He's The Sensei of Human Performance: Dr. Michael Gervais | Rich Roll Podcast

hey everybody my name is rich roll this is my podcast welcome to it my guest today is high performance psychologist dr michael gervais over the years michael has worked alongside some of the world's most accomplished most elite professional and olympic athletes to help them perform at their peak in high consequence environments today we pick things up where we last left off for basically a master class on human potential we talk about mindset intentional attention and honing focus in a distracted world and michael drops incredible pearls of wisdom on how all of us can best navigate this complicated time to find the opportunity amidst the chaos and grow if you're digging my stuff and this channel please take a second to hit that subscribe button as well as the little notification bell so you can be properly alerted every time we drop a new video i appreciate you doing that and i appreciate michael i absolutely love this guy truly one of my favorite people so let's do it this is me and dr michael gervais [Music] dr michael gervais is back in the house round four i can't believe it you've changed my life come on yeah look what you've built it's incredible man i'm so proud of you you're impacting so many lives and i'm just i'm in i'm in awe of the quality of content that you put out and how practical and helpful it is to so many people and it's been a delight and a pleasure to watch you oh man that means a lot to me i i really i don't say that lightly that you changed my life it was super simple it was benign and i never would have thought that this medium this intimate conversation between two people would be able to fundamentally shape you know how i think about not only humanity but business and connection with other people and so that that that afternoon that we sat in my office like that changed my life so i appreciate you brother that's cool well it was immediately evident to me and i've said this to you before that you have a natural gift for this and that it seemed only only you know appropriate that you would launch your own show like you're so good at it and you have this like ability to just get right to the heart of things immediately like you cut through all the [ __ ] and you see what other people don't see and when you listen to your show you get a glimpse of that and i'm always like oh man like because we have a lot of crossover in our guests so like if i'm preparing for someone i'm like oh he was on mics i gotta listen to this like this happened with apollo ono recently because he came on my show and i listened to your conversation with him and i'm like i i'm not gonna be able to do that oh come on that's not even close but you know there are some advantages of being a psychologist you have a training that i don't have well you know that being that being said it there's so much about just being authentically curious about the person that's in front of you and i'll tell you some of the frames i come from if that's useful mm-hmm sure unconditional positive regard podcast tutorial from from the master no no no no no no no find some mastery here okay so unconditional positive regard for the other you have that you that's how you've treated me in in our first conversation unconditional positive regard for the other and i think that as a philosophical note for how we engage with humans that that is born out of the um psychologist and the um the theory called rogerian psychology carl rogers unconditional positive regard and if you just stay there i think it ends up paying dividends for both yeah i mean i never thought a bit about it in that kind of context but i do like i only have people on that i'm genuinely curious about yeah and i've been in situations where a bunch of people are like oh you got to have this person on and i'm not feeling it but i feel pressured and not pressured but like well everyone else seems to think this will be great and i've learned that if i'm not feeling it myself it doesn't mean that they're not a great guest for somebody's show i'm just not the right cipher or host to bring out the best in that person oh that's a cool approach yeah and you know i i'm curious what you're searching for right now what is it look at you already i'm going to do your show later man all right let's do that but just as a high note like what is it that you're you're going after right now to try to better understand hmm well a couple things i mean the first thing i would say is i'm starting to put more attention on the guests that i'm seeking out because i really haven't done that from a vision or systemic approach it's it's somewhat reactive and very much impulsive like i'll just come across somebody and i'm like oh they're cool and i'll do that and i don't put i don't like put on my calendar okay i have to book these people and i got to seek them out and track them down like it all just kind of happens organically and that seemed to work but i think the show could benefit from me approaching it from a little bit more of a mindful intentional perspective so i'm putting my focus on that and also um most of the conversations that i've had historically have been pretty evergreen they stand you know outside the context of time and culture i could put them up at any moment and they would be fine but the world changed in some pretty fundamental ways this past year and i felt called to participate in that conversation in a more contemporaneous way so now every two weeks i'm doing a conversation with my friend adam skolnick who co-wrote david goggins book and as a new york times contributor journalist adventurer environmentalist and we talk about kind of things that are happening in the now um so that's new and that's been kind of a little bit of a a growth curve getting used to that and putting myself out out there in a new and different way because this has always been about the guest but with these particular conversations that focus gets flipped a little bit more on me i've loved it i've loved following what you're doing yeah that's cool yeah nice work so yeah that's that's where my head's at but you know i i have been spending a lot of time paying attention to what's going on in america and across the world right now and it's very unique it's concerning i think there's opportunity in it as well so why don't we start with just your thoughts on on you know how you feel about what's what's happening right now and and how you're thinking about it from a psychologist's perspective in terms of how to navigate it in a healthy way cool i think that one is let's put a little fine point on psychologists for just a moment is that there's general psychology you know and there's child psychology and then i've cut my teeth in sports psychology sports performance and then a sub-specialty if you will in consequential environments so if there was such a thing as high-stakes psychology that would kind of be where i'd sit so inside of that what does that mean my unique experience is that i've spent deep time with people that are in the most consequential the highest stress environments known to humans i'm finding incredible portability right now from those insights and practices for the rest of us because we're all in some form or another in a in a higher stakes environment oh right now the stress levels well if we just look at some basic data suicide uh suicide ideation and actual suicide are up anxiety depression addiction all curving you know hockey stick type arc stuff um so we're seeing mental health and the echo of mental health is going to be here for a while the mental health concerns and the echo from what's happening right now both from um a an awakening from the social injustice and and the systemic racism and individual racism that's taking place um as well as a illness that we're struggling with you know and so mental health is important and i have yeah i i don't think i'm the most i'd like to think i am but i'm not the most compassionate person you know i'm more of a systems thinker and i really love getting into kind of what the heart and the truth of something is and understanding how we can grow and be authentic in that growth arc towards the reaches of what is possible so that that's not like i'm not this compassionate um heartfelt high drive empathetic person i'd like to be i need to i've been working on that my whole life but i'm flooded with it now um right i'm feeling what people are feeling and i'm scared you know i'm nervous for people and then my friends that are listening to this right now are saying dude you're so bullish and optimistic about the future what are you talking about so i've got both of those that are playing forward right now so i vacillate i vacillate from despair to optimism um and i think on that that scale of systems thinking to to you know kind of feeling my way in an empathetic fashion i'm more on the empathy side i could i could benefit from a little bit more systems thinking as i just explained to you and i feel it deeply you know it's it and and i feel i've said this before also but i'm i'm essentially introverted i'm fine being alone you know i like to lock myself up in a cave and do my thing and i thought i've been training for this my whole life man i got this everyone's going to be out there suffering and i'm going to thrive but it's really warm then and not being able to see your friends and you know not being able to plan for the future or have specific things to look forward to is is very difficult but from a personal perspective the hardest part has been trying to parent two teenage daughters through this who are really having a hard time and it's been you know when you say hard time you mean like mental health mental health yeah right yeah i've got a extroverted 16 year old who wants to be with her friends and is in art school and loves that tactile practical aspect of her craft which has been stripped away from her and now she's on zoom from eight to four and then has to do her homework on the computer all in the home you know and another thirteen-year-old daughter who is very much an introvert but the deprivation of external stimuli is causing you know some real mental strain on her and i feel powerless to be of service yeah how to help them figure this out i mean i'm just it it just breaks my heart yeah i think the fact that you're um aware of it is kind of step one because some people the old model of let's call it well hold on let me back up no one's getting through this world without facing down trauma big trauma big t or small t so suffering is part of the the experience that we have it's a shared experience that we have the word trauma ends up takes suffering and puts a little finer point on it right but what we're talking about is suffering now that being said let's call it 1980 model suck it up harden up figure it out go back to work come on what's wrong with you like those are the messages that we're giving kids when we were growing up i don't know if you got those messages but you know pretty much yeah expl definitely like the narrative the social narrative was that whether it was in in the house or not and right now it's taken place it's very different the fact that you're like i'm really concerned about that you know right step one awareness always is going to start there and whatever practices that we can put in place to be able to increase our awareness we're on to something step two is be grounded next to the person that you love and so i that's what showed up for me for years working with some of the best in the world in their craft and some people that are aspiring to be is that when they rattle and i've worked my ass off to be grounded that gift whether it's an emotional rattle or something else that's taking usually when we rattle it's emotional but there's my mentors taught that to me at a young age that when i would be melting or unraveling or frustrated or scared and this is gary de blasio's my mentor for a long time like since i was 16 he just looked at me because he knew me and he just looked right into me and he's like i see you and he's like i'm here for you as i'm melting down frustrated scared whatever trying to find the words to say that i'm scared but i'm really just using frustration as the vehicle the unfortunate vehicle of talking about fear and sadness and man just have someone next to you that sees you and gets you that in and of itself probably explains why 70 of treatment effects in small room psychology take place from rapport the relationship in