Mastery is an Infinite Game with performance psychologist Mike Gervais | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

Confidence is super interesting. Like, it only comes from one place and one place only. Go on what you say to yourself.

But how on earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when, as social animals, I want to be included? I want to feel like I belong. I want to be trusted. I want to be a member of the tribe. I want to be welcomed and invited because not to be is to feel alone, to feel ostracized, to feel brushed aside.

Know your purpose. So it's no longer about identity. It's about something far larger. So your identity fades away. It just allows your identity of like, I have to perform to start to evaporate. And I'm performing because I want to contribute to something that's really meaningful and it's not Wall street, bottom line.

Mike, I'm so glad you came on the show. I am such a fan and I. I so enjoyed coming on your podcast, Finding Mastery, and I thought, you know, for those who don't know Finding Mastery, a, you're missing out, but B, how selfish am I to go and enjoy your company and not share you with everybody else?

That's great.

So thanks for. Thanks for joining our little podcast. For those who don't know you, you're a psychologist by training, and in particular, what I would, I guess high performance. Right? That's your specialty.

Correct.

And you worked with the Seahawks and other football teams. You come from sports.

Let's start for you talk about mastery over performance. And I find this is an important nuance because every CEO, you talk to CEOs and like, so what kind of culture? We're a high performance culture. We're a high performance. Everything's performance. Performance even when it's not.

Why doesn't anybody talk about mastery? Why are people so obsessed about performance? And even you, you come from sports where performance is the thing that they talk about. Why does everybody talk about performance and nobody thinks about or talks about mastery?

There's kind of like this high performance treadmill in just about every industry that you can get your kids on. You know, like there's some sort of track in the corporate world that you can get on that you do A, B and C things, and you give yourself a pretty good chance of being a high performer, whether it's technical skill development. In sport, it's physical, and for all of us, it's mental. And there's like a little bit of a track for it. And the track for mastery is really loose when I think about the difference between high performance and mastery. High performance is about executing on demand. But with mastery, there's a bit of a contour to it. There's something that just has an organic, authentic artistic expression. On demand, certainly. But there's a different contour to the path of mastery.

What do you mean by contour?

The way that you see the world around you is there's a difference between people that are committed to mastery and those that are committed to high performance. So I don't have a better word. I've been studying this thing for 25 years. And so I wish there was a way to express the space that happens for people that are committed to mastery versus like the execution. Gotta go. Drive, drive, drive, drive. Get it done. You know, execute on command. Be great, be great, recover. Be great, recover. That's like the high performance kind of process mill, if you will. Nothing wrong with that. But there's a difference between the commitment to mastery and then let me open it up two ways. Mastery really is about mastery of craft and mastery of self. So you're, you're really using the craft to go deeper, to understand the human condition. Yourself first and then in return, other people as well.

I need, I need to go deeper than this because we get judged mostly by our results. Right. Our bonus structures are largely tied to our results. A lot of people unfortunately tie their self worth to their results.

That's right.

We are a.

For better, more likely for worse results oriented society. We grade children, we grade their art.

From very young, very early age.

And it's usually individually motivated.

You know, what is your grade relative to other people?

Relative to other people. Yeah, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as we talk about this, and I'm sort of like thinking about the people I admire. Performance is an output. It literally comes at the end of something.

That's right.

Mastery is an input.

Yeah. Mastery is a commitment.

Like the mastery comes before.

That's right.

And so that's one difference, which is somebody who is, you know, you actors always talk about the craft. You know, you say, how do you know that person's a good actor? Like they study the craft.

Yes. I was with the Seattle Seahawks for nine seasons and just about every game we won a lot. It was a high performing team. And just about every game we're on the 50 yard line pre game. There's like the stadium holds, let's call it 70, I think it was like 78,000 people. So it's about half full at this point. There's good energy. Players are out there moving around, doing their thing. And for sure Coach would always come up to me and say, so Mike, what do you think? What do you think, what do you think about today? And at first I thought that I needed to answer that. Like I am the high performance psychologist. I need to answer what I think about their mindsets or their commitment to winning or their ability to win today. And then I realized like, no, this is about the coaches really asking what do you think of their framework? What do you think of the quarterback's framework? Is it sturdy or flimsy? Is the offense going to get knocked around or are they grounded and really sturdy in how they're going to go about being their very best? And to your point about input output, there is another output, winning, whatever that means. Right. And when you cobble together a bunch of performance outputs, you get to the outcome. Right. Whatever winning means for people. And in that process, if you have a sturdy, nimble, strong, agile, the anti fragile type of stuff, if that is the way that your psychology is built, you can go weather some really incredible, hostile, rugged, challenging environments psychologically. So it, when you say it's an input, it's a fundamental decision that you make that I'm moving towards mastery as opposed to high performance.

I went to Japan and we went to visit a samurai sword maker.

There you go.

