How to Train Your Mind Like a World-Class Athlete — Dr. Michael Gervais Explains

The whole game of high performance begins with awareness. Hey, everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace. Today, I'm talking with performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael works with Olympians, pro athletes, and top executives to help them unlock their full potential. Today, we'll be talking about what it really takes to perform at our highest level, not just in sports or work, but in life. Here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais. Hello, nice to meet you. I'm gonna ask you how you would like me to refer to you because, do you want me to say Michael, Dr. Gervais? Docael Gervais? That's, yeah. Sweet. Mike is cool. So, thank you. Okay. Well, my name's Rosie, you can call me Rosie. And I'm one of the teachers here at Headspace. So to start, I think one of the main things that I found fascinating of your work was obviously the work that you do with some of the top athletes in the world and professionals in high-stake environments. So just to get the audience a little more familiar with who you are and what you do, what sort of drew you to this field of performance psychology and what started you on this journey? So, when I was a young athlete my sport of choice was surfing. And in surfing, what ended up taking place for me is, I was, like, in Southern California, I'm careful to say this out loud, but I was a good little surfer and in practice I, you know, not practice, I'm sorry, just like on free surfing. It was good. I was good. And then came competition day. You know, I had some fans, not fans, family and some friends and some folks there and judges. And I was like 20% of myself. So as a 16-year-old, I couldn't figure out how to get free. I couldn't figure out how to do the thing that I knew I was capable of doing. And there was, it was one competition, It was probably like 7:30, 8 in the morning. Beautiful conditions, glassy about head high, kind of the dream conditions for a surfer. And in this case, there's only three of us out in the water. And this competitor paddled by me, and he was probably like six years older than me, so I was in high school and he was a bit older, and he paddled by like this, you know, wise person. And he said, Gervais, I surf with you out here all the time. I don't know what's up, but you gotta just stop worrying about all the things that could go wrong. And I thought, how does he know? And he paddled off, left me with that kind of grenade of a thought. And he didn't tell me what to do with my thoughts. But as a 15-year-old kid, I knew that what I was doing wasn't working. And I was over-indexing on what they would think, over-indexing on...