EntreLeadership - #236: Dr. Michael Gervais—The Mental Game, Part 1

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

You could say that high-performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais is in the business of being the best—or at least his clients are. Everyone from the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks to Olympic gold medalist Carli Lloyd and Fortune 100 CEOs has worked with him to maximize their mental game when the stakes have been the absolute highest. But whether you’re on the playing field or in the boardroom, learning how to discipline your mind (warning: it’s not easy but so worth it) can be the difference between your personal best or completely missing the mark. And it all starts by deciding to see the world differently. Join us for part one of this special two-part episode to start learning how it’s done. entreleadership.com/podcast Decision Making Checklist Work/Life Balance Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our feature interview this episode is with Dr. Michael Gervais. He is a psychologist focusing on high performance in sports, business, and beyond. John, and then after the conversation, we have two great resources that are absolutely free,

so you want to stay tuned for that. Well, folks, Dr. Michael Jerva popped on my radar screen from one of my dear friends who's been a guest multi-times on this show, John Gordon. So John was tweeting and back and forth, and I'm paying attention to this, and I think to myself, well, I need to be in on this conversation. So I text John. So tell me about Michael Jerva. He goes, man, he's awesome.

That's all I needed. And so I dove into more about Michael Jervais, and he gracious. agreed to come on. Here's the deal, folks. When we did our survey last year, one of the top categories of content you wanted more of is personal growth. Well, today, not a bunch of business principles here. This is about peak performance and a specific focus on mental peak performance, which is huge. If you discard psychology, you're a fool. That's right. That's what I said. You're a fool if you discard the science of psychology. I'm an amateur psychologist. I use it a lot on the Ken Coleman show. I read it for my own growth and I read it to parent my kids. It's huge. And we go deep dive

in on this conversation. It's going to be a lot of fun. Michael has coached not just the Seattle Seahawks, but many high achievers in every major walk of life. So specific topics, pressure, pessimism, hesitation, failure. Listen in. Here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Jervais. Well, this is a special treat, Michael. You and I share a mutual friend and John Gordon, who's been a guest on this broadcast many times. And I was checking out your content about a month or so ago when he told me about you. And I think this is going to be so much fun. And so to get started, I want you to take us back to when you decide that you're going to go full bore all in on the idea of being a high performance. psychologist and really study the best performers in the world? Well, first, thank you for including me in your community. And John Gordon is an absolute legend, so it's always fun to have mutual friends with John. And yeah, so it started a while back ago. I'm 45 now. And the journey really started when I was a young athlete, and my sport of choice was surfing. And there's two types of surfing.

There's free surfing, and there's competitive surfing. And I was just fine as a 15-year-old kid in free surfing as soon as competitions were on where there was people watching and there was judges and there was a critical eye on it. All of a sudden, I was a completely different athlete. And I had no idea that there was this field of sports psychology that existed. So I'm sitting out in the water and there's a gentleman in my heat and he paddles by me and it's a crisp morning, waves were perfect, about seven feet, a couple feet overhead. And he paddles by me and he says, hey, Jerva, you got to stop worrying about what could go wrong. And then she just kept paddling out the back of the waves.

And I was sitting there and I thought to myself, how in the world does he know that I'm screwed up? Because he was watching me all, you know, every day of the week. And I was fine. And then as soon as competitions would happen, I was different. And so like a good competitor, he didn't tell me what to do. He just told me stop doing something that I was doing. And so I just sat there for a moment as a 15-year-old kid, you know, by himself out with mother nature with, you know, not dangerous surf, but certainly some powerful surf. And I thought to

myself, well, let me just start thinking about what I do want to have happen. And it was the first real time that I used my imagination for performance. And it was the first time I really put together this intimate link between the way I was thinking and how that impacted how I could access my craft. Wow. I love how you say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where it started for me. But that was as a little kid, you know. And then, and then I just went on this relentless path to try to understand that link between how our minds work and how we can access our craft. And, you know, I did undergrad psychology master's degree. I started in traditional masters in therapy. And I said there's, I dropped out out of two semesters. I said, there's no possible way. And this is no disrespect to anybody.

