The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 547: Dr. Michael Gervais - How To Stop Worrying What Other People Think About You (Finding Mastery)

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 The pursuit of mastery is part of a process. It's an orientation towards experience. It's about being fully absorbed in the moment. Our fear of other people's opinions (FOPO) has become irrational and unproductive, and its negative effects reach far beyond performance. If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you—your talents, beliefs, and values—and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you'll harm your potential. Acknowledgments: "To Lisa, the love of my life. "It's because of you that I no longer pray for calm waters, but to rather test the strength of our sails." Basing self-worth on performance –  when the core motivation of pursuing excellence is proving our self-worth, mistakes, failures, opinions, and criticism are experienced as threats rather than learning opportunities. A Learner's Mindset  - A student came to a renowned monk and asked to learn about Zen Buddhism. Shortly after the monk launched into his discourse, the student interrupted him and said, "Oh, I already know that" in an attempt to impress the monk. The monk suggested they discuss the matter over tea. When the tea was ready, the monk poured the tea into a teacup, filled it to the brim—and then continued to pour—spilling tea over the sides of the cup and onto the table. The student watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself, "Stop! You can't pour tea into a full cup." The monk set the teapot down and replied, "Exactly. Return to me when your cup is empty." "Anchoring our sense of self in discovery is not a cop-out to avoid committing to who we are; rather, it's simply an acknowledgment that we change with time." Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert points out, "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." Purpose over Approval – From a young age, we are conditioned to seek approval. Over time, we develop a built-in mechanism to check outside ourselves to see if everything is okay. But… we have another choice. That is our purpose… "Purpose is the belief that you are alive to do something. It is an internally derived, generalized intention that's both meaningful to you and consequential to the world beyond you." Optimism isn't soft. in fact, it sits at the center of mental toughness. Have you conditioned your mind for optimism? Dr. Mike has worked with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and his leadership team to develop psychological principles and practices for high-performing teams and cultures. As a sport psychology consultant, he was a member of the Seattle Seahawks team for 9 seasons, including two back-to-back Super Bowl appearances (winning in 2014). His primary objective was to assist Head Coach, Pete Carroll, to build a mindset-based culture. For Red Bull Stratos, Dr. Mike helped Felix Baumgartner manage his mind and body under pressure for his record-setting skydive from 128,000 feet. We need to make a fundamental commitment to practice at the edge of our capacity. One of the prompts I use in my life is, "What did I do today to push my edges?" What did I do that was uncomfortable… And making the commitment to stack day after day of pushing my edges makes that comfort zone bigger and bigger. Ask yourself, "What did I do today to push my edges?" 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.

The first rule of mastery is push your chair back from the table and say, I'm going to make a fundamental commitment to work from the inside out, rather than work from the outside end. The most dynamically powerful people in the world do not let their external world dictate their internal experience. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 6-6-8.

6-6 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how I book The Pursuit of Excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 666866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader Dr. Michael Jervais is one of the world's top high-performance psychologist. His clients include world record holders, Olympians, internationally acclaimed artists and musicians, MVP's from every major sport and Fortune 100 CEOs. He is also the founder

of Finding Mastery, a high-performance Psychology Consulting Agency, and he's the author of a new book called The First Rule of Mastery. Stop Worrying about what people think of you. During this conversation we discuss the problems with basing your self-worth on performance and what we can do instead. Then dealing with FOPO. FOPO is fear of people's opinion. Dr. Mike shares how we can better manage this and then what it means to have a, quote, learner's mindset and how to cultivate this in yourself and your team. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation.

with Dr. Michael Gervais. Dr. Mike, it's great to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man. I'm stoked to be here with you. And there's that voice I've come to know. Thank you, man. I love the book. The first rule of mastery, stop worrying about what people think of you.

But it's funny, Mike, I actually moved directly to the back because I loved one of your acknowledgments specifically. And I wanted to start here because it sounds like this is the most important person in your life. to Lisa, the love of my life. It's because of you that I no longer pray for calm waters, but to rather test the strength of our sales. It's beautifully written, man. What made you write your love note to your wife in that way in the acknowledgments of this book?

Oh, we've been through some rough waters now. So we met young, and we met in high school. And then I think it's an amazing opportunity to meet somebody that young and have a deep passionate love with the person, but there's complications in that as well. And so it's like we were two oak trees just forming and then we started to wrap our roots around each other. And it was a real challenge as we were straining and yearning for understanding independence and separation, but we had this love for each other in this intertwined way. So what we had to do is we had to do real work to create that healthy ecosystem that's separate but touching at the branches rather than at the roots. So we did quite simply, she one day, we're seven years married and she's like, look, I love you,

you're a good man. I can't do this anymore. I'm losing my way of who I am. I'm sorry. You've missed all of my signals. Well, we're done. All the explicit. I don't know if your audience has got some youth in there or not, but they'll be mindful of that.

but all the like what that and so I moved out scared as you can be because like I had blown this now because I was selfish ambitious trying to figure out how to build a business and understand psychology at the deepest level and we just reached an impasse and we did the deep work we got back we got our ass into therapy we feel fortunate that we found a wise woman that held us accountable and we thread that needle now it's really hard to do and so we've been married like, you know, 20 some years and 30, 30 years. And so anyways, that's why people ask me all the time as a quote-unquote high-performance psychologist, is there a golden thread?

