Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

Finding a way to coach yourself with challenge and grace can be an extraordinary unlock for performance.

Mikaela Shiffrin is an Olympic gold medalist and the winningest alpine ski racer in World Cup history. We first released this conversation in 2024. She has since won Olympic slalom gold at Milano Cortina and a record-equaling sixth Overall Crystal Globe, and what she describes here is the work that was already well underway.

Mikaela and Mike get into the performance anxiety that had her sick at the start gate years into her career, the self-coaching habit she built...

What happens to the rest of your relationships when the one you have with yourself goes untended?

Dr. Thema Bryant is a clinical psychologist, tenured professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, director of the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory, and former president of the American Psychological Association. She hosts The Homecoming Podcast and wrote Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love.

Thema emphasizes that one of the biggest predictors of our mental wellbeing is not your achievement or your bank account. It is the people you spend your time...

“…the stories that we tell ourselves and other people become our lives.”

— IN-Q

This is a conversation about the story you are living inside, about creativity as a practice rather than a talent, and about why being witnessed helps us release what we might otherwise carry alone.

Before this conversation started, IN-Q walked the entire Finding Mastery team through a poetry workshop. Each person wrote about a personal experience with risk that changed the direction of their life, then read it out loud to the room. Mike opens this episode saying he has never st...

What if the calmest person in the room isn’t avoiding pressure, but experiencing it differently?

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is one of the world’s most recognized spiritual teachers and humanitarian leaders. He founded the Art of Living, which teaches meditation, breathwork, and service in over 180 countries, and he is the author of Notes for the Journey Within.

Stress has a use, and Gurudev compares it to a pinch of salt in food, useful in that amount and unconsumable past it. Most of us have taken on far more than that, and have neve...

How much of the time you spend in pain comes from the injury itself, and how much comes from the fear around it?

Dr. Tom Walters is a board-certified orthopedic physical therapist, strength and conditioning specialist, educator, and founder of Rehab Science. He has spent more than two decades helping people understand pain, movement, and injury recovery, and he is the author of Rehab Science: How to Overcome Pain and Heal from Injury.

Tom’s starting point is that pain and injury are not the same thing. Pain is an unpleasant sensory or emotional experience ti...

A letter landed on Masud Husain’s desk about a man in his thirties who had stopped doing anything at all.

Dr. Masud Husain is a clinical neurologist, neuroscientist, and Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain and author of Our Brains, Our Selves, winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

The letter was about a man named David who had been highly productive, worked in finance, and was charming company. Then he lost his job, stopped showering, and could not be bo...

What moral code do we need when our tools can reshape intelligence and biology itself?

Jamie Metzl is a technology and healthcare futurist and geopolitical expert, founder and chair of OneShared.World, and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He has served on the U.S. National Security Council and with the United Nations in Cambodia, and he is the author of Hacking Darwin, Superconvergence, and his newest book, The AI Ten Commandments.

The book began as a question Jamie put to a popular AI model, asking what ten principles, drawn from all of...

Tamsen Fadal was 47 and anchoring the evening news when the first hot flash hit.

She got off the set and lay down on the bathroom floor. No one had prepared her well for any of this. The answer, when it finally came, was a short note from her doctor in her patient portal with four words: "In menopause, any questions?"

Tamsen Fadal is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, executive producer of the PBS documentary The M Factor and The M Factor 2, and New York Times bestselling author of How to Menopause. She spent thirty years in...

What are the things we can do today to help minimize our chances of developing dementia as we age?

Dr. Tommy Wood is a physician and neuroscientist, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington, and author of The Stimulated Mind.

The book takes on a belief many of us still hold, that the adult brain becomes fixed at an early age and then declines from there. Tommy traces that idea back to 1906 and to the words of a Nobel laureate. Then he unpacks what the latest research and data say, and...

This is a conversation about habits, the ones you want to build and the ones you want to get rid of.

Jon Gordon has written more than 30 books on leadership, habits and mindset, including numerous bestsellers.

Jon's most recent book is titled The Power of Positive Habits, and it tackles a critical issue so many of us face: how do I break the habits that no longer serve me, and how do I build ones that will help me flourish?

