E44: Psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais on Mastering the Mental Game of Leadership

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

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Today's guest is Dr. Michael Gervais, the high-performance psychologist behind the Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl championship, the 5 Olympic games with Team USA, the mental training of 50,000 Microsoft employees, including CEO Satya Nadella, and guys jumping out of planes from space. If many of you remember Red Bull Felix Baumgartner jumping out of space and skydiving to the Earth and some cool stories about that that I've heard from you recently. And Mike is also one of my absolute favorite authors and podcasters, thought leaders, and I was telling him before we recorded, has been a really big influence on my life from afar for close to a decade because I'm a lifelong Seahawks fan. So, this is a special episode for me personally, and I can't wait to bring a glimpse of some of the teachings that have helped me and my leadership team a lot to anybody not already familiar with him. And a shout-out to Adam Alfano for kicking this whole thing off. And I hadn't even thought to reach out to a guy that I had this respect for. And I was like, yeah, why couldn't I have Dr. Gervais on the podcast? That would be cool. So, thank you for joining. I'm really excited for this.

Kyle, what up? Great introduction. Thank you for the kindness and the graciousness, you know, in that introduction. And I listened to your episode with Alfano and I was like, Adam nailed it, you know? And so nice job by being able to bring, you know, some of the best of him forward. So yeah, I'm super stoked to be here with you and happy days. Let's get into it. Cool.

So we're going to talk about two big topics today, which are, which is a little bit of your greatest hits. I want to talk about creating the right type of competitive environment because my audience being revenue leaders, sales teams and go-to-market orgs can be known for toxic levels of competition, certainly apparent in sports teams as well, which is where your work originated. And then we're going to get into a bunch of learnings from your new book, The First Rule of Mastery. And talk about FOPO and some causes and cures. And we're going to dig deep and really apply this for sales orgs. So before we jump in, I gave a very quick intro, but like, just tell people what Finding Mastery is and some of the work that you've done over the last years.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you for that. So Finding Mastery is a high-performance psychology consulting firm. So we've built an intellectual property-based approach to help leaders and organizations and the full employee base of an enterprise company to train their minds in the same way that we have trained world-class athletes. So we're taking best practices from elite sport and crosswalking them to big business. And essentially what that means is in sport, there's 3 things that we can train. You can train your craft, your technical skills, if you will. You can train your body, and you can train your mind. And the best of the best of the best in elite sport do not leave any of those up to chance. And when I pop my head into big business, they were like, what do you mean mental training? What exactly is that? And so, I was like, oh, it's like this wide-open playing field because in business, most people spend a lot of time training their craft. They kind of understand the value of training the body, but that's not really their carriage to deliver their craft. So, I'm in business now myself. So, it's like it's not essential, but it actually is. It feels like it's not essential. But the high note here is that all of us can train our minds to perform in high-stress, high-speed environments. We can train our minds to be just a little bit more grounded. We can train our minds to be more at home with ourselves. We can train our minds to pursue those bold ambitions that are exciting. So that mental skills training bit is where we're spending most of our time at Finding Mastery.

Awesome. So a bit of a warm-up question because as a Seahawks fan, I couldn't start anywhere else but here. But what's your favorite story from your time working with the Seahawks and Coach Carroll? And because you were there for the heyday, 10 years within the Super Bowl range. So give us a, give us a story that you're really proud of from that.

Oh, Kyle, I've got so many. I was, I was with the team, with the team for 10 seasons. We were able to go to 2 Super Bowls and it's not an easy path to do something extraordinary. And winning a Super Bowl is very, very, very hard to do. You've got, you know, 60-some elite competitors from the athlete standpoint. You've got another 25 alpha competitive coaches. You've got a support staff that are alpha competitive people. So you need about 125 people that are, you know, at the pointy end of the arrow there to point in the same direction. And it's hard enough to get a team of 10, let alone 125, let alone, you know, in some sales organizations, there's thousands of people, you know? So, I'll share the story, but I just want to give the context is Marshawn Lynch. I'll start with him, one of the best running backs to ever play the game. He is an N of 1. In research, we talk about like there's a number of subjects and he's an N of 1. There is nobody like Marshawn Lynch. One of the core attributes that we wanted to make sure we were teaching the athletes and the coaches is optimism. It's a fundamental belief that something's going to break free, that something good's going to take place. I have not met a world's best, Kyle Norton, that is not fundamentally optimistic. Okay? So, that's a really important experience and finding. So, if that's the case, then we need to train our team to be optimistic. Pessimism is this thing that like, I don't quite think it's going to work out and I need to reserve myself just a little bit because I'm not really sure. And it's a safer psychology, but it never really allows us to go to that extra special space. So, optimism is again, this fundamental belief, something good is about to take place. And when you have that fundamental belief, it is at the center of mental toughness. Okay? So, here's a great example of how that works. We were down by like 3 scores. In the NFL, 3 scores is almost impossible to come back from. Defense got a turnover and you could start feeling some momentum shifting in the game. But now we're down by 2 scores. And it was one of those games where playing the Rams, and it was a crosstown rival, if you will. And it was one of those really chippy, kind of bloody games for the guys. You know, people were— there's a lot of injuries that were taking place. So it was kind of a sketchy, hardcore game. And everybody could feel the tension. We're down. And it's in those moments that most competitors go, just get me in the locker room, get me out of here. I do not want to get hurt in a game like this. That is like, the juice is not worth the squeeze. Okay, Marshawn Lynch walks by 4 of us, we're on the sidelines. Marshawn Lynch, he's got a bag of sunflower seeds, he's— half of his mouth is full of them. And he walks by a few of us and he looks at the, the guys and he says, who wants to come to the front with me? Spits out a couple more seeds and kind of keeps walking. Who wants to come to the front with me? He was not talking about the front of the locker room. He was talking about going, getting in that really intense injury-ridden bloody mess of football on the front line. And the 3 athletes standing next to me kind of like, oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, it only takes one person. It only takes one person to kind of stand in that space and see that if we apply ourselves, something good could take place. And so that's like this story of optimism that is so rewarding to be part of. So that's one story. Another story, just to stay Seahawks with you here for a minute. It was after we won our first Super Bowl and we built the entire culture on the inputs. So there's inputs and outputs and output is winning. The inputs are all the things that you invest in to maximize the output. So, at the Seattle Seahawks, we only would talk about winning once a year. It was kind of a throwaway comment. So, we would spend weeks installing, teaching basically, the culture that was, we think, one of the most important competitive advantages we'd have is clarity on principles, clarity on shared practices, clarity on what the North Star is, clarity on what we were looking for from each other. And in elite sport, certainly at the Seahawks, it was about a 60% turnover every year. So imagine 60% of your sales force is different in 12 months. 60% of your leadership team is different in 12 months. So both athletes and leaders, it's all new. Okay. So at the end of that teaching and install of the culture that we want, call it an onboarding, but it's a 3-week onboarding. Coach Carroll or somebody at the front of the room would say, "You know, man, if we get this right, we just might win the whole thing." And that was it. So, the rest of the year was about the inputs. Now, what are the inputs? Being a great competitor. So, I know you and I will want to talk about that. Being deeply focused, having great confidence, being a great teammate. Making sure that you meet the demands of the moment in a calm, focused way that is able— where you're able to bring the brightest of you forward. Okay, I can go on and on and on. Inputs to output. Now we just won the whole thing. Fast forward, you know, a handful of months, we're in the locker room, champagne is flowing, and Coach Carroll brings everyone, you know, kind of to the middle and he holds his hand up and everyone's huddling around and kind of one big kind of team moment, if you will. And he says, we now have what everyone wants. And I panicked. I thought, what? He's going to say we now have the trophy. We now have the championship. And that's not what I signed up for. It's not what he and I had ever agreed to. What I signed up for, what our commitment together, Coach Carroll and I, was to be masterful with the inputs, to really work the process of helping each other be their very best. It's that simple. That was our whole ambition, was to create a system where people could be their very best. All right. We now have what everyone wants. I said, oh no. And he says, the knowing of what it takes for us to be our very best. And I thought, there it is. That's it. That's exactly it. It was the promise we made. It was the commitment we held. And now we know together what we were capable of. And so, that's a really special moment for me as well. So, I could go on and on and on, but I'm sure, you know, this is not the essence of what you want to talk about, but I'm happy to keep going.

