Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Stop Worrying About What People Think Of You | Michael Gervais

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Why fear of other people’s opinions (FOPO) holds us back, and what to do about it.  Michael Gervais is a high performance psychologist and the host of the Finding Mastery podcast. His new book is called The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You. In this episode we talk about:A handy new acronym: FOPO, Fear of People’s Opinions How the evolutionary roots of our desire for social acceptance work against us in the modern world Why caring about what others think is not the same thing as worrying about what others think The difference between a purpose-based identity and a performance-based identity The anti-FOPO power of things like: imagination, journaling, meditation, social support, and considering your mortalityWhy focusing less on yourself can be the greatest bulwark against FOPORelated Episodes:Michael Gervais and Pete CarrollMichael Gervais in conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/michael-gervais-returnsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing? My guest today is a high-performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world's greatest athletes, and he argues that worrying about other people's opinions is a hidden epidemic and may be, in his words,

the single greatest constrictor of human potential. He's come up with a new acronym, FOPO, F-O-P-O, fear of people's opinions. And the stakes are high, he argues. In the grip of FOPO, you play it safe instead of taking risks. You resist standing up for yourself. You value approval over authenticity

and you pursue other people's dreams instead of your own. This is the third appearance on this show by Dr. Michael Gervais. As I mentioned a few moments ago, Michael is a high-performance psychologist. His clients have included the Seattle Seahawks, many Olympic athletes, MVPs from every major sport, internationally acclaimed musicians,

and Fortune 100 leaders. He's the host of his own podcast called Finding Mastery, and he's got a new book, which is called The First Rule of Mastery, in which he coins the new acronym FOPO. In this conversation we talked about how the evolutionary roots of our desire for social acceptance work against us frequently today, why caring about what other people think is not the same as worrying about what other people think, the difference between a purpose-based

identity and a performance-based identity, the anti-fopo powers of things like imagination, journaling, meditation, social support, and contemplating your own death, and why focusing less on yourself can actually encounter intuitively be the greatest bulwark against fearing other people's opinions.

Michael Gervais coming up. First though, time for a little BSP, blatant self-promotion. I am doing two informal weekend retreats with my friends, Sabine Selassie and Jeff Warren. We call them meditation parties. They're going down at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. One is coming up in May and another in October. They're open for in-person and also virtual registration.

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Michael Gervais, welcome back to the show. Dan, I am so stoked to be here with you, thank you. It's a pleasure, by my math, this is your third appearance and I was thinking back to the last one, which I believe was in 2021 or 2022. You came on with Pete Carroll, who was the head coach at the time of the Seattle Seahawks. And I remember I was recording in a closet in the house we were renting at the time.

And my young son came into the room and announced that we were having tacos for dinner. I don't know if it made the final edit of the show, but you guys handled it with good humor. That was fun. Yeah, that was great. So you have a new book out now and it's a great topic. But one of the first thoughts I had was, huh, what is the connection between fearing what other people think of us and high performance, which is what I've always talked to you about. And you have a good answer, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me.

So can you explain it? So if you and I were drinking poison every day, which is a nice little shot of poison every day, and I were to say to you, hey, listen, you know the first rule of probably overall health is to put the poison down. You say, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So I think the poison that we're drinking when it comes to the good life, when it comes to high performance, and certainly when it comes to the path of mastery, is that we are drinking a poison every day. And that poison is this excessive worry, this rumination. Are we okay in the eyes of others? I'm just having a little fun saying I think it's time to put that poison down.

Your words in the book, you call it a hidden epidemic. So I guess my question, it's a two-part question, like what's causing it and is it getting worse? Yeah, I think it is getting worse. And I'll explain some of the conditions to support that thought. But let's just first do the biology of it. Like we are designed, well-designed, to orientate our lives to find safety. That is part of the main dictum of the brain. That 3.2 pounds of tissue is to figure out how to scan the world for danger.

And safety, the opposite of exploring danger, is finding safety. And a near-death, a couple of hundred thousand years ago was rejection from the tribe. And rejection from the tribe is exactly what it sounds like is like, uh oh, I'm about to get kicked out or I am kicked out. That rejection was a near death sentence because it's too wild out there to forge and fend

and hunt and gather if it was just the two of us that got kicked out. So acceptance is a really big part of safety. And we are highly skilled biologically to scan the world and find the hint of rejection, just the potential of rejection. And that is so powerful as a dictum for survival that in modern times, we haven't quite squared it yet.

We're still dealing with it. We haven't put light on the power of it. And that's all I'm doing here is shining light on this ancient system that is not properly squared for modern day challenges. And then the second part of your question is, you add the public nature that most people feel that they are, social media and otherwise, and that

is certainly an accelerant to that brain structure that is left undisciplined. It is running wild. It is underneath the surface doing its thing, having its own party, and we say, why are we so stressed out? Because that resource, it's sucking up a lot of energy. Am I okay? Am I okay in the eyes of them? And I'll do whatever it takes to be able to fit in because that is part of safety. We'll even abandon some of our first principles and our virtues and values to laugh at a joke that we don't really think is funny or we don't even know the lines of the movies that people are referencing, but we don't want to be left out of the joke, so we laugh.

It's like those small little subtle ways that we're conforming to be liked, as opposed to just saying, I don't know what you're talking about. All that really lands for me. I mean, I think about, with my mind at least, and I suspect this is true for most people, that I'm just walking through the world constantly sending out these anxious sonar pings, and how am I doing? How am I doing? What does this person think? Am I okay? Am I okay? Am I okay? And as you described it, this is like a blessing and curse of the human design or the way natural selection designed us. Our strength is that we can work together, but our Achilles heel is that if we don't have social approval, we feel very unsafe for very good reasons because on the savanna, as I often say, a lonely human was a dead human.

And then you go on to say that now that we're living in the panopticon of social media, where everybody's a brand, this is just on steroids. That's exactly it. And so here's the opportunity. We're just putting light on it and shining it. And I don't think that what you and I just said is all that novel or new.