itself accounts for we believe about 70 of change not the advice or the counseling just being there yeah listening seeing understanding and then if you've got some really cool tactics and strategies that you can layer on top of it that only accounts for 20 to 30 of the change the impulse that i'm always fighting is is trying to fix it of course of course it's like i can't fix it so then i get rattled and i'm not able to be that calm soothing presence i find that hard to believe it's true man i fight a heartbeat julie she'll tell you but you know the other piece is like but what you're talking about too is that um you you did you say the word powerless or or helpless which word did you choose i think i used powerless yeah which is um that's where it starts to get scary for the people that are supposed to be the powerful right so what does powerful mean not like i'm powerful and gonna tell you what to do mr mrs you know per like not that type of power i know that's not what you mean but albert bandura are you familiar with his work ah this is this is gonna be fun rich so albert bendor dr bandura um living legend he's uh octogenarian at this point stanford and he changed psychology so uh i like he was one of the freaking top-tier tip-of-the-error people that i wanted to have on finding mastery and i got to sit down with him so it's like a living legend that i got to sit down with so his uh original paradigm shifting um theory was on self-efficacy and so efficacy means power efficacious it's a beautiful word not well used um not often used so self-efficacy he found that there's five ways to build a sense of internal power for people to have agency and agency is a fancy word for you determine your experience in life you're an agent in this as opposed to at the whips end of your external world but so what does it mean to be age have agency and how do we build efficacy it's really cool and without getting too far in the mumbo jumbo you know all of these skills i'm going to rattle them all i'll ride them off quickly vicarious experiences so looking at somebody that is doing something close to what you want to be doing one day just looking at it and being able to see that i think i could do that over that's how oh look at the choices they made just watching mentorship in that way but they don't have to be true mentors but something that's close to what you want to do what's an example just as an example to point to to look to yes yeah that's a so that's actually a really important part of becoming efficacious is seeing what good to you looks like or maybe great the next is self-talk knowing how to talk to yourself you don't know how to talk to yourself well it's nearly impossible you know and this is where you recognize the kind of the [ __ ] of naive optimism meets the frontier of being in the amphitheater like it's got to be real the way you speak to yourself and i haven't met though i haven't met a world-class thinker or doer that isn't fundamentally optimistic yeah that's a key theme and point that you make time and time again and compete to create yeah which i'm on like chapter eight of now which i love the audio book yeah yeah the audiobook it's great thanks i love it yeah um i love it because it's comprehensive but it's also very practical and understandable and you just relate these tools that we can all implement into our life that are all lifted from your work and your studying and working with all of these athletes but what was really striking about it is is this refrain that all of these things are are trainable or teachable from optimism to grit confidence to calm we tend to look at high performers and think well that yeah that guy's super optimistic he always thinks it's going to work out he's able to control his mechanism he was born that way yeah or had great parents yeah yeah exactly and i just you know i'm debbie downer or i always think it's not going to work out and that's just the way that i'm wired yeah that so there there's likely a predisposition towards anxiety or depression or optimism or pessimism that we're not fully aware of right there's some genetic coding that happens passed on from a genetic standpoint from our parents and grandparents that being said is optimism and pessimism are the two basic frameworks for how you view your future it's kind of that there's there's not another one some people might say no realism well you can have a realistic pessimism and a realistic optimism it is the frame that you see your future through and so it's a learn it's a trainable skill completely trainable so is the opposite of that like helplessness and learned helplessness optimism and learned optimism oh yeah that that doesn't actually snap well together but the optimism and pessimism sorry both are learned and which means we can get better at them so walk me through the difference between what you just said and our kind of pop psychology version of that like the fake it till you make it and you know i'm stuart smalley and i'm going to look in the mirror and and recount these affirmations like what's the difference between truly training somebody to pivot from you know a pessimistic outlook on themselves in life and getting them into a more optimistic state okay so the first order of business it's always going to come down to awareness like how are you imagining your future and if it's fundamentally pessimistic like things don't work out then let's recognize that there's a moment to be able to get better at it you know to shift it and the data is really strong about why optimism is an important function for health performance well-being and so the first order of business like i said is always going to be awareness it's where mindfulness and meditation journaling and conversations with wise men and women are really important because if you're not aware of the way you're thinking about the future you can't change it like there's there's you're kind of stuck but i think most people are on that kind of recursive loop where they're not even consciously aware that they're constantly affirming some story about who they are in it from a negative perspective well and if you challenge them on it they'll say well you don't understand my life or something like that like there has to be a willingness or like a crack in that an opening where they can say or they can see themselves from 10 000 feet and say i need to address this you're right on the money so this is this is the unfortunate insight that i i wish it wasn't i wish this wasn't the case but i my experience with working with people is that it's not until they have enough pain do they do the work to change i'm a living example of that you are yeah we've talked about that yeah you really are and my favorite people are people that have faced the darkest parts of being human and say okay forget about it like i'm going i'm doing this differently because they've got to the truth of some stuff you know the dark side of humanity the suffering side and they understand it and so that being said is like there needs to be enough pain for change to happen because change requires real work and this is why i'll say to folks like there's no hacks there's no tricks and tips you know for fundamental growth and it's a mistake to look at the strong men and women on the podiums or the ceos of whatever and say oh look at how good they are from a physical standpoint to celebrate them just because of they've had outward success is the mistake the opportunity that sits underneath is how do they organize their life and it's a fundamental organization towards the man or woman or person they want to become it's a fundamental commitment and there are there are no shortcuts here there's no hacks to that so how do we organize our inner life get real with like the pain that you are carrying from an early part of your life that is still part of the conscious or non-conscious narrative that is shaping thoughts and shaping words that you choose and shaping the actions that you take and without some sort of examination or some sort of honesty about the way that you shape your thoughts and your words and your actions i think it's really tough to flip a fundamental view of how you think the future is going to go from pessimism to optimism can i add one more layer of complexity your brain is not trying to help you become optimistic the three pounds of tissue is saying hey dude stay alive find the threat find the danger you know you don't want to be taken for the fool that didn't jump when there's a a line in the bush is there lines in bushes you know like you don't want to be the fool that doesn't react properly but you also don't want to look like the fool that re reacts too quickly so that's where we get these freeze mechanisms you know fight flight freeze and submit and so your brain is trying to figure out how to survive and your higher consciousness you need to probably put a pin in that because that's a big word right big phrase but your your ability to use your imagination i'll be more pragmatic for a moment your ability to use your imagination to imagine what could be for you counterbalanced to your brain's dictum to survive to recognize the sources of threat and pain real or imagined from early on or or that's possibly going to show up in this moment and it is ready right now to say hey flood some physiology so that you can be on point and not be taken advantage of in modern times so your brain is not trying to help you in this i don't know whether i feel good or bad about that damn you know so yeah well i don't think i think that if we said the good or bad piece and we said well that's actually the truth of what's happening so what do we want to do about it fundamental to all of this in compete to create is this commitment to self-understanding like that underlies all of it like you can relate these tactics and these strategies like here's your morning routine here's a breathing technique here's a way of journaling and here's a way of getting clear on what you have control over versus what you don't have control over which are all super helpful but short of a fundamental commitment to personal growth and broadened self-understanding these things are not going to avail you much right yeah so talk a little bit about that first because that's the most important step like in 12-step step one is the only one you have to get perfect i feel like in this context that commitment has to be firm for any of these other things to to have the efficacy that they potentially can have so okay so i love so you're getting right to the truth of it this is where it all begins is what do you really want and if you're looking for better you know because you know that there is something deeper in you there is more room to grow there's further to go there's a deeper authenticity there is deeper purpose and meaning and you want that in your life okay so those those are the mechanisms that i've spent a lot of time trying to understand and it has to start from that place like okay i'm sick and tired this is a phrase that you'll recognize of being sick and tired so i'm sick and tired of walking into a room and feeling like i'm just i'm not grounded i'm not me um i'm beholden to what they might be thinking of me i've abandoned my history for the approval of somebody in this room yeah you like that oh man this is like my achilles heel fear of people's opinions oh yeah yeah it's you're not alone brother like i suffered i suffered fobo for a long time it's probably what led me to you know this this um deep almost sometimes i don't wish that people have this um i don't wanna say maniacal but this and it's not quite obsessive but it's this deep kind of want to understand how do humans work because i spend i'm up all night thinking about it it feels like most nights you know it's the thing that keeps me awake it's a beautiful science it's complicated um but all that being said is that's where it starts like is there more in you and if there is let me hold on put a pin in that there is more in you there is more in me so what do we do to be able to free ourselves up to express the the reaches of our potential what do we do well if you and i wanted to go walk from here to new york city and we hadn't done it that walk before you know what you and i would do we would go get with somebody we'd say hey who's walked it tell me what to do on the rockies when i get to the rockies tell me what to do when you know or help me understand how to navigate this type of challenges or what are the challenges so you would go get around a