's no coaching really at that time. So pay attention. And if you really want to experience the thrill of surfing, you must put yourself in a intense, difficult, challenging, scary situation to be able to ride the wave with all of the momentum it has. And when you put yourself in that most precious situation, when you're paddling into wave, you're at the top of a wave. If you, if you hesitate, you're,

You get pitched over the wave and you're rolling around underneath the wave. And sometimes if it's a big wave, it's scary. And sometimes it's small. It's no big deal. I don't want to over exaggerate. But you have to put yourself in a position where the timing and the nuances are critical to the success. And if you are too early, you get hit by the wave from behind. If you're too late, you get pitched over the falls of the wave.

So there's a timing to mother nature to surf well that has served me well in business and relationships in life as well. And then each wave is uniquely different. And so when you look at a surfer who's doing something that looks easy, they are very practiced at being in the present moment because you only get to practice surfing about six to 10 times an hour.

on a environment that is completely brand new, meaning every wave is brand new. So it's very hard to get good at something that is that inconsistent in training, where you compare it to like track and field or stick and ball sports, like, I don't know, say basketball. The hoop doesn't change. The floor doesn't shift on you. People around you move, but basically the skill is the skill on a stable surface. Look at the back of the rim, cock your arm and shoot it. Same for dance, same for other sports as well. So

So that's end all be all is I learned how to navigate social settings and I learned how to navigate mother nature and both of those, that combination of what the unsaid but explicit rules of mother nature and the often unsaid and hidden rules of social environments. They were really important, informative takeaways for me, both for business and in life.

Yeah, well, thank you for sharing that. And I can relate to you. My father growing up moved around a lot too. He was in sales. And I was very happy when I moved from Illinois to where I grew up in Pennsylvania when I was also around third grade, but for different reasons. When I was five, around five, I was pushed from behind playing tag and had a traumatic brain injury. And I know Jim Quick was similar to Jim, but

I became the boy with a broken brain. And so I felt so just different than my classmates. Plus on top of it, it caused me to have amplyopia. So on top of all my learning difficulties and speech impediments that I developed, I now had a patch on my eye. So I look different. And when I moved to Pennsylvania, I got to remove that patch and it was like my life was reborn, but

That story is going to play a lot into our conversations because that bullying that I went through and everything else really caused me as I got older to not be comfortable using my own voice and listening too much to what people said. But I want to go back to the surfing just for a second. Earlier in the year, I interviewed BJ Fogg, who I'm sure and BJ was talking about that one of the major reasons he spends so much time in Hawaii is because he loves to surf.

And he was talking to me about it's this unique combination of mental clarity flow. And as you were describing this ability to perform or have to shift your behavior in unpredictable environments, how has your surfing and the lessons you've learned not only helped your life, but more importantly, helped you guide athletes, particularly in events like you've coached Olympic surfers, but other high stake professional athletes as

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So I spent, let's call it the first 20 years of my professional life working with elite performers, some in stick and ball sports, like the big NBA, NFL. And then I moved to what I would call more honest environments. So I left big sport because I didn't feel like it was honest. And it was 20 some year olds with huge platforms that were more interested in how they looked and

and how other people were adorning them as opposed to a full-on honest commitment to be one's very best, what I would call the path of mastery.

I left that environment to get back to honest environments, which is to answer your question, when you're in a consequential environment, and I would not call football one of the more rugged sports, certainly, and rugby, definitely rugby. I don't call them hostile. And you say, or some would say, well, you've never tried to catch a ball with a 200-pound missile trying to tackle you to the ground. True. I never played at that level.

However, I was in the NFL for nine seasons with the Seattle Seahawks and we worked at the highest level. We got to go to two Super Bowls, won one and lost one in dramatic fashion. And I did a survey, an informal survey with athletes and coaches, is football hostile? And it was a 92% came back and said, no, rugged. It's not the intent to harm other people. However, it can be. So it does sharpen you a little bit.

And then on the other side, to get to your question, when you're operating in environments where you can die, where when we go on a strike mission, so to speak, and the athletes are packing their bag and their tent while they're up on the side of a cliff because they're about to do the thing that they set out to do, and they pack up their bag and all their gear in their tent because if they die, they don't want their friends to have to pack up their stuff. The level of honesty...