But I, I just couldn't study the dysfunction of the human mind and spirit. And so I dropped out. and I found another field called Kinesiology. Got a master's in kinesiology, but it didn't offer me enough. I wanted more. I needed to understand the mind at a deeper level. Went back and got a PhD in psychology with an emphasis in sport and high performance, licensed as a psychologist in California, and realized I still didn't know anything at that point.

And then like all of us, just cut my teeth in the real world of high stakes environments. And so that's how it happened. Yeah. Well, I love that you describe it as high stakes environment. When you're running a small business or you're an entrepreneur, You're leading people. That's a high-stakes environment. That's why I really wanted to have this conversation with you.

Because obviously your background, you work with a lot of high-profile athletes, teams. But I want to go back to that surfboard because the way you said it, and of course I said this, I loved how you put it because I think it's really great for people to understand that it's not just changing your thinking, but imagination is a very specific word that you use there. And I want to drill down really deep on that because I'd love to know. what you have learned since about imagination and how imagination really does play into high performance? Yeah, it's a great question.

And it's actually a quite textured question. And there's a lot of nuances. So, you know, let's let's see if we can unpack it a little bit. One is there's great body of research around visualization and imagery. And basically, that is the harnessed use of our imagination to facilitate. images and ideas and patterns and behaviors that facilitate great performance in the future. And so there's a lot of work around how that impacts the brain, how it impacts neurological patterning for efficiency. And at some level, you know, we are, that's what our body and brain

is trying to sort out is how to be the most efficient. Now, anybody that's in a world-class athlete or musician or entrepreneur, we are looking for the most efficient ways that think and move. And that is, you know, we hear it all the time in the business world about rapid iteration. And the essence of that is knowing how to take an information quickly that works and doesn't work and pivot accordingly. And imagery is a way for us to preset or front load what we would like our experiences in the future to feel like. And so we become more familiar with them. That enhances confidence. Again, it changes the brain patterning as well. And so there are some very concrete ways that we can help people use imagery. I'll tell you the challenge with this part of the conversation,

though, is that all of a sudden I think people can go, almost gloss over like, oh my God, seriously, you want me to sit down and imagine success of the future? Right. And it almost can, it can feel cheesy really quickly. And I'd suggest one other element here. And I'm happy to give you the mechanics of how it works. But there's one other element is that a disciplined mind is rare. The natural state of our mind is like a drunk monkey, it's sloppy, it's curious, it's all over the place, it's emotionally erratic. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not. And, you know, that's the natural state of our mind. So to train our mind to become disciplined, to be focused in the present moment now and now and now again for extended periods of times, it is so rare that it's beautiful. And to do that, to create that

focused, discipline mind that is nimble and can adjust and has a great fortitude at the same time, that can be trained. And imagery is one of the ways that can help train that. Because what ends up taking place is, as soon as we sit down to focus on what a future success could look like, and that could be a hallway conversation with somebody or it could be something more intense, our mind will naturally begin to wander away from the thing that we're trying to imagine. And that's that drunk monkey that easily wanders. And when it wanders, our job at that moment is to go, oh, I see you wandering.

