Shadowing Practice: How to Achieve Ultra High Performance | Dr. Michael Gervais on Impact Theory - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The greatest fear in modern times is what other people think.
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So our job is to love others and not give a shit what they think of us.
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Because we only get one emotion at a time.
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That's how our brain works.
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One emotion.
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So our job is to really find the right state that we want to be in, the right emotional place, and use that rather than let the brain win.
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And if that is untrained and unconditioned, it will win.
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Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.
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Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people
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and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.
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Alright, today's guest is a high performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world's most accomplished athletes and performers.
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He's helped level up everyone from Olympic gold medalist and MVPs in every major sport to elite UFC fighters, Red Bull extreme athletes, the US military,
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and the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks.
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He's the guy you call in when you absolutely, positively must set the skydiving world record by jumping out of a helium balloon at the edge of space
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and falling back to earth at faster than the speed of sound.
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Or you decide you want to become the first person to
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survive jumping out of an airplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute.
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No matter what your discipline, if you play in rugged, hostile and elite spaces, he's the man you bring in to help you build a mindset for unparalleled achievement.
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A peer-reviewed published author with some of the most usable insights into the mind there is.
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He's been featured by virtually every high-profile news outlet around, including NBC, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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His principles and teachings are so sought after that he
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and legendary NFL coach Pete Carroll co-founded the corporate training institute
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Compete to Create to help some of the world's largest and most prestigious companies create winning cultures that foster greatness and fulfillment.
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Their client roster is the who's who of the Fortune 500 and includes Microsoft, Zynga, and Boeing.
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So please, help me in welcoming the host of Finding Mastery, one of the most recognizable minds in the field of optimal human performance, Dr. Michael Gervais.
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What a great introduction.
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Dude, thank you, man.
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That was fun.
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Dude, your story is crazy.
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What you help people do is really, really extraordinary.
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That's where I want to start.
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What it takes to play at that elite level, especially around the framing of ...
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You said that every great change starts with pain.
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I found that really intriguing.
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It feels dark, it feels heavy when you say that, but that's been my experience, that it's accurate, is that the reason people change is because of pain.
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The reason we grow is because we get uncomfortable and we embrace being uncomfortable.
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But being honest with the pain
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that we feel is usually the prime mover for people to do the work that is necessary to push to the edge.
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In the space of world leading athletics and arts and business, everybody works hard, right?
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And some people work smarter, but everybody works hard.
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So there's a balance in modern time right now about running to the edge and then properly recovering.
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So why would somebody run to the edge?
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And run to the edge of their ability?
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To the capacity that they have within themselves.
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So yes, but when we talk about capacity, we're talking about emotional capacity, mental capacity.
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Long gone are the days where it's just physical capacity.
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You can get your heart rate up relatively easily, and that is the old way.
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It's still relevant, but that is an old way to think about capacity building.
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That's not the case anymore.
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What we do is we spend time working to understand the strengths of people.
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We want to understand where they want to go and how they want to be on that going in their life.
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That's like setting a vision.
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I want to go back to pain for a second.
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I have a quote which I thought was really extraordinary.
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This is from you.
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The worst thing we can do for our loved ones is to try to reduce their pain.
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Yeah.
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Does that sound surprising?
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It doesn't from my perspective now.
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That would have been absolutely shocking to me 15 years ago.
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What changed for you?
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All the stuff that you talk about, pain being the motivator, all of that, all of my success is predicated on misery, period.
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And you talk about the need to ...
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You don't use the words rock bottom, but I'll use that because that's how it felt for me.
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I needed to hit rock bottom in order to put in the work, in order to be so desperate that I had to let go of my old way of thinking about myself.
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I had a fixed mindset.
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And I didn't have these words at the time, but this is me now looking back.
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It was a binary choice between depression or a growth mindset.
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And I didn't know if a growth mindset was real.
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I just knew it was different than the depression that I was racing towards.
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In that period, that just was the spark of,
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I was suffering so much and laying on the floor of my apartment and broke and hopeless and all of that, and just trying to figure out how do I move forward from here.
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If you had said it at that moment, I would have said the sole reason we exist is to reduce the pain of our loved ones.
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Yeah.
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Okay, so there's a difference between pain and suffering.
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There's a difference between there.
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We're all suffering.
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We all have suffering.
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We all have an emptiness or a dark place
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or corners inside of our spirit and our mind that are not fulfilled and watered and full.
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We all can relate to that.
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When I'm talking about pain, I'm not necessarily talking about suffering, but acknowledging our suffering, being in touch with the pain,
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that's enough to say, when you're really honest, That's enough to say, I can't do this.
