Transcript of Dr. Michael Gervais: How to Perform Under Pressure Without Destroying Your Mental Health | Mental Health | E383

The world right now is saying we're more anxious, more depressed, more addicted, more loneliness than we've seen in our lifetime, at least. If you want to live in a way where you have voyancy and joy and happiness and a fire in your belly, then you need to train the skills. And those skills are psychological skills.

Today, we're diving deep into the mental side of greatness with one of my favorite returning guests, Dr. Michael Gervais. He's a high performance psychologist, and he's here to show us that real success starts in the mind.

When we study the greats, they are not trying, for the most part, to be the best. They are trying to be their best. The mastery of self is really when you understand who you are and how you work. It is really about Talk to us about why we need to avoid FOPO and how we can. Fear of people's opinions, we believe, according to our research, is the greatest constricter of somebody's potential. This is not not caring about other people's people's opinions. This is about the excessive worry. Now, the thing about this, Hala, is that YAP, gang.

We talk a lot about mastering our craft, but how often do we talk about mastering ourselves? Today, we're diving deep into the mental side of greatness with one my favorite returning guests, Dr. Michael Gervais. He's a high-performance psychologist who's coached Olympic athletes, Navy Seals, and top CEOs, and he's here to show us that real success starts in the mind. In this conversation, we're unpacking the science of mental training, how we can sharpen our focus and emotional control. Dr. Gervais shares powerful tools like breathwork, mental imagery, and journaling to help us unlock our potential in both work and life. Hey, if you're new here, make sure you hit that follow button on your favorite podcast players so you can keep listening, learning, and profiting. Michael, welcome back to Young and Profiting podcast.

I love being on this podcast and having conversations with you, so thank you again.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I know last year we talked a bit about mastery, but since we last talked, the world has changed so much. Everything is so AI-driven. We're using AI every day in our lives. I'm wondering, since we last talked, how has mastery evolved in mind?

The concept of mastery has not evolved. Let me just reground. But the world around us has. I think that that's one of the really important characteristics of the nature of mastery is that there's a timelessness to the idea. I and others, I think, are really happy to upgrade when the timing is called for. But so far, it still holds true. Just to reground, though, there's mastery of self and master of craft. It really is about the path of becoming one's very best and moving toward the ability to artistically express yourself, whether it's on canvas or in word or whatever it might be, to artistically express yourself on demand, independent of the conditions around you. That's mastery of craft. The mastery of self is a requisite. The mastery of self is really when you understand who you are and how you work, how your thoughts and emotions work in said environments, and you have a command of yourself no matter where you are or what the conditions are. That's the path of mastery of self and the path of mastery of craft. Ai has not changed that. If anything, it's called for a deeper investment in mastery of self and mastery of craft because the conditions are changing underfoot.

I'm really glad that you gave us this foundation of mastery of self, mastery of craft. Why don't we a little bit deeper on that? Why don't you tell us what that really shows up like in our day-to-day lives? I know you work a lot with athletes, but if we're executives and entrepreneurs.

You can pick any craft that's of interest to you, whether it's athletics or entrepreneurship or artistic expressions. And whatever that thing is, is actually not as interesting to me as the other part, which is mastery of self. But mastery of craft is just the pond that we're agreeing to swim in, the pond that we think is interesting to swim in. Again, whether it's a sporting pond or an artistic pond or entrepreneurship. And it is almost like the excuse to better understand who you are, how you're becoming, and the skills required to be artistic in your own sense of self. When I think about mastery of craft and self, that gives great range to explore who are we really capable of? Who are you capable of becoming? That really is the quest of mastery of self. And again, just like psychology is not confined by the environment or the room that we're in, your psychology goes everywhere you go. Your mind goes everywhere you go. So whatever environment that you're inhabiting is the opportunity to work through and express yourself at the highest level. And whether it's entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out deal making, we're trying to figure out how to maximize output, whatever it might be.

That's just the excuse. That's the agreed-upon pond that we're all swimming in. And it is really about, do you have the internal capabilities to be at home with yourself wherever you are? And that, again, is a different way of thinking about mastery of self.

What obstacles and challenges do you see when people are trying to master themselves, especially when it comes to entrepreneurs?

Okay, so I said this the other day to a friend of mine, and he's a world world-class singer. When I say world-class, I mean world-class. I said to him, Wow, that is beautiful. I wish that I could sing a 10th of the way that you sing. I think I'm tone deaf, and I just don't think I could ever get anywhere close to that. Thank you. He reflexively pointed back to me and asked me a question. He said, How often do you train singing? I said, Oh, no. I really think I'm tone deaf. He says, That's really rare. He says, But so how often do you train? I said, No, I don't train. He says, Well, how would you expect to be good at it? I was like, Fair point. I think the same holds up in my relationship to singing. I had this idea that I could never sing like that. He's just pointing to, If you put in the work, you might get close. You would definitely get better. I hold that same framing for the becoming of your very best. What I mean by that, more particularly, is dealing with stress well, dealing with frustration well, dealing with things that don't go according to plan well, working with emotions well.

And the world right now is saying we're more anxious, more depressed, more addicted, more suicidal ideation, more loneliness than we've seen in our lifetime, at least. And so the health of the world, the mental health of the world, is not great right now. That's because the external conditions are thorny and they're fast and they're moving in what seems to be erratic ways. Meaning AI is coming in. The way that we're working has really changed in a lot of ways, not just because of AI, but because of COVID and because of the aspirations of how we want to live our lives. The old way is not working. I give you the best of me to the company, and the When he says, Here's some money. That no longer works. There's a new model that's happening for us, and we're still forming our ways through it. Back to my original point, is if you want to live in a way where you have voyancy and joy and happiness and a fire in your belly and this feeling behind your eyes to get after it, a connection with other people, then you need to train the skills. And those skills are psychological skills.

