A Bit of Optimism - Mastery is an Infinite Game with performance psychologist Mike Gervais

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Fierce competition can lead to burnout. How do we train ourselves to maintain excellence without giving in to the pressure to perform?High-performance psychologist Mike Gervais has a solution. He calls it mastery. Mike's approach to mastering our thoughts and emotions has helped Olympians win gold medals, the Seattle Seahawks win the Superbowl, and CEOs take their companies to the next level.Mike and I sat down to discuss the psychological tools to fine-tune our inner voices and why focusing on purpose instead of outcome empowers us to accomplish difficult things.This...is A Bit of Optimism. To learn more about Mike's work, check out his podcast:Finding Mastery 

We live in a world that demands that we pursue performance, grades, corporate incentive structures, even the way we think about relationships. High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais has a solution. He calls it mastery. Guiding people to achieve mastery of themselves and of their craft is what he has used to help Olympians win gold medals, help the Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl, and helps CEOs take their companies to the next level. The host of the acclaimed podcast Finding Mastery joined me to share some actionable tools

that can help enhance our performance while also becoming healthier and more confident human beings. This is a bit of optimism. Mike, I'm so glad you came on the show. I'm such a fan. I so enjoyed coming on your podcast, Finding Mastery, and I thought, you know, for those who don't know Finding Mastery, A, you're missing out, but B, how selfish am I to go and enjoy your company and not share you with everybody else?

So thanks for joining our little podcast. You're a psychologist by training, and in particular, I guess, high performance, right? That's your specialty. And you worked with the Seahawks and other football teams. You come from sports. Let's start for you. You talk about mastery over performance. And I find this is an important nuance because every CEO, you talk to CEOs and like,

you know, so what kind of, we're a high performance culture. We're a high performance. Everything's performance performance, even when it's not. Why doesn't anybody talk about mastery? Why are people so obsessed about performance? There's kind of like this high performance treadmill and just about every industry that you can get your kids on, you know, like there's some sort of track in the corporate

world that you can get on that, you know, you do A, B and C things and you give yourself a pretty good chance of being a high performer. And there's like a little bit of a track for it. And the track for mastery is really loose. And I think, when I think about the difference between high performance and mastery, high performance is about executing on demand. But with mastery, there's a bit of a contour to it. There's something that just has an organic, authentic, artistic expression on demand, certainly.

But there's a different contour to the path of mastery. There's a difference between people that are committed to mastery and those that are committed to high performance. So I don't have a better word. I've been studying this thing for 25 years. And so I wish there was a way to express the space that happens for people that are committed to mastery versus like the execution, got to go drive, drive, drive, drive, get it done. You know, execute on command, be great, be great, recover, be great, recover. That's like the high performance kind of process mill, if you will. Nothing be great, recover. That's like the high performance kind of process

mill, if you will. Nothing wrong with that, but there's a difference between the commitment to mastery. And then let me open it up two ways. Mastery really is about mastery of craft and mastery of self. So you're really using the craft to go deeper to understand the human condition. Yourself first, and then in return, other people as well. I need to go deeper than this because we get judged mostly by our results, right? Our bonus structures are largely tied to our results. A lot of people, unfortunately, tie their self-worth to their results. That's right uh we are a

for better more likely for worse results oriented society we grade children we grade their art from very young very early age yeah and it's usually individually motivated you know what is your grade relative to other people relative to to other people, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as we talk about this, you know, and I'm, and I'm sort of like thinking about the people I admire, performance is an output. It literally comes at the end of something. That's right. Mastery is an input. Yeah. Mastery is a commitment. Like the mastery comes before. That's right. And so that's one difference, which is somebody who is, you know, you actors always talk about the craft. You know, you say, how do you know that person's a good actor? Like they study the craft.