And I'll tell you what happened is that I was 16 years old. This is the epicenter of this shadow self that I was playing a game, you know, in my life. I was 16 years old and I had just saved up for two summers to get my first car. It was a Mazda B2000, a little pickup truck. And it was like two grand or something. And I was, I'm driving down Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California. And I can tell that there's a car behind me and it's going a little bit faster and it's

going to pass me going in the same direction. And I straightened up, I grabbed the steering wheel to look a certain way to look cool. And I thought to myself, they're going to look inside this car and see a cool kid. And so I got that lean and I was driving. I didn't want to be obvious. And I just kind of glance over at the car that's passing me that I was propping up literally the cool posture. And damn, they never looked in. They never looked in my car. And I thought to myself as a 16 year old kid,

like, what am I doing? What was all of that activity? And I knew that that was not the right way to go through life. And I instantly felt all that heat in my body, like this big truth-telling signal that you're a phony. You're just trying to look a certain way. You are totally faking it.

And I knew that I knew how to fit in and be okay in social settings. And that stems right back to early childhood trauma for me. So I knew how to do that, but I didn't know how to be all of me. But it was so kind of embarrassing and quiet that I never announced it, you know, like I never talked about it. And then fast forward like 20 years later when I had the privilege as a sports psychologist

to work with some of the world's best. And it's a private conversation. We're doing good grounded psychological work and the world's best are saying, Hey, you know, I just don't want to look stupid out there. There's millions of people watching and Dan, I know you know this and I don't want to let my agent down. I don't want to let my parents down. I don't want to let my neighborhood down.

And so one of the great fears was not getting hurt even in rugged environments like American football or MMA. It was not that. It was more about the way that other people were thinking about them. So I said, oh, there's something here. I'm not alone in it. And there was some relief in knowing that there's others that have the same struggle as me. And then so three years ago, I wrote an article for HBR, three page article, just to get some of these ideas out. They called 12 months later, Dan, and they said, Dr. Gervais, you are the number one downloaded article 12 months in a row.

You touched the nerve. So this thing about this fear of other people's opinions, it's why public speaking is such a radical fear for us. There's no marauders. There's no snipers. There's no marauders. There's no snipers. There's no like people that are going to physically harm us if we don't find the right words or the speech doesn't come out correctly. The dangerous thing in an audience is their eyeballs, their opinion of us.

And so I just wanted to get underneath the surface of what is that? And we had fun. We called it FOPO, kind of a cousin to FOMO, you know, fear of people's opinions. And that, that's kind of the origin story from my personal experience to world class, to the most of us around the fears that we have of wanting to be okay in the eyes of others. We're going to talk at great length about what to do about this, but let's just stay on the downsides of FOPO. What can you say about how this poisons us?

Well, it's a corruption to the path of knowing what you're truly capable of. I'll just use myself. I continually shape shift and conform and sometimes contort even to what they want as opposed to what I believe to be best for me and them. And so I'm serving them. I'm outsourcing my sense of self and my identity

and my self-worth and my sense of belonging to them. And we never know truly what we're capable of because the primary game is to fit in for safety rather than the primary game of authenticity and potential. So that's one. The second is the ram that's running underneath the surface. To do all of that social pinging, to use your earlier language, that is very expensive as an organism to run. And we are in a human energy crisis right now. We are tired.

The human experience in the Western world is we have fatigue and agitation and depression and anxiety and addiction. And we're just, we've got this soup where we just feel more tired than I remember us in my 50 years of being on the planet that I ever remember. And we might want to point to the external conditions like a pandemic and social upheaval at certainly the United States, but that's not a good enough answer because the dark ages were way harder, right? Medieval times were far more dangerous and consequential than the lap of luxury that we have today.

So it's not that the external world is creating this internal fatigue. It's that we haven't properly invested on our psychology. We haven't done the work that you've suggested for many years that people do, which is like, hey, pay attention to how your thoughts work. Pay attention to how you work with your thoughts and emotions. Work from the inside out.

And when we do that work, we end up being able to meet the demands of any moment. And so we've got this reverse polarity that's taking place where we think that we are not living the good life because the external world is not favorable for us. It probably never will be, by the way. The world is not designed for you to thrive, Dan, for me to be great. It's not designed that way. It's actually quite harsh. And so it requires this internal investment in psychological skills, which I know you and I vibe in the same way.

I didn't learn those psychological skills in grade school, in high school. I certainly didn't learn them in college. Where do we go learn them? Because we're kind of forced up against some sort of crisis or pain to say there's got to be a better way. And this chronic fatigue that so many of us are feeling in the modern work way, unfortunately, it's not sharp enough to make the radical changes. We oftentimes need acute pain. We need something to really grab us attention rather than the slow, slight decay over time of vibrance. That doesn't give us enough of an amplification to say, I'm making a change. Evidence by why, you know, I don't know,

six weeks after New Year's resolutions, people tend to fade away to their best commitments. Just want to push you a little bit to say more about how damaging FOPO is. I'm going to read you back to you and then shut up and let you amplify what I've just read to you from you. Quote, FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives and the consequences are great. When we let FOPO take control, we play it safe and small because we're afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. When challenged, we surrender our viewpoint. We trade in authenticity

for approval. We please rather than provoke. We chase the dreams of others rather than our own. Yeah. The first thing when you play that back to me, I go, oh, that was good. I like what I wrote there. And I think it summarizes it pretty good. Like, there's a sadness to this, to this facing of FOPO. And at the same time, hopefully, like, as a quick second drop, it's like, and there's something I can do. So the cost is great. Evced by how you just explained it.

And the excitement is, okay, yeah, I've been living too long playing that game, that second game, that shadow game. What can I do about it? Let me ask you a question I'm sure you get all the time. Don't we need to care what other people think of us? I love that question. And you changed the word from worrying about people's thoughts to caring about people's thoughts. And I'm ringing the bell on worrying.

Yeah, I would never ring the bell to stop caring. So there's a difference, right? And so the people who don't care are sociopaths, narcissists, and maybe the enlightened. Maybe those are the ones that don't care. I don't know about the enlightened. But I know that sociopaths and narcissists really don't care all that much. We don't need more of them. We have enough.

