The Psychology Of Winning The Super Bowl | Seattle Seahawks Coach Mike Macdonald

Mike Macdonald (0:00)

Players know, well, what do they know?

Well, they know who's full of shit. They know who's a good coach. They know who the best players are. They know what the organization is like. They just know. So if you go around trying to fool them, like shame on you, you have no idea.

Michael Gervais (0:13)

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers.

SPEAKER_3 (0:20)

A high performance psychologist named Michael Gervais.

Michael Gervais (0:23)

Who head coach Mike Macdonald and former head coach Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project.

SPEAKER_4 (0:32)

Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough.

Michael Gervais (0:37)

Today's guest is Mike Macdonald, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and the youngest head coach in modern NFL history to win a Super Bowl.

Mike Macdonald (0:45)

I'm not like coming to the table saying, hey, look, this is the Seahawk way of doing it. Go to page 43 It's like, no, I'm kind of new to this thing too, and we're going to apply our principles, but we're all going through this thing together.

Michael Gervais (0:56)

We explore one of the core principles shaping his team, through not around.

Mike Macdonald (1:00)

When the players felt that the coaches were in the fight with them and they said, hey, look, these are the things that we need to do a better job of to prepare you guys to go play mentally, physically, tactically, all those things. You know, we started to feel that buy-in from the players and our process started to improve.

Michael Gervais (1:15)

With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with my colleague, friend and Super Bowl winning head coach, Mike Macdonald. Coach, we, I have had the privilege to get to know you, and the community probably doesn't know the way that we know each other, other than you're the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and I've been fortunate to work with you the last year. And so, maybe just in your memory, maybe bring the listener up to speed on how we met and kind of what started that.

Mike Macdonald (1:51)

Yeah, it's funny, the things you don't know, you don't know, but have an idea of where we wanted to go from year one to year two. And John Schneider and I had some several conversations. And then from your relationship with him going back several years, we met up with you and Steve Houshka. And it just became really clear that you had a great, like a really cool perspective to something to offer that maybe I didn't know that I needed and kind of just hit it off. Like it felt like from our first conversations, you know, not to blow smoke or anything, but like it felt to be really trustworthy. And we had a lot of productive conversations. And then it just hit the ground running. I felt like I felt like we just really got off to a strong start. And we've just kind of been powering through ever since.

Michael Gervais (2:34)

Yeah, I didn't actually know that part of it, that you don't know what you don't know, which is like actually was an asset for you. And so what I remember about our first conversation is like, oh, OK, well, he works really fast. Oh, he asked really thoughtful questions. OK, plus, plus. He's like demonstrating that he's a great learner.

And come to find out, yes, on all of those. But one of your superpowers is that you really want to understand something and then put it into action.

Mike Macdonald (3:01)

Well, in our first conversation with John, I mean, I'm feeling you've asked this question before. But hey, what percentage would you attribute your team's performance to mental skills or just mental aptitude? And we always throw out a pretty big number. And you're like, well, if you actually believe that, well, we need to put some energy behind this. And then the things that you were talking about, I was like, man, the vision, I think that very similar, I think John and I's initial conversations with Jody about where we wanted to take the team, it had the same feeling of like, oh, our vision for where we want to take our football team.

And it felt like the things that you could one, add to it, but also help us get there, and things I felt like you thought were important, like you felt that alignment, and so that was exciting.