Is there similarities the best in the world? Is there commonalities amongst the one percenters? And I went on an early part of my professional career to try to answer that question, because when people would ask it, I was curious about it first. And then when people would ask it, I didn't have anything close to us to us. satisfying answer or understanding. So I made a deep commitment to try to figure that thing out. Two plus decades later, what I've learned is like, yeah, it starts with their relationship

with themselves and the relationship they have with their support system. Nobody does the extraordinary alone, period. Nobody does it alone. Individual contributors in business, they've got a team. They're part of a team. They're part of an ecosystem. system. Singles and tennis, individual surfers, big wave surfers, they're not doing it alone. There's a whole team and systems. Our relationships are at the center of this whole thing.

And it starts with the relationship with yourself, with others, mother nature, experience, machines. So our relationships are at ground zero. And that's the common thread. Now, not all relationships are healthy and not all performance models are healthy. Some of the best in the world are really screwed up. And it's fun to have a cocktail conversation with them, but you probably don't want them in your living room more than like once or twice, maybe, because it's all about them. If you really understood the pain and complications that they're going through, you'd have a different type of feeling for them. And so I hope that we can have a conversation about the pursuit of mastery rather than pursuit of high performance

and what sits underneath of that as a potential catalyst for fulfillment in life as opposed to the shiny metallic feeling of excellence. And so I'll stop there. So thank you for the acknowledgments. Yeah, man. No. What does the pursuit of mastery look like in your life? When you think about what mastery means to you and being in pursuit of that, and let's

go, let's make it personal for a second. and then we can maybe broaden out to how others could do the same. But what does it look like in your life? I'm not interested in mastery as a final product. So it is a path. It's a pursuit to just double down on your question. And that pursuit means it is a orientation towards the experiences that are unfolding. So mastery is the ability to be fully absorbed in the present moment even when it's hard to do so.

That's mastery of self. and to be able to eloquently adjust when it's really hard uniquely for you or maybe uniquely for all people. So mastery of self is this orientation you have towards experience, working from the inside out to be in the present moment more often and have the skills to adjust to the trade ones. That's mastery of self. Mastery of craft is related, but a bit different. It's the ability to artistically express through some form.

whatever that form is, canvas or your body or whatever, in the most stressful environments, and to be able to do that in a way that is authentic to your expression. Okay, so I'm going to use me now as an example. When I wake up in the morning and I'm riding that dual parallel path of mastery of self and mastery of craft, it comes down to me to these little micro decisions that I'm making. and am I lining myself up towards the first principles in life that matter most to me, like kindness and compassion and strength and artistic nature? Those first principles matter.

And my thoughts, words and actions, mastery is lining up my thoughts, words, and actions towards those first principles. And then to be able to a skill that on command, on demand, even in rugged, hostile, consequential environments, I can access it. So small little decisions, micro little decisions that I'm making to navigate the rough waters, if you will. It feels like you've gotten very intentional about setting your code, your core values, your first principles. What's the process like? What was it like for you and how could somebody else get that code to live by and then figuring out the behaviors that align with that code? How did you do that? How do we do that? Well, I was influenced by all of my upbringing.

And part of my upbringing, there was a religious component to it. So my first code was influenced by my neighborhood, by my family members, by the nation I grew up in, and by the practices that were handed to me from a religious approach. All 11 world religions have a quote unquote doctrine of values. virtues, and practices. And so most people are influenced at some level that type of influence early on in their life. Now, whether they continue with it or not, those are some of the adult decisions that people make. So that's what the early path look like for me. And then I was in college and there was a Jesuit professor.

So I went to Loyola Marymount University and it's taught by Jesuits, which are radically aggressive philosophers, the theologians that in a contankerous way tend to say, why are you eating fish on Fridays? What? Why are you doing that? Do you know why you're doing that? Somebody raises their hand. This is like a sophomore lecture hall. Someone raises their hand and says, well, not lent and sacrifice. And he goes, do you know that the bishop who started that decree, his brother, own the wharf? How about it? What are you going to do about that now? Okay, so just getting you to really dig down into like,

what is it about your actions that are like where are they coming from? And we are all biased, corrupted in some way by imperfect information and knowledge. And I think it's really important. The first rule of mastery is to work from the inside out. To know yourself, to know, to be a student, of your own psychology so that you better understand blind spots and tripwires so that you're not just caught off guard and automatically head down this path that is not the person you want to be, but like this reflexive response for survival.

So the first rule of mastery is push your chair back from the table and say, I'm going to make a fundamental commitment to work from the inside out rather than work from where most of us orientate ourselves is from the outside in. The most dynamically powerful people in the world do not let, important word, their external world dictate their internal experience. Most of us, their external world is whatever it is. It's chaotic or it's stressful or it's hostile in some way. And it influences our internal state of being. The radical ones, they've worked from the inside out.

And they go into environments. And because they have such clarity and they've got these rich mental skills, that they can live with conviction in moments where they're not popular. They're saying the thing that is uncool, but they're so clear, and they've got these great mental skills to navigate that stress, that they live with conviction. Those are the greats that inspire me. And that I'm doing my best job, but I don't know how I'm actually doing.

I'm trying to be to live the good life, which means a fulfilled life with great relationships and high perfect. purpose and I find myself still stuttering and stammering with like choking up a little bit. No one really chokes in athletics by the way because nobody is eating on the field. But I find myself like responding in ways that, man, just a little bit tighter than I wish I was. And I'm a little, I feel a little bit more insecure than I wish I was. And shit, I'm doing way better than I was last year and way better than I was 20 years ago. The world does not need a 20 year old bike.