The level of no BS when it comes to trusting self and trusting others, the level of full on acceptance of what is and commitment to be one's very best together with your teammates is so pure and so refreshing that what it's informed me and my practice now is basically a consulting firm helping big businesses understand how to use exactly what you're asking, the insights from elite sports.

is when you're operating in real consequential environments, it's a forcing function to be incredibly honest. And in the business world, and even in much of the big stick and ball sports, they're not honest. It's so clouded with noise. And most of the noise is external, kind of bleeding in, and it bleeds in. And it's a bit of a drug. And I'm not, I compassionately understand what I'm saying that

I don't, I recognize that I could be right what I'm pointing at myself. And I was there for a while as well, is that this admiration, adulation that happens is a drug. It feels wonderful. And it's a corruption to one's purpose. And it's a corruption to one's deeper identity. And it's a corruption to one's potential.

And so I had to go back to those honest environments to really understand how does at the highest level of consequence, at the highest level of skill execution, like Felix Baumgartner in the Red Bull Stratos program, where he jumped out of space at 130,000 feet, like the Heaven Sent project I worked on where Luke Akins jumped from 30,000 feet out of a jetliner without a parachute.

into a 16 story net that he and his team built. Completely binary outcomes, either you make it or you don't. That it's so glaring when people are asking, hey, Finding Mastery, hey, Mike, can you help our team be a better team? And first of all, in big business, the art of being a great teammate is not well understood. So if you want to be in a great team, it's really about the substrate of how well we are as teammates.

And it only lasts so long to connect to the company's purpose. If you can't lock the company's purpose with your personal purpose in life, it's an extraction.

And like the company sucks the best out of you because you haven't held up or done the adult work to say, this is my purpose. And I want to, I'm going to be honest with my purpose. I'm going to be honest with the pursuit of the company's purpose. I'm going to figure out how to stitch those two together. And I can't do this without a bunch of other people. And I want them to serve me well, and I need to serve them well. So it's personal purpose,

a larger mission of the collective, knowing what it means to be your best so that you can be the best teammate to other people. And I just gave like a bunch of clues and I would love to unlock it, but that is what consequential environments, some might call it a VUCA environment, but it's even more consequential than that, that it's a forcing function to be really honest with yourself and those people that you're in those environments

environments with will quickly call you out. And what I see, because lives depend on it. And what I see in the corporate environments right now is that we don't want to be jerks to each other. Some people are jerks.

So it shows up, they're narcissistic, anxious, OCD, performance driven, their identities wrapped up in like how well they do what they do. And the slightest of mistakes or the anxiety of it not going well becomes very prickly and frustrating and intolerant and toxic, if you will. But that's not the majority. The majority of people want to have a great life and be on great teams and be great partners to other people. And they want to do something meaningful with their life. However,

With the corporate structure the way it is, in California at least, it's very hard to fire somebody. It's very difficult to do. And owners and C-suite have to be very thoughtful and careful about how they coach and how direct or indirect they are and the performance review planning. I get it. I do get the protections for people and I respect that. However, I see it

like stripping away the essence of the purity that's offered in those honest forcing function environments because they're so consequential. And there's got to be a better balance somewhere between the two, because I would not suggest that, you know, John, you jump out of a plane at 30,000 feet without a parachute, like even as skilled as you could be. And, but I would suggest that in the corporate world's,

There's more room. There must be more room for a more honest conversations without the fear of people falling to a thousand pieces and or suing later for

I don't know, whatever the HR policies that get pushed up against. So I gave you a lot there, John, maybe you can pull it apart in what you think is useful. Mike, let's pull this apart a little bit. So I'm going to tell you something you don't know about me. I've talked about this story on the podcast. I've moved away from it for a while because I was worried the listeners were hearing too much about this story. But I told you I used to work at Dell. Well, prior to working at Dell, I worked at Lowe's Home Improvement.