Now, what we have inhabited is from our parents and grandparents. We have adopted this way of thinking about psychology that it's for the weak, it's for those that don't have their stuff together, it's taboo. That is changing, not fast enough. I would just suggest that if you want to live your very best life, I don't understand a way through that aspiration without training your own mind, without knowing how your mind works, how your emotions work together. That really is, for me, what the definition of psychology is. It's the study of yourself so that you can build the right tools to live with joy and happiness, purpose, meaning, connection, fill in the blanks. Just like I was saying to the singer, I wish I could, he's saying in the same exact thing that I say, You can. You have to train. People say to me, God, I wish I could just live a little bit more free or happy or connected. You can. You have to train, though. It's not physical training. That's good. That's important. But it's something else with that, which is emotional mental training.

I'd love to explore that more. We love actionable advice on the podcast ask, so what are some tangible ways that we can actually train our minds? Therapy comes to mind, of course, but I'm sure you've got other daily ways that you're training your mind.

Let me frame it, and then I'll drop right down to the actions. I've spent the last 25 years working with World's Best in sport and high-pressured environments across multiple disciplines. It's apparently clear to me that there's three things that we can train as humans. We can train our craft, that's the technical skills. We can train our body, the physicality for health and mobility or whatever, and we can train our mind. So when you ask about how do you train the mind, I just want to put it in context that it's only one of three things as humans to invest in in, in the way of becoming your very best. So now we drop down one level and we think about how to train the mind. There's two basic camps. One is self-discovery, the process of really understanding, and the other are mental skills training. You You need both. So self-discovery is marked by three things. Conversations with people of wisdom. So maybe that's therapy, maybe that's sitting with your grandmother, maybe it's a priest or a rabbi or somebody, like somebody that has wisdom. That's one. The second is journaling. It's really hard to fake yourself out.

It's really hard to offer something on a piece of paper that isn't honest and real. And when you do that work, you become more clear. And then the third is meditation and mindfulness. So that, meditation, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom, those are the three for self-discovery. There is no shortcut here. There is no seven steps or hacks or tricks or tips. It's like, go do the work. Okay, that's one. Now, the mental skills training, the other bucket, if you will, the way we train mental skills is the same way we would train technical skills or physical skills with sets and reps. So you start off I don't know, do you play a sport or an instrument, or do you have something that as an art or movement that you're invested in?

I love Pilates.

Let's do Pilates just for fun for a moment. When you first go to a Pilates class, you need to get familiar with the apparatus. You need to understand what this reformer does. There's a basic knowing what the mechanics of the machinery are. The same true as in psychology. What are the basic skills? On a reformer, you've got a platform that moves, you got some springs, you've got a bar behind you that you can leverage. In psychology, you've got self-taught, you've got emotional regulation, and you've got imagination as the three main parts to psychological skills. On your first session in Pilates, you would maybe do something easy. You're not going to load up a bunch. You need to understand how it works. We start in an easy path, and then we move our way up to something a little more challenging. Eventually, it's like, really at the edge of what's hard. There's a stacking of intensity, if you will. The same is true for psychological skills. If you're going to do, say, breathing work, you would start something relatively easy, understand the mechanics of the breath, and then you would progressively work into a more intense practice.

Let me give a more concrete example. It sounds easy. It's not a trap question here, but how many parts to a breath are there, Hala?

Well, there's inhale, there's exhale, there's holding it. Three?

There's four.

Okay.

There's the inhale, then there's a pause at the top that you could extend or make it really short. There's an exhale, and then there's a pause at the bottom that you They didn't make it really short or long. There's four parts to each breath. That's like understanding what the springs do in Pilates and whatever. But we have to know the basics. Isn't it wild that as smart as you are, as successful as you are, you and your community, that knowing how many segments to a breath escape us.

Yeah, it's like the thing we do all the time, but we don't even know about it.

It's pretty remarkable. We've got thousands of breaths that happen every day, but it's below conscious awareness. When you bring it to the surface, breathing can actually change your psychology and your physiology. It's a dial that you can work with. Okay, let me go back to the training, though. If there's four parts to each breath, there's three types of breathing trainings. Underneath each type, there's hundreds of iterations, but I'll give you the basics. You've probably heard of box breathing. Box breathing is like four seconds in, four second hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold at the bottom. It's a square. It's easy. Over time, you can extend it to five, five, five, five, six, six, six, six. You might even do box breathing after a workout, which is a little bit harder. You might do box breathing when you're emotionally charged, which would be even harder to do. Again, we're stacking the intensity both in time, the four-second units versus the five-second units, and doing it in close proximity to an elevated heart rate. That would be levels up. The reason we do box breathing is to enhance focus, first and foremost, and then you get a nice little gold dust of relaxation.

But it's really a focus training. That's one bucket, and we're going to stay on breathing, which there's other tools as well. The second bucket is what's called down regulation. We're going to work on relaxing through this one. The primary objective is to relax. For every unit inhale you have, you have double the units of the exhale. If you breathe in for five seconds, you would have a small pause, like a half a second pause at the top with a 10 second exhale and a half a second pause at the bottom. Twelve of those in a row has been said to reset the rest and digest system in our brain and body. So it starts to get us into that more relaxed state. For the science friendly folks, it's the parasympathetic nervous system that would be activated at that point, the rest and digest system. So that's about after 12 breaths of a down regulation sequence. Then the third is to build capacity. It's to, on design, stress you out, to create an acute stressor where you have to work with yourself in this highly stressed environment. That type of breathing protocol is like this. It's, let's call it, six seconds in, six second hold, 12 seconds out, and then a six second hold.

It's 6, 6, 12, 6. If you can do that 10 times in a row for three days in a row, then you would graduate to 7, 7, 14, 7. If you can do each one of those sequences 10 times in a row for three days in a row, you would graduate up to 8, 8, 16, 8. Now, the thing about this, Hala, is that at about breath three and breath 8, your body says, Get me out of here. I'm starving for oxygen. This is really hard. I want to break. Of course, you can always break the sequence. But when you move through it, you change your relationship with stress. You physiologically give yourself a more robust a more antifragile mechanism inside your body. You extend your capacity to do hard things later. Those are the three basic breathing protocols. We could also get into self-taught, we could also get into imagery and other best practices, but I don't want to just be a science nerd and give you all best practices.