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I don't want to do this anymore.
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This is not the person I want to become and be on a regular basis.
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If that's the case, if that assumption is right, then as a loved one, my job is to help you get real
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and experience those places as often as you can so that you make the declaration to say, no, no, no, no, no,
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no. That's not okay for me to feel and be this way on a regular basis.
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So let me pull on that thread just a little bit further.
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It is healthy and necessary to feel all of the human emotions.
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When we ask people, what do you want in life?
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Most people say, I want to be happy.
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Wait, hold on now.
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If grandma dies, do you want to be happy?
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That's like, really?
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When your child is sick, do you want to be happy?
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No, no, no. I think the answer is that we want to feel all of the human experience to its fullest, never lose ourself in it,
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but to experience all of it.
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And so we're getting into the weeds of some very esoteric and non-scientific thinking right now,
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but the practice is that if I care about you deeply, the mistake I can make in your life is to help you feel like it's all okay.
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Like oh, it's okay.
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It's okay that you're drinking and driving and you killed a 14-year-old.
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That's no problem.
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You'll do better next time.
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No, the work is to say, well, what's this like for you?
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To feel that pain so you make the commitment to say, no, no, no, I can't do this anymore.
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And that's when it becomes really real.
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It's interesting.
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So that made me think about standards and holding people to a standard and loving them at the same time, which that's entirely stuff that I hear you talk about,
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and then knowing your work with the Seahawks and Coach Carroll.
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So this notion of relationship-based groups, teams, companies, however you want to think about it, but how do you simultaneously hold somebody to a standard,
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say you messed up, and at the same time love them?
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Okay, so that is the fabric that binds us, right?
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I think.
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I'm imagining for you the same, is we want to be around people that somehow give us the sense that, when I'm around that person,
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I don't know, I just feel better, they make me better somehow.
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Let's say it's you and me, and what I want to feel from you is that you've got my back,
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you understand me, and that when you're making decisions, it's not just for you, it's for me as well.
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And so a rising tide floats all boats.
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The relationships that go wrong or sour is if I'm on the side of this relationship,
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I'm like, do I trust that he's making these thoughts or moves because it's right for him or me?
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And the sour relationships are the one where it's really just good for you, and I'm just casualty in your experience.
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So what we do ahead of time is we invest in the relationship.
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So for example, the Seattle Seahawks, the product is football.
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So just like a business, you've got products for your businesses as well.
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But we are a relationship-based organization.
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If Coach Carroll was here, he'd say, that's how we run the organization, a relationship-based organization and the output is football.
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We found that to be incredibly valuable because we don't do, none of us do this thing alone.
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And if we're really going to go the distance and really step into the frontier to do the amazingly difficult,
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challenging things, we need to lock arms to stay in the trenches long enough.
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And what happens for most people is we lock arms, we say, oh yeah, let's go get it.
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And then we lock arms and as soon as it's hard, the brain kicks in and the survival mechanisms in the brain are stronger than the thriving mechanisms.
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The survival mechanisms of the brain light up, and what do we do?
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We save our own ass, and we unlock our arms, and we take care of ourselves.
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That is how people fray in rugged and stressful environments, emotionally stressful environments.
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We unlock.
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The extraordinary are able to stay the course, locked arms, because they're mission-minded, they're really clear about what they want to experience, and they bet on each other.
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That really hit me hard, and now what I want to know is how many areas of your life outside of sports does that apply?
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Where I want to get to is how the locking arms, not fraying, betting on each other,
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like that tribal mentality, which when you were telling that story, really, really hit me and it made me think, okay, how much am I doing that in my business?
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Very plausible to do in my business, though hearing how well you guys do it, it makes me want to be better.
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Definitely possible in my relationship with my wife, but then how far can we expand that?
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Because if you could have that kind of relationship with a potent enough number of people and a versatile number of situations,
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it just feels like you could accomplish so much more.
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But I just don't know how many places it actually applies.
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Is it realistic to do with your friends?
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You know what I mean?
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Yeah, it depends on the community that you're building.
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We'd like to think that we are all a pebble in a pond.
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So the weight of the pebble indicates the ripples and the output, the effect.
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And those inner circle, there's a greater impact, and then as you spread out, especially through social media, there's larger impacts.
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But yeah, it is available.
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You're in relationships in every community that you're in, and I don't know if you have spent the time to articulate your philosophy
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and to be able to get it in maybe 25 words or less, maybe down to four, three, or two, one word.