And he's one of the last like hundred guys left making samurai swords in the traditional method where he folds the steel himself and does all this. And his story was quite remarkable, which is he had a desk job and was like, I can't, this can't be my life. And he quit and decided to become an apprentice sword maker and has now been on his own. And he says, we talk, you know, we're talking to him and he's like, you know, I'm still, I'm still learning one day I hope to be good at this. And we're like, how long have you been doing this? He said 30 years.

That's that.

That's it, you know.

Yeah, you're lighting up when you say it because like that appreciation truly for being a beginner in your approach to like how things really work. And as you get further down the path, even at 25, 30 years and you're further down the path of really understanding something.

The mastery of self is what drives that curiosity. Yeah, like wait, how does this man, if I could just figure out how to really dial this thing in, in the way that I see it could be, yeah, how do I match my skills with the, the challenge ahead of me or in front of me?

He doesn't think he's bad at it. No, he just knows he can be better.

That's exactly it. And there's a.

There was an incredible lack of ego, you know, at the same time. An incre. Self confidence.

Yeah.

Because otherwise you wouldn't have the grit to stick with it and realize them. Because I think you have confidence. If you see yourself improving.

Confidence is super interesting. Like it only comes from one place and one place only. Go on what you say to yourself. That's it. And so now that has to be credible.

Yeah.

You have to speak to yourself in a credible way. And there's, there's a calculus, there's a math. It's a math problem psychologically, if you will. Is that what's happening for confidence? And I'm going to tie it to your point in a second. Is that there's this constant calculus which is I'm interpreting the challenge ahead of me or in front of me. The demands of a challenge. Okay. Whatever it is, playing one on one basketball against Michael Jordan or having a conversation with you or whatever it might be. I put you and Jordan in the same category. And.

So no, for real, like it's a. It's a perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my internal skills.

Let's say that again. A perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my skills.

Right. And so if I can see the challenges high and wonderful and big and whatever, and then I can also know how to back myself, that I've got skills to navigate this challenge. Right now I've got like the, I've. Now I've got the ability to speak to myself in a way that builds confidence. So confidence is state specific, meaning it changes from moment to moment, from environment to environment. But that's the math that sits underneath of it. And you were probably really smart when you were young, you're smart now. It's like the same as a young athlete. They're probably pretty talented when they were young. Certainly the exceptional ones are. And they. Or you didn't maybe really learn how confidence worked because when you walked into a room, you were always one of the smarter ones that got it quickly. So you didn't know that it had to come from this calculus. It just was a thing that happened based on how well things go. Now here's the trap. My confidence comes when something goes well. I feel confident when I get two buckets in a row. Now I'm confident when I walk on stage and people smile and I say a couple funny things and something smart and I get that look from the audience, Then you nod your head like, nah, now I'm in my pocket. So that's dangerous because you're waiting for your external world to give you the information that your internal world is solid. And when it goes directionally in that way is a problem. Now you're constantly getting whipped around the external world. So if you get the direction of this right, and you build it on the math that we just spoke about.

Okay, so here's the reality, the real story. Yeah, I was a solid B student.

Okay, cool.

Right?

Yeah.

I think my brain worked quickly, but there's some subjects I just didn't grasp and to this day I still struggle with. Right. You know, my friends were the smart ones. Like, my friends were the one who was the straight A student in math or the straight A student in English or the straight A student in history and they all had a subject. Or a couple of my friends were jocks who were like the star football player. I.

Jogged around the track occasionally, you know, so what was going on? So. So for me, the challenge was I was always the dumb one or the not athletic one around my friends. I mean, I was athletic, but I was never an athlete. Yeah, right.

There might be something really healthy going on there that you didn't over identify. Your identity was not wrapped up in what you were doing.

And so, and so the stress that I had was, what's my subject? Everybody has a subject. Like, that one's good at math, that one's good at English, that one's a great writer, that one's great at physics, that one, you know, And I had no subject. And so I had to go on a journey to be like, I'm fine at everything, but I'm great at nothing. And I. The lesson that I started to learn was I looked outside of the subjects that were written on my school schedule and thought, what is the stuff that I'm good at that my friend that I'm. I mean, that I'm better than my friends at? And I was better at asking questions, I was better at talking because I had to be, because it was a survival instinct for adhd, because I couldn't study. So I had to get good at asking good questions and listening to the answers. And I didn't know what to do with that, but it gave me confidence to know that I had a thing. It just wasn't written down on my high school schedule or my college schedule.

I've got a story for you. I've got a story for you to.

To relate to what you just shared is that in high school and college I didn't have a thing either. And so I'm. I'm a psychologist in high school. I got an F in psychology.

So I keep my high school report card in mind as a reminder. You know, it's great when you can find your thing at a young age. I was, I was a bit of a wreck. Yeah. So I love my parents. Dad was a functioning alcoholic, mom was codependent and I knew that I wasn't. I didn't have a thing either. I was athletic, but I was not the athlete. I was clever and smart, but I was definitely not the student. And so I didn't have a thing either. And I think that there's a case to be built that when you over identify early on your identity with the thing that you're good at, it can get you really good because you have to go all in. So when you stand at the pitcher's box or the batter's box or you're on the pitcher's mound or whatever sport it is, and your entire identity rests on you striking people out or hitting home runs, you practice hard. You practice probably practice harder than just about everyone else. So at a young age that gets you really good. Now you're, this is a dead end, full stop dead end approach because you are so much more than the thing that you do. So you and I accidentally were afforded this luxury of kind of the flounder, floundering years where it's like your identity was not wrapped up in it and you didn't know the thing that you were that was going to spark you.