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When you think about the hustle hard approach to life. It's refreshing in one way because living a great life is not marked by a foot massage and avocado toast at 10 o'clock every day. It doesn't work. So we do need to apply ourselves, and we We really need to apply ourselves in a deeply nauseatingly focused way. That time under tension is a prerequisite. But that's for technical skill. That's so that you can think clearly and critically, technically. But when you put pressure on that system and you don't have the psychological skills to navigate that pressure. It's as if those things that you've worked so hard to be able to do, just you don't have access to it. In sport, we call it choking. You You don't actually physically choke, but you do choke off access to the way that you want to behave. You choke off access to the way that you want to relate or think. That's what stresses, that's what pressure is. Psychological skills buffer that so that you can think creatively and critically. You can access those skills that you've built even when the pressure's on. There's no way around it. Either you're going to grind and never really know what it's like to consistently rise to that moment to be able to be artistically eloquent when other people are overstressed and not thinking creatively and critically or imaginatively, or you figure out the right inputs for the output.

What I'm going to say is when we study modern-day greats, they are pointing to the value of investing in their psychology. That's essentially what the subscience of sports psychology psychology is built on. Psychology is built on studying people that have disorders. How does that happen? What are the ways that they think that lead to depression or anxiety? What are the genetic factors and environmental factors that lead to depression and anxiety? And then sports psychology is the study of how do the people that perform and live the greatest way we can imagine, how do they use their thinking? What is their genetic coding that they're maximizing? And what are the environmental triggers to help them with the behaviors that they're looking for. It's a very long way of saying, The grades are showing us how, and it's an investment in 3 to 8 minutes, maybe upwards to 20 minutes a day, to have the internal experience that you would hope you would want to have for your kids or your teammates or your loved ones. It's not that hard. Holly, you have the time. You probably need somebody in your corner that says, Hey, I'm going to do the work with you.

Okay? Let's report every day to each other to see if we're actually doing the journaling work, the meditation work, the breath work, the imagery work, the self-talk work, and you just go on a training program. If you did it, Hala, for 90 days, every day, you train your mind just like you train your body. Do you go to the gym and outside of Pilates?

Yeah, all the time, every day.

It's because you want something from it. You want a healthy cardiovascular system, you want healthy musculature, you want to look and feel a certain way, all of that, right? So the same is on the mental side. You go to the gym probably 45 minutes to an hour a day.

Yeah, it's an hour and 15 minutes, usually.

That's four days a week?

Four or five days a week, yeah.

I'm suggesting eight minutes a day. Eight minutes a day. That is available for all of us. If we don't have eight minutes a day, something's wrong with the way we're designing our life, and/or we don't really understand the value of it. We don't do things we don't value. If we don't understand the value, that makes sense to me, and that's why I point to the greats. It takes a little bit of time to get the feelings that you're looking for, whether you're in the gym, you don't go to the gym and all of a sudden, I don't know, have 10% body fat or something. It takes time. Same is true for mental training. You don't do a handful of meditations or a handful of whatever and be like, I feel so happy in my life. It takes time.

Is there an easy way to get started? I know you mentioned eight minutes a day. Is that an eight-minute meditation? Or what are you referring to in terms of eight minutes?

I would say that meditation, I think the narrative is clear by now, the value of it. Eight minutes of meditation a day would be a great way to start. Eight minutes of a conversation with somebody of wisdom would be an interesting play to start, but usually those are a little bit longer. Eight minutes of breathing work, it's a good place to start. Eight minutes of mental imagery, that'd be an interesting play to start. Each one of those are uniquely different. Let me just hit on the imagery so we're on the same page. I know you've had tons of gurus about meditation. Something I think is very apparent in elite sport, but less apparent for the rest of us, is that elite athletes use their imagination to see themselves performing and being their very best at a later state. Imagination is the thing that allows us to predict and muse about the future. If left Unchecked. If left undisciplined, it's supposed to try to sort out survival. Our brain's mandatory algorithm is to survive. That means it's going to scan the world and find danger. That means when left to its own devices, the imagination is to muse about things that could go wrong to prevent us from being eaten by the wildebeast.

Left unchecked, our imagination goes to bad situations, dangerous situations. That's totally Very good. I want to make sure my mind does not lose that bias. Naive optimism, thinking about the future in a naive way is very dangerous. Grounded optimism is awesome. Mental imagery is literally closing your eyes. It's a little bit easier because we're visual creatures. To close my eyes and to see a compelling future and to see me being my very best in it. It's like creating It's the most beautiful movie you can imagine, and it's your movie. I asked world's most dominant UFC fighter for the history of all fighting, the most dominant UFC cage fighter, and I asked them about imagery. His name is Hicks and Gracy. Some of your audience will know Hicks, and many will not. He's older now. He's out of his prime of fighting long ago. He says, Mental imagery. Oh, yeah. That's the most beautiful movie I can imagine. I play that movie every day from multiple angles with multiple scenarios so I can see and feel myself being my very best in what matters to me, whether that's being great in the cage because it's dangerous and being great at home.

That's the power of mental imagery. Left undisciplined, I'll come back to this full circle, is that it moves to an anxious movie. It moves to a worried movie. It's okay sometimes, but if you're feeling a certain way, if you're unsett, if you feel anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, much of this might be the programming that is just the natural byproduct of what your brain and your mind are supposed to do to keep you alive. I'm suggesting learn from what the greats do, purposefully design that movie every day from multiple angles, multiple scenarios, where you are absolutely seeing and feeling yourself being the rock star that you want to be. The joyful, bubbly, zest, fire, whatever the additive is, you get to create that movie. It doesn't mean how. It doesn't mean if you see it, it's going to happen. It's not like that. It's not like if you imagine the red Corvette showing up in your driveway that it's just going to show up one day. It's not like that. But when you see yourself moving gracefully, when you hear yourself in your own imagination adjusting and showing up in tense moments, you are programming your sofa future states.