That's so highly applicable, that story. So, One of our most recommended readings at Owner is The Score. The Score takes care of itself. Obviously would have had a big influence on, on Coach Carroll being a California guy. And so it's deeply resonant and I think deeply resonant with how we try to approach building our team. Like we have a daily routine called chop wood, carry water. Stolen from the book. It's just about the daily discipline, doing the unglamorous work and putting in the inputs and then detaching from the outcomes. So I think this is exactly what I was hoping to get from the conversation because I think elite sports ports over so nicely to sales in many ways. And we're going to talk about those different those different ways. So, that's awesome. All right. Let's move straight into topic 1. So, I think it— there's a very smooth transition from a focus on the inputs to creating the right competitive atmosphere. And so, in sport, you mentioned the 60% turnover. You're operating as a team. Everybody is going after the same objective, but at the same time, you may be competing for the same job with 6 different 6 different people. You know, in training camp, you start with almost 100 players going to— for 52 roster spots. And, uh, there is a— there is an internal competition, uh, that is a fire that, that lights so much energy and activity, but then can also go the wrong way. And it's the exact same way in sales, uh, organizations. You could have a group of 10 or 50 reps that are all vying for a very small handful of promotions at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter, trips to President's Club. So there's this really interesting dynamic between individual and team performance. And you can be measured the same way you can be measured on the field by a million different metrics these days, is the same way you get measured in a sales org to performance to quota, your conversion rates, activity volumes. And so there is a lot of resonance. And I think this is an odd dynamic for many and a dynamic that quickly tips in the wrong direction one way or another. Either the environment is not quite competitive enough, especially in sort of a post-COVID era where we had the great resignation. Things were easy in technology and SaaS for many years because money was free. And so you have many organizations that have tipped into being not competitive and driven enough. But there's also a long history of sales teams, which is still common today, where there's too much competition and it's a shark tank. Like, I started my career in a boiler room. It was an absolute shark tank, and people would steal your leads and shank you for a deal. And so there's a very narrow golden path where the right type of competition is helpful. And obviously, your framing on, like, what, who you're competing with and what competition means is very different. So maybe just lay out some of the basics of, like, when you talk about— your book's called Compete to Create, for those— I don't know if I've said that directly yet. But when you talk about compete to create, like, how are you using the word competition?

Okay, good. So the audiobook that Coach Carol and I wrote together was called Compete to Create. And on the back of our philosophy and the best practices in high-performance psychology, we also built the business Finding Mastery, as it's now called. And so in that book, one of the things that we make sure that we highlight is like, how are we viewing and how are we creating an ideal competitive environment. So first, it requires us to define competition. So, the way that we think about competing, it is not competing against others. It is not the attempt to try to be better than somebody else. That is a total mistake because now we're putting ourselves in a position that we're measuring against something that is not in our control. It is not the scoreboard we're interested in. We want, as a fundamental principle, we want to put people in a position of the highest leverage they can be in, where they have the power to bring their best self forward. What do I mean by that? The way we define competition is to compete to be your very best. Okay? The aim is for you to be just a little bit better, a little bit better, you know, is to keep growing, to stay on that arc of figuring out how to unlock all of the gifts that you have inside you to be able to access all of the skills that you've spent a ton of time refining. Compete to be your very best first and foremost. Then compete to be a great teammate. Now, you got to define what a great teammate means. Nobody does the extraordinary alone. We need each other. So, that thing that you were describing where people are stealing this and and kind of backdoor and other things. That's a terrible culture. That is not a teammate. That company, I will bet right now, maybe they get a short-term gain because they got a bunch of sharks swimming around and that company went under.

Oh, yeah.

We've all seen that movie and nobody really wants to be in that culture. You maybe make a lot of money for a short amount of time. No one likes it. You know what we want? We want to be part of something that is awesome. We want to be supported and challenged to be our very best. With that definition that I'm talking about, Kyle, I don't think you can ever have enough of that competitive spirit to help each other be their very best. It starts with your personal commitment, and then you put that gaze on your relationships with others. Compete to be the greatest. In my case, the greatest husband and father and teammate and friend. That I possibly can be. Okay, so that's the main ambition. Then that unlocks this whole kind of seemingly magical world of what it takes to be your very best. And it's not magic at all, but it is support, then challenge. So my job, let's say you and I are, let's say I'm a head coach and you're an assistant coach, or you're the star quarterback and I'm the head coach. Is that I've got to figure out what first and foremost, what is special about you. Okay. I need to see that. I need to see what that can look like tomorrow and in 3 years' time from now. Horizon 1, 2, and 3, if you will. And I need to know how to coach you, how to support you and challenge you. Is it real-time in public? Is it quiet off to the side? What are the triggers for you? We need to calibrate on that together. And you need to also, if you're really on your game as an aspiring great quarterback, you need to help me, you know, as well know how to coach you and how to push me in the right way, support and challenge. So, it becomes this relationship-based approach because go back to that first principle. We need each other. Nobody can do the extraordinary alone. That means we need to be great teammates. Okay, so let me tell you this throw story. We're at the Seahawks. Bill Russell comes in to share, you know, how he's won so much. He was one of the most winningest in the NBA ever.

