Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

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.
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Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
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#FindingMastery #ThemaBryant #DrMichaelGervais #MattersOfTheHeart #Relationships #Trauma #Healing #Shame #EmotionalSafety #SelfWorth #Attachment #Loneliness #Therapy #Psychology #MentalHealth #HighPerformance #Emotionaltrauma #reltionshiptrauma #selfhelp #selfhealing
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“…the stories that we tell ourselves and other people become our lives.”
— IN-Q
This is a conversation about the story you are living inside, about creativity as a practice rather than a talent, and about why being witnessed helps us release what we might otherwise carry alone.
Before this conversation started, IN-Q walked the entire Finding Mastery team through a poetry workshop. Each person wrote about a personal experience with risk that changed the direction of their life, then read it out loud to the room. Mike opens this episode saying he has never started a podcast feeling the way he felt coming out of it.
IN-Q is a spoken word artist, two-time Emmy-nominated lyricist, multi-platinum songwriter, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of Inquire Within. He has written songs with Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, and Aloe Blacc, and he was one of the original members of Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles, the open mic he calls church without religion.
IN-Q and Mike get into the three guidelines he gives people before they write, and the night he read his old breakup poems and realized every one of them applied to the new breakup.
He also describes giving himself the room every morning to decide not to be a poet. Choosing it again each day – instead of waking up already being one – keeps the work from turning into a life he inherited from a version of himself that has already faded away.
Both of them tell stories about an old chip on the shoulder, and the two trace back to a similar place. The chip became fuel. IN-Q calls it unhealthy fuel, and describes chipping away at it now, trying to turn it into a sculpture.
Change your story, change your life, is how he puts it. He also tells you exactly where to start.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources
IN-Q’s Website: in-q.com
IN-Q’s Books: Inquire Within, The Never Ending Now Poetry Journal
IN-Q’s Album: The Never Ending Now (featuring Isabella Turso)
IN-Q’s Poetry Special: IN-Q – Live at the Ace Theatre, streaming on Amazon Prime Video
IN-Q’s Poetry Workshops and Retreats: in-q.com/poetry-workshops
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Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
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What if the calmest person in the room isn’t avoiding pressure, but experiencing it differently?
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is one of the world’s most recognized spiritual teachers and humanitarian leaders. He founded the Art of Living, which teaches meditation, breathwork, and service in over 180 countries, and he is the author of Notes for the Journey Within.
Stress has a use, and Gurudev compares it to a pinch of salt in food, useful in that amount and unconsumable past it. Most of us have taken on far more than that, and have never learned how to put it down or manage it well.
Gurudev and Mike get into why he defines success as exhibiting your limitation, why he thinks failure is worth being proud of, and why authority over your own mind is the only authority there really is. Mike asks him when his body last went into fight or flight. He says it never has.
This one is for people who are working hard and running warm. What Gurudev points back to is something simple and repeatable: breathing, meditation, and learning how to release stress before it accumulates.
Near the end, Mike asks him to finish a sentence: Mastery is... Gurudev’s answer: recognizing you are not there.
Enjoy the conversation.
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Links & Resources:
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Website: gurudev.artofliving.org
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Books: Notes for the Journey Within: Essentials of the Art of Living, An Intimate Note to the Sincere Seeker, Celebrating Silence
The Art of Living Foundation: artofliving.org
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
Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X
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