There's so many thoughts going through my head, which is this goes to. And you and I have talked about this, which is the concept of finite and infinite thinking, right?

Yeah.

And the finite. There's a great irony in this, which is to say I have a subject or I'm a basketball player or I'm a pitcher or whatever it is, and I'm going to be the best. I'm going to work hard and I've got that work ethic and I've got that discipline. The problem is there is a date that, that stops.

That's right.

You either get injured, get fired, or it's just time to retire.

Just about everyone gets pushed out of the pros.

And the same can be is true in life. I'm the best lawyer, I'm the best banker, I'm the best, blah, blah, blah. And at some point you're going to have to leave. They'll either Push you out or you just age out. Right. There's the number of CEOs or high performing executives that I meet that leave their careers or you know, sell their companies, whatever it is. And they have massive identity crises because their entire lives they've defined themselves by this one thing.

That's exactly it.

And here's the analogy. I have a friend who grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo, North Dakota, who dreamed of being a New York City Rockette and making it to Broadway. No kid from Fargo, North Dakota. Parents of the sacrifice. You know, all of this stuff. And she made it, she went, she made it to Broadway, she became a New York City Rockette. Right. All of her dreams came true. Yeah. And then what? She, she spent her entire life committed to achieving this thing. Did it for a few years and then she chased the dream and accomplished the dream.

Yeah.

And then literally didn't know what to do next.

If you knew what I knew about what it takes for a kid to be one of the best in the world, to be a high performing athlete or whatever. Fill in the blank. Artist you we were would not be pushing our kids.

Yeah.

The washout is incredible.

Yeah.

And I think most of us. So what you're describing, you're framing it as the infinite and finite game. And when I hear you speak that. That to me is a performance based identity.

Right. Because it's goal based. Right?

Yeah.

Like I'm gonna be the right.

That's exact. That framing is.

And that's the opposite of mastery.

100%.

That is they're high performers and they, and they have the resume to prove their high performance. But then when you peel the onion and the day after the career, the day after the dream accomplished nothing. Scared.

Fear. I actually.

Uncertainty. Doubt.

For who? For the high performer.

For the high performer.

Yeah.

And even if they don't achieve the dream, which is more likely.

Yeah.

Most people will not become super models or you know, profile high profile, you know, athletes, etc. But I've defined myself by this thing that I actually didn't accomplish. Then I think it's even worse.

Oh, this is tough. This is one of the reasons I think when I speak to folks in the corporate spaces is like purpose is a big deal. Like what am I doing? What am I really doing? I mean, we're on this radical rock spinning around. I don't even know how I got into this body. We're using this made up language right now to try to connect, to try to think about our experience together. To try to be just a little Bit better. And I think that the commonality amongst people that I can see that that binds us is we all want a great life. Yeah. Not just a high performing life. What is that? But we want a great life with this short amount of time that we're here. And that's where that conversation about purpose, what am I doing here? And I think it's a bit of a rite of passage to adulthood to have a sense of what am I doing with my time here. And it does not need to be this grand thing. It can be to be a great partner to my spouse. It can be to, you know, to be a great dad. It can be to, you know, have fun and bring joy to other people in my neighborhood. It does not need to be like serial entrepreneurship, like whomever, fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be that. But to have a sense of purpose is huge.

I want to go back to that confidence thing. At some point in life. We all struggle with it. Nobody is immune.

No, it's state specific, meaning that it's, it's, it's like moment to moment.

I can have high confidence one moment and nothing the next.

That's right.

Depending on what I'm doing or who I'm talking to.

Depending on what you're saying to yourself about challenge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's such a good one.

It's the way you're framing the conversation. And if you, if you think, if you entertain, what are they thinking about me? Then we're on a slide for confidence. Like a downward slide. If you start like, what is Simon thinking about? What I'm saying right now is getting in the way of that calculus, which is, is like, no, this is. I love this conversation. It's really challenging to find the right words to describe things that are hard to talk about. And this is what I really enjoy doing. That's how confidence will be built for me.

You're bringing up something that. Look, what did Teddy Roosevelt say? You know, comparison is the thief of joy.

That's right. Yeah.

You know, and you're bringing up something which I think is so easily understood and so difficult to do. It is well and good to say, don't care what other people think about you. We all know that.

Grandma told me that.

Right? Grandma told me that.

Yeah.

But how on earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when as social animals, I want to be included? I want to feel like I belong. I want to be trusted. I want to be a member of the tribe. I want to be welcomed and Invited because not to be is to feel alone, to feel ostracized, to feel brushed aside. We know what happens. A social animal left to their own devices is destructive to others or destructive to themselves. And that's a whole different topic.