11 championships, I believe.

There you go. How about that? More rings than fingers. And so Bill comes in and, you know, he's a large human. So there's some of his physicality that of course would have helped him be a good a good athlete. And at one point in the conversation with the guys, he says, you know, I knew I was good. I knew that I could do things with the ball that was pretty special. But, you know, I wanted to win. So there's nothing wrong with that ambition, okay? That's the output. Winning pays the bills, it buys private jets, you know, fill in the blank. There's nothing wrong with that. And he said, this is the big insight. He said, but for that to happen, I needed my guys to be great. For that to happen, I needed to be a great teammate. So you know what I did, men? When I would wake up in the morning, the first part of that exercise of getting out of bed and getting out the door and sometimes even driving to the facility, what I was thinking about was, how can I be great today for Kyle Norton? How can I be great today for Roger? How can I be great today for Coach 1 or Coach 2 or Equipment Manager 3? And so that's how he would spend his morning. It's not about getting himself right. And there's a problem with our narrative right now in pop culture, like the morning mindset routines, da da da. I want to give you a morning mindset routine. I think that you guys might like. I think we spend a lot of time thinking about this. But the idea is it's not about just you. It's about you being in service of other people, you being a great teammate for other people, because again, nobody does it alone. We need each other. So this whole thing, Kyle, this whole thing rests on your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others. Okay. So before he enters the training facility, he's already done a bunch of imagery. A bunch of intention setting, a bunch of like clarity around how he can be great for his teammates to help them unlock something special. And that doesn't mean it's all smiles. That might mean, you know what I think Kyle needs? Kyle and I need to have a knee-to-knee conversation. You know, sometimes, sometimes a shoulder-to-shoulder conversation is important. You know, it's a little less intense. But you know what? I think Kyle and I need a knee-to-knee conversation. We need to, we need to make that eye contact, and I need to say some stuff to him that I don't think he's going to want to hear. How am I going to do that? That's a great teammate. That is an awesome team. Okay, so, so we got competition, the spirit of it down. We got relationships as the foundational piece. And then what we need to, to build on is how do we be great teammates to each other. Now you got something. You got something in there.

Why do you think so many leaders struggle with this? And they struggle to create an environment where their leaders and individual contributors fail to live in service of others, fail to be great teammates.

Okay, Kyle, you know this. When you're stressed, your brain is designed for survival. You know what that means? You got to take care of yourself. That's the reflective response. Your brain is saying, look, I don't know if we're going to make it. We should try to find a way out of this. This is not, this is not designed for survival here. Like, we should leave. That means maybe I got to unlock my arms to my teammate and kind of leave them out. Maybe I push somebody else forward in front of the wildebeest. Maybe I point my finger. Maybe I just don't say anything because if I challenge leadership and I'm stressed already, if I challenge leadership, maybe this isn't going to go right and I'm kicked out. So, when your ecosystem is not properly recovered and you feel this thing called stress, but really what I'm talking about is chronic stress. Stress is actually what makes us. Stress is that thing that unlocks the best of us, but that's different than chronic stress. So acute stress is that, that moment where the alarm system lights up, your brain goes, ooh, okay, something's on here. Switch on, be about it. Deep focus, kind of full engagement with the moment. Acute stress is awesome if you know how to manage yourself. But if you don't let go of that acute stress, if you don't recover from that acute stress, it moves to moderate stress. And if you don't shed the moderate stress, it moves to chronic stress. If you don't shed the chronic stress, according to Hans Selye, one of the first researchers here, it moves to early death. So I've skipped a couple steps, but that's the finding. So, so to be your very best means that you must invest in how your brain and mind work with stress. So Flip this thing around. You have your sleep right. You're eating the right food. You are exercising your carriage, your body, and your muscles and your oxygenation of your system. You've invested in your psychology to navigate high-stress moments well. When you're in that frame of mind, you see other people. You're not just trying to survive. You see what it's like to be the other person so that you can be in service of them. So, that's where the analogy of put your life vest on first before you put it on somebody else does hold up. And what that means in the business world is every— all of us understand the value of acute stress and we all understand the danger of chronic stress. But in the business world, what's missing is something that is deeply apparent in the sport world. So in the business world, we do not teach recovery. We do not invest in proper recovery mechanisms. In sport, we don't have to ask anyone to work hard. They're doing it. They're motivated. They're committed. There's like a lot on the line. And so for the most part, you know, like hard work is not the issue. Okay. Of course, there's a little bit of There's times when you got to really kind of challenge people. Okay, whatever. But after 4 hours of that kind of nauseatingly deep physical work per day, we spend another handful of hours on recovery. It's soft tissue work, it's meditation, it's breath work, it's ice, it's heat, it's stim, it's muscle mobility, it's stretching. Okay. Um, and in the business world, we don't teach it. It's not part of the structure and it's not part of the skill set. And that's essentially— this is a— this is me saying this is the hinge of what my whole investment in my company and investment in, in our partners' companies is doing, is we want to teach the right structures to optimize high performance for people and the right psychological skills for it. And so, so the small little idea of building recovery into the mechanism is a game changer for the humans and for the output. And so that's why I was saying earlier, I want it— I'd love to share, and maybe we can just, we just create something unique for you guys. And, and, you know, we'll put it in the show notes or something, but the morning mindset routine that we've spent a lot of time dialing in, it's a 90-second training. Um, and, and maybe we can just build a little website for you guys and send it to you, no cost, free. If someone wants to hook into a best practice that's a 90-second best practice.

Great. Yeah, let's definitely do that. Just explain what a morning mindset routine is for people to give them a preview.