Jon and Mike discuss the inward reflections that have helped them break the...

What is the change you seek to make?

On today's episode we go back to the Finding Mastery Vault for a conversation with Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur, teacher, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time on leadership, creativity, and making meaningful change. Seth has written more than twenty international bestsellers, including The Dip, Purple Cow, and The Song of Significance, alongside one of the longest-running daily blogs in the world. His claim is that naming the change you're actually trying to make is more than a branding exercise. It's what helps make every downstream...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers to those questions help unlock your potential?

For this 30th installment of our popular Ask Me Anything series, Dr. Michael Gervais is joined by co-host Victoria Garrick Browne, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, former Division I volleyball player at USC, mental health advocate, creator, and speaker. Victoria turned her own private struggle with performance anxiety and depression into a gift for millions, and she founded The Hidden Opponent, a nonprofit that brings mental health education and support to student-athletes on campuses around the country...

When the moment arrives and you don’t have a script, are you trying to impress, or working to connect?

Matt Abrahams is a lecturer in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, host of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, and author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. His path into this work starts very young and is almost comically literal. His last name starts with AB, so all through school he was the one teachers called on first. He felt what it is to b...

What if the kids who look like they’re doing just fine on the outside are quietly struggling to make sense of what’s happening on the inside?

Ross Szabo is one of the leading voices in youth mental health education: founding Wellness Director at Geffen Academy at UCLA, founder of the Human Power Project, co-author of Behind Happy Faces, and author of A Kids Book About Anxiety. His story starts long before the titles. Born into a family with severe mental health disorders and addiction, Ross was 11 when he visited his older brother in a psychiatric ward...

What has been the cost to women of relying on research that was never designed around female physiology?

Dr. Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and bestselling author of ROAR, which challenged the idea that women should train and fuel like men, and Next Level, which focuses on health, performance, and physiology through perimenopause and menopause. Over two decades of research, she has become one of the leading voices reshaping how we understand women's health, with a message that has become synonymous with her work: women are not small men. That line started as a...

How do great leaders build teams to become who they're capable of becoming, and prepare them to handle their emotions when the pressure is highest?

Eddie Jones is one of the most accomplished coaches in world rugby. He has led Australia, England, and Japan on the international stage, and guided Japan to one of the greatest upsets in rugby history at the 2015 World Cup. He has built a career on turning teams around, creating pressure, and challenging more from the people he leads. There is a fine line in that work. Too little challenge and we never...

What if the most important work of parenting isn’t about your child at all... but about understanding yourself?

Dr. Dan Siegel is a Harvard-trained clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, a neuroscientist, and one of the leading voices helping us understand how relationships shape the developing mind. He has authored over 20 books, five of them New York Times bestsellers, including co-authoring The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. Trained as a developmental attachment researcher through the National Institute of Mental Health, Dan has spent more than 40 years studying how the adults who care for children influence who th...

If your body already has powerful systems designed to repair and protect you, are your daily habits helping switch them on... or working against them?

Dr. Valter Longo is a professor and director of the Longevity Institute at USC, one of the world’s leading researchers on aging, nutrition, and lifespan, and the author of The Longevity Diet and his latest book, Fasting Cancer. His path into this work is an unusual one. He started as a jazz performance major, chasing rock guitar, and walked away the moment they told him he had to direct a marching ba...

What does it take to build a team that trusts each other enough to go through hard things together... not around them?

Mike Macdonald is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and one of the youngest head coaches in modern NFL history to win a Super Bowl. His path is an unusual one. He grew up with almost no family pipeline into football, a baseball kid in Georgia who fell in love with the strategy of the game watching his dad’s home video of his eighth-grade football games. When an injury ended his playing days in...

What if the reason so many of us are struggling right now isn’t a lack of success… but a lack of connection to something deeper?

Dr. Lisa Miller is a clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University, and author of The Awakened Brain, and her research challenges something many of us have been taught to overlook: that spirituality isn’t optional, and it isn’t just religion… it’s a core part of how we’re wired. Her journey began at 26, on an inpatient psychiatric unit, where she watched the best available treatments fall short for people in their darke...

