Dr. Michael Gervais is one of the world's top high-performance psychologists. He's the co-creator of the Performance Institute at USC, and he's the host and creator of the podcast Finding Mastery. In this episode, Michael shares how we can use psychology to help pursue our wildest ideas.
Dr. Michael Gervais is one of the world's top high-performance psychologists. He's the co-creator of the Performance Institute at USC, and he's the host and creator of the podcast Finding Mastery. In this episode, Michael shares how we can use psychology to help pursue our wildest ideas.
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Shelby Stanger:
Over the years, we've talked to plenty of incredible outdoor athletes, people who've walked across America, scaled El Capitan, or highlined over some of the world's largest canyons. Though they train physically for months or even years, a huge part of the preparation is psychological. These athletes have to train their minds to perform under pressure, to push through self-doubt, and overcome anxiety.
Dr. Michael Gervais is one of the world's top high-performance psychologists. He's the co-creator of the Performance Institute at USC, and he's the host and creator of the podcast Finding Mastery. Today, I'm talking to Michael about how we can use psychology to help us pursue our wild ideas. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production.
Michael Gervais grew up as an athlete. And in college, he became fascinated by how humans perform under pressure. After getting his PhD in performance psychology, Michael went on to work for the Red Bull Stratos Project. There he famously helped Felix Baumgartner manage his mind and body for his record-setting skydive from 128,000 feet in the sky.
In 2011, Michael signed on with the Seattle Seahawks. His primary objective was to help head coach Pete Carroll build a mindset-based culture. He worked with the Seahawks for nine seasons, including two back-to-back Super Bowl appearances. Now Michael works with all kinds of athletes, and he spent the past three Olympic Games working with athletes on Team USA.
Michael Gervais, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Michael Gervais:
I'm so stoked to be here. Thank you so much, Shelby.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, this is exciting because we haven't had on a true sports psychologist. And you've interviewed so many people, including guests of this show, like Jimmy Chin and more, on your own podcast, and you have all these books. And really, this show is about how to get unstuck and how to use the outdoors as a catalyst to change. But you've been working with the top outdoor athletes. What are some of the things that you see that athletes come to you for?
Michael Gervais:
Well, I think it's not dissimilar to the stuff you and I would want to sort out. There's some lifestyle things that are maybe just causing some extra stress or not quite dealing with some of the relationships properly. There's always that in whether it's an elite athlete or an aspiring elite athlete, whether it's traditional sport or adventure sport. That is always kind of part of the mix. I don't know anyone that has their social and intimate life all buttoned up, so that usually pops up in some form.
Shelby Stanger:
That's good to know.
Michael Gervais:
Yeah, it's good. Welcome to the club. Doing this work actually reminds me that we're all just trying to figure the same stuff out.
The other capabilities are like confidence. Even though somebody has had multiple gold medals or has scaled whatever, done first a sense here, there, and the other, understanding the mechanics of confidence is very important for folks. Because if confidence is dependent on recent success, then it's a very dangerous proposition. You want to get the ordering and the math of confidence right so that you can decide your level of confidence independent of the conditions.
People come to work on confidence. They come to work on making sure that their arousal levels under high stress or fear feel manageable. They want to work on mental imagery. They want to work on what next, and what is the meaning of my life. I've done all these amazing things. I'm paid so well, or not. What am I really doing here? So, just having a sounding board to work that out as well. I mean, what else are we doing in this life instead of just trying to figure it out?
Shelby Stanger:
Over time, Michael has broadened the spectrum of who he works with. He realized that the same techniques he uses with athletes can also be used by high-powered CEOs, creatives, and really anyone who follows their dreams. As he worked with more clients and dove deeper into the research, Michael realized that there's one major obstacle that often stands in the way of people's performance, fear of people's opinions, or as he calls it, FOPO.