So, before you step into the noise of the world, right? So, there's this concept of signal-to-noise ratio. So, the noise are all the stressors, all the ways that you get pulled, all the things that need to get done, all of the kind of stressors, if you will. We just want to take a beat and help you connect to the signal. So what is the signal? The signal is there's 4 things that we think are materially important, and you can do this while the sheets are still on. So first thing is a long exhale where you send a signal to your brain that you're in control of the show. And when you send the signal that you have the luxury of a long exhale, you prime the brain to say, hey, listen, it's safe, it's good, we're okay. You do a couple of those, it's really nice. But we're saying one breath, start with one breath. Then we move to one gratitude. Now, if you want to do more than one, it's awesome. So a gratitude is we're lighting up a different circuitry in the brain. And instead of the brain doing what it's supposed to do, scan the world and find all the dangers, you find just one or two things that you want to really feel that you're grateful for. So it opens up a different counter-rotation to the brain's primary dictum. Okay? One breath, one gratitude. The third is one intention. So we're borrowing from the science of mental imagery, and you see how you want to show up at a particular moment later in the day, and you start doing some mental imagery about you being your very best. That's a handful of seconds there. And then the last is you just pull your sheets off and just take a moment as you slide over to the edge of the bed and just take a moment to be where your body is. So that's about being present. So one breath, one gratitude, one intention, and then just take a moment to be present. That little 6, um, that little 4-step 60-second routine is something that, um, we found to be really valuable. And my team just handed me something we can do here. Revenueleadership.findingmastery.com. So if you go to revenueleadership.findingmastery.com, we'll have that set up just uniquely for your team.

Awesome, love it. And, and for those who are more brand new to it, why— just talk about neuroplasticity and why some of these exercises are so foundational for changing the way that we feel when the day is well underway and we're in the throes of the stress.

Okay. So, I've been fortunate to work with some extraordinary edge-pushing leaders of industry. And, one commonality is they're fundamentally optimistic. Another commonality is that they've taught me is they, they don't respect the edges of potential. They, of course, they're trying to figure out how to get to their edges and move past them. And most people never get to the edges of their potential. They run up against the edges of their belief system. So it's the belief system that we've got to get after, and that invisible programming of who you are in this world, that is kind of the, let's call it the end game, if you will, of the deepest part of the investment. When you examine and hold in the light your belief system about who you are and what you're capable of and how you fit in this world, and you open that thing up and you reestablish a more healthy or more optimized and a more forward-pushing belief system, everything else from there follows. And so that's the thing that I think the extraordinaries have taught me more than anything is their honest commitment to self-discovery. They are not looking for shortcuts. They're not looking for the 7 tips or the tricks or the 7 steps or hacks. They're not looking for that. They understand that those are totally flimsy. They want to get the big rock in the container. And, and, and from that big rock in the container, which is like a belief system and the self-discovery process, then you start to add on all of the other psychological skills to, to see how far you can take this thing.

And, and I think the thing that so many people miss is this works at the root wiring of your brain. And, I was in technology. Meditation and mindfulness has been in the zeitgeist for quite a long time now. I'm a very skeptic person. And so, it was pretty slow on the uptake, I would say, until I read "Search Inside Yourself" by Chade Meng Tan who built the mindfulness program at Google. And, One of the things that made it applicable for me is that he really talked about the fundamental neuroscience of like, what are you doing? And he relates it to exercise. Every time you do an exercise, you are putting force on that muscle so that it can regrow in a stronger way. And that's the same as any of these exercises, traditional meditation or a morning routine, or you could go, the Tony Robbins direction. There's many different versions, but fundamentally, it's like rewiring and strengthening the parts of our brains that we want to have more easily activated. And, if you are constantly activating your amygdala and your fear response, it's going to be really easy to be fearful at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, if you're practicing gratitude and optimism every single day, it's much easier to fall into a place of optimism when things get challenging. And, one of the things that I don't know if it's the podcast or the books, but that has always stuck with me is that optimism is a learnable trait. Optimism is any of these things are learnable skills, which is a message that I think— and, this is back to fixed versus growth mindset. But is an important message to get out there. So hopefully people take up on it.

Yeah, that's a cool, simple way to understand is that all of the mental skills that I'm interested in are ones that you can train. You can train to be more calm. You can train to be more confident. You can train to be more optimistic. And these are the psychological skills that the best in the world have refined and developed. And we like to think that they were just kind of born that way. But they've invested in those practices and it doesn't take a lot. It's just that we haven't been exposed to what those best practices are because in the Western world, there was the shame and taboo around psychology. Like if you go work on your psychology, that means there's something broken or weak. As opposed to what best in the world have said is like, look, there's something in me that, that is really special and amazing. And I just want to be able to access those capabilities more often. So, Doc, what do I need to do? Oh, well, let's figure it out. Like, how do you get more calm? How do you— what's it like? And then so we studied the best in the world about how they were organizing their inner life to be more calm and focused and confident. And now we just would— we're playing that back to the next generation. So, yeah, these are all relatively simple skills to develop, and there's nothing really complicated about it. But what's complicated— what's complicated is having it customized for you, right? But the skill itself, like being more calm, comes from breathing. And so we can set up a breathing training protocol that's going to meet, you know, 92% of the masses pretty well. And so I don't even think we're at a place where we need to think about customization for most people. It's like, do you have a breathing practice? Do you have an imagery practice? And I'm only talking about like 6 to maybe 20 minutes a day. That, that's totally doable for a full, um, proper investment in upgrading your psychology.

So to give people a really powerful tangible example of these mental skills being learnable. Maybe tell folks the story of Felix Baumgartner and how you worked him from borderline panic attacks in the jumpsuit to being in this thing for 6+ hours and diving out of an airplane.

So Felix Baumgartner was the pilot, the athlete in the project called Rebel And so he went to the stratosphere, the edge of space, and had this idea since he was a young person that he wanted to travel the speed of sound. And so he got a bunch of engineers together. He had a funding, you know, a brand that was going to fund it, Red Bull. And the idea was, okay, so if you wanted to travel the speed of sound, we had to go really high up where there's near zero air resistance. Zero gravity. And if you were to be able to get that high and you were able to jump in the moment that you were going to pass through the, um, the sonic experience, meaning you're traveling Mach 1, the idea was you would be— your head and torso would probably be traveling about Mach 1, but because there's drag on your arms and your legs, that you'd be at a transonic experience. So the brightest minds weren't sure if his arms and legs were going to rip off as if he were to pass through. So there's, there's real danger in this project, you know, like there's real limits going on here— limit pushing, I should say. And, um, that was only one of five very dangerous propositions that could take place. So it was about three years into the project and Felix, um, became claustrophobic, and so he needed to be in a aerospace spacesuit for 5.5, 6 hours. And he was hitting the panic button after about 5 minutes of being in the suit. So, that's when they called me in to see if he could work through that experience and just by applying good psychological science. And happy days. He invested in his psychology. We worked from a model to extinguish fear. Not fear management, which is like a level that most of us would, you know, appreciate to be able to manage our fear a little bit better. It's a nice thing, but he needed to extinguish this very particular fear. So we did that science. And, um, you know, this was about 3 days of, of work, 10 hours a day.