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And so that type of work, investing on the clarity that you have within yourself, allows us to have a greater weight in that pebble.
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And so from clarity, we can train our mind to have conviction in stressful environments,
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and the clarity also allows other people to know really what we're about.
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And then when we ask them what they're about, that's how you start to build that deeper bond.
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And what I've found is that most people want to stay on the surface, because it's hard to talk about things that are hard to talk about.
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And there's like three levels, right?
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You can talk about, I don't know, beer and pizza, and sporting event scores.
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And there's nothing wrong with that, but that's just some type of relationships.
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And then underneath, there's other conversations which are about ideas that are hard to articulate.
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And then underneath of that, it's talking about personal experiences that are hard to articulate.
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And those are kind of the three levels of depth that I think most conversations get bucketed in.
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One thing that I found really interesting, you talk about really being yourself, asking people what they're really like, the relationship that you have with your wife,
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and what you talked about, that very courageous moment of hers where she actually said, this isn't working.
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You've done your homework.
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I mean with stuff like this where I can learn like it's
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so powerful to me and the way that you think
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and some of the lessons you put together Really really are insanely powerful
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This one I found interesting I found your reaction to it
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or at least the way that you frame it now really powerful
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So walk us through that moment how authenticity plays into it and how you get to those deeper levels Yeah
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It's not easy, you know intimate relationships are challenging and because the person that we're talking about knows you and knows
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If the if the relationship is really rich Almost all of you.
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I'm not sure as a as a human somebody this might sound sad
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But I don't think
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that another person even in the most intimate relationships can know all of another person
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So there is a loneliness to the human experience
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that I think is important just to honor and that doesn't mean I'm by any means depressed.
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There's a vibrancy about how I view life and engage in life, but there's also this honesty about the lonely part.
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What happened in our relationship is that I was ripping and running, figuring out I was in the study mode, big time study mode of the science of psychology,
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and I had some early budding successes that were taking place.
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And essentially, I was not watering the relationship, and I was being selfish.
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And that thirst I had for understanding the science
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and the application of the science of psychology was out watering the intimacy and relationships of that relationship.
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So one day she came home, and looking back, I was surprised by it, but looking back, all the telltale signs were there.
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For a long time, she'd been saying, hey, pay attention to the relationship.
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But I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I really thought it was all fine, but it wasn't.
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And so finally one day, it was the most candid conversation, and she just grabbed me.
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We've been dating since high school.
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And she grabbed me, not forcefully, but grabbed my attention, and she said, as a friend, as your best friend, I'm telling you, this doesn't work anymore.
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I love you.
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wonderful person, but I can't figure out how to be me in this relationship." And so I was like,
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holy, that's the worst thing that a friend could say, the worst.
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And so I was like, no, no, no, no, no. And she's like, okay, okay, I feel you now.
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And she's like, no, no, no, it's too late.
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And so that was my cue.
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I had to leave, out of kindness and compassion for the experience.
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And she's feeling it deeply.
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And I wish she was here in this conversation because she'd make light of it and say, well, you know, yeah.
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Because looking back, it was the richest, most intense thing that I've been through in the relationship.
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We hit rock bottom, to your point.
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I moved out and kind of bounced around from a couple different places.
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It was a month before we went back and had a conversation.
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And basically, she's like, I'm done.
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I said, let's give it a chance.
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We've been together a long time.
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Let's just give it a chance.
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So we went to therapy.
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And day one of the therapist, I identify with my Italian roots, and she's Cuban.
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And so the therapist is across from us, and she says, this, hold on, hold on, as we're like our temper is up.
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She says, this is as bad as I've ever seen it.
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And so she basically asked one really important question.
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She said, do you guys want to do the work?
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You need to work, Mike.
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Lisa, you need to work.
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Do you want to do the work with each other or with somebody else?" And I thought to myself, oh my god.
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If she says, I want to grow, but I want to grow with someone else, this is the end of the relationship.
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That was the moment.
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And my heart goes, ba-boom.
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And I knew that I couldn't go first, because that was the problem.
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I was going first too much.
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And so that moment lasted, felt like an eternity.
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And obviously she said, I want to do the work with you, but I'm not sure that I can trust you that you'll do the work too.
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So we did some work.
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And so we're still married together.
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It's great.
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Looking back, I mean, the work, I would encourage everybody, anybody that in your community,
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to do that intimate, deep work with somebody and have real conversations.
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The freedom is incredible on the other side of it, really incredible.
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And it's hard to get to.
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So that deep work of really getting to know somebody, of figuring out what's important to them, seems to be exactly what you do in your practice as well.