You know, I think it's right.

People who hurt themselves and hurt others, you know.

Yeah. And that we thrash when we're not connected. And the thrashing makes sense because our brains are wired for safety and belonging is safety.

Yeah.

You know, the. Think about like the sheep and the wolves. The sheep in the. That are in the middle of the pack are way safer than the sheep on the outside and way safer than the sheep that's kind of wandered off. So being rejected by the tribe is a form of.

200,000 years ago, a death sentence.

And yeah. The mammalian brain still freaks out.

Yes. Now.

Yeah.

And then. So if you think about that mechanism is still ancient brain. Modern times. It's still happening for us. And then you wrap the modern kind of identity with what you do. So when you go out and do something. I'm an executive, I'm a manager, I'm a salesperson, I'm a cmo, whatever it might be. And. And you're getting data back that it's not good. And that can either be objective numbers or a lift from an eyebrow from your supervisor or whomever or eye roll in a meeting that. That is so triggering to the survival brain that we do something very predictable. We'll conform, we will contort, we will confront.

And sometimes. Sometimes we just cut off the relationship because it's too much. But think about the conforming. Confronting. Which are. They're all Cs. Which is kind of fun. No science here. Just a nice alliteration way for me to remember it. But the conforming is. I might laugh at a joke or. Or go along with something that's slightly offensive to my moral code, to what I think is right. But that person has power. So I slightly conform. We've all done it. Yeah. The contorting is where it becomes.

We do it on dates.

Yeah. Right. To be liked.

To be liked.

Yeah. And then they find out like, wait.

You know, you don't think I'm funny.

What just happened here? The contorting is when it's really problematic when we. When we really do.

So contortion is an extreme. Full of. Of confirm.

Of conforming forming. Yeah. Like I might really like.

You're literally abandoning your moral code.

That's right.

To be like.

To be in. To not get pushed out.

Got it.

And that's a form of loneliness, right? Oh, yeah. It's a fear and loneliness that, you know, that if, you know, if they kick me out.

Yeah.

I'm kind of screwed. Yeah. Like, I don't. I don't have a backstop here.

Okay, so I'll tell you a quick story, and then I have to go back to this question. So I watched this documentary about flat earthers. It's an okay documentary, but the thing that I loved about it was there's this guy who. Who was the leader of one of the. The flat earth organizations, and they consider themselves people of science, and they have scientific explanations for, you know, why the earth is flat. And they conduct an experiment to prove that the earth is flat. Spoiler alert. They accidentally prove that it's ruined.

And they look at the science, they look at this experiment, they go, huh? And maybe we did the experiment wrong. But the leader of the group, he recognizes what's going on here. He's a smart guy. And because he's such an ardent flat earther, he's been rejected by his friends and family growing up. His only community are other flat earthers in this group. And now he recognizes that gig is up, but he actually doesn't come clean because if he leaves that group, he's got no one.

Yeah. You know, yeah. It's the same with, like, some of the divide that we're seeing politically.

Like, they form such tight belongingship that if they.

And they've.

And they've cost relationships getting into those groups.

That's right.

That if I leave this group, I literally will have no one. And that fear is so real that, as you said, I do. I do worse than conform. I contort for belonging.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so there's this pervasive worry. Am I going to be accepted or rejected by others? That is a very healthy, pervasive survival tactic. Am I going to get rejected or accepted by the tribe? When it bleeds into the words you choose, the clothes that you wear, the conforming or contorting that you're going to accept or not, it becomes almost a clinical condition.

How would you diagnose that?

Just, it doesn't meet the clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder. It does not meet that. Allah. Doxophobia is like the kind of the fear of being out with other people. It's not that either.

It's on that path.

It's on that path for fun.

So our nation, if we were diagnosing our nation.

Oh, yeah.

So we're a nation of Allah doxophobics I've never said that before.

Isn't that fun? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for fun, you know, we all know what FOMO is. Fear of missing out.

Yeah.

For fun. I coined fopo, fear of people's opinions. And I think that we're on the glide path. Like, the fear of people's opinions is really quite high. And it makes sense to me though, because we live in a performance based culture. Yeah. And in a performance based culture, it would make sense that I would organically developed a performance based identity.

Right.

And then underneath that, it would make sense that I would be anxious and hustle hard and all that kind of stuff about being my very best or being the best, which is now, like, my identity is wrapped up in how well I do whatever I do. And I'm constantly scanning the world to see if I'm okay. Are my numbers good? Are people looking at me? Okay. Are they laughing behind my back or with me? Like, what's happening? So that it's. It's an exhaustive approach to see if I'm okay is the problem. And how do you get around it? I. This is gonna sound too simple, but. Cause nothing's quite this simple. Be very clear about your purpose. And you say. Why do you say purpose? A purpose based identity. If think about any. Who inspires you, Simon. Like global changers with us or no longer with us.

