Mastery is an Infinite Game with performance psychologist Mike Gervais

0:00We live in a world that demands that we pursue performance, grades, corporate incentive structures, even the way we think about relationships. High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais has a solution. He calls it mastery. Guiding people to achieve mastery of themselves and of their craft is what he has used to help Olympians win gold medals, help the Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl, and helps CEOs take their companies to the next level. The host of the acclaimed podcast Finding Mastery joined me to share some actionable tools that can help enhance our performance while also becoming healthier and more confident human beings.

0:44This is a bit of optimism. Mike, I'm so glad you came on the show. I'm such a fan. I so enjoyed coming on your podcast, Finding Mastery. And I thought, you know, for those who don't know Finding Mastery, A, you're missing out. But B, how selfish am I to go and enjoy your company and not share you with everybody else? That's great. So thanks for joining our little podcast. You're a psychologist by training. And in particular, well, I guess high performance, right? That's your specialty. And you worked with the Seahawks and other football teams. You come from sports. Let's start for you. You talk about mastery over performance.

1:28And I find this is an important nuance because every CEO, you talk to CEOs and like, you know, so what kind of culture? We're a high performance culture. We're a high performance. Everything's performance, performance. performance even when it's not why doesn't anybody talk about mastery why are people so obsessed about performance there's kind of like this high performance treadmill and just about every industry that you can get your kids on you know like there's a some sort of track in the corporate world that you can get on that you know you do a b and c things you give yourself a pretty good chance of being a high performer and there's like a little bit of a track for it and the track for mastery is really loose and i think when i think about the difference between high performance and mastery high performance is about executing on demand but with mastery there's a bit of a contour to it there's something that just has an organic authentic artistic expression on demand certainly but there's a different contour to the path of mastery there's a difference between between people that are committed to mastery and those that are committed to high performance.

2:41So I don't have a better word. I've been studying this thing for 25 years. And so I wish there was a way to express the space that happens for people that are committed to mastery versus like the execution, gotta go drive, drive, drive, drive, get it done. You know, execute on command, be great, be great, recover, be great, recover. That's like the high performance kind of process mill, if you will. Nothing wrong with that, but there's a difference between the commitment to mastery. And then let me open it up two ways. Mastery really is about mastery of craft and mastery of self. So you're, you're really using the craft to go deeper, to understand the human condition yourself first, and then in return, other people as well.

3:29I need to go deeper than this because we get judged mostly by our results, right? Our bonus structures are largely tied to our results. A lot of people, unfortunately, tie their self-worth to their results. That's right. We are a, for better, more likely for worse, results-oriented society. We grade children. We grade their art. From very young age. Very early age. And it's usually individually motivated. What is your grade? Relative to other people. Relative to other people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as we talk about this, you know, and I'm, and I'm sort of like thinking about the people I admire.

4:11Performance is an output. It literally comes at the end of something. That's right. Mastery is an input. Yeah. Mastery is a commitment. Like the mastery comes before. That's right. And so that's one difference, which is somebody who is, you know, you actors always talk about the craft. You know, you say, how do you know that person's a good actor? Like they, they study the craft. Yes. I was with the Seattle Seahawks for nine seasons and just about every game. We won a lot. It was a high-performing team. And just about every game, pre-game, coach would always come up to me and say, so Mike, what do you think?

4:48What do you think? What do you think about today? And at first I thought that I needed to answer that. Like I am the high-performance psychologist. I need to answer what I think about their mindsets or their commitment to winning or their ability to win today. And then I realized like, no, this is about, they're really asking, the coach is really asking, what do you think of their framework? What do you think of the quarterback's framework? Is it sturdy or flimsy? Is the offense going to get knocked around or are they grounded and really sturdy in how they're going to go about being their very best?

5:21And to your point about input output, there is another output winning, whatever that means, right? So when you cobble together a bunch of performance outputs, you get to the outcome, right? whatever winning means for people. And in that process, if you have a sturdy, nimble, strong, agile, the anti-fragile type of stuff, if that is the way that your psychology is built, you can go weather some really incredible, hostile, rugged, challenging environments psychologically. So when you say it's an input, it's a fundamental decision that you make that I'm moving towards mastery as opposed to high performance.