and then to refocus and come on back. And that relentless refocusing is the makings of a disciplined mind. And again, that is a rare, rare skill. Very rare because, you know, my brother is a Division III golf coach. So he's a very, very good golfer. And so I've been around golf. I'm not a very good golfer at all. But one of the things we see in golf many times is that there are some very talented

golfers that nobody has ever heard of or see. play on television and they're in these golf clubs all around the country, but they don't have what it takes between the ears. This is something I've heard a million times, just giving it a practical application here. The idea of imagining and the imagery is not cheesy because it is that relentless discipline of the mind that allows a golfer to make it through high pressure where one put is a career defining moment, where one putt is worth a million dollars. You know, you just name the pressure pack situation. I'm just using golf as an example. But I tee you up there, Michael, to talk about that because it is that idea of constantly being able to discipline our minds

to envision what we want to happen that allows us to handle pressure and allows us to go further than we thought maybe we could go, correct? We're right on the money, literally. And I think that it is a suite of one of many mental skills that are very potent and powerful. And one mental skill alone, is not enough. Oh, I love it. It's like, yeah, one tactic alone is not enough. It's the tapestry and the stitching of the tapestry of mental skills and psychological framework, and I'll unpack both those for us, that allow people to dissolve pressure, that allow them to move into any environment and authentically express themselves, authentically express the craft that they've relentlessly built. And it is that tapestry, and there's a handful of skills that we can talk about, but also the

psychological framework that people have, that also can be built and become more sturdy to be able to handle difficult environments. And we can literally train both of those. Besides imagery, what are some of these other things that mentally we can begin to develop those disciplines? Many people would nod their head to say, you know, mental toughness is important. And having that fortitude to stick with it and to become and be resilient. Like those are important skills. Yes, they are. What we have learned from world-class athletes is that it is necessary to have that. Same with entrepreneurs, same with business managers, same with senior executives. That mental discipline and toughness to be able to deal with difficult situations is a prerequisite. How do you train it? It's really actually pretty

simple. Optimism is at the center of mental toughness. So optimism is the way that you think about your future. So is pessimism. They are learned skills. They are learned abilities. We learn, we don't come into this world optimistic or pessimistic. We learn from our family, from our parents, from our friends, from the TV shows that we watch, whether it's good to be optimistic or pessimistic. And so what we have found, both from research as well as from being in the amphitheater with world-class athletes, is that if we can front-load the ability to be optimistic, and anything that's an ability you can get better at. So if we can front-load the training to be more optimistic, as soon as it gets hard,

all of a sudden now we've got this conditioned pattern, this mental pattern, to say, hold on, let me stay with it, because it's about to get good. Something good is going to take place. And so what that allows us to do is stay in it, stay in it just a little bit longer, to keep fighting, to keep trusting, to keep letting go, to keep holding on and to the things that we need to hold on, to be disciplined enough to focus on the next most important task at hand. And so optimism is part of a psychological framework. Do you believe the future is amazing or not? And if you don't believe the future is amazing, it's really hard. It's not impossible, but it is really hard to play the long game, whether it's business, relationship, or sport. I want you to speak to our listeners who are honest enough to say, I'm pretty pessimistic.

My background played into that. I find myself being pessimistic. people tell me I'm pessimistic. And not only am I pessimistic, I'm a little bit cynical that I can even be optimistic. So they're sitting down with you. And you just said clearly and concisely that we can learn optimism. We can retrain our brain. For someone who's steeped in pessimism, what would you say to them?

Great question. And most people don't say they're pessimists. Most people that are not optimists. So again, there's only two options, optimism, pessimism. Most people that are not optimists say to themselves, I'm a realist. Yes, I've heard that a million times from my dad. Drives me crazy. Yeah, right.

So I'm a realist. Okay, well, does that mean that optimistic people are not real? And a cynic or a pessimist might say, yeah, they believe in things that are not really real. And so let me just put an asterisk and a caveat in this conversation is that naive optimism is very, very, very dangerous. Yes. Naive optimism is what keeps people in battered relationships. My partner is going to change. The belief that it's going to work out without any evidence that they're doing the work to change.

So I want to just make sure that we're calling out there's a difference between naive optimism and real optimism. And then there's a difference between naive pessimism, like unbiased, non-conscious pessimism, just not even aware that you see the world in the future of being bleak. and then what people would call the realist pessimist or realistic pessimist. Okay, so, okay, without all the mumbo-jumbo here, folks that want to become more optimistic, it's actually pretty simple. I don't need to convince them because that's not the business that I'm in. I'm not trying to help somebody that doesn't want to change to change. So if somebody says, hey, listen, I like being a pessimist, I say, okay, cool.