Yes. I was with the Seattle Seahawks for nine seasons and just about every game. We won a lot. It was a high performing team. And just about every game, pre-game coach would always come up to me and say so mike what do you think what do you think what do you think about today and at first i thought that i needed to answer that like i am the high performance psychologist i need to answer what i think about their their mindsets or their commitment to winning or their

ability to win today and then i realized realized like, no, this is about, they're really asking, the coach is really asking, what do you think of their framework? What do you think of the quarterback's framework? Is it sturdy or flimsy? Is the offense going to get knocked around or are they grounded and really sturdy in how they're going to go about being their very best? And to your point about input output,

there is another output winning, whatever that means, right? So when you cobble together a bunch of performance outputs, you get to the outcome, right? Whatever winning means for people. And in that process, if you have a sturdy, nimble, strong, agile, the anti-fragile type of stuff, if that is the way that your psychology is built, you can go weather some really incredible hostile rugged challenging environments psychologically so it when you say it's an input it's a fundamental decision that you make that i'm moving towards mastery as opposed to high performance i went to japan and we went to visit a samurai sword maker.

There you go. And he's one of the last like hundred guys left making samurai swords in the traditional method where he folds the steel himself and does all this. And his story was quite remarkable, which is he had a desk job and was like, I can't, this can't be my life. And it was like, I can't, this can't be my life. And he quit and decided to become an apprentice sword maker and has now been on his own. And, you know, we're talking to him and he's like, you know, I'm still, I'm still learning. One day I hope to be good at this. And we're like, how long have you been doing this?

He said 30 years. That's it. You're lighting up when you say that because like that appreciation truly for being a beginner in your approach to like how things really work and as you get further down the path even at 25 30 years and you're further down the path of really understanding something yeah the mastery of self is what drives that curiosity yeah like wait how does this man if i could just figure out how to really dial this thing in, in the way that I see it could be. How do I match my skills with the challenge ahead of me or in front of me? He doesn't think he's bad at it. He just knows he can be better.

That's exactly it. And there was an incredible lack of ego. You know, at the same time, an incredible self-confidence. Because otherwise you wouldn't have the grit to stick with it and realize them. Because I think you have confidence if you see yourself improving. Confidence is super interesting. Like it only comes from one place and one place only.

Go on. What you say to yourself. That's it. And so, now that has to be credible. You have to speak to yourself in a credible way. And there's a calculus, it's a math problem, psychologically if you will, is that what's happening for confidence and i'm going to tie it to your point in a second is that there's this constant calculus which is i'm interpreting the

challenge ahead of me or in front of me the demands of a challenge okay whatever it is yeah playing one-on-one basketball against michael Michael Jordan or having a conversation with you or whatever it might be. I put you and Jordan in the same category. So it's a, it's a perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my internal skills. Perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my skills. Right. And so if I can see the challenge is high and wonderful and big and whatever, and then I can also know how to back myself that I've got skills to navigate this challenge. Right. Now I've got the ability to speak to myself in a way that builds confidence. So confidence is state specific, meaning it changes from moment to moment, from environment to environment. But that's the math that sits underneath of it.

And you were probably really smart when you were young. You're smart now. It's like the same as a young athlete. They're probably pretty talented when they're young. Certainly the exceptional ones are. And they or you didn't maybe really learn how confidence worked because when you walked into a room, you were always one of the smarter ones that got it quickly. So you didn't know that it had to come from this calculus. It just was a thing that happened based on how well things go. Now here's the trap. When something goes well, I feel confident. Yeah. When I get two buckets in a row, now I'm confident. When I walk on stage and I say a couple of funny things and something smart, and I get that look from the audience. So that's dangerous because you're waiting for your external world to give you

the information that your internal world is solid. And when it goes directionally in that way, it's a problem. Now you're constantly getting whipped around the external world. Okay. So here's the reality. Here's the real story. I was a solid B student okay good right yeah i think my brain worked quickly but there's some subjects i just didn't grasp and to this day i still struggle with right you know my friends were the smart ones my friends were the one who was the straight a student in math or the straight a student in english or the straight a student

in history and they all had a subject or a couple of my friends were jocks who were like the star football player. I jogged around the track occasionally. For me, the challenge was I was always the dumb one or the not athletic one around my friends. I mean, I was athletic, but I was never an athlete. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There might be something really healthy going on there that you didn't over-identify your identity was not wrapped up in what you were doing. And so the stress that I had was what's my subject. I'm fine at everything, but I'm great at nothing.

