Cliff Avril, Retired NFL Defensive End

Cliff Avril (0:00)

Because you get this all the time, people are like, oh, you're retired, you know, you played 10 years in the league. What are you going to work for? Like 32 years old. Like, what do you mean? Like, everybody wants to roll out of bed and have a purpose.

So that's my anxiety more so than anything is like trying to figure out what that next thing is, what else I'm passionate about to wake up, roll out of the bed outside of obviously my family and my kids, but wake up out of bed and have a purpose.

Michael Gervais (0:35)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations, is to learn how the extraordinaries think and do, how they organize their internal world and their external life, to understand what they're searching for, what they're driven by.

Basically, we want to understand their psychological framework, the path that led them to now, and the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

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Now, this week's conversation is with Cliff Avril, a former NFL player, that's the National Football League, who is a member of the Seattle Seahawks team who won Super Bowl XLIX, and not only was he a member, he actually set a record by scoring only 12 seconds into the game. Pretty cool. Cliff and I met at the Seahawks, and I had the pleasure of catching up with him at the NFL Scouting Combine this past week in Indianapolis. And he recently retired after a great 10-year run in the league, and he's now in the transition process of searching for what to do next. What is his purpose now that the craft that he's dedicated more than half of his life to is no longer available?