You know, like, let's see if there's another area that you want to work out. but realize what you're saying is that the framework in which you see the future is that you're saying that I don't think things work out very well for people and myself included. So then there's a ceiling that you've just placed on your potential. Okay. And so my conversation usually does stop there with people. And I don't want to invest in somebody who's placed this real ceiling in their life and they're not willing to change. So it's like, okay, I love you on your way, though. So those that say, you know what, I am tired.

I'm tired of getting in my own way. I'm tired of like freaking out that it's not going to work out. I'm tired of being the adjutant in all the conversations of finding all the errors that certainly could harm us. And that's exhausting. And so I say, okay, great. All right, if you're ready to change, now let me put another astrogate here. The only reason people change is because of pain. So how we grow is by getting ourselves uncomfortable.

Pain is why we change. So our job to help others become their very best, to support people, to challenge them to become their very best is to help them identify the sources of their pain and then hold up a mirror to it and say, do you still want that? And as soon as they say no, they say, okay, listen, let's start to train your mind in your brain in a different way. And how do you train optimism? There's a great piece of research at a University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, did this wonderful, fantastic piece of research where he asked thousands of people to, to go out into the world, and this piece of research lasts seven days, to go out into the world and focus on or find three good things. And at the end of the day, write those three good things down.

And what he found is people that came into that study that were depressed, just that small little act of finding good and writing it down at the end of the day, stabilize their depression. People that came into the study that were not depressed, when they studied those folks after the seven days at one month, six months, and a year later, they reported an overall life satisfaction. That's tremendous. It's almost unbelievable, but that's been replicated. So we challenge athletes and performers, and I'll tell you about the business folks that we work with as well, is that we challenge them to go on a 30-day run to find what's good, to reorganize how

they scan the world and to find three things that are amazing about their day that really happened, and then just log them at the end of the day. Now, what that fundamentally does is our brain, brain, my brain. Our brains are designed to scan the world and find danger. Our ancestors gave us that gift. And so if we are constantly scanning the world to find what's dangerous, and then we start to believe those stories are real threats to our survival, that's the beginnings of pessimism. So to become optimistic, in many ways, we have to override our DNA. We have to override our brain's natural ability to find the world and scan all the dangers. Now, mind you, we don't have saber twos running after us.

We don't have dinosaurs stomping in our backyards. We don't have as many real dangerous threats in the world other than natural disasters, for sure. There are predators, human predators, so we need to keep alert for that. But the real threat for most people in modern times is what other people might be thinking of us. Yes. And so if we're using our massive supercomputer inside of our skull, this tissue, this three pounds of tissue, to scan the world. If this is how we're going to use that supercomputer to scan the world to see if we're okay based on what other people think of us, that's like a freaking golden cage. That is a trap that is going to keep people stuck for sure.

And I know it because I suffered from it for a long time. And there's incredible freedom right on the other side to train your mind, to scan the world and find what you're going to. could be and what is amazing. That's really good stuff. One of the things I was doing some research on you and your philosophy and what you're teaching and what you've learned. And when you go about studying, you know, how do the greatest performers in the world, how do they use their minds?

This was written in your bio. This is really great. I want you to unpack this. You said the answer to this question lies in the space between hesitation and commitment. Oh, my goodness. I just think that is a gigantic. conversation. What is that space between hesitation and commitment? And why is it so important for leaders and high performers to understand that and begin to master that? That's cool. Thank you for

calling that out. Yeah, that is a important concept for sure for me. So the path of mastery or the path of self-improvement or the path of high performance, there is no one path. There are no seven steps. There are no secrets. There are trends and themes that keep emerging from people that are on the world stage. And one of those trends is that people that are highly skilled. And this is where the science of sports psychology began is saying, hey, how do they, meaning the tip of the arrow of performers, how do they work? How do they think? How do they train their mind? And people that are masterful play in the spaces between the notes. And so the rest of us are just trying to get from note B to note D on the piano or whatever that means in our own life.