That programming is not a secret, and it is something that requires skill to do. In elite sporting environments, we have coaches for that, and the rest of us are left to our own devices to say, Well, how do I do? Just like you're asking, Well, how do I do it? I'll get off this narrative now, but it's just one more thing to say. Close your eyes. Imagine the colors, the scenario, the environment, the setting. Bring all of your senses to it, and that takes time to get them right. Then play the movie however you want. You can fast it, rewind it, see it from different perspectives, change it altogether. If you don't like it, move on. If you did that in eight minutes a day, that's pretty cool.

That, to me, is just so, so powerful. While I don't do a lot of breathing or meditation, I do visualize myself and really have positive imagination in terms of what my future is. There's been certain moments in my life. I remember Russell Brunson asked me to speak at Funnel Hacking Live in front of 8,000 people, and I just kept envisioning a standing ovation and that it was going to be flawless. I practiced a lot to make sure that would happen, but it's exactly what I imagined as what happened in those moments.

Let's do the public presenting thing for a minute. It's one of the great fears for Westerners. What's at stake on that public speaking is really your identity, the way that they think you. I think it's one of the great fears for modern people is the fear of other people's opinions is the greatest constricter, as you and I have talked about before. But when you're doing imagery, I think if I was to shape that for you, and that's the movie you're running. I would do an 85, 15. So 85% of the time run that movie where you are 100% in control of seeing how it goes. The audience standing up and giving you all that adulation is not in your control. I would actually not have that be part of the imagery. So interesting. Put a pin in that for a minute, okay? I would spend 85% of the time seeing yourself running this beautiful movie where you're walking onto the platform grounded and clear. You put in your words. Those are mine. Grounded and clear and benevolently interested and curious, but also honoring. There's things that I really want to share and I know. But I'm also like a learner.

There's a unique broth that is unique to me that you need to know what it is for you. See yourself walking or entering into the room in a certain way, and then seeing yourself stitch ideas together from slide one to two But it's about the feeling that you're looking for, not about their response. That's 85% of the time. Then 15% of the time, this is going to sound contraindicated, I would suggest you see yourself walking on stage being really anxious and nervous, maybe nauseous, maybe a poor night's sleep, 50% of the time being in a compromised situation so that you get familiar with some conditions that could show up. Then seeing yourself work with those. On the Finding Mastery podcast, we had Bob Bowman on, which was Michael Phelps' coach. And he recounts the story of Michael Phelps and how he does imagery. Michael Phelps is the greatest of all time swimming, just the ground. And he put in that 15% category, and he saw himself with his goggles flipping up at the Olympic trials and water filling up his eyes as he was making the last handful of strokes towards the end there. And he was using his imagination to see how he would adjust to that because goggles flipping up and water in your eyes is really distracting, but it happens.

So he says, I want to know how to respond. I want to be familiar with that. So he would play that movie handfuls of times just so he would be familiar with it. And just because you see it doesn't mean it happens. It's not how this works, but it does ready yourself. It does prepare yourself. And it did happen for him at the Olympic Games. And as the story goes, he stayed on time, on pace, unfettered, unbothered by his goggles flipping up, water gushing into his eyes, and he out touches his competitor by fractions of a second, and is on the podium as a gold medalist. So 85, 15 is a mix that I think is pretty sophisticated. And the other thing is it's a nice little splash at the end to maybe see yourself standing on the stage. I mean this, just a little splash. Seeing yourself standing at the end on the stage and seeing the audience roar. That's cool, but it's a nice little hint. It's a nice little splash at the end, and that's it.

I'm hearing you saying focus on what you can control more so, focus on how you're going to feel. Also, give a little bit of attention towards what could go wrong to prepare your sofa how to show up if something goes wrong. I feel like those are just really, really helpful pieces of advice.

Then the last bit on the imagery thing is know that it's hard. This is not an easy thing to do. When I do imagery with myself, so I grew up big wave surfing, and I'll just use that example, I put myself in a heavy situation because there's a couple of things I want to work out. I'm paddling for a wave. When you're paddling for it, you're putting yourself in one of two of the most dangerous moments on a wave. If you're behind at that moment where you're paddling, you get pitched. If you're too early, you get crushed. So I got to find that right rhythm, and you pop up, and I see myself in my own body moving down the wave and then making a bottom turn to set up my next segment of the wave. You can see yourself in your own body, or you can see yourself watching from a different perspective. The science is unclear about which is better if either is all, but you want to feel it. You want to feel it. As I see myself bottom turning, I would see myself my back foot slipping off. I don't want that.

I would rewind I'd rewind my movie and put myself in a situation that I would regather myself and work through that bottom turn and have great command over that moment. I would go at 25% speed, and then I'd run it back, 50% speed, and then I'd run it back, 75% speed, and then I'd run it back, 100% speed. That takes a discipline. That takes effort.

Also, expertise. You know how to actually do it correctly. You might not in practice do it correctly every time, but you know how to do it correctly.

Part of the early research here is that they would wire folks up in the laboratory and observe a couple of things, how the nervous system would fire between people that were doing the activity, in this case, it was basketball, and people that were imagining the activity. And what we found is just imagining the activity would fire across the nervous system the same bundle the same regions as if you were actually doing it, but it's as if it was below detectable movement. So you're getting neurological wiring across the most sophisticated part of that movement. The second thing that they observed is that just observing in your own mind, movement, like a basketball free throw shot, created what's called myelinization across the nerve bundle. So myelin sheath is like the rubber coating in our nervous system that wiring has. When you hold a wire and it's got rubber around it and it's got the metal through the middle. The wiring is actually really important for efficiency of how fast The electricity moves through that wire. The myelin in our nervous system is made up of fat cells. It's made up of, partly of omega, fish oils. The more myelinization you have on your nervous system, the healthier the nervous system is, the faster it moves as well, the more familiar that track would be.

You got to make sure that you've got the right omega balance in your body. When you just imagine doing an action, it lays more myelin across that nervous system. If you see yourself doing something, quote, unquote, perfectly, it's not a word I use ever, but I'm putting it in quotes for a shorthand, if you see yourself doing it expertly, is the right word, then that bundle becomes more grouped. Just seeing it creates more myelin sheath across your nervous system for the expert grooving of the pathway. Holly, that's a mind-blowing idea.