But I was recruited to join Lowe's. And I just want to give you the circumstances that I walked into. So I am hired into a VP role. And at the time, I was 33 years old. I was the youngest VP in Lowe's, the entire company. And in my peer group in the IT arena, I was 10 years junior to anyone else. Okay. Now I'm hired...

to come in because my last job was I was the chief information security officer for this global company called Lendlease.

And Lowe's had just undergone the largest hacking incident in the history of retail. But when I come on board, I am hit with two things that no one had told me. The company had really started out as a mom and pop and had just scaled accidentally to being a $40 billion company when I was with them. And things were so bad that our data center manager didn't know that if

whether if we plugged in another server, it was going to take the entire data center down because we were so close to exceeding our limits on power capacity. But then the other thing I learned is the first week I have a meeting with the head of HR and I'm thinking this is going to be an introduction to my team and everything else and who my director of ports are, the lay of the land. And it was a little bit of that, but she tells me,

John, we just did employee engagement surveys. And on top of everything else, the group you're inheriting has the worst employee engagement score out of 350,000 employees in the company. Oh, geez, John.

So this is what I walk into. And I did what any executive would typically do. I started talking to my peers and business peers about the function I was inherited and why do we have this security event? And all of them are saying, I got a bunch of people who aren't worth a crap, this or that. But then I did a thing that I think a lot of leaders fail to do. And that is to put themselves in the shoes of the lowest level.

ranked person you have in the organization. So I had a 24 by seven operation and I started going in at two o'clock in the morning and talking to the people in the call centers and the operations command center and the security command center and the data centers. And what I found, and it speaks to what you were talking about, is that the vast majority of them had no idea

how anything that they were doing was impacting the customers, was impacting the strategy of the company, was making a difference. And the two bigger things I learned were that no one ever asked them for their opinions on things. So they were complete order takers. And then no one took the time to look at them as holistic individuals to see what they wanted to do with their lives, both at work and outside of work. And

I implemented a program where we tried to address all those things. I ended up getting moved 18 months later to another position, but shortly thereafter they did another employee survey and this time the group came back second highest in the entire company from being the lowest 18 months to two years prior.

And it all goes to the things that you're talking about. So let's maybe just unpack a couple of them because I was talking to Gary Vaynerchuk and we were talking about he appointed Claude Silver to be the chief heart officer. It's the first one that I'm aware of that anyone's been called that instead of a head of HR, a chief heart officer, because he wanted to understand the heartbeat of his employees.

If you're someone who's listening to this, why is that element so important to success? Oh, good question. I think it's because the research around impact and self-efficacy is noted. So significance of work as it relates to the greater impact is really important for a sense of efficacy, which means a sense of power. So efficacy is a fancy psychological term for power.

And when you can see or others can point out to you more aptly that you are making a difference in the greater whole, it does something primal and ancient to your brain. So safety is what the brain is designed to do. Our ancestors gave us this powerful brain and this radical computer, if you will. And it's really orientated for just a few things, one of them being safety.

And so we're constantly scanning the world to see where to assess safety or danger and belonging.

is one of the most primal ways to know safety. And you say, what do you mean? Say, if you're part of the tribe, if you're part of a community and you're recognized that you have value in the community, you are likely not to be kicked out very easily because the ones that are kicked out got eaten by the wolves. They got sucked up by mother nature and don't survive very long. So safety is belonging. And one of the ways in the modern world that

that pulls forward from 200,000 years ago, our ancient brain in modern times is when leaders are very explicit and clear, hey, this is how you are making a contribution to the fuller tribe. Whether it's like you do great at chopping wood and starting fires, or the way that you are

making sure that the pencils are stacked properly in the back office for us to be able to draw well or whatever we're doing. I'm thinking like old school engineers or something. That matters. And so what it does is it quiets the brain down from being anxious about, am I okay here? And so when we think about modern leadership,

1980s leadership was really born out of the industrial revolution, which is, hey, we're going to use humans as cogs in the machine and we're going to extract the best out of them. And modern leadership is really about unlocking all of the talent that lies inside the person for the greater good. And because that we hold dignity of the person. So we see the person with great dignity and we want, we're committing to helping them live a rich life together.