Those spots are taken. And so I think the worrying, the excessive worry, am I going to be okay in their eyes? That's the culprit. That's the poison. That's the broth of the soup of depression, anxiety, addiction, fatigue. That's the bell I just want to ring out loud or put some light on, which is, it's this excessive worry. And I tried to explain this in saying that there's

at least three phases to FOPO, fear of people's opinions. This excessive worry is the first is the anticipation. And I think it shows up as a easy analogy when you're in your closet and you're picking out clothes for an event and you're looking at different things that you could wear in your closet. The filter is, yeah, well, Johnny liked this,

well, Xander liked that, well, Susie think that, you know, and you're thinking about the way that you're going to be perceived and the anticipation of all the conversations and the things that are going to take place later has an anxiousness to it. So the bulk of this process is the anticipation phase as opposed to when you're in your closet and you say,

I'm feeling sweater today, or I'm feeling jacket today. You're working from the inside out. And it sounds super simple and it's so slippery. This filter is so slippery. It's, it's as slippery. Let me kind of go out of the closet for a minute and go into the social event. Is that if you feel uncomfortable, awkward, maybe open up your phone to send a signal that you know, you got other stuff going on, like you're a busy quote unquote person.

That's FOPO at work. Or like I said earlier, laughing at a joke that you don't even know kind of the movie, but you don't want to be the one left out or holding a cocktail when you don't really want to drink, which again, you don't want to be the one that's weird or different. And it's that pressure, if you will. So it's incredibly slippery. And it's a big anticipation phase. And then when you're actually in the social environment, it's this constant pinging and checking. And it's looking at micro expressions and tone of voice

and body language and are they talking to me? Are they critical of me? Are they liking me? And doing whatever it takes. And I sound obnoxious when I say it, but it's that hoping and desiring of being accepted. And at the extreme case of FOPO, we completely lose our way. But the more pedestrian, more common version of FOPO is just feeling that tension when you say something and people skip over it.

Or not quite sure if you can get in the rhythm of the conversation because maybe what you have to say is going to be not heard or received well. It's that more subtlety that is the big tax. So it's that checking. And then the third phase is the way you respond, which is conforming or contorting to the norms as opposed to playing your own instrument and enjoying that rhythm. As I'm listening to you speak, I'm realizing that FOPO, even though it's ostensibly about other people, is a kind of self-centeredness. Oh, yeah. And yeah, we went after that in the research as well, is that phenomenon called the spotlight

effect. Is that we believe, people believe, that we are under a spotlight. That you, Dan, are attending to my sweater and my shirt and my hair and the tone of my voice, whereas in reality, you're attending to what you're saying and wearing and how your hair looks. So we all have this, not all, most of us have this spotlight effect where we think we're at the center of the stage when in return, we're not paying as much attention to the other person as we are to our own selves. So we end up walking around like these individuals masquerading like we're social animals, but we are fundamentally social animals.

And so it's this weird corruption of how we're designed to be interwoven, interconnected tribal community members. And what gets in the way of it is, am I being accepted by the masses, by the others? And that's where the beginnings of the spotlight effect are. And it was a fun experiment that happened in Cornell. Professor Gilovich, Thomas Gilovich, a brilliant mind, he created this experiment where he had a group

of about 100 freshmen students, as most research experiment designs are. Freshman are the guinea pigs there. And so he has a hundred in a lecture hall and they just got a handful that are walking in individually. So he's got some in a waiting room and each one walks in individually by themselves alone. And the researcher says, right, we want to give you this shirt and it's a Barry Manilow shirt.

And it's got this big picture of the emblem of uncool. You know, like Barry Manilow is not the shirt that these kids want to wear in front of their peers. They say, all we want you to do is walk in front of your peers, do this little thing, like sign some paper. You're not saying or doing anything majestic here. Just sign some paper, stand there for a few minutes, do a thing, and then walk off. How many people do you think are going to notice you? And those that were in the room by themselves dramatically overestimated the attention

that they thought people were going to observe them with. They thought that the room of 100 people, like most of them are going to see them and recognize that they are wearing an uncool shirt. And that was like, that was the big insight. Most people in the room, it was like 25% noticed. And the individual thought that it was the majority of people would notice. So, you know, they dubbed it the spotlight effect, and it's a clever little experiment to reinforce that we are not at the center of the universe.

You know? Just to be clear. It's a useful reminder. Are there gender or even racial angles here? Like if you're in it from a marginalized community or a community that's been mistreated in any way, are you more or less likely to be obsessed with how people are perceiving you? Okay, so I think that that probably doesn't point to gender. We didn't find that in the research. It points more to identity, the way that you formed your identity.

And identity, for most of us, it's this junkyarding patchwork type of sense of self. And it's passed on by your parents, how they see you and think about you and performance and culture and how you fit into the wider sense of community. It's the magazines that you picked up. It's the way your neighborhood talked about things, the way your community in large talked about things, the culture of you and your people. So oftentimes identity is passively formed.

And in the Western world, we are performance obsessed. And it makes perfect sense to me that, we are performance obsessed. And it makes perfect sense to me that out of a performance obsessed culture, how well you do and how you stack up against other people and how popular or how much money you make or whatever the metrics or the scoreboard is, that it makes perfect sense that people in an uninformed way would create a performance-based identity. Performance-obsessed culture creates performance-based identity. And performance-based identity, by definition, is I am what I do and I am what I do relative

to you. So I'm trying to prop up as big of an identity as I possibly can, which means I feel better if you and I are in the same sport or the same industry, and I'm doing just a little bit better than you, that now my performance is more intact. That's many of us. We don't have a name for it.

We don't walk around saying, oh, that's your performance-based identity. You know, like, it's kind of a nameless thing at this point. But what we found is that people that have a performance-based identity, that's a radical on-ramp to FOPO because you are paying attention to who you are relative to how others are doing the same type of thing. So there's an othering tuning fork as opposed to a purpose based identity.

And so that migration from a performance-based identity, which I think makes sense that it's there, I don't think it's very healthy, it's quite exhaustive, it might get you to the world stage, you might make a lot of money on it and literally be the best in the world or one of the best in the world, the thing you do. But it's not the path for the good life. It's not the path for the contorness of and the shaping of flourishing or happiness and joy. Okay. Again, it'll get you good at something though, because there's a little bit of anxiety that

sits right underneath the surface. But that migration from a performance-based identity to a purpose-based identity is the on-ramp to FOPO is performance-based and the off-ramp or one of the off-ramps is purpose based. Purpose based identity is exactly what it sounds like Dan. It's, I'm connected to something far bigger than me and I'm committed to adding to that large, meaningful endeavor that really matters to me. And I'm a cog in that wheel, I'm part of that ecosystem