The people who inspire me are not household names. The ones that are living anyway. They're certainly not do one that's a.

Household name that we can vibe with.

Okay. Martin Luther King.

Okay. So Dr. King Jr. If he was sitting in this conversation with us, he would probably be talking about equity. He would probably be talking about, like, freedom of rights, the dream that he has. So this is all wrapped into his purpose. So when your purpose is clear and it's bigger than you and it is inspiring and it matters to you, you're trying to get help, so you want to pull people in. You can't solve it alone. Mike, Simon, can you guys help me? Like, there's, you know, there's something here that's bigger than all three of us, and I want to see if, you know, we can do something special. And so it's no longer about identity. It's about something far larger. So you've. Your identity fades away, and the thing that you're trying to solve together comes forward. And we're no longer managing identity and ego, but we're committing together to a shared purpose. It's that invitation which is go full circle. Back to mastery. It is an invitation to explore potential. That's really what mastery is. And the invitation is always available to everybody, each one of your listeners. The invitation is available right now to fundamentally commit to a life that you are going to explore what is possible for you. And it feels overwhelming. And you say, where do I start with this? First, just snap into, like, in this brief amount of time that I might be on this planet, when I look back, what do I want to contribute to? So start with purpose.

But I think. So how do you help an athlete find their purpose? Yeah, well, because they were raised to perform.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And while they're in the league that they're in, whether it's the Olympics or the NFL or NBA, whatever it might be, the purpose is quite clear, you know, so the purpose is given to.

Them, you know, win championships.

Yeah. And that wears out at some point.

That's not really a purpose, though, is it?

No, that's more of an outcome, a goal. But it's like a binding thing for us together. Okay. You know, but it falls.

It has the appearance of purpose, and it works for a period.

That's right. And again, it's finite, you know, in all the ways that you would articulate that. And so what it does, though, it serves a bit of a placeholder for them to know what it's like to be part of something bigger where they can't solve it on their own. Even individual athletes, whether it's a golfer or singles tennis player, they're part of a team too. Yeah. And so, so I think the question was more tactical. Like, how do I help people?

Yeah, like, like, like what? It's. Because I think, look, everybody's looking like the rise of spirituality. Everybody's looking for their sense of purpose. You know, I mean, I mean, I wrote a book about it, you know.

What do you do? How do you take people on the journey to actually help them?

Answer the question first is help them sit with the pain that they feel. I think one of the greatest gifts we can give people is to hold steady while they are exploring the hardest parts of themselves. And so without judgment, without critique, to a container.

Yeah, a safe space.

A safe space. Not trying to fix, not trying to coach, not trying to solve anything, but. But just hold the space for them to explore the harder parts of themselves, to put words to the emotionally charged parts of themselves. We all have pain, suffering. We all have trauma, micro or massive traumas. And it is important to at least index and understand those. And most of us, if you stay with that. First assumption that I have is that we all got something. We're working through that. The response to unexamined trauma is to protect ourselves from re traumatizing. To being re traumatized. So we put up all of these weird little things that we do to be safe. You know, like, let's say that you almost died at 75 miles an hour around a corner that was like a hairpin corner and whatever. And there's smells and sounds, all the kind of classic examples of a PTSD moment. Well, it would make sense that maybe you don't go around hairpin turns anymore, or you. You slow down or you're very cautious, or you grip your nails into the side of the. If somebody else is driving. Like we're trying to protect ourselves from being re traumatized. So we have to. What we do.

I need to. I need to. I need to underscore this. We're not trying to protect ourselves from dying. No, we're trying to protect ourselves from being re traumatized. Because if you ask people, why are you freaking out? You know, it's. You're like. They say, because I don't want to die, but that's not true. I don't want to be retraumatized.

They didn't die from the thing.

They didn't die from the thing.

Yeah, but it was so.

But it was traumatizing, so jarring that they don't want that feeling for an.

Extended period of time.

Fear, again.

That's exactly it.

It's not post traumatic. It's not a revisiting of the original trauma. It's a fear of the trauma.

Recurring. Correct.

That's really important. That's a huge insight.

Yeah, I was just gonna say it was. For me, that insight was like. Cause I saw it. I see it in sport as well. So let me be less dramatic than somebody almost dying or fill in the blanks. Whatever trauma the listener is working through, you can also have it in sport. So Seattle Seahawks, just for a moment, we won a Super bowl in dramatic fashion. It was like, wow. Like Super Bowl 48, 2013. Okay.

It was a lot to a little.

A lot to a little.

Okay. That's all that matters.

Yeah. And it's.

Numbers don't matter.

To go back the next year and we got back the next year and.

Back to the Super Bowl.

Yeah. The reason it's so hard is because your coaches get plucked. Your teammates or your players, they get bigger contracts from other teams. So like. And there's like a 40 to 50% turnover on the team. So you've got to recapture the culture. It is not a glide path. It's a hard thing to do. And we got back and we ended up losing in the dramatic fashion. As you well remember. It was like the half goal line. And it was a sure thing that the best running back in the. In the league was going to kind of walk it in on Tom Brady's offensive or defensive line. And we're going to win back to back, which is really rare to do. And we, We. We made some mistakes and the ball was turned over and we lost the game with seconds to go on. On the goal line. Right. Okay.