It was only 3 days? Wow. When I heard the story, I thought this was like a multi-week thing.

Yeah, no, I mean, 30 hours working on your psychology in a very concrete, specific way is a pretty heavy lift. So he had the standom of the interest, the commitment to do it. And then of course, you know, we stayed connected. I was connected to that team and him for another 2 years. And that was more light touches, you know, but so yeah, so it was extraordinary. Now it'd be remiss for me not to thank him. He went to the Stratos, broke numerous human potential records. He brought me up there with him in spirit by in 2012, him pointing to the work that we did. And when it was still taboo for humans to say, I'm working on my psychology, in 2012, he said, I just got to tell you guys, you know, to the media world, to all of you, not just guys, but to all of you, that it was the work on psychology that was, you know, material for me. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, team. And he brought me up there with him. We just lost him. So, he's recently passed away and I'm still working through the grief process about him and for him. And so, he's a special human. He changed my life in such meaningful ways. And, I think he inspired so many of us on how to design a life that has meaning and purpose and pushes right to the edge and a life that is about really living. And so, yeah, thank you for bringing him up and hopefully we share some light on why he was so special, but also like you too, me too, we can all invest in just a little bit more of a switched on way of living.

Yeah.

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And, and the part I love about that story is you know, he went from not being able to be in the suit for more than 6 minutes to now multiple hours just through, you know, ramped exposure to the experience. And you're working on these like core skills. And if that can happen in 3 days, it's a great call for folks to think about what they can accomplish over the course of weeks and months and years of practicing these skills daily. Because I know for me, my first VP of sales job where everything was new and I operated from a place of fear frequently and I had certainly a performance-based identity in the worst way at the time and moving into a place where now I feel like much more purpose-driven and much more focused on service to others. I think it has had a profound effect on on how I can operate. And so maybe let's just talk about that. So give folks a concept for performance-driven identity, some of the risks there, and how they should move to a more purpose-driven approach to leadership and their life in general.

Let me put a little more wood behind the last comment that you made, and then I'll swing over to the your question, um, because you're hitting on something really important. You're talking about neuroplasticity. I'm talking about like these psychological skills that best in the world have some command over. And we're talking about time, like the amount of time it takes. It's a life investment, you know, and it does not require a whole lot of time every day. I think the challenge here, Kyle, is that most of us, because we've swallowed this narrative that we're supposed to have all the answers when it comes to our psychology, that we don't really know where to go. We don't really know what to do. So if you want to be a little bit better in your life, you know, you, you go to fitness. Awesome. You go to nutrition. Great. But we're not sure where the resources lie for you know, mental or psychological. So I, I will point to something that is pretty pedestrian and easy to understand, which is like a mindfulness practice. 6, 8 minutes a day of mindfulness, according to research, is awesome. 20 minutes is a little bit better, you know. Breathing training, I'll go back to that, you know, some sort of, I don't know, 4-minute breathing training a day, just slow long exhales. And I'm happy to send your team or your community a bunch of breathing trainings that is good. Investing in your self-talk, understanding how you work with your self-talk, there's training and exercises around it. So anyways, I just want to be really concrete that this is not just sitting and talking to a therapist. Yeah, it's good. That's really nice for the self-discovery process. But there's also very concrete practices, best practices, if you will, that we can all get a little sharper with. Okay. So, now, you're now back to one of the big rocks again, which is a performance-based identity versus a purpose-based identity. So, a performance-based identity is quite simple. When your identity is infused with how well you do something. So, you are connected to your performance in a way that it feels like That is who you are. And it is so slippery. It is so valued in the Western world that at some point, we even introduce ourselves based on what we do. So, hey, my name is Kyle Norton, and I am a chief revenue officer. It's like your role as opposed to your philosophy, your role as opposed to your purpose in life. So, performance-based identity, it makes perfect sense that we would be attaching our identity to our performance because our culture is obsessed with performance. So, it's a pill that we have swallowed. Now, how do you move to a purpose-based identity? One, you have to be kind of sick and tired of feeling like your entire essence hinges on how well you've done. Last quarter, or how well you've done in an interview, or how well you've done on a pitch. Or, you know, so you just have to at some point be exhausted by chasing on the hamster wheel. Yeah. So one of the things— this first came into light for me when there's an elite athlete that said to me, he said, you know, Mike, um, this idea of being and doing has me up at night. Like, I am tired of thinking that I need to do the extraordinary to be extraordinary. I am tired of trying to chase all of that to feel like I'm okay. So he just swung the hinge the other direction. He said, I know I need to be more. I need to be more present, more creative, more connected, more grounded, whatever the adjective is. I need to be be more of that and let the doing flow from that place. So it's not do more to be more. It's be more and then let the doing flow from there. And so what are we talking about in this case? We're talking about be more connected to your purpose. And when you study the greats, the ones that have stood up over the ages, like Jesus or Buddha or Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Dr. King or fill in the blanks, that these extraordinary humans were very connected to their purpose. And every environment that they entered, they had a quote-unquote purpose mindset. They had a mindset about being lined up with what matters most to them. So, purpose is like this high calling. It's this thing that matters deeply to you. And then, those people that change their family dynamic, change the neighborhood dynamic, change a global dynamic, they are so clear about their purpose. And then, they have the abilities to line up their thoughts, words, and actions. I should be more articulate. They have the psychological abilities to line up their thoughts, words, and actions when the environment is stressful, when there's pressure in it, when there's consequence in it. Those are the people that I love studying. It's those people that have a purpose mindset, but they've grounded themselves in something bigger than themselves. It's what part of what purpose is, something that matters to them and something that is out in front of them. Those are the three legs to purpose. Matters to you, it's bigger than you, and it's out in front of you.

And so in Compete to Create, you talk a lot about how people can develop their purpose and philosophy and values. Let's just tie off this topic here and give people a preview, because I think this is one of the massive gaps. Is that people like me are— we are our number. Our identity is our ability to achieve a number. And that ebbs and flows. So maybe just give people a preview of how somebody can identify their purpose.