and the rooms I go to, and then I'm going to do public speaking or private speaking like I'm That's coming forward now and it's not look at me it's I'm pointing to the bigger thing and That is such a relief to people that there's no reason there's such a up earthing of how healthy a purpose-based identity is you said before that you can ride a performance based identity to being world-class at something. Can you ride a purpose-based identity to that same level of mastery and achievement? When I think of purpose-based identity, I tend to go to folks that change the world

and change lives in radical ways, whether we know them or not. Some of the most powerful purpose-based people, we don't know who they are because they're a single parent raising three kids, knowing that they never went to college and making up a scenario, and they've got two, three jobs to be able to align to a purpose bigger than them, which is giving their kids a better go. So if you take that mechanism and you shine light on someone who's struck the timing in a more interesting way, you know, where Mandela or Gandhi or Jesus

or Buddha or mother Teresa or Eleanor Roosevelt or fill in the blanks that these people that are global game changers, that they were purpose-based. And without you and I even studying Mandela's history, most people know what he stood for. Most people know that Mother Teresa stood for compassionate, you know, taking care of other people that had physical ailments and were suffering in that way. She's like, no, I'm doing this thing.

I know that you don't think I should. I know you think I'm going to get leprosy myself, but like I'm committing my life efforts to healing. And I hope you want to be part of it. And if you don't, that's okay. Love you anyways. But I got something I'm trying to do here. I think there's a difference between a life of mastery

and a high performance life. They look the same from the outside, but on the inside, the life of mastery, a la purpose has a shaping and a contour. There's a warmth and there's an agitation and tension that comes with it because it's so important and big. But high performance is more metallic. It's more execution. It's more about delivering on time and at a high level. They look the same from the outside, but the inside, they feel radically different.

And so I would double down on your question, Dan, and say, oh yeah, purpose-based, I think actually can go further than just high performance alone. Coming up, Michael Gervais talks about why focusing less on yourself may be the best way to defend against faux pas. He talks about why true masters are committed to focusing only on what is under their control and how we can use imagination to our advantage. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you

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Download the 10% Happier app today, wherever you get your apps. Let me go back to this thing about race and gender for a second. I don't know enough from the inside to understand what it's like to be in this situation because, well, both of us are white men, so we're part of the sort of dominant culture.

But if you're a woman in a male dominated world, or if you're an indigenous American in a white dominated world, aren't you gonna be pushed by exogenous factors outside of your own makeup or even internal training into a world where FOPO becomes a pretty necessary and defensible survival tactic? So there's a thing called second self or code switching that I've learned eloquently from athletes, specifically African American athletes that talk one way amongst their peers,

whether it's an athlete or it's a group of black athletes, and coaches who in some sports in the NFL, there tends to be a disproportionate relationship between ethnicity between the two groups. Coaches tend to be more white, athletes tend to be more black in general. And so there's this idea of code switching. And it's this idea that I know how to act a certain way in both groups. But the tax of having to switch is a tax that many people don't really appreciate how expensive that is.

So second self or code switching. Second self in this way also shows up like, I'm one way at work. When I'm at home, I'm different. That's a code switch as well. It's not as dramatic as having to switch code inside the walls of business. And there's a little switch as well. It's not as dramatic as having to switch code inside the walls of business. And there's a little bit of a lower drag when you've got time to code switch between work

and home. But inside the walls of an organization, it's incredibly expensive. That is gender and BIPOC tuned. And so I think that that's a real question that you're asking and it's an expensive mechanism to run. What do you advise your patients or clients in these scenarios? To at least address the choices that they're making and to have a conversation about the risks on either side. And so there's one senior executive at a multinational corporation tech company and

we did a bunch of deep work on her personal philosophy, which is just basically one or two sentences that as best they can articulate her first principles in life. So personal philosophy is like, what really matters to you? What are your first principles? And can you get it into some sort of colorful couple sentences, knowing that a whole bunch of other principles sit underneath there. But what are those first principles? So she got really clear. She read it out loud. I could see her throat begin to change to her shape. I could hear it in her voice. There was that swelling behind the eyes. Her temperature in her face changed. Her eye dilation changed. And she just made this contact with me and her eye contact and she said, this is so true, this is me.

This is really what I stand for. And I just kind of held that moment with her. And she said, but I can't be this person at work. I said, okay. Give it a little bit of breath, you know, a little bit of space to have her feel those emotions. I said, so what do you want to do about that? And she says, well, I don't know, I think I need to quit. I said, that's do you want to do about that? And she says, well, I don't know. I think I need to quit.

I said, that's one option. What other options do you have? She says, well, I could go in and just kind of be that person, but I'm sure I'm going to get fired. So OK, that's another option. What's the third option we could go on? And she goes, there are no. It's one of those two.

Either I go in, guns blazing, this is me, this is how I'm going to show up. And she was afraid that the people in power hired somebody that was A, B, and C, and she was more D, E, and F. And so she was afraid she was going to get let go or marginalized. And so the question was, go find a new environment or be you in the current environment. And she chose the latter, which was, I mean, remarkable courage required to do that. And I'll make this even more personal, is that my wife and I were seven years into our marriage.

And we dated in high school, we dated in college, we got married seven years in. She said, I love you, I don't know how to be me around you anymore, and this isn't working, you got to go. And so I left. I didn't want to. This is my best friend. I didn't want to. But I was selfish and I was over indexing on my career and what I left. I didn't want to. This is my best friend. I didn't want to. But I was selfish and I was over indexing on my career and what I needed. And she was losing her way of who she was. And she's crying. And she says, as a best friend, you have to move out. That's a holy shit.

And I know as a psychologist that separation is like the fast track to divorce. Most people that separate never make it back. So here I am leaving knowing that this is likely a divorce. And a month later I called her and I was like, hey, listen, can we get our ass into therapy? She's like, I'm done. I said, come on, can we just go one session? She goes, okay, you know, out of the 15 years, like, yeah, we owe it to ourselves. So we find ourselves in therapy and I've got Italian roots, she's got Latin, she's full

Cuban and El Salvadorian. We are at each other. First 15 minutes of therapy, the wise woman stops us and she says, all right, this is about as bad as it gets. And she asked a question, Dan, that only a wise person would answer or ask. And she says, Mike, you know you need to do work? I go, yeah. And she says, Lisa, do you know you need to do work?

And Lisa's like, yeah. She goes, okay, here's a question. Do you want to do the work with each other or do you want to do the work with other partners? Dan, I was like, holy shit, that's a question. That's the question of all questions. My heart dropped. I was the most vulnerable I think I've ever been in an intimate way. This is a one-way door here.