Yeah, it's like getting reps in without actually physically doing anything.

Without sweating, without putting yourself in harm's way. It's remarkable. The reason this is not celebrated more, I think, is because we're so interested in a cold shower. We're so interested in a sauna. These are hard, interesting modalities, but they're flavorful of where we're at a narrative. I'm telling you right now, mental imagery, visualization, as some call it, has been around for a long time time. So is cold, so is heat. I get it. But it's in plain view, and it's a massive, massive advantage to living the life that you want to live.

For somebody like me who has a little bit of ADHD and has trouble sitting still and meditating, Which I know stillness is really important to everything that you teach. Mental imagery sounds like something that I can do often and in a routine.

You know what that means to me is with ADD or ADHD, it's just a little harder. It It doesn't mean you don't do it. It's just a little harder than somebody that doesn't have it. But you know what? It's harder for me to dunk a ball than it is for somebody that's 6'5. But if that's important, I got to put in the work if I want to be able to do it. It might be harder for me to do X skill in my craft than somebody else, but it's an important capability, so I've got to invest in it. I would say, I'll give you this one for you and other fidgety people. When I do mental imagery, my eyes are usually closed because I don't want to be overwhelmed, like I said. But sometimes you can do it open, no problem. But for those watching, you can see my hands is that I'm actually using my body to sink in, to feel. It's not like I'm sitting on my hands in a meditative dignified spine. You can do that. You can lay down and do imagery, or you can have slight movements where you're using your body to go through motions, feeling yourself walk on stage, seeing yourself hold moment, feeling your arms coming out.

It's slight movements. It's not the actual full movement. It's just slight movements to accompany the imagery that you're doing.

Young and profitors. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. Here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. It's key to understand your six types of working genius. The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni, and he's a business influencer and author. The working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations.

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Fear of people's opinions, we believe, according to our research, is the greatest constricter of somebody's potential. This is not not caring about other people's opinions. This is about the excessive worry and addressing the excessive, nearly incessant worry like, Are they going to think of me based what I wear, what I say, what I eat, what I look like, what I do and don't do? This excessive worry that is a rumination underneath the surface. That is something that we must square with in modern times, because, again, our brain is designed to scan all the dangers. The great danger for our ancestors that they passed on to us was being kicked out of the tribe. Because if you and I were responsible for something, Hala, we were meant to go hunt something or gather something or whatever, and we're the team, and we came back empty-handed. The elders of the tribe would say something like, Hala, Mike, we're counting on you. There's going to be some hungry kids in our tribe because you didn't bring back this stuff. What happened? And you'd say, it wasn't me, it was Mike. Or you'd say, Look, okay, we understand. Okay, all right, give us another shot.

We understand what we did. And the elders say, Okay, you got another shot. We're backing you. So we go out, and if we come empty-handed again, we're relegated. Being relegated socially 200,000 years ago was a near-death sentence because you and I are trying to figure out the wild world of the Wildebeasts and the warring tribes and rain and heat. It's too much. We need each other. Our brain is tuned to listen for our name. It's tuned to what are they saying or thinking. We're playing this game, this radical game of not being of avoiding rejection. It's this fear of rejection that is just underneath the surface. When you shine light on it, you have some optionality. I would never say, Stop caring. I say, Stop worrying. I would never suggest that being free from the opinions of others is the right path. But loving other people and holding your own standard for the values and the skills that you are working on expressing, there's a different math, if you will, amongst people that are, I think, the most game-changing, shifting people on the planet. Those are the ones that I highlighted in the book and in the research.

We called it the first rule of mastery, and it is literally Stop worrying about what they think of you and do it a little bit differently.

I'm wondering how that translates into goals people are thinking about their New Year's resolutions. When I was just telling you about my goal of Funnel Hacking Live, that as big speaking thing I did was everybody standing up and giving me a standing ovation, and you were like, Don't make that your goal. Talk to us about how we should be framing our goals with FOPO in mind and with all your knowledge about mastery in mind.

I don't think it's a bad goal. It's just you're putting yourself the standing ovation or winning in some way. It's like, they're great. I wanted to win everything that I did when I was in fourth grade. I just don't need to think that way anymore. Because when I'm thinking about things that are... My goal is something that's out of my control. Now I'm out of leverage. Listen, I want to win still, but I'm placing my inputs on things that I can completely master. I'm not interested in controlling the controllables. I heard you say that earlier. I'm interested in fundamentally mastering the things that are in my control. Goals that are about winning that have to do with other people's participation, there's a place for it, but it's of that light little dusting that I've found that the best in the world, they are not trying, for the most part, to be the best. They are trying to be their best. And they also believe that their best is so world-class that if they just string that together consistently, all of that podium, all of that money thing does happen for them eventually. So when it comes to goals, there's a place for outcome goals that, by definition, do not have your full control.

There's a place for it, no problem. I would put 95% of my thinking power into the goals that are 100% in my control, and I would fundamentally commit to mastering those. That's the way that I think we put ourselves in the greatest position for being powerful. The way I think, the way I use my emotions, the way I work with other people, all of that is the stuff that is the broth, again, of mastery. I would distill those Now, there is this meso-layer about number of downloads, maybe for your podcast network, revenue stream for whatever, or number of shows that you want to sponsor. There is a thing there that's cool, and it's not about the ultimate thing, but it's about steps along the way. But underneath the surface, the magic happens when you figure out the things that you are 100% in control of, that you can invest in every day, that lead you to those objectives, to those outcomes. That is not new. That is not new information. I just want to make sure that we're saying the most obvious as a regrounding. The other thing, resolutions we know, they don't work according to research.

Why is that? Is because the plan is not adequate for the idea. Within three months, the majority of resolutions fall apart. There is good science, though, about the timeliness of a fresh start. A fresh start happens on a Monday. A fresh start happens at breakfast. Start happens on January first. A fresh start happens in the US, let's say, Thanksgiving Day. There's a fresh start going into a holiday season, something like that. Taking advantage of this momentum that happens around fresh starts, there's good signs there. When we use January first as a mechanism to get our stuff together, to declare and make a promise about how we're going to do a new, fresh year, and then we put in the work underneath of it of the skills that we need, hopefully, to master, to be proficient with. That is how the best in the world work is that they use the beginning of a season with an idea of what they want to go do, and then they spend all of their time working on mastering the capabilities so that when they have moments, like a game, that they're able to express themselves at the highest level, what they're truly capable of.