It was so traumatizing. Nobody lost their life.

Right.

Okay. But there's no redundancy in the brain. Like this part of the brain is for, like hairpin curve corners, near death experiences. Yeah.

Losing games and this.

Yeah. It's the same network.

Right.

Right. Like this highly emotional. Oh, my God. What just happened?

Right.

This is heavy. I don't have a way to deal with this.

Right.

And it was so traumatizing for so many of the team that all of these mechanisms the next year were all of a sudden erecting in our culture. And it was really about people not. Not putting themselves in a vulnerable position, which is required to be great so that they wouldn't have that feeling again.

Playing not to lose.

Yeah. Versus playing. Playing that it wasn't my fault. It's your fault.

Right.

And you better be right. And I'm not going to put myself in a vulnerable spot unless I know that you figured out why we're in this situation in the first place. So now we were never.

Everybody's a victim now.

Yeah. And so we never got our noses pointed in the same direction, which is a very hard thing to do. And so trauma doesn't happen just from.

The classic word of trauma. It also has all these other things that, you know, are so emotionally volatile that they can shape our psychology.

This is such a big. Like the.

I love that you love this. Yeah.

The bells are ringing.

You know, you look at our society right now where, you know, mass layoffs as a mechanism to balance the books did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s.

Wow.

It did not exist. Right. Layoffs were used when your company faced an existential crisis. You were going bankrupt. And the only means we had was to sacrifice our people just to keep the company afloat. But just missing the quarter or missing the year, like we're profitable. Not as profitable as we had hoped. So you lose your job. Right. Literally didn't exist.

Wow. Yeah. And the, the, that's why people had one career. That's why.

It's why you had one career.

They weathered the, the Wall street and C suite weathered and you know, and.

True loyalty existed, which is, we'll take care of you and you're going to give us your all for your whole career. And it was mutual.

You're going to, we're going to, you're going to give what you're going to.

We'Re going to protect you. Company's going to give you, offer you employment for your whole life. And in return, you're going to be super loyal and offer us your best work.

You know. You know what? Actually it was mutual. Yeah. And you know what happened? Okay, so.

And then it became like a mafia don thing, which is, I expect you to give me the company loyalty, but I'm going to offer you nothing in return.

And so that we. I call that the extraction model. You're going to give me everything and.

I offer you nothing.

Right. And you're going to like, lose your relationship with your kids and you should.

Just be grateful that I pay you.

Yeah. And by the way, work harder because someone else is going to take your job. That extraction model was a real thing for whatever reasons that we could opine about. And it's flipped now, though the workforce, workers or people that are know being employed by large companies are saying, yeah, you need to help me unlock.

I think, I think what we're facing is more complicated. Right. And I think you're right. But I think the reasons how we got there are not ideological. That though it's tempting to think it is, I think it, it's, it's, it's traumatic, which is we've gone through.

A generation, lived through having no job security. It used to be believed that a corporate job was stable and an entrepreneurial venture was insanity. It was insane because you could lose everything. Right. But now we've created a corporate culture where you can come in one day thinking you're stably employed and you've lost your job through no fault of your own. It's not a meritocracy.

It is definitely not meritocracy.

And so that's the fallacy and folly is that a corporate job these days is actually more unstable than an entrepreneurial venture, which is considered extremely high risk with an over 90% chance of failure. But that's insane, right? That it's been flipped on its head.

That's a cool insight.

And so, and I think now you look at the Younger generation, which is everybody in the younger generation is one degree away from a layoff. My parents got laid off. No meritocracy, no fault of their own. Or my friend's parents or my friends, you know, got laid off through no fault of their own. We're all one degree away, whether it's ourselves or somebody else who got laid off. Again, not a meritocracy. And so the trauma of you asked me to give you everything and be. And be loyal and I did and it got me nothing. Or I watched other people, my friends, family, lose everything or my parents lose everything. I saw how it affected my home. You like, how dare you just demand. And I don't think it's ideological, although I think people use the language of ideology. Yeah, I think it's your, I think it's your insight, the fear of being re traumatized.

I completely agree. To add one more layer of complexity, our kids, if our kids were, you know, high school, college age and that it used to make sense that the loneliest population or segment of the population was 65 and above.

Yeah.

The loneliest segment in the United States right now is 14 to 21.

Yeah.

So. So that type of like avoiding be being re traumatized and our kids are incredibly lonely. It's a pressure cooker. And so when I spend time inside of the corporate world, we are not talking about working harder. The hustle hard thing is I can't ascribe to it because I'm looking at people that are exhausted and anxious. And the message is like, from elite sport, I want to show you how we recover. What happens behind the velvet rope of elite sport is that we spend way more time talking about daily recovery, then we talk about working hard. The environment is stimulating. It's, it's great in so many ways. It's on. The pressure is on. An elite sport, the required vulnerability and risk taking in practice every day is unbelievable. Way more than game day. In practice you've got your peers that are almost as good as you, or in some respects as good as you.