We're just trying to get through a conversation or we're just trying to find the right frames to build a business or we're just trying to get our footing right for the right one put. And so the masters, though, they're playing in the spaces between. And in the most rugged environments, the most hostile environments, there is no love. luxury for hesitation. That gets people killed. And unfortunately, that happens in very dangerous environments, people that protect our country. They can nod their head to that, people that are true explorers, and they hesitate in the backcountry. They can nod their head to that. And then even people on Wall Street and people, entrepreneurs, where family members and loved ones and friends' lives are on the line for them to not hesitate, to get it right and to move forward with bold

conviction. And so how do we become familiar with the space between? We have to train our minds to be engaged and aware of the subtle nuances at the edge of the envelope. And so the edge of the envelope is that place of instability. And it's a mathematical term, essentially. The edge of instability is where most people are so afraid of what will happen is they shudder and return to safety. And I'm talking about emotional instability right now, not physical. I mean, that's, you know, anybody that really wants to work hard can change their physical shape, like in some sort of percentage. And that's by getting physically uncomfortable a lot and repairing properly. But the edge of emotional instability is so daunting for people. This is why public speaking is so

hard is because we've got those two things that we were talking about, the convergence of I'm scanning the world to try to figure out if you think I'm okay. And that's our major threat. And as as soon as somebody stands on stage, you're like, I don't know what you're thinking of me. So literally my fight, flight, freeze, submission responses kick on. And I feel like I'm in a completely different body. My heart rate goes up. My breathing changes. My eyes start to dart for the danger that I'm, because I'm feeling a certain way.

My hands start to sweat. I sweat in other weird places. So all of that fight, flight, and freeze are not aligned with the fact that I get to share ideas with somebody. This is why public speaking is so hard is because there's a misconduct. alignment between what's actually happening and our ancient brain in modern times trying to sort out that am I safe or not based on what you think of me. So the second convergence is that we can train our mind to be in the space between. And one of the great ways to do that is through mindfulness training, is to settle our minds down,

to focus on one breath at a time, to notice what pulls our mind away from the present moment, and to have the skill to refocus it back. And over time, one ends up happening is we do become better, more aware of our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations, the environment around us. And with great awareness, we can become more sensitive to how to shift and guide to become more masterful in our thoughts or emotions or, you know, whatever's happening from the environment around us. But that falls very short of this human expression. Awareness is fundamental.

It's important. it's a prerequisite for people that are highly, highly skilled at whatever they want to be skilled at. But there's a second pillar of mindfulness that it's essential that we honor, which is insight and wisdom. So in the space between hesitation, commitment is where insight and wisdom is revealed. And in the space between hesitation and commitment are such in unstable and difficult environments that that's where we learn what we're really about. You've heard the phrase. You've got to be comfortable, getting uncomfortable. Oh, yeah.

Okay, so that's good, but it is really about pushing on a daily basis to the edge of emotional instability. That's what that means. Wow. Which just that sentence alone freaks people out, you know, because you know this as a psychologist. One of the things that we're so scared of as human beings is the unknown. So when you're telling us to push to the very edge, I don't know what that's going to look like. I don't know how I'm going to react. It's like we're flight.

that fear as well, correct? But it's not as hard as we, it is challenging because if you've ever been at the top of, let's say, a ski run or on stage even, going like in the back ready room to go on stage, or you're about to walk into a boardroom and pitch an idea for the company or VC pitch, whatever it might be, it's the behind the scenes that's harder for people. Once they get into the amphitheater, once they put their skis downhill, once they get into their room and they get their mojo rolling, it's fine. It's the worry about what's about to happen that is actually at the center of a mental illness called anxiety. It's an illness. Right? And so

about 15% of Americans report having that illness, I think the numbers are easily doubled. I think one in three people across America, the United States, suffer from the mental illness of worrying about what could go wrong. That means that they either they're born with a certain condition or they've earned the right to be scared on a regular basis based on how they speak to themselves. And so with some relatively not complicated ways, we can undo that. And we can become more grounded, more present, more authentic. And I'll just share one last piece with you on this, is that the model that most of us are working from is that we need to do more to be more.