I'll leave you with this on the goal setting thing. I spent 10 years with the Seattle Seahawks. We won a Super Bowl and we lost a Super Bowl, which is a rare thing to do, super special. Both of those years, we only talked about winning once. It was like three weeks at the beginning of the year when we're working on our culture, when we're working on our psychology as a team approach. Three weeks were installing the way that we think is going to give us the best chance of training our mind, training our craft, and training our body to be great teammates for each other. Each person to be their very best so we can be great teammates to each other. That's what makes a great team. Side note, I'm fatigued about like, How do we make a great team? You'd be great teammates. How do you be a great teammate? You invest in you being absolutely your best in the most stressful conditions. You will never be a great teammate if you're losing your shit as soon as it gets stressful, as soon as it gets scary, as soon as it's not going according to plan, when you're blaming other people, when you are pointing your finger, when you are intolerant of other people's process, you will never be a great teammate, you'll never be part of a team, and we need each other to do the extraordinary.

So I'm ringing the bell. You've got to invest in your psychology to be great at the moment of stress. Okay, back to the scenario. This three-week install at the beginning of the year. And then it's a throwaway comment by, usually, it was for both of these years, in particular, it was by the head coach, Pete Carroll. He says, If we do what we just said, and we do it to our very best abilities every day, we just might win the whole thing. That was the only time that we talked about winning. I'm being dramatic. Maybe there was another mentioned somewhere in the air. But as a unit, we only focused on the things that were 100% under our control. I've got living proof through that story that it is an outsized investment when you are mastering the things that are in your That goes back to what you were talking about, meditation, breathing, imagery. Self talk.

Self talk. Those are the ways that you can manage your emotions. A lot of the people listening to this show, they're entrepreneurs, they're executives. When it comes to being in a high-level position on a team, I feel like when things go wrong, it's usually because you as a leader were unable to manage your emotions. I feel like whenever I can think of any low point In my career as a leader, I have 60 people on my team. It's like, Man, I wish I just kept my cool or that I just handled that with a little bit more grace and poise. Those are the only times where I look back and I'm disappointed in myself. I could make a mistake, I could lose money. Those things I don't even think about. It's when I lose emotional control that I feel like that has repercussions down the line because the way that your team responds to you is in direct relation with the energy that you're giving out as a leader.

There is not a word out of place. I think what is important for me to add to that, which is very little, is that we have to practice working with emotions. If you're practicing, just like we talked about earlier, there's steps. You practice a skill, whether it's Pilates or throwing a football or speaking or singing in a calm environment, then a moderately intense environment, and then a highly intense environment. There's an arc. If you think that you're going to good with emotions in a highly stressed environment and you're going to sort it out at that moment, but you haven't practiced emotions at the former two levels, meaning the calm environment and or the more moderate stressful environment, it won't be there for you. We need to work What do you do with emotions in calm environments? How do you do that? Meditation, journaling, conversations with people of wisdom, putting yourself in a situation to feel and follow that feeling, name that feeling. Emotional intelligence is a skill set. Intellectual intelligence, general intelligence, as it's known, is pretty fixed, according to research, most research. Emotional intelligence, as one of the core foundations for living a good life, is a learned skill.

You got to look in. You got to understand. Just naming an emotion and following an emotion, it's two of the really big skills to be able to have in the bucket, if you will, of performance. The other bit I'll just add is that people are pretty stressed right now. When we think about our teammates and our partners, they're caring a lot. People are carrying a lot around with them. The world is not designed for our success. If we want to have the great life that we imagine, we do need to understand how to work with emotions, more importantly, how to work with feelings. Emotions are the physical things we feel, and feelings are the private things that happen. Feelings are private to you, they're private to me. I have to ask you, Hala, I noticed that your breathing changed or your heart started pounding or your hands were shaking. What's happening? Then you would go to say, I'm really scared or I'm really excited. Physiologically, they might look the same, but psychologically, the feelings are so private. Emotions are public. We need to work with both the The observable public parts, the emotions, and the private piece, which is our feelings.

Let's do a little scenario work. Let's say I'm a leader on a team, and the team does something that is clearly wrong. There's an SOP, they've been trained, and they made a mistake, and a client got mad, and it's because they didn't follow what they knew they should have done. How would you manage your emotions in this case?

It depends on a couple of variables. I've invested a lot of time under tension to work well with emotions. My emotions are available to me, and I have the ability to toggle them up, toggle them down, for the most part, I get caught in this storm of emotions as well. But so one is I just want to level set that, that I am aware because of how much time I've practiced them. For the most part. I'm not walking on water. My wife reminds me of all the time. There's none of that that I would ever pretend. Okay, my 17-year-old son reminds me that more than you would imagine as well. There's an awareness. The second thing is, now we're talking about somebody didn't follow an SOP and there's a poor performance moment. Is that I need to know and have a relationship with that person, with my teammate, with my employee. I need to know what their scar tissues are. I need to know what their hopes and dreams are. I need to make sure that I have a relationship with them that if I were to express frustration, it's fine. It's just expensive for me, and it's expensive in taxing for the other person.

But if we have a relationship, and they know me and I know them, at the right levels, I can say, John, what the fuck? And John goes, Oh, shit, I know. I say, Look, all right, we'll solve this later. Okay, how do we fix it? How do we fix it right now? And then so we go into maybe that's the lowest performance thing, I would say. At my highest version, the thing happens and I go, Mark it. Let's solve it right now. We'll come back. No worries. Let's solve this thing. Come on, let's be great. That would be a range. I have to know how they like to be coached as well. Some people fall apart when there's public coaching. So I have to know my teammate. So well in advance, I ask all of my teammates, How do you want to be coached? How do you want to be in intense environments when they're not going well? And some will say, Pull me aside. Some will say, Give it to me straight, right between the eyes. Some will say, So I've got to know. I've got to know myself and I've got to know them.