Waiting for you to make a mistake in front of the coaches so that they can get a shot.

And particularly bad in football.

Exactly. And to be great, you have to take a risk. So you've got to get to that messy edge where you don't know if you're going to be successful or not because that vulnerability is required to take the step to stay progressively on a growth arc. It's really hard. So day in, stress is on, pressure is on. Day in, we need to recover in an intelligent way. And I just think that, you know, if we could do a little bit better on how we think about our future. So that's anxiety or purpose based.

So when you say future meaning not goal oriented but rather what's this all for?

Yeah.

So what's the. I want to win a game. Why? I want a game so that I become a champ. Why do you want to be. And you keep going and going and.

Going until you get to purpose.

That's not a. That's. That's bigger.

That's bigger. Yeah, yeah. And you can also like, I've got another way to do that as well. That is absolutely a great exercise to do. But if we did some of that work and then we learned how to speak to ourselves, to back ourselves and to coach ourselves and we're just a little bit better at how we worked with our own self. Self talk, if you will. We figured out a really thoughtful daily recovery program because the stress is real. We need equal units of recovery every day. And we could start to migrate from that first pillar of purpose. We could start to just dissolve our performance based identity and be more aligned with purpose. So there's a twofold on that first one. Yes. Know your purpose and what that does is just allows your. Your identity of like, I have to perform to start to evaporate. I have to perform to matter. It starts to evaporate and I'm performing because I want to contribute to something that's really meaningful and it's not Wall street, bottom line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you.

Yeah. It's maybe to fill in the blanks.

What are things that you've learned over the course of your life and career that you have adopted yourself to aid in your own recovery? If recovery is more important, as important, if not more important than.

Yeah, I can give you a ton of tactics and I'm happy to do that right now. The first is like if you think about the energy system that we have, I want to be. This is going to. This will make sense for Gen Xers and above, but maybe not below. I want to be a really efficient carburetor. So I go to sleep at night and I fill up all these fuel reserves. And a carburetor is this thing that sits on top of the engine and it decides based on how much you accelerate or put your foot on the pedal, how much fuel goes into the engine. And if I am really nervous and anxious and quick to frustration or intolerance and I'm kind of edgy and snappy, the carburetor is wide open and energy is just coursing through the system needlessly. So because I haven't modulated the way that I'm seeing the world around me. So the first order of business is that I want to be able to figure out how to see things as opportunities rather than threats.

Give me an example.

Let's say.

Let'S say you've got an opportunity to pitch an idea to a board or VC firm or somebody. And this is the last, this feels like the last one. You deny, deny, deny, deny. You know, you're kind of on your, the end of your.

Or you're an actor or whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah.

And how do you walk in staying hopeful and seeing as an opportunity as opposed to like if this doesn't go well, I don't know how I'm going to eat.

Yeah.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

There's a discipline required, there's a mental discipline to speak to yourself about yourself, about the opportunity that you're working towards that is just required. And so opportunity versus threat is kind of a big deal. And the way you frame just about anything.

I love it when they mic athletes.

Yeah.

And you hear that football player going, you got this, you gonna do it. You got this, right? Yeah, you got this, you can do it.

And that's not everybody, that's just, that's just some, you know, if you will. Yeah.

But I love the fact that it's that at the most elite levels they still need the self pep.

We all do. We all do. Whether it sounds like that. So here's, here's a fun way to. So I don't want to go away from recovery, but on this thread is that one of the things that I help executives and athletes alike is to know your ideal performance mindset. So in athletes we call it icm, Ideal competitive mindset. So it's the center of the bullseye.

When all cylinders are firing.

What does that feel?

What's going on?

Yeah, right inside.

Know that feeling.

That's right. What does that feel like? And what are the. What's the. So. So it's like a bang bang experience. Thoughts and feelings. Right. Thoughts and emotions, if you will. So know it. Name it. Put some sort of name on it. You could name it, I don't know, tiger lilies. You could name it Kenny. Kenny, whatever that means. Right? Yeah, name it. That's funny. That's really funny. So you name it anything. I wasn't actually thinking of a name but like so like Some athletes, like these two Olympians I'm working with right now, she calls hers free flow. And so that's nice. It's like this free openness. But there's a. There's a flow to the way that she's, you know, that's her ideal competitive mindset. That being said, is that now, now everything that you do prior to the performance is really to get to the crescendo of the ICM or the ipm ideal performance mindset if you're not in sport. So the way that you physically warm up, but the way that you brush your teeth, the way you get into your car, get out of your car, the way that you walk into a threshold, the way you tie your tie, all of those things that you do, they're little threshold moments to back yourself, to build yourself, to be close, just a little closer to the icm. And when you do that over time, before you know it, that ICM feels real familiar. So you can practice putting yourself in an ideal state. And so you do.

So you're just more likely to get there more often. That's the point.