Michael Gervais:
I spent the last two years researching a very particular concept. What I found is I thought I was alone in this feeling of this dis-ease, and discomfort, and anxiety, if you will, about the judgment and critique of others. I knew other people had anxiety, but come to find out it's like 30% are struggling with clinical anxiety. And in some cases, 7 out of 10 people have struggled with some level of anxiety in the last 12 months. Those are really high numbers.
When it comes to anxiety, there's a specific anxiety that I was attuned to for much of my early life, and it was the fear of judgment, the fear of critique. We coined it fear of people's opinions as a rich way of thinking about what I think is the number one constrictor of one's potential is this excessive worry about what they might be thinking of us, and it's exhausting.
It would be worth us talking about how much do I actually give to the opinions of others. Am I able to design and paint the canvas of life on my own terms or am I constantly working to adapt to what they might think of me? If we look from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains are wired to be part of the tribe to fit in, and we are very sensitive to even the slightest beginnings of potential rejection. What many of us do is we're scanning the world to see if we're okay. And that's a problem because we find ourselves conforming, and contorting, or confronting just to see if we're okay.
Shelby Stanger:
This is giving a crap what others think, which is the subject of your next book. I think that is a huge thing. A lot of the people that are guests of this show have started movements for what they believed in. Most people who pursue a wild idea, if it's wild, someone's going to tell you you're crazy for doing it. And most people aren't going to be on board with your own wild idea, so this is really good stuff.
This is something that paralyzed me When I was writing my first book that just came out. The whole time I wrote it and the whole time it was coming out, I had in the back of my head like, "What if people hate it? What if the subjects of the book hate it?" It was awful. We have one guest on the show who gave me some good advice, Pattie Gonia, the famous outdoor drag queen. I interviewed Wyn, and he was like, "If people are giving you hate, do what RuPaul says, pay the haters no time." But I think that's easier said than done because we're all a little bit in our head, and we all do want to fit in. So what are some things we can do that works?
Michael Gervais:
It's really cool. On the Finding Mastery podcast, there's the artist Moby. His quote was something to the effect of when he saw himself for the first time on a magazine cover as a musician, he was like, "Oh, this is nice. This is love. People know me. I have meaning. I'm on the right path. I'm okay." Which looking back, and even saying out loud, he recognized was not healthy.
But I think if we're honest, there is this, use his word again, an intoxication, a craving of being told that you're good, or that you're okay, or that you're on the right path. Then, what he did is he spent the next 15 years obsessing over what people were saying or not saying about him. He had to stop by handing over the power back to himself. The way that we do that from a technical standpoint is first you have to feel the pain. The pain is like, "I am letting my external world dictate my internal experience." It's not until you feel that pain that you'll make the change.
So, what is the change? It's moving from a approval-based philosophy, avoidance of rejection and craving for approval, to purpose, and shifting from a performance-based identity to a purpose-based identity. A performance-based identity is exactly what it sounds like. You base your identity in relationship to how other people perform. When our identity is linked to performance, the quality of our performance defines who we are. And you recognize this as an athlete. That's why when we go on the field, or the pitch, or the floor, whatever it might be, or the outback, is that it feels like it's life or death, but it's actually our ego that's on the line, and our entire identity is at risk. If I don't perform to the highest, most perfect standard, then my self-worth is at stake again. That's why we've got this fear of failure. It's not that the failure's so bad, but the reason it feels so bad to us is because our identity is co-mingled with that failure. That's called a performance-based identity.
The pursuit of excellence and high performance, of course they're important, and performance matters in this world. We learn a lot about ourselves by doing difficult things and testing the boundaries of our limits. But when the core motivation of pursuing excellence or high performance is to prove our self-worth, mistakes, and failures, and opinions, and criticism are experienced as threats rather than as learning opportunities. It's moving from that type of toxic internal framework to a purpose-based identity...