That model is broken. You know it, I know it. The idea that I need to one day, I'll one day I'll be okay if I just do more in my life. It's so fundamentally flawed that as soon as you achieve that thing that you set out to achieve, that any successful person that has had some level of success, they say, that's not what's fulfilling. And so the model needs to be flipped on its head to say that we need to be more and let the doing flow from there. the being more, be more present, be more authentic, be more grounded, be more connected to oneself so that we can be more connected to other people, to Mother Nature, to God, whatever the spiritual frame might be. So we need to be more and let the doing flow from there.

And that is, it requires inner engineering. There's nothing soft about this conversation. Psychology is invisible, right? And so, like, it can get kind of freaky for some people, but there's nothing soft about this. This is a hardcore. What are the levers that I can manipulate and use? What are the mental skills that I can grow and get better at so that I can be confident in any environment?

And I can be authentic in any environment. You know, I love your background with working with athletes and coaches. You work with a coach who I really admire. I've never met him. And you know what? We have a very large audience. So maybe I'll put the pressure on you to connect me to him to do an interview down the road. But I really admire Pete Carroll.

I think this guy is one of the real joys in NFL coaching today because this is my opinion. I think he's the one high-profile NFL coach who comes at it from a positive perspective and how he communicates, loves on his players. It's not my way or the highway. I'm not an anti-Belichick fan, but I mean, he's just the other end of the spectrum. And we tend to think that every coach he's successful has got to be like a Bill Belichick or a Nick Sabin. And I just like Pete Carroll's style. You've told us so much here, and we have little time with you left.

But what works about Pete Carroll's approach with pro football players? I 1,000% agree. And I've been fortunate enough to work with Coach Carroll for the last, I think it's six seasons. And he is an uncommon, relentless person who invests in optimism. And he just exudes it everywhere he goes. and he is a relationship-based coach. The organization the Seattle Seahawks produces football, high-level football, and he would consider the organization of relationship-based organization.

So what is extraordinary about Coach Carroll is he's got all the skills and acumen for his technical craft, and he goes further by understanding at a real deep level how to enhance the mental skills for people. and he does it by really caring about who the people are. And that is at the center of first him going on a journey of self-discovery to understand what he stands for, what guides his life, what his framework and North Star is. And we call that having a personal philosophy. And then he asks his coaches and athletes,

you know, what is your personal philosophy? And that sounds super mechanical, but that shortcuts so many of the layers of trying to figure out who people are. are by just going right to the center and saying, okay, you haven't done that work yet? Okay. So next Tuesday, come into the office and let's talk about it. Let's be very clear about what your personal philosophy is and what your mission, what your vision in life is.

And those become two bookends, if you will, of the relationship. Now, I'll tell you something really fun. It is a good story. It's going into our first Super Bowl. It was about four weeks in. And Coach Carroll says, hey, Mike, this is in the hallway at the training facility. And he says, Mike, can you feel it? And I said, yeah, like, it is amazing in the culture.