community of people that understand deeper that have done it they've traveled the path and that would be the second step is there more yeah but that example presupposes that you have enough self-understanding to know that you want to walk from california to new york i feel like there's a lot of people who are living their lives reactively they know they want their they thirst they hunger for more meaning more purpose more passion in their life but they're completely bereft of the tools or the means by which to connect with what that might look like so they're shooting darts in the dark thinking i want these things but how do i even begin the process of trying to figure out what that might mean for me so i would say um the way that we do it for let's just talk individually right now for one-on-one type stuff is let's say let's use an extreme example somebody's really struggling right and they're highly anxious or highly depressed or they're really struggling in in life first it's like okay well let's let's just stabilize a little bit and so stabilizing is like how do we help somebody be present and being present is where your body and your mind are in the same place focusing on the same thing so that's what being present is so how do we do that first and if you're not with somebody that knows how to do that how do you do that well this is where meditation and mindfulness is like the modern science and the ancient wisdom of it is paying dividends it's one of the ways to start and if that feels like too big like focusing on one breath at a time over and over and over again if that feels too big then okay how do we get to that next place well maybe there are some very easy ways to say okay well i'm going to start being my best coach and so now we're kind of moving into that self-talk thing a little bit and the small band-aid kind of tactic if you will is be great at coaching yourself today mindfulness is about listening and then coaching is more about self-talk like what are you going to say to yourself so those are two kind of maybe some ways to start and then i'd say [ __ ] get your sleep right yeah you know that's super practical you got your whoop on oh yeah yeah i i've been i i see you've got yourself never i haven't taken it off since i got it seriously i love it yeah yeah can i tell you a funny story yeah so i i first got it when i was doing this is your world that i played in for a moment but it was an ultra that i was training for i followed it oh dude i met i met somebody i met myself in a different way i i can't wait to tell me about that yeah so you were you were in a paddle board from catalina to l.a stand up yeah so stand-up paddle i grew up as a kid surfing and i'd look as i look west there's an uh an island catalina island it's about 30 miles away and i get frustrated with the island because it would block some of the big south swells that would come in and then also i'm incredibly inspired by the island from this one narrative which was natives that long ago that were on the island would build their own canoes and they'd pair up either two people or three people or sometimes one person they would travel the 30 miles come grab some supplies and then bring it back to their family i'm like damn that's yeah it's legit it's across shark alley it's across you know 30 miles of open ocean there's some pretty uh shifty currents that are happening in the pacific and i always thought like you know hundreds of years ago that was taking place like man i'm equally as inspired this is weird but the men and women that put up phone wires or phone poles in the as pioneers to places like deep and mountains and i'm always like somebody was here drilling into you know mother earth here oh i don't know why but anyways so i'm watching that and then one of my friends i shared that idea with him like how inspiring he goes why don't you do it i don't know i don't i don't do ultra types i don't do distant stuff i'm not built for that and so he just self-defeatism coming right out of the gate for a high performance psychologist i thought it was actually working from reality yeah but i was like i didn't think i had that and i had very little interest you're watermen though yeah i spent a lot of time in the water but not but but if you think about the way i've organized my life it's really more about um in the sport world and working with the athletes i work with more about intense adrenaline management um and then it wasn't until maybe about eight years ago that i started started spending time with people that were doing back to back stuff like what you're doing you know like really distance-based stuff um carl metzner d metzler metzler do you know that name he ran the pony express no so it's a project that we did with red bull metsker metzger i think it's metscare yeah it sounds familiar it was amazing he ran the pony express sorry carl if you're listening i'm sorry carl yeah it was a um it was amazing what he did he ran the pony express like almost without stopping like back to back you know days like it was incredible so that's when i first really got exposed to the red bull project of what it takes for you guys to do what you do so a friend of mine held me accountable and um i said yeah okay at one point i was like yeah yeah i could i think i could imagine myself doing that and for two three years in a row when the season would arrive he's like so are you gonna train for it ah maybe next time you know and finally it's like enough of your [ __ ] and so we were training and um i blew it on nutrition dude i took everything so seriously i and i want to get to the woop story but i didn't i never did anything like this and i got my nutrition wrong so a mile 23 of 31 um i was hallucinating and it also happened to be that i was doing 3.1 miles an hour uh into a 3.1 mile current so standing still at for 47 minutes um hallucinating mild hallucinations just under under fueled um yeah i mean overtaxed under fueled i came out classic rookie mistake i came out too fast and everyone told me mike take your time come out slow and and i thought i was um but i didn't really have this the awareness and sophistication i didn't have someone coaching me you know from a distance to do like slow down that just comes with experience though i mean it being your first you you bit off something big for your first time out yeah and this is the fun part about the whoop i'll go in reverse order i met myself in a new way at mile 23. and i needed it you know i felt disconnected to nature so i called this thing called i called the project project reconnect and what i learned twofolds was like what isolation and loneliness means uh because i was there i felt a sense of abandonment that i was like i don't know why but abandonment came up for me which was a really cool way for me to get to some truths for me and then the second thing is that um i realize that i am nature we are nature so nature is not the ocean that i would go get connected to you and i are the same kind of stuff and so it was a recalibration that i didn't need to reconnect to nature i need to reconnect to my nature and we are nature it's not the mountains and the oceans the in the grass our humanity is nature and it's complicated it's beautiful so that was uh kind of what happened it was transformative say at least for me and then but whoop back to woo so one of the peter park was a man who was helping me get right get fit and he's amazing i don't know if you know peter but i know who he is i've never met him yeah and so amazing human you guys would love the conversations uh that you guys would have but anyways so he's helped me get right and he goes listen make a promise when you wake up in the morning it was like a 4 30 wake-up call he says don't check your whoop who gives a [ __ ] yeah you're going right i was like yeah so i'm going so um long story made a little bit longer here is that i wake up in the morning and we had to move up our launch date it was just a strike mission it was just me going uh with a boat in case i got in trouble a trail boat and um and so uh oh so we had to move up the date a week early and so i had i had five days of travel in um like seven different hotel rooms and i was like okay give me a two day breather and then no gotta go now so so i woke up and you know what my whoop score was i don't know 13. yup was it it was 13 oh man i've had those days i'm going to show you i'm going to pull it up and show you wake up and you're just like today is not my day so it becomes a predictor of behavior so it's dangerous in that regard so i didn't look though yeah i made the commitment and so that had something to do with bunking like i was on fumes and you know it also reminds me of and i think you know this probably better than i do is that we are made of so much we are capable of so much and so um there's so much more inside of us and so it was a reminder of that yeah that's great i love that i mean i think that there's it's beautifully told um and i'm glad you have that experience i think there's something very unique about the endurance pursuit that stands distinct from the acute challenges of some of the athletes that you work with where it's about these like microscopic moments yeah and that kind of you know and and dealing with like fear you have you know guys jumping out of planes at 25 000 feet and the kind of stuff that that you're more familiar with but wait without a parachute right without a parachute into a 16 story net that he built did you have luke on the show no i i would love to oh i would love to you guys would have a great conversation yeah i'd love to talk to that guy insane for people that don't know michael worked with luke akins who jumped out of a plane at 25 000 feet without a parachute and landed in a net this is the most bananas thing ever the size of a two-car four-car garage you know like he's working with uh with david blaine right now are you involved in the ascension project i'm not no when i saw david do his little trailer uh i i immediately thought of you and wondered whether you were involved yeah luke is yeah luke that's a that's a pretty luke's is more dangerous i think by far but what david blaine's doing is real so it's supposed to be like today i think but weather pushed it off so basically what he's doing for those that don't know and he will have done it by the time this airs but he wants to just strap himself to a whole bunch of balloons and float up into the air like a little kid yeah you know and he and he has a parachute up in the balloons but he's not going to put it on until he's out of sight because he wants that visual and then his his idea is to go up to the elevation of everest he wants to get above 25 000 hopefully up to 29 and then parachute down it's crazy it's awesome what's so amazing and unique about that guy is that he pairs his magic skills with these true feats of athletic endurance that's right the breathing and the cold and all the stuff that he does that makes him very special yeah for sure but back to the endurance thing i mean i think what i've learned and what it sounds like you got a taste of is is that unique experience of self-connection that occurs when you're beyond depleted and stripped of all of your natural defenses and all the layers that prevent you from being that connected to who you are and the environment and there's like a percolation of self-awareness and self-understanding that occurs and then it translates into doing these things that you didn't think you were capable of and so you become more connected to your potential like the ceiling on what you become what you believe is possible gets raised that's exactly it and you were asking earlier like how do people actually get to step one maybe the step is to sign up for something with you because you're going to push them into the like you know into that thin herd space you know and i don't know if you're doing that much anymore with the current conditions or at all but if if somebody could pair up with you for a little bit i mean you'll take them there oh i could take them there yeah you'll take them there and and what a guide you'd be really you know and so that's one way to do it for sure and i also think that we don't have to do extreme anything to get to the extreme awareness you can do it on a pillow you can do it in a conversation with someone that is wise and you can do it by yourself in journal it's harder that way it's harder yeah you know or you could take ayahuasca i suppose which some people do yeah um we all have our our ways of