And when we line our noses up toward the same big purpose or goal or mission, whatever word that the organization works, it's a very rare and special thing to do. And it does take leaders to understand the humans, to understand how to unlock. And one of those unlocks is to, I'll give you a methodology here in a minute, is to help them understand how what they do is having an impact and

also be so honest and clear that what they're doing is not helping and hurting. And we need to coach it or course correct, or we need to figure something out. So you coach the behavior, love the person, you see the person and support and challenge the behaviors. And one of the most, and here's the little three-step process that works in elite sport that I've seen at work wonders in business as well. And I learned this from one of my colleagues at the Olympics is that the

Yes, that. So when somebody does something great, the old phrase, catch them when they're being good, you celebrate like a wild person. When you see the behavior that you'd like more of, that they're trying to get better at, and you say that right there, and they say, what, this? And you say, yes, that. Do that again. Keep doing that. That's what we need. So that, yes, that. And

I just can't overestimate the importance of a sense of belonging. And that doesn't mean in business that you belong forever.

It means that we have to honor the transactional nature of business, which is that we get to do this together when we are both performing well together. So sometimes people hold a little bit more power in that dyad than others, but it's transactional. And I think it's a mistake to say we're a family and we're here to be in each other's lives forever. That's not how elite sport works. It's not how big business works. It's like there's a

transactional nature to it, but it does not mean that we don't see the person be great at pointing out the behaviors that we'd like to see repeated and even more explicit about how they fit into the greater whole. John Wooden, one of the great sport coaches of all time, UCLA basketball, one more than just about anybody else. He would on day one bring, as the folklore goes, I had a chance to have a sit down with him when he was alive and it was a very

It's such a special moment, but he would bring the greatest. I would have loved to have had that opportunity. Yeah. And I asked him, so I was a young sports psychologist at the time. And I said, do you work with a sports psychologist? And he said, no. And I thought, oh, there's an opportunity for him. Maybe for me too. And he went on to explain that the attention to detail that he provides to build people feels like it's sufficient.

And it's a very, I'm going to get some, I'll finish my story in a minute, but it gets to the opposite approach, which is tear people down to build them up. What he's doing is seeing the person and building their inner belief and

and their connectivity amongst each other, how we have to do this together. You play a significant part. So please, I'm going to support and challenge you to be your very best because I'm counting on you. Johnny's counting on you. Roger's counting on you. Boosters are counting on you.

And what he would do at the beginning of the season to finish my stories, he would bring the best in the world, the best, not the best in the world, the best college recruits in the world. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recounts the story. And in day one, he would teach all of these highly skilled athletes how to put their socks on, how to tie their shoes. And the question often came up from the athletes, coach, I know how to do this. Why are we spending time here?

And he would pause and he'd say, because if you have a blister, you cannot contribute to the whole. And we need you to contribute to the whole. And so he would do the same with the person that would bring the balls in and off the court, on and off the court to understand just how important that job was. And then when I was at the Seattle Seahawks, we, we laid deep.

deep, what am I saying? Tall flagpoles around culture. It was one of the most important pillars that we created there. And the culture was surrounded around helping each individual be their very best together and

And to do that, that didn't mean just the athletes. That meant the coaches, the staff, the support staff, including the team of folks that were our custodians for the facility to make sure that they were also included in that commitment to the whole. And we would include them on day one with the culture that we wanted to build. And we would be very explicit. Look, we're trying to do something very rare, very elevated, very special that

And if we do this right, we just might win a Super Bowl. But we need for all of us to be great. If there's not toilet paper, if the toilets are dirty, if like you're part of the contribution here is substandard, man, we need you to be great. And you'd see them like instantly. They're like, yes, I'm part of this, too.

And so I could go on and on about how every, what I'm saying is that every person matters because they breathe. And when you can explicitly show how their contribution matters,

of their skill matters to the whole, you start to add to some, you start to build the base of something that's very special. And at the same time, you're lowering anxiety. And right now, anxiety is in an all time high. In modern world, it was probably pretty damn high during the dark ages. I mean, the Roman empire was really brutal. So I'm just talking about the last maybe 60 years is pretty high or maybe a hundred years. It's pretty high.