We were switched on. Guys were highly competitive, that alpha competitive, I want to grow at all costs. I want to get better. You know, it was just an amazing environment. And he says, do you think anyone else outside of sport would be interested in what we're doing? So his stuff is on how to switch on a culture to help people become their best. And then my stuff is on like training the minds of people who want to be their personal best. And so we just, without hesitation, we started to just write down what.

he and I had done together for the last year or so. And we shared those concepts with a CEO of a Fortune 50 company. And he said, I want this for all 100,000 of my employees. And so we said, oh my God, like, how do we scale up on this? Because it's just the two of us. And so we wrote a curriculum. We put together a four-week online course. We hired Olympians and sports psychologists that when people go into that course, they are coached by them on mindset. It's not open for the public at this point, but it's open for large corporations. And it has been a blast, taking the insights and pearls and wisdoms and tactical trainings of the mind that we've learned on the front line from world-class athletes and share it with the business world. And it's just been a blast.

It has been a phenomenal experience to learn from people that are in the business world and how hungry they really are and how fatigued our workforce right now is. Well, I bring it up because I don't know how many big-time sports fans. I'm a I'm a sport. It's nut. My audience knows this, so I always excuse myself. We try not to talk too much sports. But the background on Pete Carroll is the guy failed a couple times in the NFL before he goes to USC and turns the USC program around, restores its to its glory, and then goes back to the NFL and finally wins a Super Bowl with Seattle. The question is, was he naturally, you know him personally, was he naturally an optimistic person, and if so, how much of his experience with failure in the NFL did it shape

his response moving forward? And I'm just curious how much failure helped him reshift or maybe rewire his brain that led to great success. So, you know, there's the phrase that we throw around, fail fast, fail forward, fail off, and that's all good and dandy. It's, you know, I mean, yes, The idea underneath that is that we have to have the capacity to go for it. And when we go for it, we're going to make mistakes. And we need to learn quickly from our mistakes so we don't repeat them. I mean, that's not complicated. But there's so much pain with failure, really.

If you really go for it and it doesn't work out, that can be painful, financially, emotionally, even publicly sometimes. So what happened for Coach Carroll is that he got fired from two jobs and he said, oh boy, I got to figure me out. Because at these two jobs in the NFL, I didn't do me. I was torn between doing what the owner wanted, what the GM wanted. I got to figure me out. So he pulled out, as the story goes, that he likes to share with people,

as he pulled out a bunch of spiral notebooks and just started writing. So he journaled. He journaled. And then he went back over the journals and said, what are the words that keep coming up over and over for me? And it was about being a competitor. And so he started to find what competition means to him. And he said, okay, right.

if I get another chance at this, this is how I'm going to lead. This is how I'm going to be consistently myself. And this is how I want to shape the culture. And he wrote that down. And he said, these are the rules that I want to have in place. And he wrote those down. And those are very clear. He's archived those.

But doing that alone work is necessary. And whether you write it down or you listen through a mindfulness practice or you speak to wise men and women, it is necessary to go on that journey and self-discovery to become very best version, authentic version of yourself. And so he is a living beacon of somebody who is consistent and loves other people. Bill Belichick is also a beacon for consistency. I don't know Bill Belichick, but I know he's consistent. Absolutely. And Pete Carroll is consistent. So leaders, like, consistency is the hallmark. How do we become consistent? Follow some of the great stoic philosophers about know who you are and dress accordingly. That is it. That's it. That

is it. It's about being the best of you. Don't try to be relentless. But you've got to train for that. You know that. You've got to train your mind. There's only three things as humans we can train. You can train our craft which is I know a lot of your conversations on your podcast about training craft.

You can train your body and you can train your mind. That's it. Everything falls in one of those three buckets. Good stuff. Well, folks, there it is. You know why I had him on. This is hopefully the first of several conversations. We want to have you back. Michael, I know you got new stuff coming out all the time, and this is really, really great stuff.

And love for folks to know how they can connect with you. Where would you send them? Thank you for this conversation. Maybe I should apologize. It's so animated because I really have seen what happens for people, myself included, but world-class performers even where when they invest in training their mind, like what a difference it is for them, both for their relationships as well as their performances. So where can people find me?