getting there i guess yeah yeah that's come but yeah but endurance soldier endurance has been this amazing teacher in my life and i don't necessarily feel like i have that much more that i feel like i need to prove to myself in that regard but the lessons that i've learned from that inform everything that i do there you go and you know i think that right now the lessons that we need to learn are incredible right now like whole like what are we doing with politics you know what what are we doing with covid and what are we doing with i mean this the perfect storm here between racial justice um mother nature like let me let me speak on mother nature for just a minute one more minute is that i bought this i'm i'm disappointed it's too strong of a word but man i bought this sinker this hook is a better way to think about it early when covid was first announced and it was like okay isolation lock down war you know front lines home front and then i said wait a minute those are all jail house terms those are all like war-based frameworks that we're trying to do something against mother nature so it's wrong our our tactic our approach is fundamentally dislocated from how mother nature and we are mother nature are working together and so i think that if we could take a pause and this is not practical but as an at an individual level right to take a pause and say what is my relationship with nature and not to get too woo-woo about anything but this is mother nature speaking to us this is our planet saying hey i got something they're going to spin at you here and what is your relationship going to be with it and all that being said is like i've bubbled up big time you know like i've uh for part of my job responsibilities and to honor the people that i work with like in a really significant way so but i just want to pause and say let's get back to maybe some first principles about nature and how we're relating to our nature and the nature around us there's a lot to be mind in that i mean similar to you i've been essentially locked down but i've spent a lot of time thinking about that you know not just the efficacy of our national strategy or global strategy but how to behave on a personal level like there's there's our macro relationship with nature and then our interpersonal relation each one of our individual relationship with nature on a macro level nature is telling us look your your systems are broken your relationship with the animal kingdom is what created this so i'm going to throw you a curveball because you need to take a look at this we're not really taking a look at it on an individual level there's very little talk about ensuring that our individual immune systems are intact and part of buttressing our immune system is being in contact with a diversity of environments and other people but now we're being told we have to remove ourselves from other people and i understand that like and i'm doing that and i'm wearing masks and being a good citizen and all of that but what is really going on here and now we're in this situation where we bungled and mishandled this to such a vast degree that there's no end in sight for this current protocol short of a vaccine being developed we're just going to continue to accumulate a thousand cases a day or whatever it is uh we're not going to reach hurt immunity in this way we're we're kind of either we completely lock down or we completely open up but we're in this liminal space where we're not really achieving anything except prolonging the length at which we have to delay everything else in our lives yeah i'm it's um you and i are going to be fine and we're going to figure it out because we have agency back to kind of point number one and we are using as best we can our community and our information from science and our history and being alive to want to do right you know for self and others and those that have some underlying conditions some real anxiety some victimization some um some depression like holy [ __ ] like really you can't go out of your house right now you know without being scared or there's a belligerence that you hide behind like i'm not doing this you know but that's an over course over correction too for many people at least for um a trigger point or a tripwire for what it feels like to be told what to do and so i'm yeah it's brutal well it's a witch's brew it's not just the pandemic it's our political environment it is economic insecurity that's driving you know fear division vitriol loneliness separation there's a giant swath of this country who feels unheard they feel like they lack agency in their lives and now they're we're in a situation that's so acute that it's a trip wire so we're seeing these flare-ups you know and then they end up in these videos they get shared on social media that is only exacerbating this vicious cycle of of acrimony that is denigrating the the kind of cohesiveness of the american experiment in general it's crazy i've never seen anything like this meanwhile you know we have these um uh you know social protests over police brutality and racial injustices and all of those are you know to some degree appropriate responses to you know a system that has perpetrated harm and um and lack of justice for so many people in this country and all of that taken together has created this moment that is very strange and it's cr from for myself it's like there's an uncertainty like how do i engage with the world right now and i find myself at times like should i say this well if i say this then that person's you know like the people are like afraid to speak they're afraid to act um we don't know what the ground rules are here and it's unprecedented in certain ways yeah i think i i know i struggle with that same thing like this this bit of a dance if you will because um but here's how i sort it out and the dance is like how can i say this or that right and speak my truth and also um not alienate people that i might make a mistake in what i'm trying to sort out because i'm a learner i'm trying to figure this out with everyone else and i've got to get back to first principles is what i do so what are my first principles that matter most to me and i've got and my first principles might not be your first principles but if we can get back to first principles those kind of guiding principles that shape in the most aspirational way your thoughts your words and your actions and if if we can take a moment to re-examine those and when i do that i am so clear for me um and this i'm gonna say something that's charging and electric i'm not voting for somebody that doesn't care about humanity and when i say that i know that people are saying well what do you mean he of course donald trump you know is is about humanity i can't see it so i'm not voting that way there's no chance that i'm voting that way you know if i had a daughter which i don't i'd feel awful and i might be offending you in the way that because i don't know your vote and it's okay if you don't want to share sending me yeah i don't know i don't know where you're with you on that and so i've got to get back to first principles for me and what happens for many people is they go let's say that there's somebody at our table that goes well i got first principles too and my first principles line up with supporting um donald trump for president and so now where we find ourselves in a problem is because they're so foundational and fundamental that we feel like we've got to protect them those first principles and so now we're in a vicious protection aggressive you know it feels like it's a survival mechanism and a war that's taking place on first principles and i that's where we are right now and so so for me um another first principle is to create space to talk and to dialogue and to be curious and at the same time have an eye and a lens on humanity if we don't have that i'm really not interested in being in the conversation and so i'm finding myself removing myself from many layers of conversations with people because i know that their first principle is so orthogonal and there's not an interest in anything other than defending first principle as opposed to exploring i'm okay to be wrong i'd say my ego is no longer involved in what i do and if my first principles and the way i'm acting on them are in error which they will be at some points in my life cool call me out i want to be i want to get better but a first principle for me sorry to get on the soapbox with you but humanity like it's the first principle humanity empathy listening conversation nuance appreciation yeah not narcissism i know what that is as a trained psychologist and i'm not diagnosing anybody but you know what when you can't see another person and really separate that another person is different than your identity think about that for a minute that's what narcissism is the inability to know the difference that you are your own individual person and not merely a reflection of me that is a disordered way of engaging socially and so what happens when people can't see that you have your own life and your own experience that you're merely a reflection of me and if you're right now you're wearing a striped shirt and i don't like striped shirts i'm gonna be cunning and sophisticated and making you feel absolutely horrible about how dare you wear how stupid are you why would you wear a striped shirt like please striped shirts what is wrong with you and now to the point where at some point you're like oh maybe i should maybe i should change but i've just berated you because i got the fopo yeah but i just berated you as opposed to like going to saying hey that's really curious striped shirts what's up with that so i don't know crazy got me going no i like it i appreciate that yeah you fired up a little bit yeah i mean i think that us us folks that care about humanity and the planet need to vote in an aggressive way and come out you know make get the get the mailing thing right whatever whatever you're capable of doing in north america right now um man be bold i appreciated your co-collaborator pete carroll's words the other day how about social justice how about it i mean he he's been about this for a long time yeah you know and so uh which part of his message just the speech that he gave in general about like look man we you know this is this is real and we got to deal with this like it feels on some on some level it's like of course but when you contextualize that within the the culture of of the nfl and how they've conducted themselves you know over the course of this you know crisis that we've endured um it feels bolder than it should yeah you know it's complicated and i'm so mindful that um i've got i've had incredible privilege in my life and not from an economic standpoint i didn't i wasn't born with a silver spoon but the privilege and the advantage that i've had is um a gift that i didn't even ask for but i got it and so the first time i heard white privilege i was like get out of here you don't know where i came from like no one from my family came i had a college education you know i had we had a well on a farm that we came from we didn't have uh our pipes were kind of busted up but we you know we had to figure stuff out as a kid you know i still had nice things you know i didn't go without and i was like get out of here like no chance that i come from a privileged what you think is privilege and then this was like four or five years ago when that word was first introduced to me and the gift that i've received from some of the players at the seattle seahawks and the rich conversations we'd have on the bus in between you know practice and on on road trips in between practice and uh and games and whatever and when they broke it down to you have an advantage strip that word away privilege you have an advantage you call the cops if something's wrong with your home right yeah not us you know go fill in the blanks keep going right down the list and so i go oh i had an advantage yeah i i see that and um i want to be careful because i've had lots of advantages but it can also sound like i'm starting to get egotistical and some of the the things you know but the basic advantage of just being uh born into a system that values white and being caucasian that's that's um that's something to pay attention to yeah well i just love that that coach carol addressed it directly yeah he did yeah yeah i think that um he's a humanist period you know he studied humanistic psychology he did is one of his degrees um his his master's degree studied one of the