And she said, I want to do the work with him. I just don't think that he can handle who I want to be. And I felt like I was just like I had a shot, and I was going to commit everything I had to create the right relationship for her to be everything that she wanted to be. And I share that intimate story because I know what it feels like from that intimate, vulnerable love perspective to be in a position to say yes or no, that I want to do the work here,

or I want to do the work in a fresh start somewhere else. And I think once you do some of this internal work, and you're more clear about your first principles in life, your philosophy, let's call it, the vision of who you want to be, the purpose that you are committing to, and the values that are going to help guide you along the way. And you have some sort of clarity about your self-discovery process or your

self-discovery of who it is that you're becoming. And then you say either I'm going to show up in this environment, wherever that environment is, that work environment or whatever, as that person or I'm going to go fresh start. That is completely the right that we all hold. There's pros and cons on each side of it. And I think it's a cool experiment to try to at least give yourself a go in the current environment. But I also think that the wisdom inside of people is pretty flipping cool.

And people do know what they need. And oftentimes what gets in the way of the knowing and the doing is like that fear of what could happen if it goes wrong. So I share a long story, two narratives about, I think this is one of the rites of passage to adulthood, is who do I want to be? Who am I? Who am I trying to become more often? And do I have the right set of community members to have my back, to partner with me, to be a great teammate, to go the distance. Whether that's work, at home, friendship, whatever it might be. Well, I appreciate you telling both those stories. Thank you.

And it kind of leads me right to the, what can we do about this portion of the discussion? Because in your book you say, and I'm going to quote you again, the single greatest bulwark against FOPO is having a strong sense of self, that we need to figure out what do we care about, what's our job on the planet, what's our purpose, and that will provide us with some armor against a very common trap. The twist you say though is the best way to figure out what you're all about is to focus less on yourself. So can you explain that? Yeah, I mean, a performance based identity is focused on self and a purpose based identity is focused on other. And it's forcing us to get back to what I would imagine you'd be very familiar with is the some of the first principles in Buddhism, which I put an asterisk next to my deep understanding

of all the principles of Buddhism because it's such a wonderfully mystic set of principles, but the interrelated interconnectedness of all things. And so we are more like a coral reef than we are these individuals that are just kind of bouncing around each other. And that statement I'm making is pointing to when you're attending less to your needs being met by others, you have more available resources to pour into something that is bigger and better and then only you can achieve and perform. And so that's pointing back to the purpose thing. It doesn't mean that you're not taking care of yourself. That's not it by any means. Know how to have your life vest on

before you can help another is also a first principle. So this is working from the inside out. And when you have a sense of deep trust of yourself, that there's a freedom that comes with it, that you can go into wildly diverse environments and be okay. Be you. Be a learner. You know, it's like Bruce Lee was probably relatively free from fear of being mugged in dark alleys where, you know, I got to wash my back. I don't know how to take care of myself the way Bruce Lee did. And the same is true psychologically and emotionally.

I'm not suggesting don't take care of yourself in service of something else and be exhausted by it. I'm saying work from the inside out, develop that sense of buoyancy so that you can be okay in calm waters and rapids of life. What's interesting and tricky sometimes is that the buoyancy is not going to come from self-obsession and navel gazing. The key to understanding yourself is to understanding what is your purpose and most often the purpose has to do with other people.

And you invoked Buddhism. One of the phrases that gets tossed around in Buddhism a lot is, for the benefit of all beings. And one of the things I'd like to point out is that the letter A there, all beings, that that includes you, right? So this is an interesting line to walk, is, you know, having a purpose that is externally oriented without leaving yourself out of the equation. Yeah, I'm going to use an overused phrase that has so much weight to me that I don't have a better way to articulate it in just this phrase, but it matters so much, is this

fundamental commitment to you being your very best. When you do that, at some point you end up graduating from the look at me approach to the how can I help you. And our very best is not self preserved. It is not self referenced. Our very best version is in service of. And evidenced by like this axiom that's showed up in elite sport forever and not necessarily has made it to ESPN and, you know, the local news or national news. Nobody does it alone. Usain Bolt doesn't do it alone.

Tiger Woods doesn't do it alone. None of the greats do it alone. There's a team. And they are part of that team. They are the one that's out there, you know, so they are actually hitting the putt by themselves, but it's all in context of a larger ecosystem of teammates and people that are supporting each other to be their very best. So it starts with this idea of committing to be your very best and then when you can get a community where when you have a sense that you are moving from suffering and struggling into that flourishing thriving sense because you have worked on yourself. and struggling into that flourishing, thriving sense, because you have worked on yourself.

You know how to think and feel and take care of yourself. And you're not whipped around by the external demands of the world, but you can be grounded and have some weight and you can trust yourself. How can I be part of something where people are doing the same for me and I'm doing the same for them?

And then you get this really cool rising tide. And that type of energy where the noses are pointed in, in a certain direction together, and you've got each other's back and you're really committed to helping each other be their very best. It is quite magical. It's almost defies language and what happens in those types of relationships. And it can be something as concrete a sport, to something as radically loving as a family, and something as purposeful as like, I don't know,

children that are without homes. So we're talking now about what can we do about FOPO, and we've spent quite a bit of time on the, what you call the single greatest bulwark, which is having a sense of self and purpose. Another tactic you discuss in the book is discernment. What do you mean by that? I love that you asked the question as if you don't have a formed opinion.

That's so good, Dan. Nice job. So discernment is one of the big sources of power for humans is when people have very interesting lives. And I don't mean that they've traveled the world and they've done whatever, you know, amazing things, but they've lived very curious, interesting lives. They are interesting because they're deeply interested. And that helps to create this ability to discern, to have reference points, to bounce

ideas or behaviors off of. So discernment is kind of drilling down to the truth of something. And one of the ways to do that is have very clear, durable, universal reference points. And discernment is that mechanism to have a decision-making process to say yes or no, or maybe you're, I'm not sure. Like, discernment is that ability to make choice and inform choice. You also specifically talk about discernment within the context of the serenity prayer of like being able to discern things you can control and can't.