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What does that look like?
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Where does somebody start in terms of trying to connect on that level?
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A want.
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It starts with a real deep want to do the work.
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I wish there was like the seven steps to whatever.
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It doesn't quite work that way.
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But I do know from good research that there are some telltale signs that have great accuracy of predicting separation.
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And so avoiding critique, avoiding defensiveness as a response, avoiding stonewalling, and avoiding contempt.
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So avoiding those things, people that have some of those things in their relationship, they're able to predict divorce within great accuracy within two years.
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Yeah, I remember reading some of that research, and I think they called them the four horsemen, right?
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Yeah, really, really interesting in how contempt is like the one that is just going to, if you have that, yeah, that's really, really interesting.
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So now, so thinking about that in that context, about just the way that humans come together, the way that we can support each other, the way that we transfer energy, which I find really interesting,
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not in a woo-woo way, but like really like people pick up on your vibe.
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You were telling this story about a time, I think it was with the Seahawks, but I don't know for sure, where one guy just went ballistic.
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He was just seeing red, couldn't come down from rage, and the team got in his face.
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And the way that they then re-got in sync, I thought was super interesting.
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Yeah, so that was one of the athletes was right at the edge, emotionally, of his capacity, and he was just angry, just really angry.
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And he came flying off the sidelines and just pissed.
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This is a group of alpha apex competitors.
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These are alpha competitors at the Seattle Seahawks.
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Most highly competitive environments, they are alphas.
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These are large, physically strong men.
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There wasn't one human that was able to grab all of his attention
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and help him get to a place that is productive.
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They instinctively knew there wasn't a coach, there was nobody, and they instinctively knew that they had to wrap around him.
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One guy tried, another guy tried solo, another guy tried solo, and then sure enough, that moment, and it's on tape, it's beautiful, it's really quite special.
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They just huddled around him and started bouncing in this tribal way.
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You can't plan for that.
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That's a deep connection that those men have, and a care for each other, and a care for the mission.
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How do you get that to take place?
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All of the work ahead of time on the relationships, and that's where Coach Carroll's approach, to be a relationship-based organization, it pays dividends in those types of moments.
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And that doesn't mean it's always going to happen that way.
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There's certainly times when, okay, we've got more work to do.
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But that was a beautiful celebration of someone right at the edge, not facilitating their emotions to be mission-minded,
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and the team, the community taking care of it.
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It was really cool.
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Yeah, that story really hit me.
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And I love your concept of emotionally, which I've never heard anybody talk about that before,
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emotionally going to the edge of your limits and then using that as like a training mechanism to get better, to be able to push your emotional boundaries farther and farther,
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and I assume to be able to handle more emotional amplitude, for lack of a better word.
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So the question that I had though is how do you train that?
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How do you create, I'll give you a really weird example so you know what I'm talking about.
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In the world of business, I found it was
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so hard to put myself in a situation where there were simultaneously no real consequences
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and my anxiety was triggered because that's where I had struggled.
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And I just couldn't.
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The only thing that triggered my anxiety was when there was real consequences.
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So I didn't want to put myself in that situation to train.
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So I started playing video games and I found
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that I had the same anxiety response
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because there was some 14-year-old kid who was kicking my ass
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and he was going to mock me at the end of it
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if I lost and that triggered the literal same amplitude of anxiety, which is weird but nonetheless, but there were no real consequences.
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So I started doing that as a way to see how rapidly I could come back down.
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I love that.
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God, I love that.
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Okay, so when we're talking about emotions, there's only a handful of primary emotions And unfortunately,
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we haven't done a great job in Western culture of teaching how to feel emotions, label them, and then how to work with them.
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I didn't have that course.
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I don't know if you did.
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And I didn't have a course on how the basic mental skills work, how to label them, and how to train them.
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So we haven't done a great job of doing this in the education platform.
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And if there's only three things we can train, craft, body, and mind, why are we not training the mind?
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Because the way that thoughts and emotions work, it's like a bang-bang experience.
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They happen right next to each other.
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There's some conversation about what comes first.
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Is it a thought, then emotion, or is it an emotion, then a thought?
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Most people in the field of psychology would say it's thought, then emotion.
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The way that I think about this is it's like a rider and an elephant.
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The rider is the thought.
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As soon as the emotion wants to run, because the thought, maybe the rider's scared, he's having scary thoughts or sad because he's having a lot of sad-based thoughts.
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When the elephant wants to go, when the emotions run, you're not controlling that thing.