And the lesson that I started to learn was I looked outside of the subjects that were written on my school schedule and thought, what is the stuff that I'm good at that I'm, I mean, that I'm better than my friends at. And I was better at asking questions. I was better at talking because I had to be, because it was a survival instinct for ADHD because I couldn't study. So I had to get good at asking good questions and listening to the answers. And I didn't know what to do with that, but it gave me confidence to know that I had a thing. It just wasn't written down on my high school schedule or my college schedule. In high school and college, I didn't have a thing either.

You know, it's great when you can find your thing at a young age. I was a bit of a wreck. So I love my parents. Dad was a functioning alcoholic. Mom was codependent. And I didn't have a thing either. I was athletic, but I was not the athlete. I was clever and smart, but I was definitely not the student.

And so I didn't have a thing either. And I think that there's a case to be built that when you over identify early on your identity with the thing that you're good at, it can get you really good because you have to go all in. So when you stand at the pitcher's box or the batter's box, or you're on the pitcher's mound or whatever sport it is, and your entire identity rests on you striking people out or hitting home runs you practice hard you practice probably practice harder than just about everyone else so at a young age that gets you really good now you're this is a dead end full stop dead end approach because you are so much more than the thing that you do so you and i

accidentally were afforded this luxury of kind of the flounder, floundering era, floundering years, where it's like your identity was not wrapped up in it and you didn't know the thing that was going to spark you. There's so many thoughts going through my head, which is, and you and I have talked about this, which is the concept of finite and infinite thinking. And the finite, there's a great irony in this,

which is to say I have a subject or I'm a basketball player or I'm a pitcher or whatever it is, and I'm going to be the best, I'm going to work hard and I've got that work ethic and I've got that discipline. The problem is there is a date that that stops. You either get injured, get fired, or it's just time to retire. just about everyone gets pushed out of the pros and the same can be it's true in life I'm the best lawyer I'm the best banker I'm the best blah blah blah and at some point you're gonna have to leave they'll either push you out or you just age out right and the number of the number of CEOs or high-performing executives that I meet that leave their careers or you know sell their companies, whatever it is, and they have massive identity crises

because their entire lives, they've defined themselves by this one thing. That's exactly it. And here's the analogy. I have a friend who grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo, North Dakota, who dreamed of being a New York City Rockette and making it to Broadway. No kid from Fargo, North Dakota.

Parents of the sacrifice, all of this stuff. And she made it. She made it to Broadway. She became a New York City Rockette. All of her dreams came true. And then what? She spent her entire life committed to achieving this thing. Did it for a few years.

And then she chased the dream and accomplished the dream. And then literally didn't know what to do next if you knew what i knew about what it takes for a kid to be one of the best in the world to be a high performing athlete or whatever fill in the blank artist we would not be pushing our kids. The washout is incredible. And I think most of us, so what you're describing, you're framing it as the infinite and finite game. That to me is a performance-based identity.

Right, because it's goal-based, right? Like, I'm going to be the... Right, that's exact. That framing is... And that's the opposite of mastery. A hundred percent. They're high performers and they have the resume to prove their high performance. But then when you peel the onion, and the day after the career, the day after the dream accomplished, nothing.

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. For who? For the high performer. For the high performer. Yeah. And even if they don't achieve the dream, which is more likely, most people will not become supermodels or high profile athletes, etc.