At one level, that sounds like it's been so overplayed, but it is such a first principle to know what's in your control and what's not. And what I've learned from people that are true masters, both—and I'm far more interested in mastery of self than mastery of craft alone—but people that are truly committed to the path of mastery, they are not interested in just knowing what's in their control and what's not in their control. They're not interested in just controlling the controllables, you know, that phraseology. They are fundamentally committed to mastering the things that are in their control.

And they kind of look sideways like, well, what else is there? Like that's, of course, I'm going to want to put myself in a position to master something. And for me to master it, I have to be able to fully control it. And that is like, you're basically your inner life is the short answer to what's in your control. It makes very little sense to try to control something that you cannot control. You are deleveraged. You are in a position of low power in life. Like thinking or even entertaining, am I going to win or not? It's not in your control.

But concretely focusing on having available access to the best version of your thinking and the best version of arousal regulation and emotional harnessing and being able to respond eloquently and quickly with precision, both from a technical standpoint, a physical standpoint, and of course mental, then we're on to something. And so true masters are committed to mastering what's 100% under their control. And Fulpo is not part of that. You know, another person's thoughts are not in your control at all. Full stop. You said before, and I agree with you, that the serenity prayer is, you know, can be overplayed. It's, you know, knit onto pillows and things like that. And I mean, I'm not here to criticize

any of that. And speaking personally, I actually find that remembering the heart of the serenity prayer, which is, you know, being able to see clearly what I can control and what I can't is incredibly useful, especially for somebody who, like me, has a high degree of anxiety. A lot of my anxiety centers around things like work and money, and I can very easily fall into a kind of fearful projection about, oh, X is going to happen. And then, you know it ends on like, we're going to lose the house and whatever. And the bottom line is no matter what happens, I can deal with it. That deep trust that you just eloquently referenced, that's it now. People that have that deep trust, I will figure that out too. Whatever's coming down the future lane of mine here, I'll figure that out too. There's a freedom that comes with that.

You know, a big part of anxiety is the mind running rapid about all the things that could go wrong later. And that's using your imagination to try to solve a problem, but it's the repeating of that experiment. What if this and what if that? Well, no, no, what, yeah, what if A and what if B? Wait, hold on, let me go back and think about A again.

It's that rumination and repeating of trying to solve something. The off ramp to that is coming back to the present moment and focusing all of your essence to an inhale or exhale or the task at hand or listening to another person speak. And when you can go from the imagination loop of future catastrophe to the present moment focus of a task, it's one of the great inoculations of that type of anxiety.

And that's why FOPO is this imagination loop left unchecked, left unexamined, left undisciplined in many respects. And then to say, to just recognize and be aware, like, oh, I'm spending a lot of my energy and thinking resources about what they might think of me. Holy shit, like come back to right here right now. Be in my body and then choose where I'm going to put my attention. And imagination is a really cool process. It's an amazing process that athletes, some of them, have deeply invested in.

And we know a lot from the science of imagination, of mental imagery and visualization. And anxiety is a way to use your imagination, but its aim is toward all the things that could go wrong. And athletes tend to use their imagination to see a beautiful future, one that they are highly proficient in. So you can also choose how you think about the future based on how you practice thinking about it as well. Coming up, Michael talks about how meditation can help with FOPO, the ways that journaling can help, and why instead of wondering what other people are thinking, maybe it is easier to just ask them. Behind every successful business is a story, and some of them may very well surprise you.

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and many more, Wondery Means Business. We're ticking through the list of things we can do about FOPO. Next item is one that I suspect will go down easy with this crowd, meditation. Say a little bit more about how meditation can help. Now, it's one of the three most significant practices

to increase awareness. Increased awareness, I think, of at least four things. Your thoughts, your feelings, your body sensations, we can call those emotions. And the fourth is outside of you, the unfolding world around you. So when you increase your awareness of those four things, you're able to adjust just a little bit more accurately, a little bit more easily. You're able to have more of an ability to get down into the truth of something when you're not whipped around by the world, but you're actually kind of in a balanced way attending to your

thoughts and emotions and feelings and the unfolding nature around you. So there's also two other great practices, but let me stay first on meditation and mindfulness here, is that with a mindfulness practice to increase awareness, there's a couple things that happen obviously, but relative to FOPO is that you become more aware of the excessive worrying about what they're thinking. You're more aware of how much you're checking into the eyes of others if you're okay. You're more aware of how much you're checking into the eyes of others if you're okay. You're more aware of the way that you're responding to the felt experience of maybe being rejected. So the whole inner game is, am I being accepted or rejected?

That's the broth of this phoposoup. And again, the fear of rejection is a near death sentence to our brain. So we are heightened in our awareness of that. But we also need to become more aware of how we're responding, how we're actually showing up in a relationship, how much we're checking and all the anticipation ahead of time. And when you are more aware, you give yourself a chance to do something about it, to course correct, to adjust, to notice. And the other two practices just to round it out are journaling. And the third is conversations with people of wisdom.

And people of wisdom, you know, tend to hold up mirrors pretty well. Can you say more about journaling? I actually have never really done much journaling. What is it and how do I do it and how does it help? I don't love it myself. So I can teach, but I don't embody it. Right? And so I'll just not get into the mechanics of what some best practices could be, but I'll start at the more general level, is that when you have a blank piece of paper

and you've maybe got a prompt that you want to explore, like, what did I enjoy today? Or what challenged me today? Or it's just a blank piece of paper that you're reflecting on your experience, or you're thinking about something in the future. There's a forcing function. You know when you're lying. You know when you're thinking about something in the future. There's a forcing function. You know when you're lying.

You know when you're being honest. You know when you choose between this word and that word, the feelings that are evoked from it. It is a forcing function to become more aware of the word choices and the commitments and the feelings that follow on. So it's private. There's usually not somebody else

that's checking your journal. Maybe, I don't know. But it's usually a private experience usually not somebody else that's checking your journal. Maybe. I don't know. But it's usually a private experience to create a bit of a sanctuary, lowering the threshold between how you're thinking and the concreteness of those thoughts. The other thing you mentioned was conversations with wise people. I believe you use the term in your book, create a roundtable. Yeah.

So this goes back to caring and worrying. And there are some people I don't want to worry for most things. I really don't want to worry at all. And I certainly don't want to worry if I'm okay, based on what you might be thinking of me. But I do care about some people's opinions and their thoughts. And for me, I needed some sort of mechanism, like who are they? And I didn't want a list.