uh humanistic psychologists and how it impacts i didn't know that yeah so he's a humanist as well um how are the seahawks doing well we don't know you're going you're going up to the bubble soon well you know the bubble is pretty intense and um we got to figure out what the right rhythms are and so one of the reasons i've been bubbled up is to make sure that i'm doing the right thing if ever you know that but this is it's a dislocating experience for me this year and so i typically i travel from la to seattle every week for two three four times or days a week um but to come to do that this year is irresponsible yeah you know and so yeah so the season's about ready to fire up mm-hmm uh pre-season's happening here in a bit and i'm not sure at the time of the recording where we'll be but what a massive experiment yeah you know that's taking place right now what's your perspective on how the nba has handled it meaning uh full-on bubble up right yeah um i think that at the time i would say i'd make that same decision you know and i'd probably still stay the course you know there's great consequences to this consequences to family consequences to uh earnings for the league um it feels responsible so uh there's there's there's pro cons to both but uh i'd feel safer in that environment than some of the other environments that yeah i see taking place i was watching uh um matisse tables vlogs on youtube did you check those out no i didn't but i heard it yeah it was great you know you're like you just get this flavor of what the day to day like mundanity is and all the protocols that are in place and how they really it really is a bubble like they're just in their hotel rooms and you know getting tested and going to practice and living completely isolated you know in this weird experiment and this is in many respects is a there's something really important for all of us to say what is the purpose of sport in society is it a luxury is it a requirement how does it fit why are we so interested in making this is it a business like where does sport in modern day fit in our narrative you know because i can see parents making what i would consider risky decisions putting their kids back into sport unmasked with lots of other kids running around and i'm talking about like four 13 14 year olds which is not the you know they're super spreaders in many respects so um i'm not doing that with you know in my family but so where does sport sit and i think it's a great question yeah i mean how do you answer that for yourself well i think it's um entertainment first i think that fitness and health is different you know as a as a component but it's at this point modern sport is entertainment that's actually how they're classified their paychecks are classified and so um it's a way of living for people it's their life it's their passion but from a social standpoint it's entertainment and that entertainment is a business i mean it's is is it not business concerns that are driving this push to get it rolling oh for sure so like yeah for sure and i think also when you when you when you look at the kind of the the picture of any league right now there's definitely business drivers and when you think about the importance of business across our country and these pockets it's really important to many you know it's opening a lot of doors in communities and then when you drill down the next level um coaches you know what happens to a coach if there's no yeah what happens to the athlete's paycheck you know that's what happens to the you know the equipment folks and the ticket folks and so it's a it's a larger issue about um health and if they can get it right from a protective standpoint okay you know but there's i think sometimes we forget just how just because they're on tv and they're highly skilled they deal with the same exact stuff you and i do maybe even amplified yeah they're no different than the two of us how are your olympic athletes that you work with dealing with everything that's happening right now i mean i just can't fathom having that dream pulled out from underneath me when your whole life is oriented towards working towards that specific moment and then it becomes unavailable yeah it's happening in college right now too yeah college football college like stanford volleyball imagine being one of the best in the world going into stanford and now the program's you know shut down like what it's unbelievable i mean stanford volleyball is like the fact that it's crazy dominant dominant you know and so it's happening at the olympic level the pro level it's happening at the college level and even in high school for sure you know senior year uh the hot recruit and now this kind of hodgepodge thing that's taken across the country so it that's but here's here's two examples that's happening at the olympics to go back up to your question one athlete said this is awesome mike and this athlete is a absolute flat out world leader in the sport their sport i'll keep gender and sport out of it for obvious reasons this is awesome i get to repair i get time i need time on my side and this is this could i hope it sure i sure hope it happens but i think i was probably going to make the team because to make most of the teams in the united states means that you're one of the best in the world and trials as you recognize is oftentimes a higher hurdle than the actual games correct and so i'm pretty sure i was going to make the team but whoo i got some time now well it depends on the individual because for the person who's coming up who's maybe a little bit on the younger side the little less experienced side this definitely plays to their advantage but for the person who's hanging on and this is their last dance one more year i don't know if i can do it especially when you're just trying to like put ramen in the bowl at night like most of these people they they you know there's this myth that they're all supported and have these sponsors and that's true for only a very few people most this is old data but i think it's it's about six years old that the majority of athletes or the average uh for the united states that go into the games that make it to the games are 150 000 in debt by the time they show up at the games crazy yeah and you know what we do we're celebrating you know we're watching on tv and we're like feeling so good about america and that aspirational all-in beauty uh that they represent of us like they're coming back and if they don't have a medal they're yeah you know did you see uh the way to go that hbo documentary i haven't seen it yet but yeah it's all about that yep whether you're atop the podium or an also ran once that sun is set on that event and you're overnight back to civilian life that transition is rough and i'm sure you deal with that a lot with the athletes that you work with transitions are really hard we're in a massive transition right now you know all of us are in transitional phase right now but transitions out of sport which you well recognize is really tricky and so that being said there are some frameworks to help through transition um north stars realigning the north star realigning purpose and life is kind of where it starts and so right now for all of us that's there is a moment right now for all of us to say okay what's my north star what does north star mean purpose what is my purpose and so that's a big conversation that i have with folks um touching a touchstone on a regular basis okay let's go back to purpose and i found that most people don't know their purpose they can't articulate it because it feels so big it feels like well how do you know your purpose aren't those people that have purpose the lucky ones and they just kind of knew early on i don't have purpose my purpose is for my family well that's purpose now so if purpose there's three components to purpose it's got to matter to you alone have meaning to you the second is it is bigger than you and the third it's future oriented so as you're trying to articulate what is my purpose in life it just needs those three factors and then if that feels too big you can say well what is my purpose for this month you can thin slice purpose you can then slice it all the way down to what's my purpose today and if you did a bunch of those in a row you probably snap up to larger purpose and so you can then slice it it's not in that in that framework it seems digestible what's the difference between purpose and vision like in compete to create you talk a lot about vision like you need to have this vision this this idea of what you want your life to look like and you have to put intentional attention on developing that and that's challenging to me because i don't know that i've really thought that through very much for myself we can talk about that later but how do you distinguish purpose from vision are those similar are they two different things yeah this is where like language is really important and so vision is really about when you use your imagination and you think about what it's like to be you or it's like or what the environment that you want to co-create to be but if we just talk about you for a minute when you close your eyes and use your imagination what is the vision that you can create about your best you know like what does it look and feel like and so that's what that is about what's the vision of your potential whatever word we want to use that when i say those words out loud like your best and potential it feels so the language doesn't do it quite right because it seems right yeah geoistic yeah that's right but it really is the mechanism that's underneath when you close your eyes and create an imagination of what could be what you would like your future to be that's what vision is about purpose is the why that sits underneath it like what what is your life purpose and the vision imagination is what does that look and feel like when that purpose is um is aligned with the man or woman or person you want to be um does that help mm-hmm and then underneath that is like mission like little missions like little missions it still feels esoteric like trying to figure out how to drill that down into you know a practical application on a day-to-day basis and then let's complicate it because then you got like what's your philosophy all right right yeah i got to have a purpose a vision and a philosophy come on come on man you need all of them you know i got [ __ ] to do but that's right i gotta pay some bills too you know like yes but so purpose is this thing like what am i doing with my time here vision is what does it look like when it's firing on all cylinders and then philosophy is what are the guiding principles you know is love a guiding principle that is important to you is kill or be killed a guiding principle is um capitalism at all cost you know winner go home or is it you know something on the other side which is like uh cooperation is it um uh i'm blanking on like different principles that that matter but so principles that's your philosophy vision is what does it mean when you use your imagination go big figure it out like not the what but the how and then what about values because that's come up on the podcast a lot like aligning your actions with your what is your value system and are you aligning your actions with that value system it's cool that's those are principles values are principles values in action are really first principles yeah and so i would not separate those two seems like a lot of work does it yeah okay hold on when you use your imagination and you think about here you go you're turning it on me you want to wait for it away from our pocket one way for the other one okay well i'll indulge you a little bit yeah so when you use your imagination and you think about what it's like to be you when you're like just at your best what's that what's that about what are the words you use what are the images that come up effortless uh strong capable articulate and then what are you doing to express those characteristics like when now we're using imagination about what's possible in your life so it's about you being that way but then what do you think that is is it um let's do sport for a minute is it like i don't know being in the super bowl is it breaking records is it you know there's some concreteness now to get into is it building a media empire for you is it um you know being like absolutely a community-minded person like when you when you go there what is how does it start to create some texture or some shape yeah i i think that and maybe we could