And a purpose-based identity is exactly what it sounds, identifying what are my first principles in life, which is really a fancy way of saying what are the values that matter to you, and what is the purpose of why I'm here. That is so overwhelming. It's such a big question that most people pause and go, "I have no fucking idea." So we can make it super small and say, "Well, let's thin slice that. What is your purpose for today?" Just practice that out for a couple weeks, a week, I don't know, something like that. Then you can think about, "Well, what's my purpose for this month?" Make it a little broader. "What's my purpose for this year? What's my purpose for the next three years?"
Eventually, you're going to start getting closer to like, "What am I doing here? What is my purpose of why I'm here?" When that becomes crystal clear and the values about how you want to go about it are crystal clear, you've got a path, and you've got a north star. The purpose is something, according to science, has three components to it. Your purpose needs to matter to you. Nobody can give you purpose, so it has to have meaning, personal meaning. The second, has to be bigger than you. So it's something that you can't solve today. You can't really solve it alone, so it's big and audacious in that way. The third is there's a future orientation, so there's this compelling nature that it's still right out there.
Shelby Stanger:
According to Michael, if we want to transform our relationship with FOPO, we need to work from the inside out. Rather than allow the external world to dictate our internal reality, we can flip the script by developing a handful of psychological practices and skills. When we come back, Michael shares more exercises from his new book and tells us his advice to get unstuck and go after our wild ideas.
Sports psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais has been working with elite athletes for more than a decade. He's learned that the techniques that work for folks at the top of their game can also work for people like you and me. If you've ever wanted to try van life or thru-hiking, you might find that friends and loved ones don't always understand your wild ideas. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue them. This is an issue that Michael tackles in his new book. It's called The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You.
Is there any other exercises from your new book that you want to share about how we give less crap of what other people think? I love the title, by the way.
Michael Gervais:
Stop worrying?
Shelby Stanger:
Stop Worrying What Other People Think. Love it.
Michael Gervais:
Yeah, I know. Thank you. How to stop worrying about what people think, there's so much freedom on the other side of it. Notice that the word is not stop caring. That's not the mechanism here. It's stop worrying. It's that excessive worry about what will they think that once you get this thing in order, there's incredible freedom on the other side.
Some of the practices... Mindfulness is right at the center. What mindfulness does as a practice, it's the practice of becoming aware, and it does many things. There's lots of gold dust that comes from the practice of mindfulness, but the gold is the practice of becoming more aware of two things primarily, aware of your inner experience, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your physiology if you will, and then more aware of the external world so you're more clear about what's happening outside of you as well.
If you're not practicing some sort of awareness training or some sort of awareness building, you're not in the game yet of high performance. As you do something to increase your awareness, you start to play a bit of a different game in life. That's ground zero. Start there with a practice of awareness building.
Self-study is like know how your thoughts work, know how thought one and thought two work together and impact emotion A. Get it together in that respect. I've been practicing 25 years, but I'm not just repeating good science. Which if you want to go that way, we can. But I'm repeating what the best in the world are saying that they're doing. And they get it. They're like, "Listen, I want to be great, and I can't be great unless I know how my thoughts work and how my feelings and emotions work. Because when it's on, I want to be great there too. And when it's boring, I want to be great there too. And when it's a conversation in a living room, I want to be great there. When the lights are on, and the puck drops, or whatever the sport might be, I want to be great there too." That begins with awareness training, and mindfulness is certainly one of the three tall tent poles for awareness building. So, I would start there.
Shelby Stanger:
What are some of the athletes that you've worked with doing to have more mindfulness in their life? There's breath work. There's yoga. There's meditation. Or is it just simply being able to connect emotions to thought one to thought two, or thought one to thought two that goes to the emotion?
Michael Gervais:
What I'm describing is actually a meditation practice. Breath work is not meditation. It can be meditative, but it's different. And there's a good place for breath work. The science that has come online in the last, let's call it 10 years has been really cool. But as a practice, there's two basic types of meditation. There's single point meditation, and there's contemplative meditation. One is about quieting your mind by having something very basic to focus on on repeat. That's the first part of it, that you're saying to quiet your mind.