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Your job, my job, is to be the rider, a thoughtful, aware rider of thoughts.
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And when we're able to be aware of our thoughts, then we can guide and negotiate our thoughts so they don't run wild.
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Ultimately, there's a meta-awareness that takes place where when you train awareness, and I'd like to get into that conversation with you, when you train awareness of your thoughts,
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emotions, body sensations, and your environment, awareness of your environment, those four things, we become more finely tuned so that we can choose great thoughts.
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We can harness our emotions.
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We can feel our body sensations and use them to facilitate clear thinking, creative thinking, or great output.
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And when we're more aware of the unfolding, unpredictable environment around us, we can course correct and adjust and pivot.
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And that makes all the difference in the most intense environments in the world, whether that's an emotional intensity, a vulnerability, or that is center court,
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whatever sporting environment that we're talking about.
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So back to your first thought, it's vulnerability that is how we train emotional capacity.
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And the more that we become vulnerable and demonstrate the courage to do so, we expand our capacity to feel.
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And if I know I can go to the extreme edges of an emotion,
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and I start to feel a little bit of an emotion and kind of rapidly going towards, let's say, out here is like panic,
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like high, high fear, and I'm starting to feel anxious, or I'm starting to feel something on that scale, well, I don't have to panic at anxiety.
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I can actually use it as a signal, go, oh, look, what are my thoughts?
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My thoughts are about like, this is scary what's scary about this?"
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And then I can start to work with that instead of like as soon as I start to feel something, and this is my capacity, I feel anxious, I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to run to the edge of it.
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No, our job is to pull that thing out as far as we possibly can so that when we're in those charged, emotionally charging environments, we've got lots of room to play.
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And that's the mark of a master.
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All right, I want to push you on that.
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I'm so curious, I want to know how to use this in my life.
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So when you say, how is vulnerability helping me there?
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that I'm not worried about looking stupid or whatever I'm panicking about, just don't worry about that?
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Yeah.
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It's such a multi-factored question that you have there.
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There's so much in that.
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Let's see if we can ...
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You've heard of YOLO?
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Yep.
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You only live once.
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FOMO?
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Yep.
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Fear of missing out.
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Okay.
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I want to introduce a new kind of fun concept.
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And before I share that with you, we've got an ancient brain that's working in modern times.
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And our ancient brain isn't as fast as adapting as modern technology.
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It's rapidly changing.
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So our ancient brain is designed for survival.
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Easy to kind of track that idea.
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And how we track that idea is that information right now is coming into your brain two ways, the high road and the low road.
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And the high road is up into your thinking brain, and the low road is down into your emotional call it the amygdala, into the emotion centers of the brain.
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And it's coming in here to the fight-flight response mechanisms at twice the speed.
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So it's coming in all the time, information is coming in twice as much and twice as fast before you're getting it here, the thinking part of the brain.
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So what's happening here is right now you're gating out and I'm gating out, nope, this is safe, nope, we're safe, nope, we're okay, this is okay, this is okay.
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And so our brain is designed to figure out if we're going to be okay and safe here.
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That came from saber-tooth tigers, that came from the rustling in the bush.
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Is it a saber-tooth or is it a bunny?
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And so we've had to figure out how to be hyper-vigilant so we could get away.
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Our ancestors passed that gift down to us.
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But we don't have saber-tooth anymore, so what is our modern day fear?
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What other people think.
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Period.
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So FOPO, fear of other people's opinions, right?
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I find that to be clever.
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That's good.
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I like that.
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So FOPO, but that is our modern day threat other people think.
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That's why public speaking is so hard for people, because what are the stakes there?
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What another human thinks of us.
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So what are we really good at?
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Picking up facial structures, micro-tells, if you will, if they are being critical of us.
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What do we do to protect ourselves?
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We become hypercritical of ourselves so that we get to that state before somebody else might embarrass us that way.
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And so we've got this self-cutting mechanism, this self-critiquing mechanism that we're basically beating ourselves up
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or tenderizing ourselves in not a good way so that we don't face those casualties publicly.
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So our brain is great at picking up these little signals in other people
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so that we can adjust and provide some sort of protective mechanism from being exposed of not being good enough.
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Because if we're not good enough, we're kicked out of the tribe.
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And in modern days, what that means is we may be fired.
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And so there's a lot at stake for people if they don't have a job.
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So long way of saying the greatest fear in modern times is what other people think.
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So our job is to love others and not give a shit what they think of us.
381
But not in a cold way, but to really love other people, because we only get one emotion at a time.
382
That's how our brain works, one emotion.