Well, you explored two different things there. And I want to go in a little bit deeper on the latter thing that you were just talking about. I think you and I share a common friend that we probably didn't know we had in common, and that is Sean Springs.

And I had Sean on the show and it was really an interesting discussion because he talked about the bookends of his career, the places where he learned the most about himself. And that was when he initially started with the Seahawks and then where he ended his career with the Patriots. But he told me this story that he was this young Ohio State kid comes to the Seahawks. And the thing he talked about all the time was the culture. And he said the culture is,

wasn't just Pete Carroll and the coaching staff. He said it went up to the ownership. He told me the story that one time he remembered that Paul Allen, when he was pretty junior to the team, took him on this personal tour with him. And here he's thinking, I'm here with this billionaire. But while I was with him, he made me feel like I was the most important person.

And he told me that not only was it the goal for the Seahawks to make him a great performer, but they wanted to make him a great human being. And you have a quote that I found that describes this, where you say, we are humans first.

then we are human doers. And that goes back to what I was talking about when I was at Lowe's was until you make the people feel like they're humans and that whatever they're doing matters, until you do that, they're never going to perform to the level that you want them to. That's right. Or what they're capable of. I feel like there's this leadership sometimes in the old way, it's like control and power and responsibilities and accountability. It's like this old idea of leadership.

And the modern leader, if I go back to it, is really about helping people unlock this dormant potential that they have within them. So modern leaders, it's not about control and power and decision-making rights. It is more about coaching and understanding the basic psychology of humans and human performance. And I'm not talking about psychology.

psychotherapy. I mean, I'm classically trained as a psychologist with specialization in sport performance, and I'm not suggesting that my skillset be ported to business operators and leaders. I am suggesting though, that the basic foundational understanding of how human behavior and motivation and drive and security, how those things work is part of the toolbox to help people be their very best. We are tired

We are fatigued in a real way. We are anxious. We are overwhelmed. We barely know our family members at the altar of productivity and Wall Street and making sure that we have some sort of security in modern work. People are not thriving right now. If I were to give the grade to U.S. workforce, it's not great as compared to the grade of people who know their purpose, who

are aligned on a team that's thriving, embrace the consequences, and at the same time are fundamentally committed to be their very best and to be the best with other people is a very different way of living. And so I am concerned about the state of the union of people right now. And I don't say that, I don't want to ring that bell and then not provide like a second part of the conversation, which is, so what do we do?

As individuals, increasing awareness of how you speak to yourself, on how you work with your emotions, and how the unfolding world around you is taking place.

So increasing awareness of your thoughts, your emotions, your physiology, and the world around you is the starting ground to be able to navigate this very complex world around us and this complex world inside of us. So awareness is at the kind of the core seat of the whole thing. And there's three ways we can increase awareness. Mindfulness a la meditation, conversations with people of wisdom, and the third is journaling.

So it's those three practices that I've been doing this for 25 years. They're at the core of the whole thing. And so if you're doing at least one of those, I stand on the table and say, right, keep going like you're on it. Then once you have awareness, you start to lay on psychological skills. So how do you speak to yourself first?

to provide space as opposed to constriction? How do you speak to yourself to back yourself rather than doubt yourself? How do you work with emotions as opposed to inviting them and seeing them as being exciting as opposed to being overwhelmed? How do you work with stress, acute stress, and more importantly than chronic stress? And so it's the inner world that provides like this exponential output

or living the great life. And that includes like performing in a special way, but also just living in a special way. So I just want to keep pointing to the power and potency of going within as an outsized impact for any type of life that you want to have, whether it's to be the best, your best, to be content and happy, whatever it might be,

It's an outsized impact to actually train your inner life. And we do that in elite sport the same way that we train our technical skills or our physical skills. So for physical skills, we go to the gym, right? So if you're going to train your body, you go to the gym. I don't know, 45 minutes to 90 minutes a day.