But so I'm, I feel like I'm talking about myself like I'm not here, but that's some of the ways that I'm thinking about it. I feel like you're describing a few of the friends I have in my life that they are so comfortable in their own skin. Maybe you'd call them self-actualized because the commonality they have, that I'm literally have thought bubbles of these people in my life. They've done so much reflective work and they continue to do it each and every day because we've never arrived. were always becoming, right? JJ Redick said that here, and I so believe that. But those are the people I admire that I strive to be influenced by. And when you talk to them, you realize that they view themselves as a complete work

in progress, haven't figured it out, but when we look at them, we feel like they have. What are some of the practices, Dr. Mike, that we could do to have more comfort in our own skin, to be more self-actualized, to work from the inside out instead of, and we're going to get to it because your book's all about this, instead of be so influenced by the noise that we adjust our behavior based on the cool picture we saw on Instagram of somebody's highlight reel. How do we do that? All right. It's fun. I love this conversation, Ryan. So as a sports psychologist, that's where I started my career was in sport and performance and consequential environment. Like I didn't get golf. I know I'm talking to your community. It's probably lots of golfers. I don't know if you do golf, Ryan.

Not really. Yeah, not well. I don't get. I never swung a golf club once. So, but it's more of like this philosophical position that I'm more attracted to environments that require a complete honesty and an earnest investment in technical skills, physical skills, and mental skills. And what I've found is that most of us,

we don't live in consequential environments, so we kind of wing it all. And professional athletes, most professional athletes, even like the most rugged, I spent nine years with the Seattle Seahawks and got to win in the most dramatic way at the Super Bowl and lose in the most traumatic way

in the Super Bowl. I consider that a rugged environment with hints occasionally of hostility, like real consequence. There are people that, like some heavy things happen to their body. Very few have died. So I want to up level our imagination.

Like those environments that require a true earnest honesty that I must be great, my very best and be incredibly proficient because if I make a mistake, somebody could die, I could die. Those environments, they pull for the question that you just asked for. The other environments, like in the multinational corporate world, were better than we were 10 years ago, or sports where it doesn't really feel like anything's on the line other than ego, golf, tennis.

And I love the golfers I spend time with, the tennis players I spend time with. But I'm trying to create a dissonance between, are you really going to go after building your mind? and because something is so direly important that you're going to invest your time and resources and energy for it or are you looking for like just a bit more relief from stress it's okay but i'm going to answer your question right in a way like what i've learned from the greats at the edge of the frontier where if they make mistakes they die and i'll give you a nice example

like Luke Akins gives me a call and he might not have heard his name and he says Mike I want to jump from 30,000 feet from an airliner and he's the best in the world from parachuting base jumping wings suiting and most of them their life lifespan is like five and a half to six years that's how dangerous it is he's been at this game for 20 years and he says I want to jump from 30,000 and I'm waiting because that's not a big deal for people like him he says without a pair of parachute into a 16-story net that we're going to build, the size of a four-car garage. So if he makes a mistake, game over. And so he said, Mike, so he says, Mike, are you in? I'm like, yeah. So the reason he's pulling for psychological skills training is he because he must have command of his mind, must have full command of his body and his craft. So I'm going to answer in that way.

Where do we start? First, you have to make a fundamental commitment. And that fundamental commitment is to use your imagination to think about the life that you want to have. Now, we all have limitations. We don't even fully understand what potential means. Some of us are short and tall or we have hard time with metabolism. We think slow or fast. We all have these proclivities that make us uniquely you.

However, each one of us can make a fundamental commitment to think about the person we want to become. So that's what the greats in those hostile worlds do, is they make a fundamental commitment to go after a mission, to be, to imagine the person they want to be. And then, this is the rare thing, Ryan, they make that from that fundamental commitment, they fundamentally, again, practice right at the edge of their capacity. And they do it every day. Let me not be too dramatic. They do it daily. And right at the edge of their capacity, they often do it with their peers. with coaches, with people that hold them accountable to sharpening the sword, to refining the skill.

Most of us can't handle it. It's a bit overwhelming. I know you've got an appreciation for this in sport, particularly in football. And so what can we do? Make that fundamental commitment and then fundamentally commit to working at your capacity, is that messy, stressful edge, and then have a best set of practices to recover and to do that daily. So that's acute stress and then fundamental recovery. And hold on, before you answer this question, I think I'm going to get to you. I think I'll get to you, maybe your question, is to work from your first principles. So that means getting out a piece of paper, maybe it's having a good conversation with somebody,

but write down your first principles in life and let those guide your thoughts, words, and actions. And until you have clarity of those first principles, we end up get whipped around by the expectations or the need for performance rather than being fully in control of how you line up your thoughts, words, and actions to those first principles. And that's the big, heavy commitment. That is totally available to everybody. It's a little easier to do if you're working with a psychologist or somebody that's been down the path before, but you can do it on your own, 100%. the edge of our capacity. So in sports, or like weightlifting, this is pretty easy to picture, right?

I'm going to try to lift a little bit heavier weight each time. I'm going to write down my sets and reps and weight, all that, or practicing football. I know this from watching film, correction, getting coached, and then pushing on, getting better, whatever. In the non-physical world, what does that look like? What does it look like to live and practice at the edge of your capacity? If, let's say, you are a leader, an SVP at a Fortune 100 company leading a team trying to hit the goals and hire well and fire when needed and build culture, what does it look like for that person? Everything that is really interesting is invisible. And psychology is fundamentally invisible.