talk about this more on your show but i look at like let's just take this podcast for example so i approach this much like i would approach a race i trained as a swimmer as a kid i learned visualization techniques i learned how to train my body and my mind to prepare for an event and i carry those tools into everything that i do so today i show up i prepare so that i'm ready i get in the right frame of mind and mindset i try to make sure i get enough sleep and that i'm nourished and all of those things so that i can show up and be the best version of myself in this conversation the goal being to have the the most present authentic best version of what this conversation could possibly be in the same way that when i would get up on the blocks for a swimming race i visualized it so much that now it's just a matter of executing right it's different in that in a swimming race there's much more that you have control over there's fewer variables i don't know what you're thinking what you're going to say okay this is great and i have to just be present and available for whatever is going to happen and not try to control it so there's a there's a relinquishing in it but i don't think about like oh i'm going to build this huge media company or i want to influence this many people like i just try to i'm much more in the moment of i i trust and believe that if i repeatedly show up with the best version of who i can possibly be that those other things kind of take care of themselves okay so awesome you've got the the frameworks and the process to show up and be your very best you know that flat out you know how to do that yeah i've been doing that my whole life that's right so that's baked and that's where you just went in this conversation so then i if we were if you and i were kind of drilling down which we can we can do later this will be fun but if we're drilling down i'd say okay so you know what here's a vision that somebody said let's get the best racers in the world together uh swimmers and let let's see who actually excels let's see who can actually peak and prime and bring it amongst the best that's a vision and then then if that person if that person was you you were creating that vision for swimming okay and then i would double click about the vision for you and say what what is it like for you when you're building towards that vision and you're like oh i want to be free what were the words used there's an effortlessness to the way that i would work and so that's starting to shape a vision okay then i would say well what's the purpose of this why do this why create this vision for your life what you what it is that you're creating but who the man that you want to become through this exercise what's the purpose and then you have to answer that right and then i'd say you could use values but i'd say what are your what are your guiding principles because you're gonna have to make lots of choices and then when you're making those choices you know to be a savage in business or to be a collaborator whatever being orthogonal you got to make these micro decisions the better you know your principles the easier you can line up your thoughts words and actions right and then you'll be your best so i'll do this with you just super practical my purpose is to help people live in the present moment more often that's it that's my purpose in life is to help people live in this moment more often and what i know is that to do that we have to condition and train our minds it's very specific i love that i i would have thought you would have said something like i wanna i want to help people achieve their potential or i want people to i want to help people uh you know unlock their most authentic self or their best self i think that's cool you know but those are broader yeah that's specific yeah for me because those things occur as a result of being more present in your life yeah yeah so what my purpose and remember when we go back to the science is that there needs to be three components it needs to matter to you uh yes i want people to like be their very best whatever but you know what i want to help people understand because this is the key hole living in the present moment and knowing how to condition and train your mind so that you can be present more often across potentially any condition that you are gonna find yourself in [ __ ] that's the key hole for me that's what gets my hair to stand up because i know what's possible for people when they invest in the inner life and and so so then the next is what's the vision the vision is a community of people that are flat out flourishing right and so i want to be part of that community i want to curate that community that's actually what we have in the finding mastery community right now and so because they're investing in their mind and training their mind and organizing their inner life so we're creating a community of flourishing and that becomes this exponential what happens if you've got a bunch of people that are like really thriving in the right way i don't know yet my imagination hasn't gone there yet i i i wish that i could get there i don't have that yet and then i've got first principles that are guiding my choices guiding my words and my thoughts and my actions so i can be about it um in any moment of test there's a lot of clarity there how long did it take you to arrive at this oh i've been chipping away chipping away chipping away my mentor what's it really about mike what are you really doing chipping away chipping away every time i read i bounce it up against am i full of [ __ ] is this right you know like so it's a work in progress it's um it's part of the ecosystem of my inner life that i'm bouncing up against those and i'm reserving the right rich to change it too yeah you know like but it's been but this is what you take to these corporations when you and coach carroll consult right you talk about this in the book like working with microsoft and these companies where you get people to really drill down on on these things for themselves yeah so we this is a cool story this is i'm able to talk about this is that it's in page four five six of satya nadella's book hit refresh and so satya is the ceo of microsoft so we're doing a bunch i was doing a bunch of work with satya and his executive leadership team and it's an eight hour training and subsequently we've trained about 30 to 40 000 people across their organization at eight hours a person on how to train their mind think about that investment oh my goodness that's a real investment so we that's why we built this online course and the book is meant to be a tandem to it but that's why we built this online course and that's the real mechanism i think to help align my purpose is it's an eight-hour training to show you how to condition your mind in the practices and a community of people that are doing it together so we got to the place where we talked about philosophy and satya had a moment and he's i don't know maybe six months into the job and he uh 17 15 or so direct reports 180 000 employees roll up to these 15 16 people multi-billion dollar corporation and he pauses he checks the room and he says our mission is real and it's big and we're trying to do something amazing and so what i want to do is i want to know you i want you to know each other i want you to know me and so let's spend whatever amount of time we need right here to get our philosophies our true philosophies in line and then share them with each other amazing moment yeah that's pretty cool yeah so running a massive organization like coach carroll running the seahawks right like creating a culture of openness and transparency where if you can get everybody on the same page and align then you become unstoppable and what we found is like a 30 30 30. so 30 in a so culture what is culture it's it's a pin it's a word for it's an emblem for um the relationships so relationships are the artifact of whatever the culture is and so if you can create a container a space for people to have great relationships and you got a really clear north star you got something and so it's a 30 30 30 30 of the folks in in your organization or your family are going to be all about the first principles and the mission you know and the purpose they're like yeah this is i love this place 30 are going to be like what are we doing right like this is just my job man let me go back to work and you know what you are full of bs like what are you talking about like relationships you know and then there's a middle 30. that middle third is the swing voters that's it man so work with them you know to swing 15 20 of that you got something special i wrote down this line from from the book um that that hit me which is through relationships we become and that's another kind of theme that that underscores all of this so explain what that means because it relates to what you just said yeah i think that it's we're right on it is that first the relationship with yourself your relationship with others with mother nature through those relationships you become the person that hopefully you are working toward and if you're not purposeful about it you'll become something you'll become someone and if you become a bit purposeful about it and you have that you use your imagination or you calibrate with your trusted uh community of mentors or wise men and women and people that you say who am i who do i want to become [ __ ] that's a real question so through relationships we reveal we become the person that we are becoming and so that's the idea and then uh last little fun science note is that harvard did a really really cool study do you remember the study at 75-year study maybe i don't know and they did it on fulfillment in life so they tracked people for 75 years and then basically they wanted to understand what goes into living a fulfilled life not cool so they basically they said okay at the end of the study did you live a fulfilled life 75 years or not and then they drill down underneath what are those practices and one of those practices um there's two really important findings that i i want to share one is that those that were fulfilled wrestled with the deep questions of life they didn't solve them but they wrestled what is my purpose what does it mean to be alive in modern times how do i work with money what are we doing here what happens after life you know what happens after death i should say and so those are like really big challenging grocky type questions those that wrestled with them reported to live a more fulfillment that's counterintuitive because when i think of the individual that's wrestling with those questions i picture the tortured soul yes that's the work though that is the work required you know like tell me you're not better because you you suffer a little bit in your training and you suffer a little bit in trying to find the right word to hit on your um next book or your current book you know like there's a there is a little bit of um work and struggle that goes into it yeah so yeah and the second one the second pillar of that finding was relationships meaningful relationships for those who are fulfilled and it doesn't mean that somebody loves you it means that you have someone and people to love do you think that that um that individual who's wrestling with these fundamental questions about what it you know what life is and what it means is that teachable or trainable or are people just some people hardwired to be you know prone to that kind of thought process well i think if um let's be uber practical if you're if your thought processes throughout the day are how am i gonna eat tonight how am i gonna feed my kids um yeah the larger questions are indulgence that's right indulgences so once you get that kind of basic stuff as well secured as you can it doesn't mean that this is only for the independently wealthy that don't need to think about mortgage that's not me so you know once you get kind of some basic frames of stability and security for safety and shelter and food and that stuff you provided the luxury to say okay what are we doing here because i'm working my ass off you know and i'm trying to figure it out what am i trying to figure out and i think it's a really important question to explore and so that's that's the nature of it so with this uh um purpose of trying to get people more rooted in the present moment on the front lines of this battle are these devices which are scientifically devised to maximize distraction to addict us to take us out of the moment like i feel