Mikaela Shiffrin | The World's Best Skier on Pressure, Passion & Perseverance

Mikaela Shiffrin (0:00)

I know I can do the work it takes to win again. That's the most free I've ever felt in my career. Just standing here being like, I don't care that I didn't win.

I know I can work hard enough to get back in a position. I might never win again, and I don't really care about that either. I just care that I'm willing to work hard enough to do it. Thank you.

Michael Gervais (0:27)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by training and training a high-performance psychologist. And I'm so stoked to welcome the absolute legend, Mikaela Shiffrin, to the podcast for this week's conversation.

She's earned the title, the most successful skier in the modern era. She's a two-time Olympic gold medalist. She's won 14 medals from 16 world championship races as of February of this year. And she's been named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. And in case you're wondering, she's only 28 years old.

So what does it take to become the winningest alpine skier of all time? Clearly, Mikaela has talent, confidence, discipline, but what sets her apart, as we'll hear in this conversation, is her commitment and honesty to work from the inside out. She's developed incredible abilities to tune out toxic mental noise, to perform right at the knife's edge, and to bounce back when it goes wrong, when it's hard, when it gets difficult. More than anything, her success comes from her unflappable courage in the face of challenge, where she says, the confidence to try and try again and again, even when things don't work out. When it comes to high performance, Mikaela is living and breathing the standards for greatness. So with that, let's dive right in today's conversation with Mikaela Shiffrin. Mikaela, I am so excited to finally have you on the podcast. I have wanted to have this conversation for a long time.

You're obviously a world class in how you approach life and what you do on the snow. So I'm really excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

Mikaela Shiffrin (2:24)

Thank you. It is such an honor to be talking to you.

Michael Gervais (2:28)

Awesome. Okay, good. So and what timing? I mean, with 2020, 2022 being, I don't know, seemingly from the outside, the toughest year of your life, but I don't know that for sure. And you might course correct that, but it was definitely one of the harder years I would imagine for you professionally.

And then to come out this year, like on an absolute tear, breaking the record for the most cup wins in history, 88, like amazing. How about that?

Mikaela Shiffrin (3:00)

Yeah, how about it? I don't know. I don't know what to say to that.

Michael Gervais (3:02)

I know. I mean, it's amazing. And also the best female athlete, you know, by the ESPYs for 2023, like, okay, so you're on it. Now, I want to start with a quote. Yeah, you are doing okay. I want to start us off with a quote by Lindsey Vonn.

And she wrote this about you. She said, with Serena Williams stepping away from tennis, there's room for another big female global sports superstar. And Mikaela can fill that opportunity. She's really stepped into the spotlight and done a great job moving the needle for our sport. She's competing against herself at this point and she could reach 100 wins. It's just a matter of how long Mikaela Shiffrin wants to keep at it. The sky's the limit for her.

So first, congrats on that.

Mikaela Shiffrin (3:53)

Yeah.

Michael Gervais (3:56)

What do you feel when I read that?

Mikaela Shiffrin (4:01)

On the one hand, I feel really quite honored. I feel honored that anyone would say anything like that about me.

And especially that somebody of such enormous caliber in my sport would say that about me. It's, yeah, it really, it's quite flattering. And I never really think about myself from that perspective of like, you know, now that Serena has stepped down, who's going to take her role? Because I look at so many athletes, female and male athletes, and I just, I feel like there's more than one role to be played.

And hopefully we have this, you know, we have all of the great athletes. And especially if we're specifically talking about female sports right now, we have all of the great women athletes coming up the ranks right now and performing. Maybe they've already established themselves. Maybe they're about to, but there's so, there's so much to watch. There's so many athletes to root for and to be motivated, inspired by. So like, I'm kind of trying to take this approach that maybe, maybe it sort of takes a little pressure off me, at least in my own mind, just to think that there's no one person who's carrying that torch. It's got to be all of us together.