Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Michael Gervais: State of Finding Mastery

Episode Date: June 23, 2016

Michael Gervais holds a "State of Finding Mastery" to distill some insights from the podcast so far and explain what's he's excited for going forward._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. And what we're going to do right now is spend a little bit of time on, you know, just a state of the union or a state of finding mastery. And the first thing is thank you for filling out the survey. And almost 200 people just with one simple request and one podcast shared a lot of information. And I'm going to share some of that information here. And then

I'm also going to run through the exciting things that I think we're trying to build to come next. And then the third thing I want to do is take a first pass, or maybe this is a second pass, of some of the insights that I'm beginning to pull together or understand. And this is just a placeholder for a mark in time in which this is what's making sense now. And I think that over the next three months, six months, nine months. But OK, so the first thing, over 200 people connected to the to the survey. Incredible. Here's a nice little fun tidbit about you guys is that 60 percent indicated they were risk takers. Forty percent, by definition, indicated that they were more inclined to follow rules. So that's a little bit of the makeup of who's following. So we've got a little bit of that Yahoo, go for it attitude, which is probably why you're more interested in some of the adventure or action sport type of conversations that we're

having. The second thing is that what we're going to do is we're going to take the guests have been so kind and so thoughtful and so insightful. And there's such a wealth of information that they are sharing with us that what we're going to do is we're going to take those insights. We're going to distill them down and we're going to launch another smaller podcast called Minutes on Mastery. And the Minutes on Mastery, you can go learn more about it. It's going to launch right after this conversation. And if you go to iTunes and you search minutes on mastery, you'll find it. And essentially what that's going to do is every day you wake up and you're going to have just a quick little nugget, three minutes or less that one of the guests has shared like a really applied practice or an insight that really grabs our attention. So hopefully, I mean, the idea is every day you can have a little bit of a touching on a regular basis from the thoughts or habits or ways that some of the people on the path of mastery think and or do. So hopefully you get excited about that. I know we are. The second is we're really listening to you.

And what came from that survey that you filled out is that there's a, we asked like, what are the things that you would like more of? And right out of the gates was a community. And so the way that we would like to think about developing a community is twofold. One is, can we capture a digital community and a place online that we can have further conversations? And then can we actually later down the road do some meetups? And so the first part of the digital community is that if you go to findingmastery.net forward slash community, you can find us there. And this is meant for you guys to be a resource for each other. And you'll have questions and you'll want to connect with other people.

This all came through in the survey. And the idea is sometimes we'll have answers, but most of the time you guys will have answers for each other. The ways that you're thinking about particular challenges or ways to solve some of the dilemmas that we all are facing about being parts of community that are straining and striving and looking for challenge. So hopefully that we'll set the form and then you guys take care of each other. And obviously, you know, you can share articles and videos, things that are just stimulating for you. And you think that other people in this community that we're all connected to now will be equally of interest. Okay. So here's a couple more things is that what you told us that you care most about from the people on the podcast is mental training. The second thing is mental toughness. And the third thing is fear of failure. And so this is a prompt

to have conversations around mental training, toughness, and fear of failure. And then lower down the list, the fourth item that you wanted to learn and talk more about is mindfulness, then resiliency, and then managing pressure, risk, and flow. That was kind of the top list there. And then it absolutely blew me away. Like I couldn't believe at the bottom of the list was relationships and love. And I'm going to talk a lot about love in this conversation and in these podcasts, because that's like, I think where, okay, so let me, let me pause for a moment. I think I relate to this interest in mental training, mental toughness and fear of failure and mindfulness

and resiliency, but where does it come from? Why? Why do those things? Why do mental training? Why have the skills to be mentally tough, which is really about resiliency? Resiliency and mental toughness are kind of the same coin, different sides, different words that we think about adjusting and flowing and moving forward. But why do that? It's about the relationship that we have with ourselves and the relationship that we have with others. And I think when we strip it all down, it stems from love. And so I'm going to keep going down that path. Okay. So I know you don't want to hear about it much, but I'm going to keep going down that path because I flat out, I think it's foundational. All right. Then the other part, we asked you who you want to learn from. And number one on the list by a landslide

was athletes. And right behind that was coaches. So athletes and coaches were the thing that came up most for you. So of course we're going to feature, and that's part of our community, athletes and coaches. And then the third was business leaders as well. And however, what was low on that list were musicians and actors and performing artists and homeless. And some of that might seem off access to you. And what I want to suggest here is that I hear you, we hear you, and just kind of like that love conversation is that we're going to go down this path of learning from people that maybe at first pass, you wouldn't know defined value in the way that they've organized their life and the way that they've organized their

thoughts, the way that they've trained themselves. But that off-access nature is essentially what makes people really interesting and different. There's so much we can learn. We can learn a lot from actors and musicians and performing artists about resiliency, about mindfulness and taking risks and, you know, performing well in the face of failure. So I want to make sure that, you know, we're toggling back and forth and somehow I want to be able to capture the importance on that side of it. And then the undiscovered experts, you know, if we think about who's coming on this conversation or the criteria for inclusion, if you will, there's this first filter of globally recognized experts or people that are true masters of craft that the world recognizes. Those are easy.