and we can't see our thoughts. We don't know where the origin is, how much they weigh, where they go. We can see the artifact. We can see the physical leave behind. We can see the physicalness of our world, but we can't see that invisible, beautiful world of psychology. So what does it mean to work at the edge from the psychological? It's really working to your emotional edge,

where it feels like your brain is saying with such intense emotions, run, get out of it. here, like that fight, flight, free, submit mechanism. When that thing is on point, it's a very powerful cascade of neurochemicals and electricity. When we're at that state, that's where we want to flex our psychological skills to stay in that state just a little bit longer, to dilute our reflexive nature to get out of it or to over flex in it, meaning to fight versus flee. So just to hold that present state just a little bit longer. We become a little bit more familiar with that that anxious, agitating state. So if we're more familiar with it, we might be able to dance better

when we see it later, when we might be able to think more clearly when we see it later or when we feel it later. So that's what the edge is. I think I'm less interested in the physical edge. I'm far more interested in the emotional edge because that can show up in a living room, a board room. It can show up pregame. It can show up thinking about what you're going to say prior to meeting. All of that stuff is more available to most of us. I remember Mike, I was trying to work on my communication skills, public speaking, podcasting, listening, and a friend said, you should do improv. I said, oh, there's no way. That's not for me. I'm not an actor, whatever. But kept pushing because it's a good friend who cares about me and loves me. And so I did it. I signed out for this

two-day thing. I go in there, and the very first thing we did, the teacher, which is an awesome guy, gets us all up on stage. We're in a big circle. And he says, okay, when I point to you, to whoever I point to, you're going to get to the middle of the circle and you're going to sing a song in front of all of us. And Mike, for a second, I thought, I'm out of here. Like, I'm not doing this. This is stupid. But that was because I was scared to be embarrassed. I was fearful of what they were going to think of me.

I was fearful of looking dumb. And I'm so grateful I stayed for the whole two days and went out there and sing a song. I couldn't even think of any words. So the song I ended up singing was the Flintstone song because I remember John Candy singing it in planes, trains and automobiles. Like I can remember that song and I did it everybody got a little pop from the crowd. They laughed and I felt like Immediately like I just pushed my edges right I was at the edges. I just pushed them a little bit wider and I feel like those moments when you push your edges you prove to yourself that you can do it It's actually not that hard you got to push through a little bit but then once you do it your edges have gotten wider and you're more comfortable with something that you were not comfortable with

Previous to that I feel like that's what you mean by this is Like just creating opportunities for you to regularly push your edges will make you better in all facets of life. You've just nailed so much in that quick little story. And one of, so let's do the invisible kind of piece here is that the edge, you're at the edge when you're speaking to yourself about reflexively looking for safety or relief. And sometimes that's a good statement. Like, my spidey sense comes up and I'm a dark alley and my statements are like, I can get the fuck out of here. So, like, sometimes it's really good. But when there's nothing really on the line other than what others might think of you,

those types of environments are so powerful because I want to open up this idea of other people's opinions in a moment. But when you recognize all psychology, everything about the first rule of mastery is, working from the inside out. It all begins with awareness. So increasing your awareness of the invisible world, meaning that your self-talk, the way that your feelings are taking place, those are both invisible. Emotions are visible. We can see emotions. We can see the physiology of eyes constricting or sweating or like a little tremor in the hand. We can see emotions, but we can't see feelings. They're private and we can't see thoughts. So thoughts are the way that we're interpreting our emotional body. And that's what we call feelings. So if you're blunt, if you are dull, if you are

unaware of how thoughts and feelings work for you, you will consistently work downstream. You will consistently work in the rapids of life rather than going upstream to where the river's got a nice little movement and it's easier to access the way that you would like to think. So now, after you've been successful in that environment, you had those thoughts like, oh shit, get me out of here. What are they going to think? This is embarrassing. I don't want to be here.

And you've got those constricting type of thoughts. And then you stayed in it. You had another type of narrative, which is like, well, there's nowhere I can go. Or maybe you said, like, you're not going to just get up and leave. Right. Or maybe you said, all right, forget. art you know what that's not helping let me just go for it so that's like reframing that's going from unproductive thoughts the productive thoughts so knowing that gymnastics and then even training to have

more optimal choices or patterns of thought when you're in a emotionally charged environment i call them a high heat environments when you're in those environments having like how you want to speak to yourself you can train that just like you train sets and reps in the gym you can train how you can train how how you want to speak to yourself, but to do it well, you have to put yourself in high heat moments, emotionally uncomfortable moments. And I love what you did.

And I don't know, like, I don't know what the song is. What is the song? Flintstones, meet the Flintstones. Got it. No, yeah, good. Perfect. Thank you for that.

Were you just trying to get me to sing or what? I was going to like, where's yaboo come in? Yeah, yeah, that's at the end, I think. I honestly remember more from the movie. I don't know if anyone's seen it, or maybe if you're under a certain age, you probably haven't. But it's a great movie, playing strange automobiles.

But he does it on the bus ride. It's good. No, we're starting to get to, as I read it, I call it FOPO. Is that what you call it F-O-P-O, an acronym that your book covers, it's all about this? What is F-P-O? What does it mean? How do we deal with it? Okay.

So Fopo stands for fear of people's opinions. And so people's opinions, do matter. I want to be very clear here. Some people's opinions matter a lot. But FOPO, fear of people's opinions, is this excessive worry about what they might think or what they are thinking. And so it's an anticipation. What does that word? Strike that. It's an anticipatory mechanism that involves... Sorry. No, it's so good. Go ahead. I've never said that word before. I love that you edit yourself in real time.

I don't know if I've ever talked to somebody who regularly edits themselves in real time. It's awesome. It's a great quality. You're probably talking to your producer in your head, I'm guessing, but it's great. Anyway, proceed. Yeah. So it's fun because I really value language and I value like trying to get as precise and close to it, the truth of something as I can.

