Mindset, Mindfulness, and More | Ask Me Anything (AMA) #1 with Dr. Michael Gervais

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Hi, Dr. Michael Gervais here.

And in the Finding Mastery podcast, we get lots of questions after each episode.

And the question is really about, like, how do I apply this in my life? How do I apply the principles that you're talking about around the psychology of excellence, the psychology of being your best? How do I work with those in my own life? And so in this AMA, we're going to talk about those. We're going to address those the best we can. We got lots of questions, and we're just going to kind of go through them. And we'd love for you to leave questions that you would like explored here. If this works, we'll do more of this. And listen, I love the Finding Mastery podcast, and I love this community. And so this is a real joy to do this.

SPEAKER_2 (0:47)

All right, first question is from Ryan. What are the three things the average high performer needs to add to the routine?

Michael Gervais (0:57)

So, first, I have an aversion of trying to get things down to buckets of threes and fives and sevens, and I know that people like that, because it's something like we can neatly remember. And so the first order of business is that it's not clean like these are the three. It doesn't work that way. But if we were to start somewhere, it'd be with awareness. So building awareness, awareness of how your thoughts and emotions work, awareness of how your inner life works. Like we need to have contact with our inner life. So awareness training is paramount, but it's not only awareness of your inner life, it's how the awareness of how the world around you is working.

And so when you have awareness of your internal life and your external world, how it's unfolding, you're in the game.

But if you don't have great awareness, you're not even in the game of high performance. And so some sort of awareness practice is foundational. The second is high performance is about doing difficult things, like getting right to the edge of the capacity, your capacity, staying in it, figuring it out, and executing and performing at a high level. Okay, so to do that, we need to build the capacity to handle ourselves in those moments. So some sort of capacity building process. What does that mean? That means like, now you hear people talk about doing cold showers or cold tubs or whatever. That's a capacity building from a physiological and a psychological perspective. So let's just say, for example, you get in a cold shower or cold tub, water's cold, great. You have that reaction of wanting to get out, it's normal, but you stand in it for a few more moments and breathe. You work with your mind in that high stress, high tense moment. So those types of practices are capacity building, every day doing something on that level. The third is recovery strategies.

If you're gonna get after it and go for it and do hard things and you wanna understand your capacity in life, you gotta recover. But intelligently recover every day. And there's a whole set of practices that people, I don't think we need to get into those, but like what do I do mechanically to recover?

There's lots of literature there. Sleep, hydration, nutrition, making sure that your movement strategies are right, that you're working on pliability and strength at the same time. And of course, thinking well, those are all part of the recovery process. So those three, I think, are paramount for Big Rocks.

SPEAKER_2 (3:32)

Ryan asked about what a high performer needs to add to the routine. Could you be a high performer without already having these in your routine?

Michael Gervais (3:42)

Yeah, you can, our bodies are amazing. And you can grind for a long time and arrive somewhere and strike and be really good at the thing. But at the same time, fall off a cliff. It's kind of what peak performance training is about. Like you arrive at the thing, you've grinded, but then there's a cliff. And so, yeah, you can do that. We see it all the time. But there's no sustainability in it. People don't last. And that's not the path of mastery. That's not how this works. So yeah, you can get by. So let's talk about stress. There's acute stress, moderate stress, and chronic stress. Under moderate stress, well, let me frame them. Acute stress is something happens, a gorilla runs in the room, bang, the whole thing kind of lights up, your system is on. And then we need to know how to shed that. And if we don't shed that, then we move into moderate stress.