Yeah, like, all the really good stuff is right underneath the surface.

This is good.

Yeah. So when you get knocked away, knocked down, knocked sideways, the good stuff is still under there. When I say good stuff, I mean the way that you speak to yourself with it's positive, productive. It's like building you as opposed to being critical or frustrated or like pulling you, you know, scraping at your core. In general, if you thought about types of thoughts, there's one bucket of thoughts, which is they. They create space, and another bucket of thoughts that create constriction. So when I say to myself, like, I'm really agile, I'm really good on my feet, I can do hard things, those are two things that to me, create space. And on the constriction side, when I say things to myself, like, don't fuck this one up now, or make sure you're crisp, or there's a lot riding on this thing now that creates tension for me. So I don't want to be naive that there's maybe something not riding on a moment, but I need to create something space. Because my brain is already trying to help me activate towards this thing, to get me up for this thing that I've deemed to be important. This is the threat response in our brains. So I have. My sophisticated approach is to try to be able to back all that intensity down. So I need thinking patterns that create space so I can smile a little bit. So I can be more fluid in the way that I'm adjusting to an unfolding, unpredictable moment.

I learned something pretty early in my career. I thank goodness I learned it. That, I think, is what you're talking about. And I learned to reframe a tense.

Moment to, from, to.

From, to.

Yeah.

So, for example, just as my career was sort of getting to go, like, I find myself sharing stages with people who are way better than me. Like, they're famous, they're powerhouses.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what the hell am I doing here? Right. And now my fear that my performance is going to be substandard. I won't live up to the reason they invited me.

Yeah.

All of that self host, all of that stuff. Just like I'm the weakest one here, you know? And I learned to reframe it. Like, this is the most exciting thing in the world that they let me share the stage with these amazing people.

And.

And what ended up happening was I let go of the competitive nature. Like, I didn't have to be better than them. I didn't even have to be as good as them. I just got to share the stage with them regardless of how I did and how cool is it for me.

Yes.

And I started to have. My nerves became excitement.

Yeah, that's it. So the way you frame anything is materially important. Public speaking is one of the hardest things for people. And it's because there's no physical risk. It's all identity risk. It's all ego risk. Eyeballs are. The danger in these moments is that if you are clear about the purpose.

Not about the performance, the whole thing changes. And you can walk on stage and help to get people enrolled or engaged or interested or create an invitation for something that you are passionate about. It totally changes everything.

Did I ever share with you the little insight I had between nerves and excitement that I learned from the Olympics? So I was watching one of the Olympics.

Yeah.

And I realized that all of the journalists asked all of the athletes the same question. Are you nervous or were you nervous? Right. And every athlete gave the exact same answer. No, I'm excited, or no, I was excited. Right. And it's. I started to realize that if you think about what the characteristics of nervousness are like, your heart starts pounding, your hands get clam, you start envisioning the future. What are the characteristics of excitement? Your heart starts pounding, your hands get clam, you start envisioning the future. Right. And these elite athletes had learned to interpret that data as excitement. And the reason the journalists said Were you nervous? It's because they would be nervous.

That's exactly right.

Right. Because that's why they all ask the same question. Because they're not elite athletes.

Yeah. And they're not practiced and they're not dealing with all of that emotion.

And so I did a little experiment on myself. I was sitting on a plane and we had some really bad turbulence. I gripped the seat nerves, and I literally said to myself, this is exciting. And I immediately relaxed.

Yeah. I mean.

And I reframed my own data.

Yeah. That's exactly how this Into a different.

Interpretation of a different feeling. And so when I get nervous, I always say, this is exciting. And it works. It works that quickly.

If you catch it early and you're aware. Fair enough. If you catch it really, like, you know, we talk about trains of thought.

Yeah.

You know, and so if you're. If you're unaware and that train of thought, that thought train has been running for a while. And then you're like, wait a minute, my heart's pounding. I feel like I just threw up in my mouth. Wait, this is excitement. Yeah.

It doesn't work too late.

You're way past too late. So if you can catch it really early that, you know, like, you can get on the nervous train like you were just talking about. And if you get off on stop one and you get onto the excitement train, which is what you're doing, like, no problems. It's easy. Most people, like, don't. Are struggle with the awareness piece first and then struggle with the mental tool to adjust. So it's a. Awareness is step one, and then psychological tools are step two.

There's. I mean, this is the problem of having you on this podcast, which is I want to keep going for about, like, another three.

I feel the same way both times.

I'm really frustrated because I haven't finished all my questions yet.

Such a joy.

Such a joy. I could literally talk to you forever. We have so many unanswered questions that we, you know, started to pull some strings on. I hope we can do this again.

I'd like to do it a lot more and I'd like to have you back on the Finding Master any day. Yeah, any day. So, like, maybe we'll just figure out a way to. As an excuse to have each other in our lives.

Let's just do it. Yeah, let's just do it regularly.

All right, cool.

So good to see you.

So good.

Thank you, mate.

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, SimonSinek.com for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.