Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

When Robert Greene woke from his stroke, he looked out the hospital window and everything had an intensity he had never seen.
A radiant glow in the sky and in the leaves of the trees. Crows flying past the window. The word he uses is incandescence. Lying there, he took it as a signal that it was finally time to write the book he had been thinking about for twenty years.
Robert Greene is the author of The Laws of Human Nature, Mastery, and The 48 Laws of Power, New York Times bestsellers with millions of copies sold worldwide. His new book is The Law of the Sublime. It took seven years, and because he has difficulty typing now, he wrote the whole thing by hand, over a hundred notebooks.
Robert and Mike get into what the sublime actually is, the twelve doorways he maps around it, and the thing he says narrows it: self-absorption.
What Robert wants is for you to look at the world the way he has had to learn to look at it. We are only alive once, as he puts it, and most of us are not really seeing it.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources:
Robert Greene’s Website: powerseductionandwar.com
Robert Greene’s Books: The Law of the Sublime, The Laws of Human Nature, Mastery, The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene’s Newsletter: Weekly email at powerseductionandwar.com
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Why is change so hard, and what actually makes it possible?
Dr Joe Dispenza returns to Finding Mastery to talk with Dr Michael Gervais about change, health, and the patterns that shape our lives. Dr Joe is an author, lecturer, and researcher whose work on meditation and the mind-body connection draws people from around the world to his weeklong events.
He says many of us run on familiar thoughts and reactions, often without noticing them. He describes health changes he has observed among participants at his events, and explains how he interprets the data.
Joe and Mike discuss the prefrontal cortex and its role in setting a clear intention, why the present moment is where we encounter the unknown, and what can shift when attention moves from a narrow focus to a wider one.
Joe’s definition of mastery is knowing that you know. With it, he says, comes a kind of quiet grace.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources
Join Dr Joe for a life-changing retreat experience filled with connection, inspiration, and transformation. https://bit.ly/48uAADh
Dr Joe Dispenza’s Website: drjoedispenza.com
Dr Joe Dispenza’s Books: New You, New Life: Reprogram Your Mind and Body to Create the Future You Want (audio original), Becoming Supernatural, You Are the Placebo, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
Dr Joe Dispenza’s Retreats and Online Courses and Programs: drjoedispenza.com
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Mike’s son, Grayson, wrote a book to parents about young athletes, and it challenges how we think about supporting our kids through sport.
Those of us with kids in youth sports know what the experience gives them... teamwork, commitment, the skill of balancing a full week. We have come at that subject often on this podcast, usually through the lens of the coach, the parent, or the research. This one comes from the kid’s angle – from the court, the car ride home, and the receiving end of those parent and child conversations.
Grayson has played competitive club volleyball for six years, four of them as a varsity player and a captain. He wrote the book as a high school senior, in the middle of his last season, while the lessons were still fresh.
It’s called Dear Parent: Sport Isn’t Easy. Here’s How to Have Our Back. Eleven chapters… tough teammates, coaches who get something wrong, and what a club sport actually costs in time and sleep. Each one is a story, what he took from it, and something a parent can try that week.
Mike and Grayson get into the moments Grayson felt supported and the times where he didn’t, how he learned to separate the player from the person when a season went sideways, and the thin line between extra work and burnout.
You also get to watch Mike as a dad and Grayson as a son.
The question the book leaves us with is not whether our kids’ teams won or lost... It is whether we honored the person while we were developing the player.
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Links & Resources:
Grayson Gervais’s Book: Dear Parent: Sport Isn’t Easy. Here’s How to Have Our Back.
Book Website: dearparentbook.com and you can get your copy here.
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Finding a way to coach yourself with challenge and grace can be an extraordinary unlock for performance.
Mikaela Shiffrin is an Olympic gold medalist and the winningest alpine ski racer in World Cup history. We first released this conversation in 2023. Since then, she has won Olympic slalom gold at Milano Cortina and her sixth overall World Cup title, tying the women’s record, and what she describes in this conversation is the inner work that was already well underway.
Mikaela and Mike get into the performance anxiety that had her sick at the start gate years into her career, the self-coaching habit she developed to put her own assessment first, and the race she lost at Killington that she calls the most free she has ever felt in her career. She is open about how long she let the outside world dictate how she felt about her own skiing before she reclaimed that for herself.
Coaching yourself well is incredibly difficult, and Mikaela shows us in this conversation what becomes possible when you do it in a world-class way.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources
Mikaela Shiffrin: linktr.ee/mikaelashiffrin
Mikaela Shiffrin’s YouTube Series: Moving Right Along, on her channel youtube.com/@mikaelashiffrin
Mikaela Shiffrin’s Podcast: What’s the Point with Mikaela Shiffrin: listen here
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What happens to the rest of your relationships when the one you have with yourself goes untended?
Dr. Thema Bryant is a clinical psychologist, tenured professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, director of the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory, and former president of the American Psychological Association. She hosts The Homecoming Podcast and wrote Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love.
Thema emphasizes that one of the biggest predictors of our mental wellbeing is not your achievement or your bank account. It is the people you spend your time with.
Thema and Mike get into her working definition of trauma, the difference between guilt and shame, and why so much people pleasing begins as a strategy for staying safe. Thema talks about being evacuated from Liberia as a teenager during a civil war, and the shift in her own identity after the death of her mother.
This conversation is also for the person doing well by every external measure who sees no reason to do any of this work. It is not that you need to, Thema says. It’s that you deserve to.
At one point, Mike asks her how we would lead differently if we knew what she knew. Thema’s answer is that you would not leave yourself behind.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources:
Dr. Thema Bryant’s Website: drthema.com
Dr. Thema Bryant’s Books: Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love, Reclaim Yourself: The Homecoming Workbook, Homecoming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole, Authentic Self, The Antiracism Handbook
Dr. Thema Bryant’s Podcast: The Homecoming Podcast with Dr. Thema (video version on YouTube, audio on Spotify and Apple Podcasts)
Mentioned in this conversation: Dr. Lisa Miller’s research on spirituality as a protective factor for mental health. Her Finding Mastery episode: The Psychology of Spirituality | Dr. Lisa Miller. Her book: The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life.
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery
Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter
Download Dr. Mike’s Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset
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