There's no shortcut here. The way that you do this work is there's 3 best practices. One is journal. Get your pen and paper out, go to work. Know, like, what matters to me, what's bigger than me, and what's out in front of me, and just go to work on that. And eventually, you'll come up with a purpose statement. Now, we've got lots of trainings to help people kind of walk through this process, but that's the essence. That's the essence of it. And So journaling is one way, writing it down. The other way is having conversations with people of wisdom. They'll have a way of eliciting what matters most to you and pulling it out of you. And if you can get that down to a sentence or two, like, my purpose is, then you got something. And a third way to get to this clarity of purpose is through meditation. So for some people, they don't like to write in journals. Some people don't want to have conversations about it. They want to just sit and they want to feel their way through and examine, you know, what makes most sense when you answer those 3 questions. What's bigger than me? What matters to me? And what's out in front of me? And then I will say that all 11 world religions have already wrestled with this. So you and I don't need to make up your unique purpose. It is nice, I think. I think it's a good exercise to put your own kind of stuff on it, if you will. But all 11 world religions have already wrestled with this. And so that's another place that you can start by studying those great, those great writings.

Awesome. Um, and I'll just tell people, read the books. We compete to create. Yeah, it's, uh, it's Going back to my notes was a cool experience. And it was the first time I've really—

sorry, Kyle, real quick, just so we address this one more, I think, finely tuned in The First Rule of Mastery. I think we hit this one a little bit more tighter in that book as opposed to my first book. So I would point to First Rule of Mastery to have a bit of a better solution around this. Yeah.

You talk about journaling in Compete to Create, right?

Oh, in both of them.

Okay. All right, cool. I'm not crazy because I was like, this was the first time I can recall ever journaling. There you go. Yeah, cool. Was from reading the book. Okay. So, great transition point to get into FOPO. So, latest book is The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About worrying about what other people think. So, just give people a definition. What is FOPO? And then we'll take that.

So, we've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. And we just wanted to have a little fun with what we think is the greatest constrictor. So, we didn't have a name for it, but we knew that the greatest constrictor of somebody's potential is this excessive worrying about what other people are thinking. And so that's the thing that robs us from being fully present and feeling powerful and bringing the best of ourselves forward is this little narrative. Are they going to accept me? Are they rejecting me? It's the only reason why public speaking is the number one fear for most humans. What's underneath of that is this fear of rejection by other people. So FOMO was fun and we said, oh wait, hold on. FOPO, fear of people's opinions. Oh, okay, there you go. So, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek and we're just having fun with it. And then, we did a bunch of research to support— I'm sorry, we invested in the research to better understand what are the dynamics at play here. And so, that's the essence of the first rule of mastery is understanding how do you stop this excessive worry about what are other people thinking about you. And a lot of people will ask, like, why is that the first rule?

That was my next question.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, there you go.

And so if I was to say, like, what's the first rule of health? And I cheekily say, stop drinking poison. You'd be like, oh, okay, gotcha. You know, so the first rule of mastery is like, let go of the noise and come back to the signal. And that signal-to-noise ratio is kind of what we're pointing at the whole time. And the signal is You know, again, purpose would be part of the signal. You being able to be fully present in high-stress moments, you being able to fundamentally commit to being your best and to refining a craft to be in service of something special.

Like, and so we walk through those elements in the book and give people a sense of sort of the evolutionary biology. Like, why is FOPO so strong, has such a strong hold on us.

Yeah. So I think one of the important kind of things to just see if somebody, a listener is connected to FOPO is like, you know, when you go to an event or a social event and maybe you don't really feel like drinking and you don't want to say no because you don't want to be the odd one out. So you're holding a cocktail. That's like but you're not wanting to drink it. You're not drinking. That is FOPO. Or it's when you go to a restaurant and you feel kind of uncomfortable sitting by yourself. So you pull out your phone reflexively because it looks kind of weird in other people's eyes. Or it's this excessive worry about, did I make a fool of myself with that joke at the social event? Or this excessive worry about, What am I going to wear? What's the right attire? There's lots of little slippery ways that FOPO shows up. And essentially what it is, we mentioned it earlier, is that our brains are designed to scan the world for dangers. And we don't have wildebeests anymore. That's not kind of a main driver of danger. We do have dangerous people in this world. right? But that's not the majority of people. The majority in the Western world do have kind of the basic needs met. And I'm not saying that's the case for everybody. I'm not insensitive to those experiences. But for most people, the most dangerous thing is being rejected from the tribe. 200,000 years ago, if you and I were acting a fool, if we were causing chaos in the tribe, if we were responsible for hunting or gathering and we kept coming back empty-handed. Over time, maybe 1, 2, 3, 4 times of coming back empty-handed, the elders would be like, hey, Kyle, Mike, you guys are relegated. Like, get out of the way. Kids are hungry now because I don't know what you're doing out there. But no more. And so now we're shunned and pushed to the side. So rejection, when you're pushed to the side or maybe pushed out, the wild was too wild back then to survive alone or even with one other person. So being relegated was a near-death sentence. So that was so ingrained in our survival mechanism that it is still part of most of our brains now. And so this quiet little excessive checking, am I okay in the eyes of others, is a hardwiring mechanism. And again, evidence of that, you need to look no further, is for some of us, introducing ourselves amongst 7, 8 other people and we're just saying our name, where we grew up, what we do for a living, our favorite song, whatever that kind of moment is, and we feel our heart rate come up, we get a little clammy. Let alone getting on stage and having to share a compelling, bold, maybe new idea to people. It's all kind of linked down in or notched down into this ancestral gift, which is to scan the world for the dangers. But this danger is holding us back. It forces us to play it safe, to play it small, as opposed to like really going for it in life. And so that's some of the structural brain stuff that's embedded in FOPO.

And I think where this is particularly challenging for people like me is the tenure of folks in these jobs is like 19 months because you have to produce results. And I'm talking about startup mostly, but you have to produce results. You bear the brunt of the number, even though it's a team sport, unless the product is great and you have a post-sales team that can keep customers happy. There's a bunch of other stuff that needs to happen, but oftentimes it's really easy for somebody to move out a revenue executive And so the checking in, in this environment where the job stability is fairly low, and we do this to ourselves as well, I think, like, that's another conversation. But the checking in for, like, what do the founders think about me? What do my peers think about me? Like, am I doing well? It just takes over. And I have conversations with folks and they're so locked in on now their relationship strength and perception across the business because they're just worried about, they're just worried about their job security, short-circuits basically everything else that they could be doing.