And like, so that's that, that mastery for me involves language often. is like, what the hell? No, it's not that. But I'm not, you know what I'm not, Ryan, as much as we once was? I'm not perfect here by any means like we talked about, but I'm not critical. So I don't have this other heavy baggage. Like, why'd you say that? I don't know what the word was.

I don't even know what I just said, but like, why did you say that? You're going to look stupid. That was something that I struggled with as a young person, enough so that I was, it was clear to me that fear of people's opinions is a thing. thing. It was a thing for me. And then working with world's best, I didn't know this until I was able to spend time with them. It's a thing for many of them too. So let's get into it. It's an anticipatory mechanism that involves a couple of things. It involves our psychology, so it influences our thinking. It involves our physiology, which is like our heart and our heartbeat, I should say, and our

breathing cadence. It involves our physical activation, meaning like the way we contour. our body. And so when we're excessively worrying about what somebody might think, what we're really doing is we're conforming or sometimes contorting or just going to worry about avoiding rejection, about trying to foster the right impression to be accepted. And this is a preemptive process to try to increase our relational value and our relational acceptance in the eyes of somebody else and that is biologically based. Our brain is designed to survive. That's its prime dictum is to figure out how to keep it going. And what it does, one of the things it does is it scans the world outside of us to find all the little dangers. And one of the great dangers,

we don't have saber twos, we don't have wilderbeasts anymore. One of the great dangers is being kicked out of the tribe. Because long ago, this ancient brain figured out like if we're kicked out of the tribe. We got to hunt. We got to forge. We have to gather berries. We have to build a tent, whatever that tent might have been a long time ago. We've got to provide safety. We've got to fight tribes by ourselves, maybe with a cousin and a couple kids and a spouse. Like, it's too much. It meant certain deaths. So we needed to figure out how to be accepted to be part of the community. That's showing up right now for so many of us. It's operating underneath the surface. It's this hyper-vigilant social readiness that we scan the world, we think about what people might think,

and then we conform or contort or we adjust to be accepted rather than to work from a place of authenticity or artistry or just being yourself, whatever that means to you, to say the thing that you want to say or do the thing you want to do because you're afraid of what people will think of you. And it's one of the great constrictors of people's potential. It was a great constrictor of my potential. I've come to find out. I'm not alone in it. And I don't know if you resonate with it. Yourself. Like, oh, you do. Okay. Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people do. I think it's a minority of people don't. And usually, like I said, but nobody's like fully there, but we're all getting a little bit. I think this podcast has helped me because I've spoken with so many people

who are thoughtful and reflective and done that work on themselves, that then it inspires me to do more of that work, to create my core values and the behaviors that match those core values and to create the prompts at the end of each day to question myself of my living aligned with the core values. Like for one simple example of one of my core values is being thankful, which it is. What does being thankful mean to me?

It probably means the different things for everybody. And you're thinking of what it means for you, what it means for me is to leave people, places, and things better than I found them. That's how I try to say thank you for the great privilege and gifts I've been given. And so I can ask myself that at the end of the day, did I leave Dr. Mike better? Did I leave my 10 o'clock meeting, that person I spoke with, did I leave him better? Did I leave the park better after my walk?

Because there's four pieces of trash that we picked up as a family and put it in their way. Like these are simple questions say yes, that's how I define. And I think that's what's most important, how I define living a thankful life is leaving people, places and things better and I found them. That's the work that only has happened, though, because I've gotten the great fortune, as you talked about the beginning of this, to meet with people who are further along than I am, and then I can draw from them and implement it into my life. That's what I'm trying to make this podcast to do for others. You listen to this, you invest an hour or so, and hopefully you take action, just like your book says at the end, right, idea to action. Like you're all about like not just the ideas, but putting into action. I love that way you end each chapter.

That's, I think, that's what it means to me to like live by a set of values and live in alignment because the behaviors match the values, not just you go to the corporate office of whatever company and you see the words. That's cool, good. But what are the behaviors to match those words? And how are you as the leader of that business shining a very bright light on the people who actually live those values? That's what it means to me.

That's what I think your book and your work is so, that's why I love it because it's so, that's what it's all about. And if you do that, then the score will take care of itself, as Bill Walsh might say. That's really what it's about to me. I love what you just said. And I'm nodding my head to all of it. And you come from a sport background. I come from a sport background.

And I've spent the last 10 years working on the best practices of psychology, of becoming, one's best, the sport psychology, and crosswalking them into corporate environments and business world. And I can't wait to share some of those insights because what you're just talking about is what we do in sport. In the morning or right before practice, we think about, or somebody does it for us, a coach, about what we want to work on to get better. And they might draw on a board, or if you're designing your own training, you're thoughtful about the things that you want to get better at speed, agility quickness, eye, eye hand coordination, whatever it might be, running certain routes, fill in the blanks. But we're thoughtful about it because we want to get better. And that's

that fundamental commitment that does go from the consequential environments and it holds up in many ways in the more rugged or high pressure environments of some sport. So we think about before practice what we want to get better at. We practice it. Then we're some sort of evaluation mechanism. And in sport, oftentimes that evaluation is, comes twofold. It's like how you actually actually actually felt while you're doing the thing. So there's this instant feedback loop that is really wonderful. And if you're drunk or drugged, it's hard to have that feedback loop or if you're obsessed about what somebody's thinking about you, you're not tuning to your own feedback loop about how it feels to put your foot in the ground and try to get off at a 40 degree angle or something.