four hours a day for elite athletes is the max of what they do. So think about four hours a day for an elite athlete to train their body. And most of us will never get near that. We're like more like 45 minutes, right? Like I was saying earlier, but what if you only did 30 minutes a day of training your mind? What if you did 15 minutes a day

on a dedicated fashion and what if you worked your way up to 45 minutes a day of training your mind working with your emotions the impact is exponential i've always been taught that if you just spend 15 minutes a day over the course of a year if you're repetitive about the practice you'll be 96 better than anyone else in that discipline i mean there's some data there and i would say

less being better than others, imagine as successful as you are or the listener is. And they've probably gotten to the position in life that they're in without much disciplined work on like breathing, meditation, self-talk, all of that kind of inner psychological work.

Mike, I prepared to do this whole episode with you discussing your book and we barely even have touched on it. In fact, we haven't yet. And we're running out of time. So I'm going to definitely have to bring you back. But I'm going to introduce it this way. And I'll tease the audience about having you back on if you'll come back on. I'd love to. Thank you. As I was preparing for this, I've been this year doing a daily practice where I've been reading Mark Nepo's bestseller, The Book of Awakening.

And as I was preparing for this episode, one of the messages I read, I thought really tied to the purpose of your book. And his message is to live out loud. And what he was really speaking to was the fact that we often become conditioned in life. We lose our authentic voice because we're so worried about what other people think.

we stop using it. And I thought that this really tied to the core message of your book, The First Rule of Mastery. And I was hoping maybe you could just introduce it to the audience and then I'll have to have you come back where we can explore it more. Too fun. So thank you for bringing up the book. The title is The First Rule of Mastery. The subtitle is Stop Worrying About What People Think of You. And for a long time, John, I thought that I was alone with worrying about what other people thought of me.

And I was a bit embarrassed by it. And it's not something that you stand up publicly and say, hey, I'm really worried about what you people think of me. And then I started working with elite athletes and come to find out that I was much like them in that same way is that

They were worried about letting their parents down, letting their teammates down, letting their agent down, letting the fans down, letting their coach down. It's like they were really over-indexed on what others were going to think about how they're living or how they're performing. And I was listening over years and I was like, okay, I'm not alone. So I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review and it was a three-page article.

And 12 months later, they came back and they said, Hey, that article titled how to stop worrying about what people think of you. They said it was the number one downloaded article for the last 12 months in a row. Let's write a book. And I thought, Oh man,

I don't know the science really behind this. Like I just, I had some, some nice ideas about it. And so I went to work and I found, I dug in, I, I aligned the science that would support why our brain, why our psychology, why our society is unfortunately well positioned to be over indexed on what people think of us and how to find freedom from that.

And it's not complicated. It's quite simple, actually. And the practices are quite simple. And I'd love to talk about those practices with you. I'll give you your listener. Maybe one that would be materially important is to first just take a look and see how much energy do you spend on thinking about what somebody else might be thinking about you and

And then be honest, like how much are you contorting or conforming your behaviors and your ideas to be in favor of other people? And it shows up, John, in really slippery ways. It's like, so we call it FOPO, fear of people's opinions, as one of the greatest constrictors of your dormant potential. But FOPO shows up.

when you're checking your phone so that you appear to be busy or in demand. It's laughing at a joke that you didn't actually find funny or going along with the story of a movie that you didn't know, but you don't want to be the one that didn't see it and slow down the fun train, if you will. Do you stay late because your boss is still there, your supervisor's there? There's such subtle ways. Even if you go to a social event,

and hold a cocktail, even though you don't want to drink really, like you don't feel like it, but that's what everyone's doing. Like it shows up in really subtle ways. And this fear of people's opinions is bigger than I ever imagined. And come to find out it's, it really hit a nerve. And that's really what the book is about. Like, how do you free yourself from this excessive worry about what people think of you?

Well, I love the book and I highly encourage people to buy it. It's great. And I completely agree with the premise and understand why it was so popular. Oh, thank you, John. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Mike, he's got a great podcast called Finding Mastery that I encourage you to check out. For people who want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? Oh, website. We got everything there. It's findingmastery.com.

