Leadership, Forgiveness, Authenticity and More | Ask Me Anything (AMA) #2 with Dr. Michael Gervais

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Dr. Michael Gervais by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And welcome to another Ask Me Anything. I really love engaging with our community and getting the chance to answer some of your questions. The deep thought and the curiosity, the authenticity and the vulnerability that go into these questions being asked is noted. It's appreciated. If you'd like to submit a question for future episodes, you can email info at findingmastery.net or you can leave your questions in the comment section on YouTube.

Now, with the ambiguity in the world and the headwinds that we are facing, psychology could not be more important right now. If you want to have a high-performing life, you need psychological skills and practices that are fundamentally integrated into your life. I hope that this format can be a starting point for you to explore some of the psychological concepts and perhaps think about things in a slightly different way. But creating real change in your life, that takes a deep commitment to doing the work, to know yourself and to train your mind.

If you are finding value in this format, but want a deeper level of actionable training on some of the skills that we discuss, I really want to encourage you to check out our online psychological training course, where we've pulled together the best practices that interweave high performance psychology and wellbeing. We walk through 16 essential principles and skills for you to train your mind, so that you can consistently perform toward the upper edges of your capabilities.

And as a thank you for tuning in to this AMA, you'll receive $50 off when you enroll in the Finding Your Best course. If you're interested in signing up for the course, just head to findingmastery.net/course and enter the code findingmastery at checkout. So again, a sincere thank you for tuning in. And with that, let's get right to your questions.

SPEAKER_2 (2:23)

Travis writes, I've recently listened to your podcast with David Goggins and Dr. Mark Brackett. Though I get these two are serving very different purposes in their lives, I could not help but think about the differences between the Goggins' approach to feelings and Dr. Brackett's approach to emotional intelligence.

What are the similarities you see between the two of them?

Michael Gervais (2:46)

Similarities, okay. It's a cool question because Goggins, kind of oversimplify Goggins' approach, which is like stuff it down, do it. Don't whine, don't complain, no excuses, grind it out. Go do the fricking thing. Deal with your emotions later. Or when you start to feel something that's gonna get in your way, stuff it down. So, there's a time and place maybe for that. I don't resonate with it. I don't wanna be muted in my emotional experience in life. And the reason I'm gonna say that is because early in my life, if we oversimplify emotions and we just pick four of them really quickly, there's emotion of anger, there's happiness, there's sadness and fear.

If you just think about those for just a moment, there's a wider range, but this is kind of like a very basic rudimentary approach, is that early in my life as a young adolescent male, I was permitted to do kind of the almost all of the anger scale. But when I would be too angry, like there was a rage, that wasn't cool. So if the scale one to 10 and 10 being rage, I had to back that down to like no more than like say a seven.

Okay, on the happy scale, I could do a little bit happy. I could do one, two, three, but too much happy. It was like I wasn't serious. I was one of them that's like kind of airy, you know, like up in the clouds and not dealing with reality and like there's a softness that's not okay. So I learned that young. On the sadness, no, no, no, no, no. No, you don't do sadness.

Stuff that down, right? Little bit of happiness, all of anger, no sadness, and then fear, what are you talking about? Stuff that down, you don't do fear. So, and I don't think I'm that different than many people, certainly, you know, in the Western culture, like that would be almost like a pro-social way that you would raise a young boy.

And so, and I'm not speaking to my parents, I'm speaking to like the community around me that would give me a certain clue about how to deal with emotions.

So there's this limited range that I had as a young person, little bit of happiness, plenty of anger, nothing else.

So when Goggins says, toughen up, harden up, I'm like, I know that.