So there's a couple of places. The business that Coach Carol and I started together is called Compete to Create. And that's Compete to Create.net. And then there's also a podcast that we fired up called Finding Mastery. And that's on all the players, just like yours, iTunes and Stitcher and everywhere. But it's also Finding Mastery.net. And that's where we have conversations with world-class leaders and performers about how they've trained their mind. And then the last place of social media, which is on Twitter, is at Michael Jerva.

And you can also find me on Instagram and LinkedIn, of course. Well, it's great stuff, Michael. I really do appreciate you. I'm fascinated by how the mind works and it has driven a lot of my work. I'm just not a psychologist, but I love talking to psychologist. This is good stuff. We're better for it. You've challenged all of us.

So, again, thanks for your time. Three good things. Appreciate you. Take care. Well, really good stuff there. And this is kind of fun. So sometimes when you interview busy people, you run out of time. And we had a certain amount of time in the window.

And I had to go and Michael had to go. And so we literally had to wrap it. But the team, including Will the Engineer and Eric the producer, they thought, well, we should do this again. Would you be willing to do it again? Like, let's just get it scheduled the next couple weeks. So we moved it all very quickly. I don't know how fast it happened, but it was like really fast. And so we're going to do something we've rarely done.

In fact, I don't know if we've ever done it. We've never done it. Eric, the producer, shaking his head behind the glass. So tomorrow. So now, some of you are listening to this on the Monday that it airs. I meet you people. Like, you're faithful. To the rest of you, this is irrelevant. So those of you who listen to us every Monday when a new show comes out tomorrow, part two.

A whole different conversation. Same stream, same ideas. So you don't want to miss that. So that's coming up to you. You're getting two episodes in one week. You can send all of your love mail. no donations, but you can send your love mail to Eric the producer. Podcast at entreleadership.com.

Well, I told you that we were going to have two great resources for you, and I am not a liar. First up from Entree Leadership and the team is a decision-making checklist. Now, there's 12 things in this checklist that you must review. It is great perspective, and it's great when it comes to progress. I'll give you a couple samples of this amazing resource that are very, very in important to me. One is take time equal to the size of the decision. In other words, a big decision should take more time. That's really, really important. And then number two, this is my top two, seek the counsel of your spouse. Folks, we cannot underestimate the value that our spouse brings

because they understand what we're afraid of. They understand what moves us, what motivate us, what demotivates us, whatever it is. They know us well, and they've seen us make a lot of big decisions. So anytime you are thinking about a decision, you want to get the objective perspective of your spouse because they're not in the middle of it. So that's where they're objective. However, where they're subjective, which matters most, is they're going to give you advice that's best for you. Really important stuff. So just two of the 12 decisions. This is a fantastic resource. You can text decision, just one word, decision. Text that to 33444. That's 33444. And Eric, the producer does have a link to this resource in the show notes at entreleadership.com. Click on podcast.

And our friends at Infusions Off have a great resource while we're giving away free stuff that helps you. How to achieve work-life balance, a guide. That's right, folks. Christmas, unbelievably, is just a few weeks away. And getting ahead while dealing with all of the distractions, family stuff, parties, all that stuff that comes around Christmas can be hectic as you think about launching into the first of another year well. We know that 70% of small business owners report sacrificing family or vacation time for work. Here's my point. We all need to make sure that we have some work-life balance and a guide to walk us through the assessment process so that we can get some true perspective is so invaluable. And this guide from InfusionSoft will help you

do that. Actionable tools, apps, and techniques from experts on how to work so. smarter, have an unplugged vacation, and make the most of your time. Go to infusionsoft.com slash worklife balance. That's infusionsoft.com slash worklife balance. Hey folks, if you're not subscribed to the podcast, you want to do it because tomorrow, as I told you early on, a special release, part two of my conversation with Michael Gerva. You don't want to miss it. On behalf of Eric the producer, our engineers Will Rutter and Jim Babb and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.