Yeah, that's the noise-to-signal idea. So the signal is always the things that's in the present moment and under your control, 100% under your control, and the opinions of others is not. And if you're putting your attention and resources on something you can't control, now by definition you're deleveraged, you're less powerful, and you start to feel out of control. And so I want to be also explicit, Kyle, is that we're not pointing to stop caring about what people think of you. We are saying it's the worry that is the problem in this equation. We need more caring people. We need more kind people. We need people that have an inner strength that don't need to be a jerk about anything. Like, that's not, that's not the health of a teammate when they are berate other people or belittle other people or make fun of other people, or, you know, that's not the strength of a great teammate or partner. We need more kindness. We need more caring. And that's what allows people to go further in life. We are pack animals. We are a complicated social ecosystem. And when we are trying to pluck people off, It's a different part of us that is not honest to our ancestors. It is not the path forward here. And there's going to be plenty of people in your community that go, what are you talking about? Like, you know, we are competitors. We are hunters and like we are tribal. We are more collaborators than we are hunters of other humans. And so I'd love to have that conversation. It's for another time. I think the piece that I'm most interested in your, in your introduction of this phase here is that when we are excessively worrying about what other people are thinking of us, it's a drain on our system. So this idea between having a highly stressful environment that brings out the best of us and then recovering intelligently each day. So that's the equation, high stress, high recovery, that when we've got this kind of system running in the background, am I okay in the eyes of others? It's like you got a leaky bucket. And so there's a secondary problem for that felt sense of vibrance when you're just letting the resources just run through your system in that way. So there's a problem there. And I wish that there was a simple solution, but I do know when you make a fundamental commitment back to the signal, which is you being your very best in this moment, you stop worrying about them. You start being more connected to your purpose, the bigger rock, and you start being more interested in how to help other people be better teammates and partners. And if They don't want to be a teammate and partner. No problem. That's okay. There's another tribe that they can go kind of hook into, but we need our people. And I'll leave you with this last note on FOPO here and, and our team is that I'm also not suggesting that we become immune to feedback. High-performance cultures are great at feedback. And if you just think about your personal life for a minute, the people that I want the most feedback from, they meet 3 criteria. They know my traumas. They know my scar tissue. They understand what I've been through. They've invested in that way. They know my hopes and dreams. They know my ambitions. And they've been in it. They've gone through some stuff themselves. They've been in the amphitheater of a great life. And so those folks I tune to. The folks that just kind of throw an idea over the fence, they pop something on social media, they don't know my scar tissue and my pain and my suffering. They don't know what I'm really trying to work out. And I don't know if they've been in the arena or not. So that's noise. And there's some people on your team that they are noisy on feedback. So, I am suggesting be very clear about the people you are taking feedback with. And if it is a superior or a peer or somebody that you need to tune into, like their opinion matters, you got to invest in the relationship to your best ability. And if you are a leader in the organization, You also have to help understand what that person is about, what makes them tick. So you're not just callously lobbing things over, over the fence about what they got to get better at or what they're not good enough at. So it's the relationship here that sings at the high table of helping us be our very best.

And maybe give people a sense for the framework for overcoming F.O.A.L.T. FOPO. So you talked about a commitment to purpose, but then in the book, I think it's like unmask, assess, redefine.

Yeah, I mean, unmask, know who you are, like really take it off, take a look at, and, and commit to discovering, you know, what you're really about. And that's a lifelong process. And if you can do it with somebody else that's a professional, I think you're going to have a more efficient input, you know, to get to the output there. The thing that I'll also point to that we haven't hit on is knowing the on-ramps to FOPO is like, if you're— if you have a performance-based identity, it's an on-ramp to FOPO, okay? And I'm not suggesting that some of the best in the world that I know don't have a performance-based identity. So you can be the best in the world and have a performance-based identity. It's pretty scratchy though. It's pretty uncomfortable to do. And it doesn't mean that you're at your best. It's just you struck a high-performance calibration moment where you're like really, really, really, really good at something, but it doesn't mean it's your best still. So working with the identity bit, understanding your value, your sense of worth, your belief system, really examining all the ways that you hold yourself back and what you believe you're capable of. And then of course, understanding how to work with your biology through breathing, through mindfulness, through recovery practices. Those are the on-ramps. Now, there's a set of off-ramps as well. Being a great learner. So having a curious mindset is one of the great off-ramps. Instead of reflexively defending what they might be thinking of you, you can take some feedback in. It doesn't mean you swallow it, but it comes through a filter. And then you go to understand. So be curious. Okay, tell me what you're seeing. Tell me what you're understanding. Okay, is that in context? I'm hearing what you just said. That I, I, you think I, I'd be better off if I did this. Is that because of this or that? And, and, okay, so what I've learned in the past is this. How does that— would that affect your feedback? So just be a great learner in that case. And so those are a couple on-ramps and off-ramps to FOPO.

Um, and then give people a sense for how to assess imagined versus real consequences, and, and then we'll wrap up here in a minute.

So, so help me understand what you're looking for there.

So in, in the, in the book, how to overcome FOPO. So it's, yeah, unmasking, self-understanding, and then it's, uh, I think here you're talking a little bit about real versus imagined consequences.

Yeah, 100%. So I think that, yeah, so in that assess phase, that's why I was doing the off-ramps. It's like, you know, how to work with this great constrictor for most people is, is, I would say the, the best way to do that is, um, the, the examine your worth, examine your belief system, um, understand the triggers, you know, be a, be a great ambassador of a curious mindset and, and, and do the identity bit. Those are all really good. The other thing that I think is important is, is, um, there's an assessment that we built, you know, and a fun way to see if you have some of this going on yourself. And so you can go to the website fightingmastery.com, and you can go to the website, and there's no hooks to it. It's free, and you get some feedback on it, and you can see if you have it. And just, just kind of seeing where you land with all the other tens of thousands of people that have taken it It's a nice little moment. And I think just recognizing it in and of itself does create some, like, oh, okay, you're now on the path of, like, you know, how do I go do some of these things that Mike and Kyle were talking about?

And so, in that specific scenario I talked about where, you know, you're in a team, job security feels unstable, the rest of the team around you might not have the same internal locus of control, the same grounded purpose-driven identity and leadership approach. How do you recommend folks bring their team along on this journey? Because you can't really lead alone in this way. It needs to be a broader thing.