I'd like to use my visual sensations. So I just got a round table in my mind, and I thought eight chairs felt pretty good. I could manage those eight relationships in my mind. And to have a seat at the table, there's two criteria. First criteria is time under tension. That we have time together where they know my scars, my traumas, they know my dreams and ambitions. And we've got time under tension.

So when they say something, it's in context of all of me. And so that's one way to earn a seat at the table. And the other way is, and it's better if you have both of these, but not everyone does, that you've really gone for it in your life. Like really understand what it means to go for it. Because I believe, it's an axiom of mine, that there's so much more potential that lies dormant. And those that are able to push on those edges to fundamentally commit to growing towards their potential, that type of courage is highly valued by me. So those are the two criteria, time under tension and have really gone for it in their

life. And so at least one benefit there would be, we're not saying you should not care about other people's opinions. We're saying let's not get wrapped up in unconstructive rumination and anxiety around other people's opinions. And if we are in some systematic, regular way checking in with people whose opinions are very valuable to us in some way that can inoculate us against this miasmatic, nebulous dread we might feel about the rest of the world.

Yeah, there you go. I wish that I had those thoughts in the book. I think that was really well said. Signal to noise ratio, SNR, is an engineering term. It's also a psychological term. And so, the way that I think about the roundtable of eight is that's a signal. And the noise is the people who don't really know me. Their idea might be really good. Their opinion might be factually accurate. But it for some reason, because of my traumas and scar tissues, like I don't know how to accept it. It's just like this data point that's just out there.

And if I don't do something to corral the signal, I can easily get caught in the noise. And so I need some separation distance between the noise. And most of us have a lot of noise, a lot of opinions about like how we're doing and what we're doing at work and creative arts and dress and choice of words. And I just, I need to be more locked into a signal

because I can easily find myself frayed in the noise. Likewise. Another piece ofayed in the noise. Likewise. Another piece of advice in the book is, instead of wondering what people are thinking, just ask them. That makes sense, although it sounds like it may be easier said than done. That research is really pretty remarkable, is that the researcher put together couples that were married 10 years and longer. And that's kind of the timeframe when we can start to finish each other's sentences.

There's a knowing of each other at that marker for most relationships. And what they found is that they didn't differ all that much in being able to finish each other's sentences than relative strangers, like people that knew each other but not all that well, not a whole lot of time under tension. There was a difference. People with 10 years or more did know each other better, could finish each other's thoughts, could guess what another person's thinking, but not all that much. However, what was remarkable is the overestimation

that we think just because we've been around somebody that we know them far greater than we actually do. And that's the dangerous delta. So yes, when you know someone, you're better than guessing the ideas of people that you don't know very well, but we think we are exponentially better. The takeaway of that research is we're not very good at this mind reading thing. Really not. So if you want to know what another person's thinking, the most powerful thing you can do is say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? Or when I said that, I think you had a reaction to it. Like, I hope you can be honest and tell me, you know, what I was feeling.

And I'm happy to be totally wrong on it, but like, did I pick up on something? And so with enough kind of safety in those type of exploratory relationships, hopefully people can be honest. And it is one of the greatest mechanisms for speed of trusting each other. The safety seems to be the key variable. I think that's what I was pointing at when I made the comment that it's maybe easier said than done. You know, I can imagine people not feeling comfortable with their boss, for example,

or again, if you're, you know, the only female in a largely male environment, you might not feel comfortable, etc., etc. That is 100% true. This is where that psychological safety research is very, very powerful. And where it goes sideways, psychological safety is that when it's an emblem for if we are creating a psychologically safe environment so that I can speak truth to power, so that I can bring my ideas forward, that is also equivalent to I can bring my whole self to work.

Not necessarily. You know, and psychological safety does not mean that. It doesn't mean that if I want to wear outrageous some sort of clothing, but I'm a customer facing and that's not how the brand wants to dress, that I have the right to do that. And I'm being kind of silly in this story. But psychological safety, and this is polarizing, psychological safety does not mean we're doing therapy at work and it does not mean that you can bring your whole self.

It means that there's enough space and safety to speak truth to power, that when you do say something or agitate for something, that you're not run out of the building or run off the team. And that type of safety is radical for innovation, for risk taking, for planning, for strategy. It's a really important component to high performance. One of the last things you talk about in the book

when it comes to like sort of, you know, how to handle FOPO, I believe you call it a litmus test, is thinking about the circumstances in our life within the context of mortality. Can you say a little bit more about that? You know, you and I haven't seen each other in a long time. And after this conversation,

I don't know when I'm going to get to see you. And so, most likely we'll have a salutation, you know, it's like a, see you later, or, okay, bye, thanks, as if we're going to see each other soon. And this holds up true in our relationship and it holds up true in, you know, with our kids and our spouses and our loved ones, which we say goodbye as if we're going to get another shot. But that's not necessarily the case. Matter of fact, we don't know that with any certainty.

We are banking on our history that every time we've said goodbye, we've actually up until this point had another chance, but we don't know when the end happens. And so I'm pointing to the shot clock analogy, just using a sport analogy, which is if we treated time just a little bit more preciously, and this is not a sport analogy, which is if we treated time just a little bit more preciously, and this is not a new idea, but this is just reminding us that we don't know when it's going to end. And as a forcing function, it can help us be more tuned and more present and demanding and calling for our very best with each other

because we don't know where we'll get another chance at it. So I'm just saying, you know, the 35 second shot clock forces you to take action in an NBA game that lasts 48 minutes in total. And so just having that shot clock approach was just a fun, clever way of saying, when you say goodbye, maybe mean it. And if you say goodbye to seven people a day, after a while, when I say goodbye to you, it's actually preparing me for my next relationship with the next person that I get to have an engagement with. That when I say goodbye to you and I have a moment, like I don't know if I'm ever going to see you, thank you. And I've really enjoyed our time. Thank you. And I feel fortunate to be in your life. And then I go to the next person, it's priming me to be more attentive to the fragility of that relationship too. Given that we all have limited time, do you want to spend it obsessing about what people may or may not think about you?