But I've defined myself by this thing that I actually didn't accomplish. Then I think it's even worse. Oh, this is tough. This is one of the reasons I think when I speak to folks in the corporate spaces is like purpose is a big deal. Like, what am I doing? What am I really doing? And I think that the commonality amongst people that I can see that binds us

is we all want a great life. Not just a high-performing life. What is that? But we want a great life with this short amount of time that we're here. And that's where that conversation about purpose, what am I doing here? And I think it's a bit of a rite of passage to adulthood to have a sense of what am I doing with my time here?

And it does not need to be this grand thing. It can be to be a great partner to my spouse. It can be to, you know, to be a great dad. It can be to, fun and bring joy to other people in my neighborhood. It does not need to be like serial entrepreneur, like whomever, fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be that. I want to go back to that confidence thing. At some point in life, we all struggle with it. Nobody is immune. No, it's state specific, meaning that it's like moment to moment. I can have high confidence in one moment and nothing the next. That's right. Depending on what I'm doing or who I'm talking to.

Depending on what you're saying to yourself about that challenge. Yeah. That's such a good one. It's the way you're framing the conversation. And if you think, if you entertain, what are they thinking about me? Then we're on the slide for confidence, like a downward slide. If you start like, what is Simon thinking about what I'm saying right now,

is getting in the way of that calculus, which is like, I love this conversation, it's really challenging to find the right words to describe things that are hard to talk about, and this is what I really enjoy doing. That's how confidence will be built for me. You're bringing up something which I think is so easily understood and so difficult to do. It is well and good to say, don't care what other people think about you.

We all know that. But how on earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when as social animals, I want to be included. I want to feel like I belong. I want to be trusted. I want to be a. I want to feel like I belong. I want to be trusted. I want to be a member of the tribe. I want to be welcomed and invited because not to be is to feel alone, to feel ostracized, to feel brushed aside. We know what happens.

A social animal left to their own devices is destructive to others or destructive to themselves. And that's a whole different topic, You know, I think it's right. I think you'd hurt themselves and hurt others, you know? Yeah. And our brains are wired for safety and belonging is safety. Yeah. Think about like the sheep and the wolves, the sheep that are in the middle of the pack

are way safer than the sheep on the outside and way safer than the sheep that's kind of wandered off. and way safer than the sheep that's kind of wandered off. So being rejected by the tribe is a form of 200,000 years ago, a death sentence. And the mammalian brain still freaks out. Yes, now. Yeah. And then so if you think about that mechanism is still an ancient brain, modern times, it's still happening for us.

And then you wrap the modern kind of identity with what you do. So when you go out and do something, I'm an executive, I'm a manager, I'm a salesperson, I'm a CMO, whatever it might be. And you're getting data back that it's not good. And that can either be objective numbers or a lift from an eyebrow from your supervisor or whomever. That is so triggering to the survival brain that we do something very predictable. We'll conform. We will contort. We will confront. Sometimes we just cut off the relationship because it's too much.

But think about the conforming and confronting. Conforming is I might laugh at a joke or go along with something that's slightly offensive to my moral code to what i think is right but that person has power so i slightly conform we've all done it yeah the contorting is where it becomes you do it on dates yeah right to to be liked to be liked yeah and then they find out like wait you know you don't think i'm funny what just happened here the contorting is when it's really problematic when we when we really do so contortion is a extreme full of conform of conforming yeah like i might really like you're literally abandoning your moral code that's right to be like to be in to not get pushed out got it

and that's a form of loneliness right oh yeah it's a fear if they kick me out yeah i'm kind of screwed yeah like i don't i don't have a backstop here. Okay, so I will tell you a quick story and then I have to go back to this question. So I watched this documentary about flat earthers. It's an okay documentary. But the thing that I loved about it was there's this guy who's the leader

of one of the the Flat Earth? organizations and they consider themselves people of science and They have scientific explanations for you know, why the earth is flat and they conduct an experiment to prove that the earth is flat spoiler alert they accidentally prove that it's wrong and They look at the science they look at this experiment they go, huh? And they, you know, maybe we did the experiment wrong, you know. But the leader of the group, he recognizes what's going on here. He's a smart guy. And he's, because he's such an ardent flat earther, he's been rejected by his friends and family growing up his only community are other flat earthers in this group and now he recognizes that gig is up but he actually doesn't come clean because if he leaves