That's a really good question. I mean, first and foremost, it's the The reflective easy answer is like, do the work yourself. And then you show up differently. You're more consistent across conditions. You are more trustworthy because people know what they're going to get. They understand your intent. Like trust has three legs to the stool according to research. They, when somebody's going to trust you, their character is similar across conditions. So, you know what to rely on. Their ability or their logic bridges are sound. Like, you trust that they can get it done. And the third leg to the stool is that somehow they've conveyed to you that they understand what's good for them and you in the scenario. So, there's a benevolence to the equation. So, if you get those three things right, people will start to trust you. And what I'm suggesting is that when you do your internal work, like you build your psychology and your psychological skills, then you end up showing up just a bit more consistently. And you're able there to see, you know, like what's in it for both people and how both of us can benefit from, you know, pushing a little bit further. And, and of course, um, you've always got to invest in your, in your technical skills. But if you psychologically, you tighten up you cut off access to your, your technical skills. Like, athletes don't choke, right? They don't eat while they're performing. It's a bad psychology joke. But what they do is they choke off access to their skills because their mind tightens up, and in return, their body tightens up a little bit. And when those two things start to happen, we stop thinking creatively and critically, and we go more to agitation mode or survival mode or relief mode or fight or flight as opposed to solve mode. So, that's why I'm always going to keep pointing back to just do the work and you show up differently and people respond to that in more ways than is even on the surface.

And if folks feel like they're in this spot, maybe share this podcast episode, start a little book club, read The First Rule of Mastery. As a leadership team, and hopefully, you can bring people along the journey with you. I've got a bunch of my leaders reading the book now. We don't have this issue. I think we have a lot of purpose here, but it's something I want to continue to cascade down the organization, and especially at the IC level, help them connect more to purpose and less just to their number and It's tough. It's a journey.

You know what would be fun is, so we only hire Olympians and performance psychologists. And so if you got a book club and you guys are still in it right now, let's have one of our Olympians or sports psychs pop in. And so—

I would love that.

And just coach them up. You know, bring your team and bring your questions and we'll bring an Olympian to coach them up. To really address anything that's in the first rule of mastery. Very cool.

I love it. Well, we are out of time and this was highly anticipated and I had it hyped in my mind and I feel like it lives up to those lofty expectations.

Yeah, it was fun, man.

I appreciate you joining, Mike. This was great. I'm really hoping that people hear this and dive in and read some of your content, follow the podcast. So maybe just tell people where to find you, where to, where to start.

I'll do something right before that, which is thank you for creating the space. Thank you for investing prior to us even knowing each other, like, the community, so that there's a, a fun reason for us to talk about things that, um, I think they really matter, you know, which is helping each other be our very best. And so, uh, I appreciate it. I appreciate the space you created to allow me to tell a couple of stories and point to a little science and, and share some personal experiences. So thank you for that. Um, Kyle, the— I think the best place is the Finding Mastery podcast. That's cool. Um, and you can also resource a bunch of stuff on our website that are free tools. And so that's findingmastery.com, and the podcast is Finding Mastery.

Awesome. And the Instagram is awesome. I don't know. It's newer in my mind to having such high-quality clips at volume. There's an Instagram group that I created. So, anybody from the company that adds me on Instagram, I put them into what's called the Stoic Squad. And so, I'll just forward interesting things. My whole Instagram feed is just people like you, authors and thought leaders. And stuff. And so I'm like constantly, uh, forwarding your clips to that, that group. It's another good on-ramp if people just want a trickle of Michael Jervais in their life to have fun.

That's awesome. And so what is that feed?

Uh, no, my Instagram feed, just like what I see.

Yeah, yeah, got it.

Yeah, when I started to learn more about neuroplasticity, neuroscience, I was like, why do I have anything negative and distracting and sarcastic. So, I unfollowed. This is like 5 or 6 years ago. I unfollowed all the meme accounts, all the garbage news, and I just followed people like yourself and Brad Stulberg is an author I like, Ryan Holiday, those type of people. So, when I reflexively open Instagram, I'm just getting a quick hit of—

It's cool.

—a reminder of the person I want to be. And, it's one of the things I suggest to people if they want to get their mental health and mental performance game into a better spot is just like, what are you drip feeding into your brain reflexively over time?

Kyle, that's really cool because there's this understanding we have in elite sport is that we don't rise to the occasion, we actually fall to the level of our training. And when your level of training in craft, body, and mind is ridiculously sophisticated and really excellent, then you're not falling very far. You're doing what you're capable of doing rather than this kind of magical thought, which is like, oh yeah, we rose to that occasion. Nah, you're actually doing what you're capable of. And so in that drip feed, how you're thinking, you fall to the level of your conditioning. And so if you're conditioning your mind to, I don't know, laugh at cats, you know, or whatever kind of silly memes, as opposed to like thought patterns that can unlock something for you, awesome. And I would say that like it— the ideas that come through social media are cool, but it's the training. It's figuring out how to train those from that insight or that special little thing that somebody says. It's like, what is the What's the training that I'm going to do every day to be able to take these skills to the next level?

So, if there's one thing people should do tomorrow that I just like, I want to do one thing to start on this path to apply things practically. In the book, you call it from insight to action, I think, at the end.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I would point to the morning mindset routine. It's something that is like right there. Start your day that way.

We'll set it up on that website. revenueleadership.findingmastery.com.

There you go. Yeah, we'll get that started. I think that that is the simplest, kind of most concrete way to move forward. And Judson Althoff is the chief creative— Judson Althoff is the chief commercial officer at Microsoft. And he's on public record. He was on the podcast talking about the work he's done from the inside out. And, and he's on record talking about the morning mindset routine was really an important first step for him. And so, you know, for the listener, you're, you're not alone. You're in great company with folks that are doing some of this work.

Okay. I'm going to put the, that episode in the show notes. That will be folks' first introduction to your podcast. Very relevant segue, I think. So, we'll wrap there. This was awesome, Mike. I can't thank you enough. This was an absolute pleasure and an honor for me personally. I mean it when I say it. You have taught me so much from afar over the better part of a decade. And so grateful that we could bring this to my audience.

Grateful that you spent the time. So, appreciate it.

Yeah, fun. Appreciate you, mate. Thank you, Kyle Norton. To the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe, and you can find a link in the show notes. And be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.