383
Either you are anxious or you are joyful.
384
You can't get the two at the same time.
385
So our job is to really find the right state that we want to be in, the right emotional place, and use that rather than let the brain win.
386
And the brain wins by saying, what are they thinking, what are they thinking, am I safe, am I safe, am I safe?
387
And if that is untrained and unconditioned, it will win.
388
It sounds like a lot of this rides on the back of your ability to be self-aware, and you said that there's a process for training that.
389
So how do you go about training a level of self-awareness that you can deploy against that?
390
Okay, super thoughtful.
391
So this is not a new thought, but it is gaining incredible awareness, which is mindfulness.
392
If we follow the science around mindfulness, in 1980 there was two or three research articles on mindfulness.
393
That's not a lot.
394
2008, there was an uptick, a couple hundred.
395
In 2016, there's this J hockey stick arc that's happened.
396
In 2016, 17, there's thousands of research articles from scholarly universities.
397
So what is happening with that trend?
398
Mindfulness has been around for, let's call it 2,500 years, 2,600 years.
399
And research is starting to find incredible changes in our brain, neurochemistry, neuroelectricity.
400
Structurally things are changing.
401
there's great change, and it starts with awareness of thoughts and emotions.
402
There's two pillars to mindfulness.
403
You could use the word meditation if you wanted.
404
I use the word mindfulness because meditation in alpha competitive environments has some sort of baggage to it.
405
And so we can say mindfulness hyphen training.
406
They're all comfortable.
407
That works better.
408
But there's two main pillars to mindfulness.
409
One is awareness, and the second pillar is wisdom.
410
So if we did a disservice to mindfulness
411
and we just stopped at pillar one and you became more aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations,
412
and the environment, you would be a better performer because you course correct more eloquently.
413
And here's something really important.
414
You can't, I can't be around a wise person and all of a sudden be wise.
415
You can't hijack wise wisdom.
416
You can't hack it.
417
You can't shortcut it.
418
It is within.
419
You can't read a wise book and all of a sudden be wise.
420
You have to reveal it.
421
You have to do the alone-based work of silence and listening, and you have to reveal that.
422
That's how it happens, and that takes time.
423
It takes time for this busy mind that is
424
so scattered all over the place with external stimulation and internal dialogue to quiet it down, to let go of the noise to get to the signal.
425
The more time we can spend conditioning our mind to be connected to the signal, which is the present moment, the stillness that I was talking about,
426
we reveal glimpses of wisdom.
427
Everything changes.
428
So those are the two pillars of mindfulness.
429
How do you train it?
430
Research would suggest somewhere around 8 to 20 minutes a day.
431
Minimally effective dose would be 8 minutes a day of training mindfulness or meditation.
432
We can talk about it more concretely if you want what that is.
433
Upwards to 20 plus minutes.
434
For the most part, more is better.
435
I love that.
436
When people ask you, okay, how did you end up working with Pete Carroll, was it, hey, you call him up, or whatever, which your answer to that question was amazing.
437
But your real answer of how you did it, the 18 years of cutting your teeth, is the part of your story I think I like the most.
438
Tell us a little bit about that.
439
What do you mean by cutting your teeth?
440
How on earth did you convince yourself to spend 18 years every Saturday in a gym?
441
Yeah.
442
God, I miss it.
443
I just got- You miss the gym?
444
No, I miss that experience.
445
So I'm wrestling right now in my life with who can afford access to doing this deep work.
446
Like I've trained, I don't know, 30 years.
447
I've invested millions of dollars in the craft.
448
I've made a lot of mistakes.
449
I've learned an incredible amount from research and the best doers and thinkers in the world, and there's one of me.
450
And I'm really wrestling with who has access to this information because it feels really selfish.
451
And so right now, it's reserved for the wealthy, but that's not where I came from.
452
And so the 18 years of woodshedding, if you will, what we're talking about is it was born out of an entrepreneurial spunk
453
that I didn't know what I was going to do.
454
A mentor of mine, this is right out of college, and a mentor of mine said, hey, Mike, this is a part-time temporary job that you might be interested.
455
It's like three weeks, 20 hours a week.
456
It's a nonprofit.
457
It would be nice to just kind of give to the community.
458
And it had this government funding around crime prevention and alcohol and drug prevention, those two.
459
And so day two, I was like, whoa, they're sitting on a lot of money.
460
They've got proper funding, is back in the days.
461
This was 1990, so it was a democratic approach to government.
462
And so we're sitting on lots of money, and I said, hey, I went to the executive director, and I had no place to do this, right?