that group he's got no one yeah you know yeah it's the same with like some of the divide that we're seeing politically like they form such tight belonging ship. And the cost is so high. And they've cost relationships getting into those groups. That's right. That if I leave this group, I literally will have no one. And that fear is so real that, as you said, I do worse than conform. I contort for belonging for belonging yeah that's right

and so there's this pervasive worry am i going to be accepted or rejected by others that is a very healthy survival tactic am i going to get rejected or accepted by the tribe when it bleeds into the words you choose the clothes that you wear, the conforming or contorting that you're going to accept or not, it becomes almost a clinical condition. How would you diagnose that? It doesn't meet the clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder. It does not meet that. Allodoxophobia is like kind of the fear of being out with other people. It's not that either.

It's on that path. It's on that path. You know, we all know what FOMO is, fear of missing out. Yeah. For fun, I coined FOPO, fear of people's opinions. And I think that we're on the glide path. Like the fear of people's opinions is really quite high. It makes sense to me, though, because we live in a performance-based culture.

Yeah. In a performance-based culture, it would make sense that I would organically developed a performance-based identity. And then underneath that, it would make sense that I would be anxious and hustle hard and all that kind of stuff about being my very best or being the best, which is now like my identity is wrapped up in how well I do whatever I do. and i'm constantly scanning the world to see if i'm okay are my numbers good are people looking at me okay are they laughing behind my back or with me you know like what's happening so that it's it's an exhaustive approach to see if i'm okay is the problem and how do you get around it i i think it's gonna sound too simple but because nothing's quite this simple be very clear about

your purpose and you say why do you say purpose a purpose-based identity if think about any who inspires you Simon like with us or you know no longer with us the people who inspire me are not household names the ones that are living anyway yeah Yeah. They're certainly not. Do one that's a household name that we can vibe with. Okay. Martin Luther King. Okay. So Dr. King Jr., if he was sitting in this conversation with us, he would probably be talking about equity.

He'd probably be talking about freedom of rights, the dream that he has. So this is all wrapped into his purpose. So when your purpose is clear and it's bigger than you and it is inspiring and it matters to you, you're trying to get help. So you're want to pull people in. You can't solve it alone. Mike, Simon, can you guys help me? You know, there's something here that's bigger than all three of us. And I want to see if, you know, we can do something special. And so it's no longer about identity. It's about something far larger. So your identity fades away. And the thing that you're trying to solve together comes forward and we're no longer

managing identity and ego, but we're, we're committing together to a shared purpose. So how do you help an athlete find their purpose? Yeah. Well, because they were raised to perform. Yeah, that's exactly right. And while they're in the league that they're in, whether it's the Olympics or the NFL or NBA, whatever it might be, the purpose is quite clear,

you know? So the purpose is given to them, you know, in championships. Yeah. That wears out at some point. That's not really a purpose though, is it?

No, that's more of an outcome, a goal, but it's like a binding thing for us together. Okay. You know, but it falls. It has the appearance of purpose and it works for a period. That's right.

And what it does though, it serves a bit of a placeholder for them to know what it's like to be part of something bigger where they can't solve it on their own. Even individual athletes, whether it's a golfer or singles tennis player they're part of a team too yeah yeah so i think the question was more tactical like how do i help people yeah like look everybody's looking like the rise of spirituality everybody's looking for their sense of purpose you know i mean i mean i wrote a book about it you know what do you do how do you

take people on the journey to actually help them answer the question first is help them sit with the pain that they feel I think one of the greatest gifts we can give people is the holds steady while they are exploring the hardest parts of themselves and so without judgment without critique or container yeah a safe space a safe space not trying to fix not trying to coach not trying to solve anything, but just hold the space for them to explore the harder parts of themselves, to put words to the emotionally charged parts of themselves. We all have pain, suffering.