What if the real crisis we're facing right now isn't political or technological… but a crisis of attention?

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist, professor emeritus of medicine, and the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program that helped move mindfulness from contemplative tradition into modern medicine, psychology, and high performance. The last time Jon joined Finding Mastery was four years ago, as the war in Ukraine was beginning. Four years on, the world hasn't gotten quieter. The crises have multiplied, AI has accelerated, and the same noise we worried about then has become the air we...

What if the most important skill of our moment isn't knowing more, but knowing what's actually worth caring about?

Mark Manson is the bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked, with three #1 New York Times bestsellers and tens of millions of readers around the world. The last time Mark joined Finding Mastery was in 2020, mid-COVID, when uncertainty was loud and the world felt strange. Five years on, the world is no less strange... it's just strange differently. The information ecosystem has fractured. Trust is harder to find...

Why is it that so many of us are loved... and yet don’t actually feel loved?

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness. Her newest book, How to Feel Loved, co-authored with relationship scientist Harry Reis, lands at a strange moment: a time when more people than ever say they are connected, and more people than ever say they don’t actually feel it. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Sonja offers a quietly radical reframe. After 36 years of studying what makes...

Why do so many conversations break down, even when both people are trying to connect?

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators. This is his third conversation on Finding Mastery, and the timing matters. The world has shifted since the last time he and Dr. Michael Gervais spoke. Families, friendships, even whole countries are talking past each other. AI has quietly eroded the signals we used to read each other by. And the ability to genuinely connect with another human has gone from useful to essential.<...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers help you live and perform with more clarity?

We're back with another special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast: an Ask Me Anything episode, built from the deep and sometimes vulnerable questions submitted by our community.

Joining Dr. Michael Gervais again is Jeff Byers, former NFL player, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentous, and a longtime friend of Finding Mastery. Jeff built Momentous on a foundation of transparency and scientific integrity in an industry that can be full of...

What does it really take to stay at the top for 16 years and still know who you are when it ends? 

Andrew Whitworth is a Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowler, and the oldest left tackle in NFL history to start a Super Bowl. He spent 16 seasons protecting the most valuable position on the field, finished his career by winning a championship at 40, and walked off in one of the most viral moments in NFL Films history, sitting in a circle with his kids, telling them “that was daddy’s last game.” In this conversation with Dr. Michael...

Are you playing the game, or being played by it?

Tom Bilyeu is an entrepreneur, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, and founder of Impact Theory, one of the most-watched interview platforms in the world. He has spent years studying the systems that shape financial outcomes, and in this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, he makes a case that most people find unsettling: the financial system you're working inside was not designed with your interests in mind.

Tom argues that the single most important thing most people are missing is not effort or ambition, it's a clear-eyed...

Why do we keep chasing happiness in ways that don't actually work?

Dr. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, where she created the most popular course in the university's 300-year history, the Science of Well-Being. Since then, that course has reached millions of people around the world, and her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has become one of the most trusted resources on the science of living well. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Laurie pulls back the curtain on why our minds so reliably get happiness wrong, and what we...

Why do diets so often fail... is it discipline or biology?

Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, nephrologist, and one of the most influential voices challenging how we understand metabolism, obesity, and chronic disease. He is the bestselling author of The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and his newest book, The Hunger Code, which explores a deceptively powerful question: what is actually driving hunger, and what does the answer tell us about why so many people struggle with their weight?

In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Dr. Fung explains why the standard advice of "...

What separates the athletes who perform when it matters most from those who don't... and can that difference be trained?

Michael Johnson is one of the greatest sprinters in history: four-time Olympic gold medalist, nine-time World Champion, and the former world record holder in both the 200 and 400 meters. He was also, by his own account, one of the most psychologically prepared competitors the sport has ever seen.

In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Michael takes us inside the hidden moments before the race, the call room, the gathering space beneath the stadium where eight...

There's a version of honesty most of us have never tried. Not brutal honesty. Not radical honesty. Something quieter and more demanding than either: a genuine commitment to saying what is true and useful, and nothing else.