And we've got coaches that use film and other technology and or their observation to say, hey, how about this or to give guidance or to ask questions to create an unlock. So there's that bookend thing that I think you're doing. In the morning, you're thinking about the person you want to be and maybe it's specific, maybe it's general. And at the end of the day, you're doing the same thing. That's a best practice from sport that we can pour into business and other forms living, not necessarily business.

But you asked a really important question about like how, what would be a place that we would start to examine FOPO or fear of people's opinions. And I think first, I think just recognizing it is really important. And when I think about like the power of that, I think of David Foster Wallace, the author and poet, and he tells a story about two young fish. Are you familiar with that story? Love it. Go ahead. Tell it. Yeah. Yeah. So the water.

Exactly. And so the two fish are swimming and the older fish swims by and he says, the older fish says to the young fish like, how's the water? And then the two young fish swim a bit, and they eventually, one looks at the other and says, what the hell is water? And so the older fish's question, how is water, is meant to make or spur the young fish to think about their reality, the water that they're swimming and the things that are so ingrained in their existence that they fail to notice them. And I think some of most life's, some of life's most important realities are hidden in plain sight. And that's what FOPO is.

So I think that fear of people's opinions just recognizing that you might have it, it might overindex and influence how you behave and how you express yourself in the world. Just that alone is the starting place. The next natural step, we've already hinted on it, is to know your values, to know your force principles. and then to practice the psychological skills so you can be about those first principles when it's hard. So that's what sport training does. You practice in a calm environment, how to do any technical skill, so that you can be better in a rugged environment or a pressure-packed environment. But I'm going to add one more layer to it because this is not just technical.

There's only three things you can train. You can train your craft. you can train your body and you can train your mind. So this part, relative to FOPO, is about training psychological skills so that you can be about that value of virtue in a high heat moment. And then you can say you are a grateful person. Then you can say you are an honest person or whatever. But until you take that virtue, until you can express it with some consistency under

stress or duress, it's just a good idea. It just makes you feel comfortable that you're a benevolent person. But really, you haven't earned it. You haven't done the work yet. I was reading this in your book. I just spoke to me when you write about basing self-worth on performance, especially as an athlete, I feel like so much of my self-worth was tied up in how I performed on the field. And you're right, when the core motivation of pursuing excellence is proving our self-worth,

the mistakes, failures, opinions, and criticism are experienced as threats, rather than learning opportunities, this mindset of a learner's mindset and the problems that can arise from basing your self-worth on performance. I think this is very common, Dr. Mike. I think you obviously know this. You live in this world. Can you share more about the problems with basing your self-worth on performance and how that can be counteractive to having a learner's mindset? Okay. Cool question. Because I'm imagining that your community is switched on. I haven't met your people, but you're on it.

And so this performance-based identity is tricky because let's do some good old developmental psychology, and then I'll make sense of it here in a minute. It's tricky because it likely got you or people in your community good. So a performance-based identity can actually propel you. to be even the best in the world. But it doesn't mean it's going to help you be your best. So it will work, but there's a poison attached to this. And so let me open this thing up.

Performance-based identity, what we're doing from the ages of 12 to 18 to 22, somewhere in that range, is we're trying to figure out who we are. That's our job is like, am I more punk rock or am I more rock and roll? Am I more R&B or more jazz? like, and I'm using that as a metaphor for the style of who you are. And you're starting to form your identity at that age.

It's not locked. It's not like you get handcuffed into an identity because you can always do some work around it. But when you're good at something young, okay, you're good at sport, you're good at poetry, you're charismatic, whatever that thing is that you might have a sense of vitality around. And other people comment on it. They're interesting. And it feels good because like you're being successful at it. It's coming easy. Maybe you're not having to do as much work as everybody else. And you're getting a lot of attention for it. What happens is we foreclose our identity on that one thing. And more concretely, it's like, I'm a basketball player. Maybe a little safer as I'm an athlete. But it's still dangerous because you foreclosed on all the other potentialities that you hold within yourself. And then what a performance-based identity is, I'm an athlete. identity is that I'm an athlete. The performance part is like, when I perform, I'm good. When I perform well, I'm good. Well, according to whom? According to others. So performance-based identity is

defining who we are by how we do in relationship to other people. When our identity is linked to performance, the quality of our lives and the quality of our performance defines who we are. And now we're twisted upside down because every time we go to the mound, every time we go to the mound. Every time we walk on stage, every time that we're in a boardroom, we've mingled or collapsed our identity with our performance. And that's why it feels like our life is on the line. That's why our heart pounds out of our chest. We start to sweat. Our hands start to shake. We get a cotton mouth. We stay to ourselves, what the hell am I doing here? I'm not ready. That's why we have that like existential crisis that fight, flight, freeze mechanism because we got this ancient brain

that is saying there's a threat on board and I'm going to do what I know how to do. Get that cortisol, get that adrenaline pumping, get your system ready to make a real run for your life. But what you need to do is sing or what you need to do is see a ball and hit a ball. Or what you need to do is, you know, share an idea that you think is going to move a company from A to B. and what we do in those moments because we flip and butchered this radical science of psychology we've tabooed it in a way what we end up doing is we end up faking it we're on the fucking whatever we're doing and we're faking our way through it our hearts pounding we're trying to hide the sweat and we're just like and people are good at recognizing a fake versus real so fake

it to you make it, right? I don't know where you are on that, but I'm like, please, get that out of the system. You know, like, please, okay, cool. So we fake it and there. We're struggling through it. That is struggling. That is a suffering or struggling part of life. And so it doesn't need to be that way. We can develop psychological skills. There's five basic ones. And just like you practice strength or speed or technical prowess at coding or leadership. you can practice basic mental skills. When you practice the basic mental skills, it widens the aperture for you to access your technical skills,