We all have trauma, micro or massive traumas. And it is important to at least index and understand those. And most of us, if you stay with that first assumption that I have, is that we all got something we're working through. The response to unexamined trauma is to protect ourselves from re-traumatizing, to being re-traumatized. So we put up all of these weird little things that we do to be safe. It's not a revisiting of the original trauma

it's a fear of the trauma recurring. Correct. So let me be less dramatic than somebody almost dying or fill in the blanks whatever trauma the listener is working through you can also have it in sport. So Seattle Seahawks just for a moment we won the Super Bowl in dramatic fashion. It was like, wow. Like Super Bowl 48, 2013. And it's really hard to go back the next year. And we got back the next year. Back to the Super Bowl. Yeah, the reason it's so hard

is because your coaches get plucked, your teammates or your players, they get bigger contracts from other teams. And there's like a 40 to 50% turnover on the team. So you've got to recapture the culture. It's a hard thing to do. And we got back. And we ended up losing in a dramatic fashion, as you well remember.

It was like the half goal line. And it was a sure thing that the best running back in the league was going to kind of walk it in on Tom Brady's, our defensive line. And we're going to win back to back, which is really rare to do. And we made some mistakes and the ball was turned over and we lost the game with seconds to go on the goal line. Right. Okay. It was so traumatizing. Nobody lost their life.

Right. Okay. But there's no redundancy in the brain. Like this part of the brain is for like near death experiences. Yeah. Losing games. And this, yeah, it's the same network. Right.

Right. Like this highly emotional, oh my God, what just happened? Right. This is heavy. I don't have a way to deal with this. Right. And it was so traumatizing for so many of the team that all of these mechanisms the next year were were all of a sudden erecting in our culture and it was really about people not putting themselves in a vulnerable

position which is required to be great so that they wouldn't have that feeling again playing not to lose yeah versus playing to win Playing that it wasn't my fault. It's your fault. Right. And you better be right. And I'm not going to put myself in a vulnerable spot unless I know that you've figured out why we're in this situation in the first place. Right. So now we were never. So everybody's a victim now. Yeah. And so we never got our noses pointed in the same direction, which is a very hard thing to do. And so trauma doesn't happen just from the classic word of trauma. It also has all these other things that are so emotionally volatile that they can shape our psychology.

This is such a big, like the... I love that you love this, yeah. The bells are ringing. You know, you look at our society right now where it used to be believed that a corporate job was stable and an entrepreneurial venture was insanity. It was insane because you could lose everything, right? But now we've created a corporate culture where you can come in one day thinking you're stably employed and you've lost your job Through no fault of your own. It's not a meritocracy it is definitely not so that's the the fault the

Fallacy and folly is that a corporate job these days is actually more unstable than an entrepreneurial venture Which is considered extremely high risk with an over 90% chance of failure and that's insane Yeah, that's that's a head. That's a cool insight And so and I think now you look at the younger generation, which is everybody in the younger generation is one degree away from a layoff. My parents got laid off, no meritocracy, no fault of their own, or my friend's parents or my friends, you know,

got laid off through no fault of their own. We're all one degree away, whether it's ourselves or somebody else who got laid off, again, not a meritocracy. And so the trauma of you asked me to give you everything and be loyal, and I did, and it got me nothing, or I watched other people, my friends, family, lose everything, or my parents lose everything. I saw how it affected my home. Fuck you. How dare you just demand? And I don't think it's ideological, although I think people use the language of ideology.