6:00I went to Japan and we went to visit a samurai sword maker. There you go. And he's one of the last like hundred guys left making samurai swords in the traditional method where he folds the steel himself and does all this. And his story was quite remarkable, which is he had a desk job and was like, I can't, this can't be my life. and he quit and decided to become an apprentice sword maker and has now been on his own. And, you know, we're talking to him and he's like, you know, I'm still, I'm still learning. One day I hope to be good at this. And we're like, how long have you been doing this? He said 30 years.

6:41That's it. You're lighting up when you say that. Cause like that appreciation truly for being a beginner in your approach to like how things really work. and as you get further down the path, even at 25, 30 years and you're further down the path of really understanding something, the mastery of self is what drives that curiosity. Like, wait, how does this, man, if I could just figure out how to really dial this thing in in the way that I see it could be, how do I match my skills with the challenge ahead of me or in front of me? He doesn't think he's bad at it. No, yeah. He just knows he can be better.

7:15That's exactly it, yeah. And there was an incredible lack of ego. you know at the same time an incredible self-confidence yeah because otherwise you wouldn't have the grit to stick with it and realize them because I think you have confidence if you see yourself improving confidence is super interesting like it only comes from one place in one place only go on what you say to yourself that's it and so now that has to be credible yeah you have to speak to yourself in a credible way and there's there's a calculus there's a math it's a math problem psychologically if you will is that what's happening for confidence and i'm going to tie it to your point in a second is that there's this constant calculus which is i'm interpreting the challenge ahead of me or in front of me the demands of a challenge okay whatever it is playing one-on-one basketball against michael jordan or having a conversation with you or whatever it might be i put you and jordan in the same category and so it's a it's It's a perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my internal skills.

8:16Perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my skills. Right. And so if I can see the challenge is high and wonderful and big and whatever, and then I can also know how to back myself that I've got skills to navigate this challenge. Right. Now I've got the ability to speak to myself in a way that builds confidence. So confidence is state specific, meaning it changes from moment to moment, from environment to environment. But that's the math that sits underneath of it. And you were probably really smart when you were young. You're smart now. It's like the same as a young athlete.

8:50They're probably pretty talented when they're young. Certainly the exceptional ones are. And they or you didn't maybe really learn how confidence worked because when you walked into a room, you were always one of the smarter ones that got it quickly. So you didn't know that it had to come from this calculus. It just was a thing that happened based on how well things go. Now here's the trap. When something goes well, I feel confident. When I get two buckets in a row, now I'm confident. When I walk on stage and I say a couple of funny things and something's smart and I get that look from the audience.

9:25So that's dangerous because you're waiting for your external world to give you the information that your internal world is solid. and when it goes directionally in that way, it's a problem now. You're constantly getting whipped around the external world. Okay, so here's the reality, the real story. I was a solid B student. Okay, cool. Right? Yeah. I think my brain worked quickly, but there's some subjects I just didn't grasp and to this day I still struggle with, right? You know, my friends were the smart ones. My friends were the one who was the straight-A student in math or the straight-A student in English or the straight-A student in history and they all had a subject.

10:02Or a couple of my friends were jocks who were like the star football player. I jogged around the track occasionally. For me, the challenge was I was always the dumb one or the not athletic one around my friends. I mean, I was athletic, but I was never an athlete. Yeah. Right? Yeah. There might be something really healthy going on there that you didn't over identify your identity was not wrapped up in what you were doing. And so the stress that I had was what's my subject? I'm fine at everything, but I'm great at nothing. And the lesson that I started to learn was I looked outside of the subjects that were written on my school schedule and thought, what is the stuff that I'm good at that I'm, I mean, that I'm better than my friends at.

10:53And I was better at asking questions. I was better at talking because I had to be, because it was a survival instinct for ADHD because I couldn't study. So I had to get good at asking good questions and listening to the answers. And I didn't know what to do with that, but it gave me confidence to know that I had a thing. It just wasn't written down on my high school schedule or my college schedule. In high school and college, I didn't have a thing either. You know, it's great when you can find your thing at a young age, I was a bit of a wreck. So I love my parents. Dad was a functioning alcoholic.

11:31Mom was codependent. And I didn't have a thing either. I was athletic, but I was not the athlete. I was clever and smart, but I was definitely not the student. And so I didn't have a thing either. And I think that there's a case to be built that when you over identify identify early on your identity with the thing that you're good at, it can get you really good because you have to go all in. So when you stand at the pitcher's box or the batter's box, or you're on the pitcher's mound or whatever sport it is, and your entire identity rests on you striking people out or hitting home runs, you practice hard.