your ability to think creatively or critically. But what we do is we choke off access to our ability to solve or unlock or access that neurological grooving that is really well-defined and proficient in common environments. So psychological skills, the basic psychological skills will open that aperture. But those are just band-aids until we get down into the core stuff about moving from a performance-based identity, which is, again, the relationship of how will you perform relative to other people, to a purpose-based identity. So it's like where do you want to start with the heavy lifting,

or do you want to go after some band-aids that are good for a little bit? When you put the two together, like, there is a freedom on the other side of it that I never knew possible as a young kid. As a, I never knew it. And again, I haven't arrived, but I don't sweat like I used to talking to smart people like you. We're getting better. Well, I'm curious about this is maybe somewhat in relation about fuel. So what I mean with this and from working with professional football players and teams is you

hear the story of Tom Brady and most recently Aaron Rogers who just did an interview with Pat McAfee and when he looked dead in the camera and he said go ahead and doubt me. Go ahead and doubt me and see what I do.

Guys like that seem to and Shador Sanders Deion Sanders son was saying the exact same things before they were going to play against Colorado State. Go ahead and doubt me. Let's see what happens. It seems like not only do they thrive on people doubting them slash haters.

They seek it out. The Michael Jordan stories from The Last Dance, right? All those. What do you think about that as motivation? What do you think about that as fuel about doubters and haters and how that relates to motivation and performance? I think that you can be the best in the world and be really unhealthy. Yeah.

I think you can be miserable and have a stack of gold medals, gold. fame, whatever the thing is that you're trying to accomplish externally. I think it's possible. And I think anger is one of the culprits to joy. And a chip on your shoulder, like there's an edge that is very facilitative, very functional in competitive environments and very dangerous to flourishing and happiness. It will help you work a little bit harder. It will help you not be punked or bullied or bounced around by somebody's whatever presence they have. So there's something really important to pay attention to here. If you can play it like a fiddle and you can also put that fiddle down,

if you can blame that fire and then damp it down, there's a skill in that. And I don't think that most people have that artistry of that skill and they flame the fire. It ends up burning. and ends up staying with them in a way that really does damage their overall vitality. Anger is very unhealthy from a cellular structure. It hurts relationships. So I got a cautionary tale on it. And that's all I would say. There's a chip on your shoulder that can help you and it can really hurt you. I came from a chip on my shoulder, even professionally. I was out of graduate school. I had finished up my PhD and there was this meeting of the minds and it was the the 11,

I'm sorry, the 10 titans in the field of sports psychology and then they each hand picked 10 young up-and-comers. And as the story goes, I wasn't on that list until two or three, four people said, hey, we should get this Trevei kid in here because I didn't, I wasn't part of one of those mentors. I didn't have a lineage to one of them. So they picked their favorite graduate student, right? And so I was the 21st person. Like I was the hanging chat, if you will. And it was amazing, too. It was awesome. It was three days of just like, like such great rich conversations, stimulations. It did so much for my profession. And then at the end of it, they're like, let's do this again next year. I was like, oh, this is amazing. Well, I never

heard back from that group. I didn't get invited back. And year two, Ryan, was in my neighbor. It was in my backyard. It was in the city I lived in. And I was so fired up. It woke up a dragon. I didn't know I had. And I like doubled down on like wanting to prove them. And I was like, sorry for cursing. I don't know why I have this locker room attitude right now. I usually don't, but I was like, oh, you guys just fucked up. And I was not healthy during that time, but I read more research than I think I could have ever read. I took that research and tried to wrestle it down to be the most applied practical insights I could get to. And then I created systems and programs for athletes and now executives and managers to practice in ways to

create that vitality in life and that creative ability to solve and unlock potential. So it fueled me, and so I have respect for it, but I wasn't healthy. And I don't want to go back to that. So that's how I answer it. So in a way, though, it did help you. But it's like there are two different kinds of fuel, clean fuel and dirty fuel. And that feels more dirty, right? Todd Henry talked about this a little bit.

But that chip on your shoulder, it's not a. sustainable and maybe it's a short-term thing that can help you but longer term the cleaner fuel maybe is proving your supporters right so I'm mainly yet thinking about the difference between fuel knowing when to use which fuel that sometimes that can work but it's not sustainable or it can get out of hand and if it's just a little fire if you're not careful it could become a wildfire and take over and And then you become more of an angry, spiteful person looking for the next chip to stack up on your shoulder, as opposed to looking for more cleaner fuel, your loved ones, your supporters, and your family members maybe to say,

hey, they back me, they have me. I want to do well and help people and live by my values because I'm very lucky to have this great support system in place. And that might be more longer-lasting, cleaner fuel than just stacking chips of your doubters. 100%. And I think that we're in an energy crisis. Let's play this metaphor out a little bit forward. We're in an energy crisis, a human energy crisis right now. And people are exhausted. There's two shifts. They get the kids up or they're at the office early and they do meetings and then barely get enough breaks, not outside enough, sitting, which is the new smoking as we've come to learn. And then they get home. They've got a little bit of time to do the stuff around the

family that they need to, or maybe they get some fitness in. And then they've got the second shift where they're answering emails and doing the work that they talked about doing all day. So we've got an energy crisis, a human energy crisis problem. One of the culprits of that human energy crisis is that FOPO is running right underneath the surface. It's like this application that is quietly running in the background of a computer. And it keeps us safe. It keeps us a the center of the herd. It keeps us like trying to figure out how to be included and accepted. And it also keeps us from living that full good, authentic life where we feel buoyant and we've got a zest for life. Literally, Fopo exhaust us because we're playing this parallel game

as opposed to being purpose driven rather than performance driven. And so I had a chip and I was performance driven in my identity. And it's not the right way. I think so many of us feel that and feel that exhaustion. And there's lots of ways that maybe chip at working with this human energy crisis, like best practices in recovery or mindfulness or breathing protocols, but certainly working at extracting from this performance-based identity and examining this undercurrents of like, are you trying to sort out if you're okay in the eyes of others? And squaring up with that and hello and goodbye to it as best as you possibly can. Yeah, I did not realize it's been a full hour.