like that's where we need to put our intentional attention right now if we're going to win the war of being present yes so talk about that a little bit i mean you open the book talking about that a little bit and the work that tristan harris is doing which i think is super important and i think this is a really big deal i don't think anyone would disagree with that yeah i think so and i don't want to uh knock technology at the same level it's easy for us to kind of pop uh take pot shots at technology um i'm not suggesting that's where you're going but i just want to kind of say that because i'm about to get because mike you work with microsoft [Laughter] yeah no no but i think that it's doing uh it's changing our world and it's really helping us reimagine potential and i just want to get a quick note is that when i grew up surfing we had to wait a month or two months before the magazine would come out with the new skills that the greats were doing and so iteration would happen around that month you know like the young groms would see it and be like that look at that you know like that's what the pioneers are doing that's what the high performers are doing and so human potential would progress at the rate of um creativity which is that that it's not creativity and innovation is rare it really is but when you can see somebody else be creative or innovate and then it speeds up that thing right the acceleration of information dissemination is related directly to the rate at which creative expression and innovation can occur amen look at your linear logical lawyer brain yeah making sense of everything good yes no i remember that i mean for me it was swimming world magazine you know that's right yeah on my bed stand and you would just count the days until it was gonna be in the mailbox that's right and that was the only way of like knowing what was going on and now that technology has advanced in such a rapid rate that you know we're seeing it daily we're seeing innovations and creativity and you know thin herd potential pushing stuff happening every day and so those clips are happening in a way that almost is overwhelming and so let's just talk about how our ancient brain works in modern times so our ancient brain it really hasn't evolved as fast as technology let's be clear about that and modern technology they understand the brain and the mind so the brain is the hardware to oversimplify this beautiful set of three pounds of tissue that sits on our skull it's the hardware and we've got some software let's call it the mind right now to oversimplify this they're better at it than most of us and so they know how to manipulate the brain to be attracted to their technology they know how to manipulate the mind to be attracted to their technology that's their business and they've got scores of phds that know how to create dopamine hits which if you take a lot of dopamine it would it's called cocaine so they know how to get the brain primed for that good stuff i said good stuff to somebody you know they've struggled i don't know if cocaine was a drug of choice for you or not but um no i was i was too s i knew i would like it too much yeah right yeah so okay so um so anyways they're better at it than we are and they're certainly better at it than a 14 year old is and when i say better is that as soon as we have some dopamine and some feel good stuff on our brain our brain is saying give me more give me more and what's required to that is some breaking mechanisms some self-control some awareness to pull away from the the slow drip of dopamine and that takes some discernment it takes some skill it takes some real grit to do that and it's really hard to do if purpose back to that isn't clear because it is so immediately a fix uh what's a word just attractive it's so immediately feeding and compelling as a good word that it's a nice easy trade for that versus anxiety versus purpose and certainly if purpose is not clear this uh invitation to explore a slow drip of dopamine is way better than anxiety depression or this muddled up purpose or if my purpose feels like it's just to work in this system to make somebody else money the entrepreneur the owner the factory line worker whatever so so um so what do we do i don't have an answer well it becomes incumbent upon us to create healthy boundaries around these things which takes a lot of work you know because it is so alluring you know i think from a neurological perspective what is the long-term impact of constantly enduring these dopamine hits like when i was a kid like a dopamine you know i wasn't getting dopamine hits throughout the day so what happens when you extrapolate that out over a number of of decades what does that do to the human psyche in the human machine we find ourselves with the inability to be bored and that space um boredom is like a negative connotation to space and boredom space is the place of create creative spark and inspiration awareness insight yes and so um it's where imagination you know really can flourish so i've been bored you know and it means that i don't really know what to do with myself in this present moment and um i'm struggling to be creative and and whatever so we're we're finding i i think that if you're thinking about your kids for a moment is that um there's some cool practices that we can talk about like um like my son you know they my son's school taught him this is that you don't charge phones and technology he doesn't have a phone he's 12. but you don't charge anything in your bedroom so you charge it out of your bedroom um he takes technology breaks all the time because he kind of he can recognize the difference between um the the freedom to create in that white boredom space if you will and how kind of relaxing and rewarding that is as opposed to like the stimulating on button he loves that you're on button too now so do i you know so there's there's practices to be uh concerned about and at the same time technologies here it's not going anywhere so we need we need to have a relationship with technology too yeah i just watched my daughters and this is this is the vernacular with which they relate to their peers like they have to be fluid in this language in order to fit in and to survive so it's about where does that tip into unhealthy unhealthy relationship or a dependent relationship well you know when you and i were growing up if we didn't get invited to the party on a friday or saturday night or get invited to go to wherever or go on that surf trip for me uh you find out about it kind of later yeah not now no it's happening in real time on snapchat it's like whoa yeah you know so it's brutal yeah it's really brutal there i there's a this moment where i realized my philosophy was coming through and parenting when um my son was in this small like he's as old as he now he's 12. and he was not interested in sport at this age but he wanted to kind of play with his friends and it was a basketball team and some of the other parents were um were were like really frustrated that these eight-year-olds were losing and i turned to the dad and i was like this is my philosophy coming out and i was like no no this gives him a great chance to figure out losing too and he looked at me like you're a loser gervais like what do you mean you want to teach your kids how to lose i was like yeah yeah of course yeah i want i want to figure out how to do that understand this thing about not keeping score um i do i think it's you you know why we're doing it yeah i understand why we're doing it but it goes back to what you said earlier about the most interesting people some of your favorite people are the people who have like under they've they've they've had pain in their life they've grappled with it they've wrestled with it and they've undergone change like i know some of the most my favorite people are all people that kind of had hard childhoods they got a lot of struggle and it's made them you know really amazing individuals but how do you square that with your impulse as a parent to protect your child and you know immunize them from any kind of hardship there's an athlete that i spent a lot of time with he was mvp a couple years i don't think he's not in the hall of fame but mvp a couple years and i said hey how you doing i saw him a couple years after and i said how you doing he said great you know like transition was awesome so good i said how's your son and he says he's good son was like 16. he's good what do you mean he says you know mike i gave him everything i gave him the best shoes the best coaches i had him invited to the best camps he was on the frickin floor of the nba kind of ball boy and just around it he loves basketball but i can't give him the one thing that i had the drive and the way he said that was i had nothing i can't give him nothing so he goes i don't know if i made a mistake but i didn't have cool shoes i didn't have right coaches i was left out of the rich kid club and you know what it taught me i had a [ __ ] fight i had to scrap drop my hips figure it out but when i got on the court it was on and i had purpose and i had fill in the blanks of all the stuff we're talking about and he knew exactly where he wanted to go he had a vision of what his future could be and he had this incredibly crisp every day was a mission to get closer to the to the purpose and the the vision and goes i can't give him that and so man that was an attunement moment for me like yeah i want my son to have a great education and this that and the other yeah i mean that's the the peril of every you know uh self-made man success story right yeah it's that scrappiness that got them to that place and then their kids have a totally different experience did you ever read the i think it was called g generational wealth g1 g2 g3 so g1 are the scrappers you know bold risk getting after it you know big vision type stuff for i'm talking about generational wealth g2 kind of hold the line a little bit but don't really grow it because they're afraid they were so close to the the heat of the the g1 and talking about like the vanderbilts right yeah generation one generation two you know the sons and daughters in generation three they kind of squander it they're like yeah i'm not close to the fire happens every time and i got i got 30 million in the bank and i'm 14 million you're 14 years old like what are you what are we talking about you know so yeah that's it's an interesting social study there yeah i don't know how you fixed that one maybe maybe what uh what what's his name um nebraska legend one of the wealthiest people alive uh warren buffett yeah he's not giving his kids right hasn't given his kids much bold well that's a weird one too when you make that much money and then you're like well i'm just gonna give it all away like what is your driving purpose like what i don't unders i don't understand that drive at that level when you're talking about those kind of numbers and so there's definitely odd behaviors in there it's just it's not it's nothing that interests me you have to i don't know if it's still true but if the stock market is up he gets mcdonald's every day have you heard this urban i have yeah yeah i think that's apocryphal or he and he still lives in the same house yeah i don't know i don't know him and i don't know these but it's a pretty funny story i know yeah well like so it's not about money for him but then he's a you know it's it's a mystery box to me um one more thing i wanted to explore with you you posit the question in compete to create like what is there a single determinant of success right so talk to me a little bit about that what's driving success i mean we just talked about scrappiness yeah that opens up the door to grit and angela duckworth's work and yeah andrews erickson's work and all these things that you explore it's not that simple for me right that's the question is there a single determinant and if we had to hang our hat on something we'd probably say you're you're likely not going to ever kind of reach your full expression of who you are as a person without real work and so that's where grit hangs here so grit has three components this is angela duckworth's work passion perseverance for long-term goals so you could replace i like to replace long-term goals because they feel so mechanical to like the vision that you hold for yourself so do you have enough passion day in and day out and do you have the internal skills so all of these are internal skills do you have the internal skills to roll with the punches to persevere