463
I said, if I had an idea, would you guys fund it?
464
And they said, well, what's the idea?
465
I said, well, let me go work on it, and let me kind of really get it clear, and can we talk tomorrow?
466
So I came back with this concept, and the idea was, what's a premium right now for young
467
high school and college-age athletes is that there's nowhere to go on Saturday night.
468
You can go to a party, but there's nowhere to go to do athleticism.
469
So what if we can get a gym, open up the gym, bring a DJ in,
470
make a network of high school athletes and coach them on some of the psychology that I'm just kind of learning, undergrad, I just finished my undergrad,
471
kind of just learning, if I could coach them up on some leadership stuff,
472
and then open up the gym and see if we can get some basketball going and create a culture of learning, right?
473
And so they said, yeah, let's try it.
474
So the executive director gave it a shot.
475
The first night we had 130 young men, it was mostly men, that showed up and it was amazing.
476
And that's prime time party hours.
477
We picked a neutral gang territory to do it.
478
And I was just barely one step ahead of ideas.
479
And then I was now just starting my master's program.
480
And so what I did, basically, is I used Saturday night as a refuge for me to be around people of like mind.
481
People like to sweat and compete, and not interested in the party scene, but really kind of do something fun and engaging that way.
482
And then my job, the price to admission to this beautiful indoor three-courts, beautiful, rare piece of property in Los Angeles that was gang neutral.
483
And price to admission was to listen to me for 10, 15 minutes on a thought that I thought was important.
484
And this is now, imagine 130 young men, high school and college aged, 80, 90% are gang involved.
485
And I'm not gang involved at all, obviously.
486
And when I say obviously, it's like that's not where I came from.
487
And you can imagine, they don't want to listen to me.
488
They have no interest in listening.
489
They want to play ball, listen to the music, and get on with it.
490
And so I had to be crisp and short, which I'm not in this conversation, and I had to be really intense
491
and purposeful about how can I get in a great mindset practice that they could use tonight, and we could practice it tonight.
492
And I had this staff of high school kids that were switched on about it as well, and we would support and challenge them to try it tonight goal setting,
493
self-talk, breathing when you get too intense, conflict resolution, how to use words and emotions and pull you out of the engagement rather than a fist fight.
494
In 18 years, every Saturday night from 8 a.m.
495
I'm sorry, 8 p.m to midnight, I was in a sweaty gym working out how to deliver sports psychology
496
or mindset principles on time to a group of people that didn't really care what I had to say, and I had to be crisp and short and get in it, and then see if it could work.
497
In 18 years, we had three fights.
498
Wow.
499
Three fights.
500
I mean, I just got a tweet today, and it'd be fun to share that,
501
a tweet today where a kid that came through that program, I mean, during the program he was probably 18 years old,
502
he tatted up his face, you know, like really a great edge about him, went to the edge.
503
I mean, when you go above your neck on a tattoo, there's something there.
504
And so he tatted up his face, he was really intense, and he tweeted just today, he said, Mike, thank you, a lot of lives have been saved for what we did together for those 18 years.
505
And he was a participant, showing up every night.
506
He was one that almost got in a fight on a regular basis, but we worked, and we worked, and we worked.
507
And so I miss it, I crave it.
508
The ability to share a piece of information and be involved in a relationship where other people grow is like electric.
509
And so thank you for bringing it up.
510
That's where I worked it out.
511
And by the way, my office was a janitor's office without windows
512
that it was me and three rats that I was chasing out of that thing for years, years.
513
That's where I went to work.
514
That was my office.
515
And I look back in fond memories like the good old days of being grubby and it was awesome.
516
So thank you for letting me share that.
517
Oh man, for sure.
518
Thanks for sharing it.
519
Yeah.
520
If you ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online.
521
Lots of places.
522
LinkedIn, Michael Gervais, G-E-R-V-A-I-S, and then Twitter is at Michael Gervais.
523
Instagram is Finding Mastery, and so we fired up a podcast called Finding Mastery.
524
You can also find us online.
525
The partnership with Coach Carroll is called Compete to Create,
526
and it's taking the principles about how he switches on a culture where people become their very best, and the principles of how to train your mind,
527
and putting those two things together for enterprises.
528
That's Compete to Create, and then again, the Finding Mastery podcast is FindingMastery.net.
529
All right, very cool.
530
My last question, what's the impact that you want to have on the world?
531
Okay, so the idea is one in five people in an organization, and one in five people in a family
532
or an enterprise organization to help them condition and train their mind to live in the present moment more often.