The second part is having an external focus, which is... Loving kindness has been around since the beginning of mindfulness, at least my understanding of it. It's awesome. What they end up doing is they help you become more aware of when your mind wanders from the one thing that you're focusing on. As soon as your mind goes... Say you're focusing on your inhale I am, and on the exhale here, or whatever the exercise is, is that you start to recognize quickly like, "Oh, I'm thinking about my email to do," or, "I'm thinking about this project I have coming up." So as soon as your mind wanders, that's the moment of awareness. That's it. Celebrate that because... It's not like, "Shit, why is my mind wandering?" It's like, "Oh, I just caught it. Great. Now I'm in awareness, and now I can just refocus my mind back to the one thing I want to focus on." That's it. In many respects, mindfulness is the starting over a thousand times, and that's awareness training.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any interesting stories that you came across while researching this?
Michael Gervais:
Surprisingly enough, when I was doing the research on FOPO, fear of people's opinions, Beethoven of all people, Beethoven had FOPO. He went deaf. For years, he receded from public view to hide that he was afraid of what would people think of him if they knew he was actually deaf and he was just faking his way through, he couldn't create the music that he was lauded for.
Symphony No. 5 was post deaf. It was said like... was him pounding his fist on the piano, frustrated that he couldn't quite hear the notes. Then he heard that, and he's like, "Wait, that's it." There he goes and writes one of his all-time great symphonies. There's plenty of people that have it, and I think we're all just trying to figure it out.
Shelby Stanger:
I have never heard of FOPO. I've heard of FOMO, but I really like that, FOPO.
Michael Gervais:
Fear of people's opinions.
Shelby Stanger:
I study this guy, an LA guy, Larry Crane. He passed away. But he used to say that wanting other people's approval is the biggest check you'll ever write.
Michael Gervais:
That's awesome. I mean, that's it.
Shelby Stanger:
It's expensive.
Michael Gervais:
That's it. And not only is it expensive because you're having to make some choices about your life, but it's expensive in the way that it exhausts your system.
Shelby Stanger:
Michael says that through mindfulness, we can be more aware of our trains of thought. He gives the example of someone who thinks, "This is hard." Their next thought might be, "This is really hard," which might turn into, "I can't do this." Then, 20 thoughts later, they think, "I can't do anything." That thought train dramatically influences our performance. But if that same person changes their thought mentality at thought number two rather than at thought 20, they will feel and perform differently. Mindfulness allows us to get off at an earlier stop and take a different line.
I think this practice would be really helpful for many of us. Sometimes we come up with a wild idea, and it's so exciting we can't stop thinking about it and it feels like the perfect fit. But maybe once we start planning the logistics or run into roadblocks, we start to second-guess ourselves. Those doubts lead us on one of those negative thought trains. But Michael has some great advice for people who feel stuck in a cycle of anxiety.
Michael Gervais:
For folks that have an idea of something that they'd like to do, and they've been dreaming about it a long time, they've got the makings of an idea, and they just haven't quite figured out how to make it a reality, I understand that experience. I would say the hard work, the vision casting, the creating a vision of a compelling idea, or a project, or an adventure is really one of the big rocks to get in the container. So, it's really important to do that work first.
If you're already there, I start to nod my head like, "Okay, cool." I would challenge that person to be able to describe it with great clarity. That could be in a conversation. Then, it's just a little bit better when you write it down. When you start to write down what actually is the vision and what are the capabilities required, what are the key milestones that go into making that happen, then you start to develop a plan.
The thing that I think most people we have to rub up against is not necessarily the vision in or the plan to make that happen, but it's this dilemma about the people that love me, the people in my community that think I'm a little crazy, that don't get it, that say things like, "What are you searching for?" or, "Why do you need to go there to do that?" or, "Isn't that dangerous?" or, "Oh geez, I think that time has passed you up." They kind of cock their head 15 degrees, and they shapeshift their eyes a little way, and it's a little bit of a squint with an eyebrow raise. It's just that slight little hesitation that is created in us. That's the thing to know that is likely coming.