during the down hard times and then is the vision clear enough because if the vision and the purpose and those those two words are not crisp and clear enough the pain will win when purpose is small pain will win when purpose is big you'll deal with some pain and that's the perseverance piece of this model and so um we could what we do in the online course is we double down in the book we double and triple down and kind of some of the stuff but to make it simple there is not one golden thread for determinants of success but if i was to hang my hat on something i'd say grit is really important because it's got three main components yeah and so i wish i could find i'm on a little bit of a pursuit to figure out is there golden thread that binds those that explore the reaches of human potential i haven't found one yet um yeah and grit is teachable greatest teeth well each all three of you should have told your buddy in the nba about his son i know i know you know right yeah it is and so i feel like it'd be hard to teach though grit it just feels like certain people have a motor you have you have a son like you you know i've i've got a bunch of kids like they're all different man and they all have their their motors are calibrated differently and that had nothing to do with anything julie or i did and i think that if when you think about all three of those it's so mechanical to say like what we did what's your vision that's pretty mechanical requires some honesty and some imagination and a little accountability to sharpen it up so that one's interesting but certainly goals are relatively easy it's an old conversation about setting goals right and when i ask people what do you think's harder when i go into a room and there's a thousand people and we're teaching about um or even a small room with 12 people you know it doesn't matter like and we're teaching about grit and i say what do you think's harder passion living with passion or perseverance you know dealing with the hard stuff what do you think the room does perseverance feels harder yeah my experience has been passion is way harder way harder you know perseverance dude you know it intimately inside and out most people that are successful they know how to roll with some stuff they are resilient can they get better at it probably you know that's a skill too resiliency is a psychological skill any skill can we can apply some effort towards we can get better at it but you can't manufacture passion i understand training for perseverance but how do you train to be passionate see and i love where you instantly take it because you're an examined serious person is that passion i'm going to take that i'm an examined serious person you are you are i think i'm sorry yeah yeah you are serious though right i don't know yeah you're serious i'm serious you know i don't want to be always serious but you know anyways so passion is um there's two things that get in the way of passion so consider passion that inner fire fatigue that'll put a heavy blanket on passion and fear so anxiety the chronic looping worry that things are going to go wrong and then the mismanagement of your energy system not sleeping right not eating right you know not moving right you know that fatigue that chronic stress the ability to manage chronic stress through breathing patterns eating patterns thinking patterns that that is the heavy blanket that's one of the heavy blankets that sits on the flame of passion and the other is you know just worrying like excessive worry about stuff passion feels like an unruly unpredictable energy source that's hard to control and hard to direct oh look at you you go it's big in you isn't it it's not a little flame for you huh well i don't know i i don't really i don't think about like you hear a lot about passion you gotta live a passionate life how to find your passion it's all about passion right and now there's this counter narrative like that you're seeing where you're being told forget about passion that's a fool's errand it's not about passion that's like you know not something you need to be thinking about and i sort of sit in this space where i don't feel like i don't understand where passion falls and all of this i understand drive i understand vision i understand purpose meaning and all of those things but passion just feels like something that's floating out in the clouds oh i can't really wrap my hands around so if we thought about it this way if we made it uber concrete which is um it's just that little fire in your belly to go do the thing to climb the hill to wake up and be about it you know it's that little fire in the belly that's the way i think about it and um this idea of where the fool's errand is for passion is that if you just the passion only comes from the special thing that you need to do it clouds out irrationality it can it can compel some bad choices yes it's certain yeah i wasn't going to go there yes i fully agree with that and but the idea is can you live with passion anywhere you go can you have a little fire in your belly in any room that you're in in any environment that you're in and that seems pretty daunting but that's cool like for me i like that and i'm not saying go chase your passion i'm saying be passionate and so where does that uh that hooks around to me to an ancient concept this is not something that i'm to stand on for science that's the animation of the spirit that call it a fire in your belly but the trinity is a really cool beautiful idea of that many many um spiritual frames kind of miss the subtlety about the animation of the spirit of the aliveness that comes with being human the animation of that magical world that we don't understand yet and but we think that there's probably something there you know call it spirituality so call it consciousness call it fill in the blank so man that's what that's all it is for me i want to be about it yeah so we all know we all know that that that guy or that woman who when they walk into a room they just light it up because they they just exude that in every facet of their life when i see those people i like marvel at that because it feels inaccessible but also i'm jealous like i want more of that in my life but then i'm not sure how to cultivate that i look at it as a god-given disposition that they have rather than something that they developed with some intentionality oh that's cool i think there's probably a predisposition again to that too but it's definitely something you can cultivate but the way to cultivate this is to get the heavy blankets off of it so it's like a um addition by subtraction so it's it's taking those heavy blankets i i really think that there's a couple great constrictors of the human experience right now and one of those is fatigue and so examining your recovery mechanisms in a significant way mm-hmm i'm not speaking to you rich but like the pejorative no i i i need this actually i understand what you're saying yeah that this is one of the great constrictors because chronic stress opens the floodgate for draining fuel quotes around fuel but it just drains organisms and so if we're not psychologically skilled to deal with the chronic stress no different than a dog you know when an alarm happens for a dog there's a threat and they walk away they go to the door the dormant or the the mailman's at the door and the dogs barking whatever and as soon as that threat goes away you know what the dog does they roll their head a little bit they roll their body and shake their tail and it's like they have just physically let go they don't hold resentments we we don't do that yeah so yeah i mean which we could it's the recovery mechanisms that pay dividends all right we got to wrap this up but let's close it down with maybe a couple simple tactics or tools that people could use that are feeling overwhelmed they're feeling the anxiety they're feeling the fear they're experiencing the vitriol they can't put the phone down leave us with some pearls um if i had pearls you know yeah pearls i got pearls well i'd say plenty of pearl necklace underneath that hoodie the hoodie yeah i'd say this i'd say um order one is um investigating your recovery mechanisms let's work in reverse order take a look at sleep take a look at the quality choices you're making around nutrition and make sure your hydration is right so these are all restorative type of ideas you know like get your heart rate up in an acute way if you don't have an underlying condition like get your heart rate up where you're stimulating your brain to say oh that's right we do hard things and so i'd say those are some easy frames to talk about harder to stay current with current consistent with and then i'd also say that mindfulness is a place to begin and if mindfulness seems too unavailable it's as simple as setting a timer following an inhale and then an exhale with all of your might and starting over every time that you notice that you're distracted and the moment that you notice that you're distracted just returning back to the inhale or the exo wherever you are [Music] eight minutes is good science 20 minutes is a little bit more interesting science you get to the ancients would say what are you doing timing this you know so um i'd say those are two kind of cool places to start and i go way upstream to say start with something writing down um your philosophy the guiding principles in your life maybe start with your purpose if those feel daunting start building relationships when you're talking about stuff that really matters to you and you know for a long time people would say to me mike what are the what are the best tools to invest in and and this is kind of this conversation but i'd be remiss if i said it's a fundamental organization of your life to be and become the man woman or person you want to be and then the second thing that i missed for most of my professional life is the importance of your intimate relationships outside of the craft outside of your business that you're doing um i wouldn't be the human i am today without those intimate relations and my wife at you know ground zero so um you know working on being giving love and giving away as often as you possibly can and so it ends up coming back around for the most part 100 yeah give more love i like it powerful mike gervais hey man i appreciate you you're welcome here anytime come back and talk to me some more i always find it nourishing it's a pleasure to spend time with you so thank you thank you if you want to learn more about michael check out his podcast finding mastery it's uh it is masterful can't recommend it more highly um compete to create why is it just a an audio book how come you didn't do a print book was it just a deal with audible or yeah it was an audible original so we went in a little bit reverse order and um i like the idea of not burning down trees um but now i'm craving something tangible to hold so we're gonna get to that but that's not for about a year away yeah it's cool it's really well done pete carroll pops in from time to time yeah thanks man uh to drop some of his pearls and then i liked how you you layered in some stuff from your podcast into it which is what an audiobook should be it's a it's a dynamic uh digital document so cool um anything else coming up you've got this like online football training thing too right 11 on football or some nice thing you did with nike football oh yeah that's uh just you know people are interested in the mental part of the game at scale right now and brands across the world are really interested in you know how do we organize our inner life and train our minds so it's just a conversation that's happening right um i there's a swell happening in the business world right now there's an absolute swell not from an anxiety fixing standpoint type of thing you know but like hey are people our most important part of the company how do we invest in them rather than teaching them how to sell better or market better how do we help them live better and so that's that's the part i'm super excited about right cool man all right let's do it again thanks brother peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 91,004

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, Compete To Create, high performance sports psychology, Finding Mastery Podcast, Rich Roll Michael Gervais, michael gervais, pete carroll, high performance psychology, luke aikins, psychologist on covid 19, psychologist on pandemic

Id: yXmOHP5sBxs

Length: 111min 42sec (6702 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020