I think it's your insight, the fear of being re-traumatized. I completely agree. To add one more layer of complexity, it used to make sense that the loneliest population or segment of the population was 65 and above. The loneliest segment in the United States right now is 14 to 21. Yeah. So that type of like avoiding being re-traumatized and our kids are incredibly lonely. It's a pressure cooker. And so

when I'm, when I, when I spend time with, uh, inside of the corporate world, we are, we are not talking about working harder. The hustle hard thing is, I can't ascribe to it because I'm looking at people that are exhausted and anxious. And the message is like from elite sport, I want to show you how we recover. What happens behind the velvet rope of elite sport is that we spend way more time talking about daily recovery than we talk about working hard the environment is stimulating it's it's great in so many ways it's on the pressure is on in elite sport the required vulnerability and risk taking in practice every day is unbelievable way more than game day in practice you've got your peers that are almost as good

as you or in some respects as good as you waiting for you to make a mistake in front of the coaches so that they can get a shot and particularly bad in football that exactly and to be great you have to you have to take a risk so you've got to get to that messy edge where you don't know if you're going to be successful or not because that's required that vulnerability is required to take a risk so you've got to get to that messy edge where you don't know if you're going to be successful or not because that's required that vulnerability is required to take the step to stay progressively on a growth arc it's really hard so day in stress is on pressure is on day in we need to recover in an intelligent way and i just think that you know if we could do a little bit better on how we think about our future, so that's anxiety or purpose-based. So when you say future, meaning not goal-oriented, but rather what's the soul for?

Yeah. So what's the, I want to win a game. Why? I want a game so that I become a champ. Why do you want to be a champ? And you keep going and going and going. And that'll help you get to purpose. That's not a, that's bigger.

That is absolutely a great exercise to do. But if we did some of that work, and then we learned how to speak to ourselves, to back ourselves and to coach ourselves, and we're just a little bit better at how we worked with our own self, self-talk, if you will. We figured out a really thoughtful daily recovery program because the stress is real. We need equal units of recovery every day. We could start to just dissolve our performance-based identity and be more aligned with purpose.

So there's a twofold on that first one. Yes, know your purpose. And what that does is it just allows your identity of like, I have to perform to start to evaporate. I have to perform to matter. It starts to evaporate. And I'm performing because I want to contribute to something that's really meaningful. And it's not Wall Street bottom line. Yeah. Yeah

Yeah, yeah, it's maybe to fill in the blanks What are things that you've learned over the course of your life and career that you have adopted yourself? To aid in your own recovery. I can give you a ton of tactics and I'm happy to do that right now The first is is like if you think about the energy system that we have, I want to be, and this is going to, this will make sense for Gen Xers and above, but maybe not below. I want to be a really efficient carburetor. So I go to sleep at night and I fill up all these fuel reserves. And a carburetor is this thing that sits on top of the engine. And it decides based on how much you accelerate or put your foot on the

pedal how much fuel goes into the engine and if i am really nervous and anxious and quick to frustration or intolerance and i'm kind of edgy and snappy the carburetor is wide open and energy is just coursing through the system needlessly so because i haven't I haven't modulated the way that I'm seeing the world around me so the first order of business is that I want to be able to figure out how to see things as opportunities rather than threats give me an example let's say you've got an opportunity to pitch an idea to a board this feels like the last one you deny deny deny deny you know you're kind of on your the end of your you're an

actor or whatever it doesn't matter yeah and how do you walk in staying hopeful and seeing as an opportunity as opposed to like if this doesn't go well i don't know how i'm going to eat yeah i don't know what i'm going to do there's a mental discipline to speak to yourself about yourself about the opportunity that you're working towards that is just required. And so opportunity versus threat is kind of a big deal in the way you frame just about anything. I love it when they mic athletes. Yeah. And you hear that football player going, you got this, you got to do it. You got this. Right. And that's not everybody. That's just some savages, if you will. Yeah. But I love the fact that at the most elite levels, they still need the self-pep.

We all do. We all do. Whether it sounds like that. So here's a fun way to... So I don't want to go away from recovery. But on this thread is that one of the things that I help executives and athletes alike is to know your ideal performance mindset. So in athletes, we call it ICM, ideal competitive mindset. So it's the center of the bullseye. When all cylinders are firing.

What does that feel like? What's going on? Yeah, inside. Know that feeling. That's right. What does that feel like? Thoughts and feelings. Put some sort of name on it. You could name it some athletes like these two Olympians I'm working with right now. She calls hers free flow. And so that's nice.