12:08You probably practice harder than just about everyone else. So at a young age, that gets you really good. Now, this is a dead end, full stop, dead-end approach because you are so much more than the thing that you do so you and i accidentally were afforded this luxury of kind of the flounder floundering era floundering years where it's like your identity was not wrapped up in it and you didn't know the thing that you were that was going to spark you there's so many thoughts going through my head which is and you and i've talked about this which is the concept of finite and infinite thinking right yes yeah and the finite There's a great irony in this, which is to say I have a subject or I'm a basketball player or I'm a pitcher or whatever it is, and I'm going to be the best.

12:51I'm going to work hard and I've got that work ethic and I've got that discipline. The problem is there is a date that that stops. That's right. You either get injured, get fired, or it's just time to retire. Just about everyone gets pushed out of the pros. And the same is true in life. I'm the best lawyer. I'm the best banker. I'm the best blah, blah, blah. And at some point, you're going to have to leave. they'll either push you out or you just age out right and the number of the number of ceos or high performing executives that i meet that leave their careers or or you know sell their companies whatever it is and they have massive identity crises because their entire lives they would define themselves by this one thing that's exactly it and here's the analogy i have a friend who grew up in fargo north dakota fargo north dakota who dreamed of being a new york city rockette and making it to Broadway.

13:40No kid from Fargo, North Dakota. Parents of the Sacrifice, you know, all of this stuff. And she made it. She made it to Broadway. She became a New York City Rockette. All of her dreams came true. And then what? She spent her entire life committed to achieving this thing, did it for a few years, and then she chased the dream and accomplished the dream. And then literally didn't know what to do next. If you knew what I knew about what it takes for a kid to be one of the best in the world, to be a high-performing athlete or whatever, fill in the blank artist, we would not be pushing our kids. The washout is incredible.

14:24And I think most of us, so what you're describing, you're framing it as the infinite and finite game. That to me is a performance-based identity. Right, because it's goal-based, right? Yeah. Like I'm going to be the. Right. That's exact. That framing is. And that's the opposite of mastery. A hundred percent. That is, they're high performers and they have the resume to prove their high performance. But then when you peel the onion and the day after the career, the day after the dream accomplished, nothing. Fear. I actually. Uncertainty. For who? For the high performer. For the high performer. Yeah.

15:00And even if they don't achieve the dream, which is more likely. Yeah. Most people will not become supermodels or, you know, profile. profile you know athletes etc but i've defined myself by this thing that i actually didn't accomplish then i think it's even worse oh this is tough this is one of the reasons i think when i speak to folks in the you know corporate spaces is like purpose is a big deal yeah like what am i doing what am i really doing and i think that the commonality amongst people that i can see that that binds us is we all want a great life yeah not just a high performing life what is that but we want a great life with this short amount of time that we're here.

15:40And that's where that conversation about purpose, what am I doing here? And I think it's a bit of a rite of passage to adulthood to have a sense of what am I doing with my time here? And it does not need to be this grand thing. It can be to be a great partner to my spouse. It can be to be a great dad. It can be to have fun and bring joy to other people in my neighborhood. It does not need to be like serial entrepreneur, like whomever fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be that. I want to go back to that confidence thing. At some point in life, we all struggle with it. Nobody is immune. No, it's state specific, meaning that it's like moment to moment.

16:24I can have high confidence in one moment and nothing the next. That's right. Depending on what I'm doing or who I'm talking to. Depending on what you're saying to yourself about that challenge. Yeah, that's such a good one. It's the way you're framing the conversation. And if you think, if you entertain, what are they thinking about me? Then we're on a slide for confidence, like a downward slide. If you start like, what is Simon thinking about what I'm saying right now? Is getting in the way of that calculus, which is like, I love this conversation. It's really challenging to find the right words to describe things that are hard to talk about.

16:57And this is what I really enjoy doing. That's how confidence will be built for me. You're bringing up something which I think is so easily understood and so difficult to do. It is well and good to say, don't care what other people think about you. We all know that. But how on earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when as social animals, I want to be included. I want to feel like I belong. I want to be trusted. I want to be a member of the tribe. I want to be welcomed and invited because not to be is to feel alone to feel ostracized to feel brushed aside We know what happens a social animal left to their own devices is Destructive to others are destructive to themselves.