But I have one more question if you go with it. There's some research done by Cornell professor Thomas Gillivich and also has something to do with Barry Manilow. But I'll tee up my story and then you can share more about the science behind this, Dr. Mike. But I was getting ready to go like a banquet and my dad was going with me. And I actually asked him like, well, what do you think about? these pants versus these other pants, right? And he stopped for a second. And he meant this with so much love and care because he's the best.

But he just said, hey, man, they don't care about your pants. They care about their pants. And I was like, oh, good point. Who cares? Just put on the pants and go. And so the spotlight effect, we all think that everybody's thinking about us all the time. We're always in the spotlight. We're the star of our own movie.

Everybody's talking about us. Everybody's thinking about us. What does the science say and what does this have to do with Barry Manilow? So Professor Gillivich is a great thinker and not Harold enough for his research. And this is a really funny one, is that, again, to your point, we think we're always being watched. It's part of like we haven't grown out of that childlike mind that the world is surrounding around us. And everything is taken care of. It's evidence of a stunted growth.

But this is operating for so many of us. And so he devised an experiment. This is back in like 2000. And it was to see whether people are actually observing and judging us at every turn. And it comes to find out that it's quite surprising what it actually takes place. So he had about 100 college students enter a room full of their peers, individually and alone, wearing a T-shirt with a photo of the pop singer Barry Manilow that was on the front of the shirt. And Barry Manilow is not the image of cool, right? He is not the one that is like, yeah, look at me wearing Barry Manilow.

So it's meant and designed to be quote unquote embarrassing for students, some students, for sure. So the observers in the room were sitting at a table facing the door when the students walked in wearing this t-shirt. And then afterwards, this is where the kind of the research was taking place is they asked how many of the students were willing to fill out questions. in the laboratory to be able to state who the picture was on the T-shirt. And so the observers were asked amongst other filler questions if they noticed who was on the T-shirt. And as you and I might guess, as the researchers predicted as well, the students wearing the Barry Manilow shirt dramatically overestimated the number of people who actually paid attention to what they're wearing. And the subjects guessed that about 50% of the people in the room,

would note that they were wearing Barry Manilow. Turns out, less than 25% of the observers actually recalled what the person was wearing. So when other students were asked to watch a videotape of the experiment in the percentage of the room, if they would remember the Barry Manilet shirt, 25% guessed it accurately. So this idea that we think that people are paying more attention to us than they actually are, he dubbed that the spotlight effect. And it's this hypervigilant feeling that people are paying attention to us. And as we know, as our grandparents told us, like, people are too busy thinking about themselves.

They're not thinking about you, that type of idea. Well, there's actually some research that points to that is true. And so it's basically the underlying phenomena or an egocentric bias. I think of FOPO that brings it home, right? This fear of people's opinions. In a way, it's like get over yourself. It's not about you. It's a good reminder.

And I think that's another part of it, too, is to say, hey, I'm going to do the best I can with whatever I got. But I'm not going to live in fear of other people's opinion. So, man, Mike, this was so good. And I would love to do it again. The book, which I highly recommend is called The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worry, Stop Worry, About What People Think of You. We touched on 4% of it. There's so much more to go get into the books. I have probably notes on 20 of the stories.

So there's tons of stories which help bring the concepts to life. So that's how a good book I think is written. Great stories, great concepts, obviously all the science, and then the practical application with taking theories to action as you do in each chapter. So really well done, man. I really appreciate it. And thanks for investing your time today. As I mentioned, I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

100%. And congratulations on the community that you've built and the deep dedication to helping people. and yourself be better in this funny little thing of living. So I just want to say thank you for having me and including me in your community. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this enlightening conversation with Dr. Michael Jerva.

A few takeaways from my notes, The Pursuit of Mastery is part of a process. It's an orientation towards experience. It's about being fully absorbed in the moment. What this means to me is about being present, is about getting my mind to slow down and be fully in each moment, whether that is on a stage, recording a podcast, or most importantly, being a present husband and dad,

putting all distractions away and being fully, in the moment is what the pursuit of mastery is all about. Then our fear of other people's opinions, or faux poe, as Mike calls it, has become an irrational and unproductive. Its negative effects reach far beyond performance. And if we start paying less and less attention to what we think about ourselves, our talents,

our beliefs, our values, and we start conforming to what others may or may not think, will harm our potential. And so this is more to me about getting clear on our values, or as Dr. Mike calls it, our first principles and then how to live those out. And then doing a lot of reflection to ensure that our behaviors are aligned with those first principles, with our values. Next, we need to make a fundamental commitment to practice at the edge of our capacity.

One of the prompts I like to use is I ask myself, what did I do today to push my edges? What did I do that was uncomfortable? And then making a commitment to stack day after day after day of pushing my edges so that that comfort zone becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the question that you could ask yourself is, what did I do today to push my edges? Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Dr. Michael Jerva. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to go to Ryanhawk.net, which launches you into Apple Podcast.

And once you're there, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show, hopefully five stars. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk you soon. Can't wait.