The Leonardo da Vinci's and such are easy that they should be part of this conversation. However, if we just stop there, we would miss the domain specific experts that are not hidden gems, but they are not revered, but they're really well respected and pointed to within specific domains, whether that be music or whether that be, you know, in the coaching industry or business leaders that people in the industry, they point to these people and say they're gamers. They really understand things. So we want to make sure that that's part of it. And then the third is those undiscovered experts, those, those, the people in your

neighborhood that the world doesn't know. and many people may be in their thing that they care so much about, they don't know them because they haven't applied like that next step, which is to build a business around it or to follow it to the deepest depths of the nuances. But they really do have some insights like homeless people, people that are making a choice to be able to exit from the system and be off of the grid. And that is part of the community of the homeless group. Some have mental illness and some have addictions. And some have made a choice, a purposeful choice to be off the grid. So we want to learn from the off-access point of view as well. And then there's a handful of experiences that we're noticing on the path. And the first part is that it's a windy path. There is no kind of

high-performance treadmill that you get on. And if you go fast and you work hard, that you're going to figure out mastery. It is a windy road. It's not simple to understand. And this part of it's going to take time to really pull, whether it's through machine learning or some process that we're going to push this information through to be able to understand what are the themes that come through on the paths that people are taking. The second is that there's a mark in every one of their lives for adversity or crisis. And I say everyone, I think that's not totally accurate for most. And it's just jumping right out at us that most people have faced down adversity. For example, Carly Lloyd, you know, she ran out of options and was ready to leave the sport. And now she's considered to be the best or one of the best in her sport in soccer. Sean Hutchinson talked about being flat out broke from

surfing from couch to couch and making the decision to go for it and to really chip in. Rich Roll, he walked us through from addiction to being globally recognized as somebody who is able to push limits on both health as well as fitness. And in the experience of limit pushing and triathlete as a triathlon, as a triathlete in triathlons and even more extreme conditions. Tom Osborne, he was searching deeply for that father-son relationship. Baggio went through war and the list goes on and on. Like they have faced down adversity in some kind of way and they pushed through it when they could have taken the easy path. So it's not that we've all had adversity, like for sure we've all had adversity, but what they did with it and how they harnessed it and they

stood within themselves to keep pushing and growing. And it's so easy to kind of exit out or blame others or have an excuse, but everybody so far has had a very different experience. Okay. So they've all played the long game and this really long commitment. And in that long commitment, I think that we'd all recognize just how humble, how curious the people that we're learning from. And I think it's that curiosity that leads them to understand the importance of taking risks because curiosity is actually part of risk taking. Like I'm curious about fill in the blanks, what it's like to jump from a high distance or what it's like to create a business or what it's like to share love with people that maybe don't

seem receptive. And so that curiosity leads to some sort of risk taking. So what we've, what we're learning is that they are paying great attention to developing the skills that are involved in risk taking. And those skills are essentially all the mental skills that we've been talking about. There's insight. So the folks on the podcast, they have insight. They're not just hard workers. They do hard work. But it's more than that. There's something deep that's driving them and there's a calling. And that's why I want to push back over to that earlier part that we're talking about the importance of being connected to love and relationships and having deep meaning in life. And so just as a placeholder, the insight that they've created is marked by the adversity they've gone through. It's marked by their resilience to be able to keep going forward and keep pushing through that curious lens and the wanting to know that there's more at the same time, the contentment that comes

with now. So that insight is a really important process that I'm paying attention to now. And one of the last is that they really push limits. They're hungry for progression. So as equal as hungry as they are for being connected and have deep meeting and staying the course, they're also equally interested in the fastest clip, the most accurate way, and the most tangible things that they can do every day, day in and day out, to progress in their craft. So those are some of the things that we've been talking about. And it's noticeable that there's a love of challenge. It's hard to capture exactly how that they do what they do. And it's, it's kind of like Michael

Jordan, when he was asked to coach, that it was hard for him to coach, he knew how to do it so intimately. And it was so organic, that the trying to translate all of those nuances into simple frames is not easy. So we're finding that that finding that it's a bit hard to do that. Okay. That being said, there's a lot there that I just shared. And this will all be formalized later at some point. And we're just in the phase right now of capturing and gathering and trying to understand and being curious ourselves and efficient. So I hope that that's, you know, it has been as fun for you as it has been for us as well. So let's get on with it. Let's build this community and let's be a resource for each other.

And let's stay hungry. Let's stay curious. And let's figure out ways that all of us can have that inner fire to burn, to really burn, to go for it in our lives and be deeply connected. So I want to thank everyone. Seriously, I want to thank everyone for the social and the emails and the phone calls and the, hey, you know, on the street.

I love that. What do you think about that? And just these conversations that I'm able to have that I never would have had before this medium being able to express the way that the fortune I am to know people that are just absolutely flat out amazing at what they do. So just as a quick recap and a quick reminder, deep gratitude for taking the survey. Minutes on Mastery is coming. So push over to iTunes right now and do a quick little search for minutes on mastery. And then I want to hope and encourage that you'll be part of the community. If it doesn't work, we'll pull it down. No, no worries, but hopefully you asked for it. Let's see if we can build something special there. And wouldn't it be fun if, um, down the

road, there was finding mastery meetups where people just, maybe it's every Monday, Mindset Mondays, and we just connected. And in your local neighborhood or digitally online. And there was just some rich engagement that took place there. Okay, so let's get on to it. We're going to make sure that we address exactly what you're looking for, mental training, the mindset skills, toughness, how people manage failure, and the resiliency to stay the course. But the real work, the real work is to figure out who you are, dress accordingly,

and allow and cultivate that fire within you to burn brightly so that during the difficult times, that fire is alive and well. And so I wish you the best with all gratitude, with humility. I thank you. And if there's anything that we can help accelerate in your life, let us know. We're trying our best on it and we're looking forward to what's coming next. So here we are finding mastery, kind of the beginnings of marking of some of the insights. All right. Have a great day or evening, wherever you are. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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