17:42And that's a whole different topic, you know, I think it's right I think you hurt themselves and hurt others, you know, yeah, and our brains are wired for safety. Yeah, and And belonging is safety. Think about like the sheep and the wolves. The sheep that are in the middle of the pack are way safer than the sheep on the outside and way safer than the sheep that's kind of wandered off. So being rejected by the tribe is a form of 200 ,000 years ago a death sentence. And yeah, the mammalian brain still freaks out. Yes, now. And then so if you think about that mechanism is still ancient brain modern times.

18:19It's still happening for us. and then you wrap the modern kind of identity with what you do. So when you go out and do something, I'm an executive, I'm a manager, I'm a salesperson, I'm a CMO, whatever it might be, and you're getting data back that it's not good and that can either be objective numbers or a lift from an eyebrow from your supervisor or whomever. That is so triggering to the survival brain that we do something very predictable. We'll conform, we will contort, we will confront sometimes we just cut off the relationship because it's too much but think about the conforming confronting conforming is i might laugh at a joke or go along with something that's slightly offensive to my moral code to what i think is right but that person has power so i slightly conform we've all done it yeah the contorting is where it becomes to do it on dates yeah right to to be liked to be liked yeah and then they find out like wait you know you don't think i'm funny what just happened here the contorting is when it's really problematic when we when we really do so contortion is a an extreme full of conform of conforming conforming yeah like i might really like you're literally abandoning your moral code that's right to be like to be in to not get pushed out got it and that's a form of loneliness right oh yeah it's a fear if they kick me out yeah i'm kind of screwed yeah like i don't i don't have a backstop here okay so i will tell you a quick story and then i have to go back to this question so i watched this documentary um about flat earthers it's an okay documentary but the thing that i loved about it was there's this guy who who's the leader of one of the the flat earth um organizations and they consider themselves people of science and they have scientific explanations for, you know, why the earth is flat.

20:13And they conduct an experiment to prove that the earth is flat. Spoiler alert, they accidentally prove that it's wrong. And they look at the science, they look at this experiment and they go, huh, hmm. And, you know, maybe we did the experiment wrong, you know. But the leader of the group, he recognizes what's going on here. He's a smart guy. And because he's such an ardent flat earther, he's been rejected by his friends and family growing up. His only community are other flat earthers in this group. And now he recognizes that gig is up. But he actually doesn't come clean because if he leaves that group, he's got no one.

20:57Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's the same with like some of the divide that we're seeing politically. Like they form such tight belonging ship. And the cost is so high. And they've cost relationships getting into those groups. That's right. That if I leave this group, I literally will have no one. And that fear is so real that, as you said, I do worse than conform. I contort for belonging. Yeah, that's right. And so there's this pervasive worry. Am I going to be accepted or rejected by others? That is a very healthy survival tactic. Am I going to get rejected or accepted by the tribe? When it bleeds into the words you choose, the clothes that you wear, the conforming or contorting that you're going to accept or not, it becomes almost a clinical condition.

21:52How would you diagnose that? It doesn't meet the clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder. It does not meet that. um allodoxophobia is like kind of the fear of being out with other people it's not that either it's on that path it's on that path you know we all know what fomo is fear of missing out yeah for fun i coined fopo fear of people's opinions and i think that we're on the glide path like the fear of people's opinions is really quite high it makes sense to me though because we live in a performance-based culture yeah in a performance-based culture it would make sense that i would organically developed a performance-based identity.

22:31And then underneath that, it would make sense that I would be anxious and hustle hard and all that kind of stuff about being my very best or being the best, which is now like my identity is wrapped up in how well I do whatever I do. And I'm constantly scanning the world to see if I'm okay. Are my numbers good? Are people looking at me? Are they laughing behind my back or with me? Like what's happening? So that it's an exhaustive approach to see if I'm okay is the problem. And how do you get around it? I, I, this is gonna sound too simple, but because nothing's quite this simple, be very clear about your purpose.

23:07And you say, well, how do you say purpose, a purpose-based identity? If think about any, who inspires you, Simon, like with us or, you know, no longer with us. The people who inspire me are not household names. The ones that are living anyway. Yeah. They're certainly not. Do one that's a household name that we can vibe with. Okay. Martin Luther King. Okay. So Dr. King Jr., if he was sitting in this conversation with us, he would probably be talking about equity. He'd be probably talking about like freedom of rights, the dream that he has. So this is all wrapped into his purpose. So when your purpose is clear and it's bigger than you and it is inspiring and it matters to you, you're trying to get help.