And now I'm working to match those two in service of performance. If it's a I'm going to post-review and we're sitting down, clearly, John or Susie blew it. Then I will say, okay, listen, I want to understand what happened. I'm hot and I'm frustrated, or I'm really nervous that this is going to happen again. I'll tell them my emotional state so that they can settle down. I'll say, Listen, I might even say, We've talked about this three times. This is a dangerous conversation here. We've got to solve this. Meaning you're at the end of the rope. I might say that. Or I might say, Look, it's fine. This happens. We all make mistakes. What's my part in it? Again, I've got to know the person. I've got to understand the context, but I've got to work within myself to make sure that I'm working my emotions rather than emotions working me. As somebody in a position of leadership, that context is really important. As soon as you get frustrated, it sends ripples that are not necessarily advantageous for people to perform better, but it does shift their physiology and tightens them up. Sometimes that's a good thing.

Sometimes tightening up the physiology in people is a good thing. Sometimes it's too much. The aperture shuts down and people are like, again, they feel choked off to their ability to think clearly.

How else can we build psychological safety within a team? So obviously, controlling our emotions is a huge part of it. Is there any other tips that you can give?

I would say not controlling emotions. I would say working with them. Emotions are a little bit like the You are the elephant, and you are the rider. When an elephant, an emotion in this case, wants to run, it's going to run. So I think working with emotions rather than controlling them. It's how I frame that.

Also, to your point, you might feel the emotion, feel the feeling, but you strategically are presenting it in a way to your team that you feel is going to bring out the best in them and help them actually solve the problem rather than make them feel anxious or, to your point, choked.

That's right. You as a leader need to know be artistic with how much tension, how much not. We need tension. We need tension to have that right diamond-expressing thing. Too much tension, we crush the coal. Not enough tension, we never get to the diamond. There is tension in the environment that is awesome. It's so fun. Sometimes I got to bring it, sometimes they're bringing it, and I got to back it down. There's an art in here. Let's ground on psychological safety first. For what aim? Psychological safety as a theory is designed for people to speak truth, to power, maybe, but just to speak their truth, to share their perspective without fear of being pushed out of the tribe. Psychological safety is not in the workplace. It's not designed for therapy at work. It is not designed so that you can bring your full mess to work. That is not what psychological safety is for. Psychological safety is so that when you see something, you can say it. Hey, listen, I've been studying this thing all day. I know no one wants to hear this right now because we've all made a decision. We're down this path.

But I got to tell you, I'm seeing something that's not right. I haven't worked it out, and I've worked it out. I just got to tell you, we need that. We need the diversity of thought, the diversity of unique life experiences, the diversity of unique smells across the planet to say, This doesn't fly. This language doesn't fly for that group, for this group. We need to change some stuff. Psychological safety in service of the purpose, in service of the mission, so that you can speak truth. Maybe it's the power, but not always. Okay, how do you do it? You have to know your people. That's it. We spend so much time in high-speed, high-performing environments to know each other. Because when you know each other, you have context. When you know that there's like, Okay, Hala just stepped on a tripwire here. She's in a space. Okay, hold on, hold on. Hold on, slow down. What is it? Or I see you're ripping and running, you're animated about something, and I know maybe your kid's names. I know some stuff about you, I know that this is really exciting or you're fresh, whatever. If we know each other, we're more likely to take care of each other.

Again, it's in service of this shared thing that we're coming together for. That's a lot there. How do we do it? We take time to know each other. Full stop. That's how you do it. I'll tell you a story. It was in Formula One. I spent some time in Formula One, one of the most high-performing sporting environments on the planet. After the race, the engineers, we all know the athletes. They call themselves the pilots, the drivers of the cars, and they're the stars. The car itself is a star in Formula One. There's thousands of people that are working to help the car and the driver to shave off hundreds of a millisecond across high-speed corners. This is an all-in high-speed, high-agile, consequential environment that they're working in. After debrief, the meetings that I've been part of in one team in particular The engineer, the lead engineer, would raise his hand after the meeting and start the meeting by saying, Okay, everybody, here's the two ways that I screwed up. Here's the two mistakes I'm going to sort out. I don't have the answers, but I'm aware of A, B, and C that I did at this moment, in this moment.

I'm going to look for Hala. I want to connect with you afterwards to make sure that you help me through some of these blind spots. They are showing that they are part of the ecosystem, and none of us is perfect, of course. When a leader does that, it creates air cover for other people to speak the truth about what happened. Again, it's in service of the shared mission. If everybody's in service of the mission, but the mission is not in service of their experience in life, that doesn't work. It's an exhaustive, extractive model. The company needs to know their mission or purpose, and the individual needs to know their purpose. Then we're in service of both of those together. That's what great teams do. That's what great teammates do for each other.

I have so many follow-up questions, but the first one that comes to mind is when we're trying to get to know our employees, you had mentioned we want to understand how they want to receive feedback. What other questions should we be asking people to really understand them and to work better with them?

These are hard questions, but there's no secrets in it. Everyone I work with, whether they're athletes or teammates here at Finding Mastery, I want to know their personal philosophy. I want to their first principles that they're working from. I want to know the values that those principles rest on. I'll explain all these in a minute. I want to know what the compelling future that they're working toward. I want to know their purpose in life. Now, those are all very distinct, separate things that get confusing for some people. But when I ask you, Holly, what's a compelling future that you see in your mind that you're working towards?

I envision having 100 top business podcasters in my network, and I have a company that makes $30 million a year and a happy team.

There you go. Okay, that's the vision. And I go, Oh, okay. Yeah, I want to be part of that, too. And then you say, Mike, what's yours? And I'll make something up for the sake of an opposite. And I say, You know, I want to be... This is actually true. But my vision of success is having an adult relationship with my son. And you go, Oh, I'd I'd like to help you with that, too. Now we got this thread. That's us sharing this beautiful future state. That's why we're working so hard. I say, Yeah, I want to help. I want to participate. I want to be part of yours. I'd be stoked if you could support me along the way. Maybe you say, Look, I'm going to pay you a lot of money, and this is going to be a great environment, and that's how I'm going to be in service. Awesome. We're clear. Then I say to you, What are the most important values? When you get tested, what can I trust? How are you going to show up from your values? You would say, Just give me one.