The podcast is wonderful. It's a great place to be part of our community. There's a FOPO assessment that's free and it's on the website as well. And like the newsletter bit is a great way for us to be more intimate with kind of how we've been thinking about things. So you can find everything at the website and of course, socially. Well, Mike, thank you so much for

for being on the show and I can't wait to do it at a later date, a deeper dive. This was a great teaser. - John, before we wrap, I wanna say thank you in two ways. One is I have great respect and regard from making a second act take place in life, going from a big business or big job that you had into carving your unique path, stand up on it. Like I love that, I have great regard for it. Thank you for being a beacon for that, for all of us.

And the second is I want to thank you for the space you created in this conversation for me to play and use and go somewhere. And I would imagine that's why you are such a great leader and found your way in a senior position in some of the most important companies, certainly in tech. And so your ability to listen and give space to others, me included, is noted and appreciated.

Oh, thank you so much. The honor was completely mine. Thank you so much again. All the best. Wow. What an incredible conversation that was with Dr. Michael Gervais. I hope you're leaving this conversation as inspired and fired up as I am. Dr. Gervais shared some truly groundbreaking insights on how we can rise above the fear of other people's opinions and take control of our own mental mastery. If you're ready to put these principles into action, remember, it's not about what other

others think. It's about becoming the best version of yourself from the inside out. One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is the importance of shifting your focus from seeking external approval to building internal mastery. If you start applying

that today. Just imagine what you could achieve, whether you're an athlete, a business leader, or simply striving to become your best self. These principles have the power to unlock limitless potential. If this conversation with Dr. Gervais resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Drop a review and let us know how you plan to use these lessons in your own life.

And don't forget to share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Your support not only helps us, but it also helps others on their journey of living a more intentional Passion Struck life. All the links to Dr. Gervais, including his book, will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use the website links for purchasing any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. It goes to supporting the show. You can also find our videos on YouTube and advertiser deals and discount codes at passionstruck.com.

slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. As for me, you can connect with me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles, where I post daily bits of wisdom. Before we wrap up, I want to mention that beyond hosting the PassionStruck podcast, I'm incredibly passionate

about bringing these insights and strategies directly to organizations, conferences, and teams through keynote speaking. I've had the privilege of speaking to some of the world's top companies like FedEx and Target, conferences like the Salesforce Dreamforce Conference, and different associations, helping their leaders and teams tap into their potential.

ignite their purpose and create real lasting intentional change. If today's episode sparks something inside you and you think these messages could inspire your company or organization, I'd love to explore how we can work together, whether it's a workshop keynote,

or panel discussion. My goal is to help you and the teams that you work with break through your barriers and start living and performing at the highest level. If you're interested or you know someone else who might be, just head over to johnrmiles.com slash speaking for more details, or feel free to reach out to me directly through the website. And if you think I'd be a great fit for your next event,

I'd really appreciate it if you help spread the word. Just a quick email or recommendation can make a world of difference. And together we can inspire more people to live and work intentionally and to take bold steps towards success. And speaking of inspiration, get ready for an eye-inspiring episode next week as I sit down with the incredible Dr. Deborah Egerton, an internationally recognized Enneagram expert. We'll be diving into her book, The Enneagram Made Easy, and exploring how

how this tool can help you unlock deeper self-awareness, build stronger relationships, as well as living a more intentional life. It's going to be a conversation you don't want to miss. I'm going to share something with you, John, that I don't talk about very often, but I think it's important. Even though I wasn't always treated as if I belonged,

I knew I belonged. I knew that people who were treating me differently, people who were, and I use the term othering me or trying to push me to the margins of society, that there wasn't anything wrong with me, that they actually had a challenge that they needed to work on.

that there was something in them that made it okay to try to treat another person as less than. And my work and my teaching around belonging really goes right to the core of you have to know within yourself that you belong on this earth, that you belong in the places that you choose to show up.

And the people who want to push you away, that's work that they need to be doing. And as always, the fee for this show is simple. Just share it with your family and friends. All it takes is one share to make a difference. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. And until next time, remember to live what you listen. Stay passionate, stay intentional, and we'll see you next week. Live life passion struck.

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