That's why the fear of other people's opinions actually holds us back, is that there's this reverberation that takes place when we share dreams, or ideas, or wild projects with other people, even people that deeply love us. Because the people around us, they love us. They want the best for us, but sometimes when living our very best makes them feel a little bit less than. What most people really want is to feel okay and good around the people that they love. There's a bit of a heavy blanket that can get thrown over people's dreams. The reverberation I'm talking about is when you say it out loud is to know that the echo that might come back is the unapproval, that they don't totally approve or get it.
I'll share a very concrete example. Lauren Regula, she was one of the great softball players for the Canadian Olympic organization. She was "past her prime", a 39-year-old mom, and she was offered a chance to come out of retirement and play for the Olympic team. She almost passed it up because of the judgments about her age, her choices, her role as a mom, her role as a wife. If it were not, in her case, for her partner... I mean, many of her friends were like, "I don't know." But if it wasn't for her partner that said, "I got you. Go for it. I'll be a partner in this with you. I see you. I see how much you want to take another shot at it. I got you."
This idea that nobody does it alone is so important. Even if the thing is a specific trail or a month-long adventure somewhere that's a solo expedition, nobody does it alone. So, we need each other to prepare, to go, to support, to challenge us, to literally prepare us and enable us to be our very best.
I think it's pretty common. I wish more people could understand how that echo chamber or reverberation of just the slightest little clever descent of the dream gets in the way of what we're capable of.
Shelby Stanger:
Michael's advice addresses handling the judgment of others while preparing for our wild ideas. But later, when it's time to come home, there's another important psychological factor that I actually wrote about in my own book, Will to Wild. Often, when people return from an adventure, the integration back into normal life is challenging. The event that they've been focused on for so long is over, and it can be hard to figure out what's next.
I've actually interviewed a lot of people recently that wrote books or people who've done wild ideas on the podcast. And if they don't know what's next, it's really challenging. Often, they slip into a little bit of a depression, but sometimes you just don't know what's next because you're just myopic and that's all you can focus on. So, what do you do then? Sometimes you just don't have another idea. This is all you want to do.
Michael Gervais:
And that's cool. When that thing is done or it's come to an end... The analogy we use with Olympians is that when the circus leaves town, it leaves a bit of a mess. The grass is trampled. It's a bit messy. Trash cans are overflowing. There's a mess after the big thing, after the thing that you've been working 8, 12, 16, 4 years for, whatever it might be. Just recognizing that that's part of the process, that's okay too. If you've got the luxury of having a bit of runway, meaning you've got some money that you can buy some time with, it's okay. It's part of the process.
I wish I had an easy answer, but it goes back to a compelling vision. What is so exciting about my future that I can't wait to get up with some vigor about it? And what is my purpose? Why am I going to apply effort in any specific direction? Again, nobody can give those two. That's the rite of passage of being an adult. That's why the service of psychology or having a mentor that really understands you, or a journal that doesn't judge you, like a cushion or a meditation pillow that can help provide a little bit of comfort when you're doing the inner work, those are the three best practices. People have wisdom. Talk about it with them. The second is write about it. It's a forcing function to get honest. And the third is get to know yourself, and get quiet, and feel, and observe how your thoughts and emotions work.
Shelby Stanger:
Talk with wise people, write, and adopt a mindfulness practice. I love these tips for not only figuring out the next step but, honestly, for processing anything that's on your mind. Michael Gervais, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. I enjoyed your insights.
If you want to learn more about Dr. Michael Gervais, check out his website, findingmastery.com. There you get links to his social media, and you can also listen to Michael's podcast, Finding Mastery, in your favorite podcast-listening apps. Michael's new book, The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You, is out now. Check it out wherever you get your books.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, rate it, and take time to write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.