23:49So you want to pull people in. You can't solve it alone. mike simon can you guys help me you know there's something here that's bigger than all three of us and i want to see if you know we can do something special and so it's no longer about identity it's about something far larger so your identity fades away and the thing that you're trying to solve together comes forward and we're no longer managing identity and ego but we're we're committing together to a shared purpose so how do you help an athlete find their purpose yeah well because they were raised to perform yeah that's exactly right and while they're in the league that they're in whether it's the olympics or the nfl or nba whatever it might be the purpose is quite clear you know so the purpose is given to them you know win championships yeah that wears out at some That's not really a purpose though, is it?

24:43No, that's more of an outcome, a goal, but it's like a binding thing for us together. Okay. You know, but it falls. It has the appearance of purpose and it works for a period. That's right. And what it does though, it serves a bit of a placeholder for them to know what it's like to be part of something bigger where they can't solve it on their own. Even individual athletes, whether it's a golfer or singles tennis player, they're part of a team too. So I think the question was more tactical. Like, how do I help people? Yeah, like, look, everybody's looking like the rise of spirituality. Everybody's looking for their sense of purpose.

25:15You know, I mean, I mean, I wrote a book about it, you know, what do you do? How do you take people on the journey to actually help them answer the question? First is help them sit with the pain that they feel. I think one of the greatest gifts we can give people is to hold steady while they are exploring the hardest parts of themselves. And so without judgment, without critique. So a container. Yeah. A safe space. A safe space. Not trying to fix, not trying to coach, not trying to solve anything, but just hold the space for them to explore the harder parts of themselves, to put words to the emotionally charged parts of themselves.

25:54We all have pain, suffering. We all have trauma, micro or massive traumas. And it is important to at least index and understand those. And most of us, if you stay with that first assumption that I have is that we all got something we're working through the response to unexamined trauma is to protect ourselves from re-traumatizing to being re-traumatized so we put up all of these weird little things that we do to be safe it's not a revisiting of the original trauma it's a fear of the trauma recurring correct so let me be less dramatic than somebody almost dying or fill in the blanks whatever trauma the listener is working through you can also have in sport so Seattle Seahawks just for a moment we won the super bowl in dramatic fashion it was like wow like super bowl 48 uh 2013 and it's really hard to go back the next year and we got back the next year and back to the super bowl yeah the reason it's so hard is because your coaches get plucked your teammates or your your players um they get bigger contracts from other teams so like and there's like a 40 to 50 % turnover on the team.

27:08So you've got to recapture the culture. It's a hard thing to do. And we got back and we ended up losing in the dramatic fashion, as you well remember, it was like the half goal line. And it was a sure thing that the best running back in the league was going to kind of walk it in on Tom Brady's, our defensive line. And we're going to win back to back, which is really rare to do. And we made some mistakes and the ball was turned over and And we lost the game with seconds to go on the goal line. Right. Okay. It was so traumatizing. Nobody lost their life. Right. Okay. But there's no redundancy in the brain.

27:45Like this part of the brain is for like near death experiences and losing games. And this, yeah, it's the same network. Right. Right. Like this highly emotional, oh my God, what just happened? Right. This is heavy. I don't have a way to deal with this. Right. And it was so traumatizing for so many of the team that all of these mechanisms the next year were all of a sudden erecting in our culture. And it was really about people not putting themselves in a vulnerable position, which is required to be great, so that they wouldn't have that feeling again. Playing not to lose. Yeah. Versus playing to win.

28:23Playing that it wasn't my fault, it's your fault. Right. And you better be right. And I'm not going to put myself in a vulnerable spot unless I know that you've figured out why we're in this situation in the first place. Right. So now we were never. So everybody's a victim now. Yeah. And so we never got our noses pointed in the same direction, which is a very hard thing to do. And so trauma doesn't happen just from the classic word of trauma. It also has all these other things that are so emotionally volatile that they can shape our psychology. This is such a big... I love that you love this. The bells are ringing.

29:06You look at our society right now where it used to be believed that a corporate job was stable and an entrepreneurial venture was insanity. It was insane because you could lose everything. But now we've created a corporate culture where you can come in one day thinking you're stably employed and you've lost your job through no fault of your own. And it's not a meritocracy. It is definitely not a meritocracy. And so the fallacy and folly is that a corporate job these days is actually more unstable than an entrepreneurial venture, which is considered extremely high risk with an over 90 % chance of failure.