Loyalty. Excellent.

You got two. Okay, great. Then I say, Loyalty. I say, Okay, how do I know if you're going to be loyal to me Am I the brand? Now I'm asking you about your first principle because you might say something like, loyalty to those that are in my inner circle. Am I in it or not? I need to know, how do you express that value? You don't need to answer that. Then I would say, when it all comes down to what is the philosophy that you're working from? You might say, My philosophy, I'll tell you mine, is that every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. I see every day as the platform. I see it as an opportunity, so there's an optimism to it. I see creating something with other people, part of it. The masterpiece is the expression of my craft and myself in the most capable ways. You go, Oh, that's what you're doing. That's your philosophy. Okay. So the compelling future, you got some values that you're working from. There's this philosophy thing. Then the last is, what is your purpose? Can I ask you? Do you know your purpose?

It's a big question. It's a big question. Whenever I think about my purpose, I think about my ability to use my voice and my skills to help other people in their own entrepreneurship journey. So inspiring others to be great entrepreneurs.

That's a purpose. Why are you here? I'm here to help other people become better entrepreneurs, more themselves, whatever. You color it. A purpose has to have three things. It's got to be meaningful to you. Sounds like it is. It's got to be in service of something bigger than you. When you're in service of one other or more than one, it's bigger than you. The third is, it's out in front of you. It's something to work toward. You just, by definition, according to science, hit on all three of the vectors of purpose. When you put that constellation together, now I really know you. Then if you're like, Mike, that's really it. I go, Is it like this or like that? We just fine tune it. You go, Yeah, it's more like that. Then I would say to you at the end, I'd say, How do you want me to support and challenge you? Then we have that conversation. Now we're on the path to be great teammates. Now, if I am selfish and messy, and if I just told you a narrative, but I don't really believe it, and I'm just really doing something else, we'll never be good teammates.

Those people, you got to move out. They're not part of it. That might be hard because they might be high earners, but they kill culture. They kill the team. And so I have not yet met or worked with a world-class coach in sport and business, not coach in business, but executive in business that hasn't said the same thing. Why did I wait so long to get rid of them? And I'm I talk about the high earners that are saboteurs of other people's potential. Why did I wait so long? I was scared. I was scared that they were going to take revenue and leave. I was scared that I was going to lose marketplace. I was scared that they were going to cost a game here or there.

Yeah, sometimes you got to focus on the long term, not the short term. I want to be respectful of your time. I end my show, Michael, with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improvisers can today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Understand the inputs to output when it comes to your psychological skills. Invest in one of the greatest inputs you'll ever have. Invest in how you work with your own psychology. Know yourself so that you can be a great teammate for others, and then the output starts to flow in the right direction. Invest in your psychology.

I couldn't agree more. What would you say your secret to profiting and life is, and this can go beyond business.

I think my secret is that there are no secrets. There are first principles in life that I'm working from. For me, profit, I think of holistically. I would put in place of that this idea of living a great life. What are the principles to living a great life? The research from Harvard's 85-year study pointed out eloquently two of them, connection and purpose. My relationship with myself and other people, my relationship with experiences in Mother Nature, that's the connection thing, so I invest there. Then I'm making sure that I'm lining up my thoughts, words, and actions according to the purpose that matters most to me. Those two I think, are in plain view. If you have coupled that with investing in your own psychology, I think you really got something.

Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

The podcast is a fun place. Finding Mastery is a podcast Our website is findingmastery. Com. On social, Michael Gervais. Spelled like Ricky Gervay, but with Michael in front of it.

Yeah, and he's got a great podcast, guys. I'll put the link in the show notes and you guys should check it out. Thank you so much, Michael, for all of your wisdom and your time.

Always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

What a transformative conversation with Michael. He just handed us the exact blueprint that the world's greatest athletes and performers use to unlock their potential and achieve mastery. Here's the truth that landed the hardest for me. Mastery isn't some distant goal reserved for the elite. It's just about two things. First, understanding who you are and how you work. Second, Building the skills to express yourself at your highest level, no matter what is happening around you in that moment. Here's the beautiful part. While AI evolves and the world changes, these fundamentals will stay timeless. Michael made mental training ridiculously practical. Just eight minutes a day is all you need. That's all it takes. Box breathing for laser focus, downregulation breathing to activate your rest and digest system, capacity building breathing to literally expand your ability to handle stress. These aren't gimmicks. They're psychological skills that separate people who crumble under pressure from those who thrive in it. The 85, 15 imagery rule completely shifted my perspective. I was doing it all wrong. Michael encourages us to spend most of our mental rehearsal on what we can control, your preparation, your mindset, your feelings, how you'll execute. Then practice responding when things go sideways as well.

Don't only focus on what could go great, focus on what could go wrong and how you'll handle it. Michael Phelps won gold with water flooding his goggles Because he already lived that moment hundreds of times in his imagination. I love the concept of mental imagery, and I can't wait to use this tactic. This is where it gets real. Stop obsessing over outcomes you cannot control. That standing ovation, that revenue target, that promotion, that's not where your power lives. Put 95% of your energy into mastering what's completely yours, how you think, how you handle emotions, how you show up. When you consistently nail those inputs, everything else will follow. Here's what I'm going to leave you with, Yatt Bam, the world's best are not winging it. They're training their minds with the same discipline they bring to their bodies. Your psychology goes everywhere that you go, so train it, sharpen it, master it, and make time for it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you enjoyed the show, drop us a five-star review on Apple, Spotify, Castbox, wherever you listen to the show. Nothing makes me happier than reading a great review from you.

If you want to watch this episode, all of our episodes are uploaded on YouTube. Go there, support us, subscribe to that channel, join the community. You can also find me on Instagram at @YAPwithhala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And of course, before we go, I've got to give a big shout out to my incredible YAP team. Thank you guys so much for all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA the podcast Princess, signing off.