Amen. And as we're rounding, using a sport metaphor one more time, as we're rounding third base here, there's a friend of mine who has passed away and his name is Nate Hobgud Chittick. He played in the NFL for a number of years. He won a Super Bowl and he died early. You know, he was only in his late 30s. He died early. And I bring him in the book because he taught me this thing about a screen pass. And so in football, there's a thing called the screen pass, which is it's a lateral pass and you've got a bunch of people running in front of you to protect you from getting tackled. And so the runner is literally running behind three of the largest humans on the planet

and trying to get the ball into the end zone. So he said to me, Mike, you have no idea what it's like to be screamed at by adults, six to four inches in front of your nose, with such vitriol and such frustration in front of your peers, in front of people that are trying to take your job that you're not doing good enough. He said it was so overwhelming for me in Pop Warner, in high school, in college, that finally my third year in college, I had to put up what I called a screen. And no one taught me how to do this, but I used my imagination.

I created a screen and the only things that would come through the screen were the things that were going to help me be a better me. And everything else that was negative destructive fell on the coach's side of the screen. For example, this is the way he said it. A coach would say, Nate, I've told you a thousand times. I don't know when you're going to get it through your fixed goal. I've told you it's a half step. You are taking a full step.

You're getting beat all the time. You're never going to make it to the next level. You're an embarrassment to this team. How do you live with yourself? You're letting us down all the time. It's a half step, Nate. I did a little bit of ad lib there. But so the only thing that would come through the screen was, oh, half step, got it.

Everything else would fall away. And so you have to discern, you really have to focus and have a mechanism to be able to say what comes in and what doesn't. What is the signal? What is the noise? Am I going to attend to how I look to my peers, how he's thinking of me, or am I going to make a fundamental commitment to get better?

And this is what I love about athletics. There's a lot of things that I could say. Give me pause. I spent the last 25 years in elite sport, but one of the things I love about sport is that they have made a fundamental commitment in their life to become their very best. And it tends to look technical and physical. Oftentimes there's a whole set of mental practices that sit underneath of it. They don't just say they want to be their best. They work every day to get right to the razor's edge where they could fall into a thousand pieces

or break through to a new unlock. And they're doing it in front of people that are trying to take unlock. And they're doing it in front of people that are trying to take their job. They're doing it in front of people that are deciding whether they get a chance at the next game or not. And the stakes are real, they're high, and they make that fundamental commitment

to be vulnerable in that way every day. And it does not mean that athletes are the emblem for the good life or flourishing. We all have problems, every industry, every industry, but that is special. Most of us don't know what it's like to be publicly statted and examined and publicly called out for both success and mistakes. And it's pretty radical. And they make that commitment. This has been fascinating. Is there, are there areas you were hoping to go

that we didn't get to? No, I think the only area, Dan, is like, to see if you personally resonated with FOPO. And I wish I would have asked that earlier. Do you see yourself, I know you've been very public with anxiety, but do you see FOPO as part of your unique makeup?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I don't think it's unique, which is actually liberating, but a thousand percent. I had an experience just last night where one of the big aspects of panic, which is something that I intermittently struggle with, is this sense of, are the people I'm panicking in front of going to people I'm panicking in front of gonna think I'm insane like if I'm on an Airplane and I feel claustrophobic one of the strands of fear if I'm paying attention that's running through my mind is These people are gonna think I'm crazy and like last night for some reason

I was struggling a little bit to get on a subway in New York City and I was Waiting for an empty car because I didn't want to freak out in front of other people and even on a lower sort of more quotidian Mundane daily level I have not found a way to have a career as a public figure Where I don't have some degree of fear about what people are thinking of me and what I found useful in this discussion is to delineate between caring and worrying and that that I think, makes complete sense. Because I should care.

I should care is my message resonating. How's this joke going down? How's this argument going down? I should care about that. But worrying too much about every little facial expression and how that's going down and what some person who's having a bad day may or may not say on Instagram, that's not helpful.

Yeah. And then let's open that up one more level, which is caring about another person's experience is different than caring, Allah, and now I'm closer to worrying, am I okay in their eyes? I feel a great responsibility on the Finding Mastery podcast that people are giving their time. Super precious. And I feel that I care. I deeply care that the way that we're shaping a conversation or whatever it is, that it's a good use of their time.

Now, that's very different than worrying. Am I okay? Do they think I'm okay? Is this all going to go away? That excessive worry or even that little bit of worry is fundamentally different about caring. To your point, we need more care. We need more compassion and empathy. We need more strength and we need less worry. Dan, that panic stuff is as constricting of the experience of like, oh my God, my heart rate is pounding, my breathing is outrageous, am I going to die? Like that's kind of the panic experience in its purity, right?

It's the fear that you're going to have that in a public setting is oftentimes reported to be worse than the experience itself. And that too, I think, is the FOPO mechanism working its way in there. I wonder how much freedom you have by announcing it from calling it what it is that, hey, there's this thing I have. My show up at this dinner party, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'd rather take my own skeletons out of the closet than have somebody else do it. That's a cool insight right there. I think that that level of courage is to be celebrated and the path to get there means you really know yourself. You've done some work to say,

hey, here's the shadow part that I'm trying to protect. I don't want to spend all that energy on trying to protect it, so here it is. If it makes you really uncomfortable that I might fall into a thousand pieces, I don't know. Maybe we're not going to be able to work out as a friendship or as a business partner or whatever, because this is me. Exactly.

You mentioned the podcast. That just puts me in mind of something I like to do at the end of every show, which is just push my guests to just promote all the stuff you're doing. Because if somebody's made it this far in the interview, I suspect they want to know, just please give us the whole McGill. The website has all of that. And so if there's one thing to remember, it's finding mastery.com. The podcast is called finding mastery.

And we sit down with the world's best about how they've designed their inner life. The current book right now is called the first rule. Stop worrying about what people think of you get that anywhere. And the book that I wrote was Coach Pete Carroll, the head coach at the Seattle Seahawks, is an audio-only version. And it was an Audible original. And so that's only found on Audible.

And that's called Compete to Create. And the social handles are fun. You know, LinkedIn, we're really active on LinkedIn and Instagram. Both of them are my name. Michael Gervais. And you spell it G-E-R-V, as in Victor, A-I-S. Always a pleasure, Mike. Thank you very much.

Dan, I appreciate you. Thank you. I appreciate that. And congratulations on the new book. Thanks again to Michael. Always great to talk to him. I will put a link to his last appearance on the show, which was back in July of 2020, with Coach Pete Carroll from the Seahawks. I'll put a link to his last appearance on the show, which was back in July of 2020, with Coach Pete Carroll from

the Seahawks. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our executive producer, Alicia Mackey leads our marketing, and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts.

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