It's like this free openness, but there's a flow to the way that she's, you know prior to the performance is really to get to the crescendo of the ICM or the IPM, ideal performance mindset, if you're not in sport. So the way that you physically warm up, but the way that you brush your teeth, the way you get into your car, get out of your car, the way that you walk into a threshold, the way you tie your tie, all of those things that you do,

there are little threshold moments to back yourself, to build yourself, to be close, just a little closer to the ICM. And when you do that over time, before you know it, that ICM feels real familiar. So you can practice putting yourself in an ideal state. So you're just more likely to get there more often that's the point yeah like all the really good stuff is right underneath the surface this is good so when you get knocked down knocked sideways you that the good stuff is still under there when i say good stuff i mean the way that you speak to yourself with it's positive productive it's like building you as opposed to being critical or frustrated. Or like there's one

bucket of thoughts, which is they, they create space and another bucket of thoughts that create constriction. So when I say to myself, like, I'm really agile, I'm really good on my feet. I can do hard things. Those are two things that to me create space. And on the constriction side, when I say things to myself like, don't fuck this one up now, or make sure you're crisp, or that there's a lot riding on this thing now,

that creates tension for me. So I don't want to be naive that there's maybe something not riding on a moment, but I need to create space because my brain is already trying to help me activate towards this thing to get me up for this thing that I've deemed to be important. This is the threat response in our brains. My sophisticated approach is to try to be able to back all that intensity down So I need thinking patterns that create space so I can smile a little bit so I can be more fluid in the way That I'm adjusting to an unfolding unpredictable moment I

Learned something pretty early in my career. I Thank goodness I learned it that I think is what you're talking about and I learned to reframe a tense moment. To, from to? From to. So for example, just as my career was sort of getting to go, like I find myself sharing stages with people who are way better than me, like they're famous, they're powerhouses.

And I'm like, what the hell am I doing here, right? And now my fear that my performance is gonna be substandard I won't live up to the reason they invited me yeah all of that self-hoster all the income so all of that stuff just like I'm the weakest one here you know and I learned to reframe it like this is the most exciting thing in the world that they let me share the stage with these amazing people and what ended up happening was I let go of the competitive nature. Like I didn't have to be better than them.

I didn't even have to be as good as them. I just got to share the stage with them regardless of how I did and how cool is it for me? That's it. Yes. And I started to have my nerves became excitement. Yeah, that's it.

So the way you frame anything is materially important. And I reframed my own data. Yeah, that's exactly how this works. you frame anything is materially important. And I reframed my own data. Yeah, that's exactly how this works. Into a different interpretation of a different feeling. And so there's... So when I get nervous, I always say, this is exciting. And it works. Yeah.

It works that quickly. If you catch it early and you're aware. Yeah, fair enough. If you catch it really... Like, you know, we talk about trains of thought. Yeah. You know, and so if you're, if you're unaware and that train of thought, that thought train has been running for a while and then you're

like, wait a minute, my heart's pounding. I feel like I just threw up in my mouth. Wait, this is excitement. Yeah. It doesn't work. You're way past. Yeah. So if you can catch it really early that, you know, like you can get on the nervous

train, like you were just talking about. And if you get off on stop one and you get onto the excitement train which is what you're doing like no problems it's easy most people like don't are struggle with the awareness piece first and then struggle with the mental tool to adjust so it's a awareness is step one and then psychological tools are step two the there's i mean this is the problem of having you on this podcast which is i want to keep going for about like another three hours. I feel the same way both times. I'm really frustrated because I haven't finished all my questions yet. I hope we can do this again.

I'd like to do it a lot more. And I'd like to have you back on the Finding Master. Any day. Yeah. So like maybe we'll just figure out a way to, as an excuse to have each other in our lives. Let's just do it. Yeah.

Let's just do it regularly. All right. So good to see you. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more.

Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbinius, Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.