533
Because in the present moment is where all things high performance take place.
534
It's where love happens.
535
It's where relationships and the fabric of relationships are strengthened and revealed.
536
It's where glimpses of wisdom and potential happen.
537
So increasing the frequency of people spending time in the present moment.
538
And the way to do that is by conditioning and training your mind in non-hostile,
539
non-rugged, non-stressful environments, and purposely working up into more hostile, stressful, rugged environments, emotionally challenging environments.
540
It doesn't mean that there's physical consequences.
541
It just means that something's real for you.
542
And to do that on a regular basis.
543
So one in five people to live in the present moment more often.
544
Wow, I love that.
545
Great answer.
546
Thank you so much for being here.
547
Yeah, thank you.
548
Guys, man, I'm telling you, what is utterly fascinating about him is exactly what he just said there at the end, that it's mindfulness, it's being in the present moment.
549
That is the place where all of high achievement, high performance greatness exists.
550
It was not the answer that I expected to find when I started researching him, somebody that I had known from his accomplishments, the people that he's helped do these extraordinary things.
551
I did not think the punchline was going to be turning inward, finding that inner peace, finding calm, being in this moment, and that notion that he has of letting the past
552
and the future exist simultaneously now as noise in the present, I thought was a really powerful way of explaining exactly what mindfulness is,
553
of finding that silence so that you can hear the subconscious, so that you can be, as he says, where your feet are.
554
I thought that was absolutely incredible.
555
Trust me when I say go watch the videos that he's done, the other interviews, take him as a body of work.
556
It is absolutely astonishing.
557
will be blown away I promise.
558
Alright guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care.
559
Thank you sir that was amazing.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How to Achieve Ultra High Performance”. This video has 559 sentences and 7408 words to shadow. The speech runs for 41:23. The speaker talks at a natural 179 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
| mindfulness noun | /ˈmaɪn(d)fʊlnəs/ | Awareness. |
| mindset noun | /ˈmaɪn(d)ˌsɛt/ | A way of thinking; an attitude or opinion, especially a habitual one. |
| emotionally adverb | /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/ | In an emotional manner; displaying emotion. |
| pillar noun | /ˈpɪlɚ/ | A large post, often used as supporting architecture. |
| stressful adjective | /ˈstɹɛsfəl/ | Irritating; causing stress. |
| athlete noun | /ˈæθ.liːt/ | A participant in any of a group of sporting activities including track and field, road running, cross country running and racewalking. |
| rugged adjective | /ˈɹʌɡ.ɪd/ | Broken into sharp or irregular points; uneven; not smooth; rough. |
| rider noun | /ˈɹaɪ̯.dəː/ | An old Dutch gold coin with the figure of a man on horseback stamped upon it. |
| consequence noun | /ˈkɑn.sɪ.kwəns/ | An effect; something that follows a cause as a result. |
| pebble noun | /ˈpɛbəl/ | A small stone, especially one rounded by the action of water. |
| sabre noun | /ˈseɪ.bə/ | A light sword with a curved blade, sharp along the front edge, part of the back edge, and at the point. |
| articulate verb | /ɑːɹˈtɪk.jə.leɪt/ | To make clear or effective. |
| vulnerability noun | /ˌvʌln(ə)ɹəˈbɪlɪti/ | The state of being vulnerable; susceptibility to attack or injury, either physical or emotional; the state or condition of being weak or poorly defended. |
| sensation noun | /sɛnˈseɪʃən/ | A physical feeling or perception from something that comes into contact with the body; something sensed. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| look back verb | To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight). |
| open up verb | To open. |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
| blow away verb | To cause to go away by blowing, or by wind. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| come through verb | To come into a room or other space through a door or passageway. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- No, the work is to say, well, what's this like for you?
- Is it realistic to do with your friends?
- You know what I mean?
- How do you get that to take place?
- My thoughts are about like, this is scary what's scary about this?"
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If Coach Carroll was here, he'd say · if I had an idea, would you |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has worked · He's been featured · that's been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is untrained · been featured · is predicated |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | conversations which are · kid who was · anxiety, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 148 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, tooth /tuθ/, thoughtful /ˈθɔːtfəl/, therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, emotionally /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/, sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/, anxious /ˈæŋkʃəs/
- Long words — get the stress right: emotionally /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/, articulate /ɑːɹˈtɪk.jə.leɪt/, vulnerability /ˌvʌln(ə)ɹəˈbɪlɪti/, simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/, instinctively /ɪnˈstɪŋktɪvli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like emotion, mindfulness, mindset.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.