That is where this conversation begins.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up app, joins Dr. Michael Gervais for a conversation that moves across truth, consciousness, AI, religion, and the inner mechanics of the mind. What starts as a discussion about lying becomes something much larger: an...

What if the biggest barrier between you and your potential isn’t talent - but a belief you’ve never questioned?

Nir Eyal is a behavioral design expert and the bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and his newest book, Beyond Belief. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, he explores a deceptively powerful idea: that beliefs operate like the hidden software of the mind, shaping what we notice, what we feel, what we attempt, and what we assume is possible.

At the center of the conversation is a problem most of us know very intimately: 

...

What does it look like to bet on yourself, embrace reinvention, and build a YouTube channel that reaches millions?

Michelle Khare is the creator and host of Challenge Accepted, the award-winning YouTube series where sherains with elite performers, athletes, and professionals to take on some of the world’s toughest stunts and professions. But this conversation goes far beyond spectacle. It’s about the psychology underneath the performance: how Michelle prepares for high-pressure environments, how she thinks about failure, and how she’s built a serious creative business without losing the joy at the center of it. 

In...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers help you live and perform with more clarity?

We’re back with a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast: another Ask Me Anything episode, built from the deep, thoughtful questions submitted by our community.

In this AMA, Michael Gervais is joined by Jeff Byers, former NFL player, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentous, and longtime friend of Finding Mastery. Jeff has built something very special with Momentous, a supplement company grounded in transparency and integrity in an industry that can be fu...

What if the hardest part of money isn’t earning it, but knowing how to use it well?

Morgan Housel, bestselling author of The Psychology of Money, returns to Finding Mastery to explore the core idea behind his newest bestselling book, The Art of Spending Money. In this next chapter of his work, Morgan shifts the conversation away from accumulation and toward a deeper question: after the basics are covered, what role should money actually play in your life?

While most financial advice focuses on how to earn and invest, Morgan argues that the more co...

Why are young people today reporting the highest levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and despair in modern history?

Dr. Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world’s leading voices on grit, self-control, and the science of thriving. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Angela reflects on how her thinking about grit has evolved, where it’s often misunderstood, and why perseverance without purpose can become harmful instead of helpful.

They explore what excellence really looks like behind the scenes. Not the highlight reel, but the...

What if one of the biggest nutrition mistakes we’re making isn’t what we eat, but what we’re missing?

Dr. Tim Spector is one of the world’s leading researchers on the gut microbiome and how it shapes metabolism, immunity, and even mental wellbeing. In this conversation Tim challenges the conventional nutrition playbook, explaining why calories are a poor guide to health, why most diets backfire, and how ultra‑processed foods can disrupt hunger signals in ways that make “willpower” a losing game.

A central theme in this conversation is that many of u...

Data on an NFL sideline is immediate. Decisions are filtered through fear, experience, and instinct.

In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais and NFL legend Brandon Marshall explore the tension between analytics and intuition—what happens when information is instant, comprehensive, and impossible to ignore. As technology reshapes decision-making on the NFL sideline, the real question becomes: when the moment arrives, what do you actually trust?

Gervais draws on his conversation with Hillary Kerner, CMO of Insight, to examine the human side of AI adoption and why more data doesn’t au...

Some moments don’t fade. They wait.

In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais reconnects with Ricardo Lockette as returning to the Super Bowl setting brings old emotions back to the surface. The conversation moves beyond the game itself into grief, loss, and the weight of moments that never fully resolve.

Lockette speaks candidly about the Super Bowl heartbreak, the injury that ended his career, and why public grieving can be harder than physical pain. Drawing on their close relationship, Gervais helps him unpack what those experiences still mean—and how...

The huddle is one of the quietest moments in football—and one of the most revealing. Before the play is called, before anyone moves, a team comes together in a space where trust, tone, and connection matter more than words on a whiteboard.

In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais and All-Pro wide receiver Brandon Marshall go inside the huddle to explore what really happens in the moments before action. Rather than breaking down strategy or schemes, the conversation focuses on culture—how relationships show up under pressure and how teams signal beli...