The Invisible World of Being Human
Michael Gervais and his Love of Peak Human Performance
“We haven’t even scratched the surface of our human potential. If there are any limits, they’re just the beginning of limits.” — Dr. Michael Gervais
Michael Gervais, a fifteen-year-old competitive surfer, paddles into the horizon. It's just before dawn. The water is glass clear, with waves about a foot overhead. Conditions, in other words, are perfect.
But something feels disconnected as he sits on his board this morning. His mind is clouded by a weight he can’t shake off.
An older surfer notices Gervais’ distant gaze and paddles over. “I surf with you every day,” he says. “You’ve got to stop worrying about all the things that could go wrong.”
Before Gervais can ask the older surfer if he is clairvoyant, the surfer paddles away. Gervais ponders his advice, and soon, he has an epiphany.
“I just flipped it around,” he says as he recounts this encounter at the crux of his surfing career. “I could think about all the things that could go wrong, or I could think about all the things that could go right.’”
Gervais didn’t realize it then, but he had just applied a fundamental principle of sports psychology — he shifted the focus of his imagination from the “what if” of failure to the visualization of success. He focused not on what he feared but on what he aspired to achieve.
“If there was a lightning bolt moment, that was it,” he tells me as his smile widens. I can tell that he’s thought about this a lot: the moment that sparked his passion for the mental aspect of human excellence, what he calls the “invisible side of being human.”
Today, Dr. Michael Gervais is a well-known psychologist renowned for decoding the pathways to peak human performance. He hosts the popular Finding Mastery podcast, is cofounder of the Performance Science Institute at the University of Southern California, and helps everyone, from Olympic athletes and Fortune 100 CEOs to thousands of world-class performers, learn how to do the extraordinary.
For nearly a decade, Gervais collaborated with Pete Carroll, legendary coach of the Seattle Seahawks, where he was instrumental in cultivating a mindset-based culture that significantly elevated team performance. He also played a pivotal role in preparing Felix Baumgartner for the groundbreaking Red Bull Stratos space jump.
When Gervais was just a teenager who surfed every day, he had no idea that mental training — or performance psychology — was a “thing.”
“Looking back,” he tells me, “I was always obsessed with getting better.” But after graduating high school, he wasn’t sure where his path would lead. He enrolled in community college because he knew he’d still be able to go surfing and also because he didn’t have the grades to get into a four-year university.
“I was surfing more than I went to high school,” he says, a playful smirk on his face.
When he arrived, three professors altered his path: Dr. Zanka, Dr. Perkins, and Dr. Kuzio — a philosopher, a theologian, and a psychologist. “It sounds like the start of a bad joke,” Gervais says, laughing. “But they saw me coming. They’re like, ‘Look at this kid. He’s got no clue.’ But they loved the invisible world of being human.”
Gervais soon fell in love with that world and thrived in the challenging environment his professors created for him. He gravitated toward psychology, eventually majoring in the field while minoring in philosophy.
After completing his undergraduate degree, Gervais faced a common dilemma. “What do you do with an undergrad in psychology? You go to graduate school,” he says, again laughing. He pursued a master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy but dropped out after one semester, realizing that the study of disorder wasn’t for him .
He was twenty-four and unsure what to do next when his mentor, Gary DeBlasio, told him about sports psychology. Gervais had never heard of it. When he found out that it meant, at its core, the study of excellence, he was all in.
“And that’s where the adventure started,” he says. I can see a glint in his eyes that reminds me of that teenage boy having ahas while waiting for waves in the ocean.
Once out of graduate school, with newfound insights in hand, Gervais wasted no time applying them. In 1995 he started a not-for-profit program called Late Night Sports, securing government funding from the South Bay Youth Project in Redondo Beach, California, to open a basketball gym. There, he deployed the sports psychology principles he was learning, focusing on leadership and personal growth. Every Saturday night, from 8 p.m. to about 1 a.m., Gervais dedicated himself to teaching these young athletes not just to excel in their sport, but also to apply psychological skills in various aspects of their lives. His efforts were pioneering; at the time, sports psychology hadn’t gained the recognition that it has today. Gervais was charting new territory, driven not by demand but by a deep-seated conviction in the value of his work.
“I was going in and translating complicated science to 16 to 24-year-olds that did not want to listen to me,” Gervais says. “They just wanted to play ball.”
But he knew he could help them, so he kept trying to get through to them. Their price of admission was six minutes of listening to Gervais translate something from the world of psychology that he wishes he’d known at their age — skills like mental imagery, breathing training, confidence training, and goal setting. He did this every Saturday night for 18 years.
“It ended up being this radical translation mechanism from science to application,” he tells me. “It was my woodshed.”
If the kids struggled to grasp a concept, or if they applied a technique that didn't yield results, they were quick to voice their feedback. This helped him learn how to communicate complex scientific principles to a community that he knew would benefit from them.
Gervais’ passion for the “invisible world” comes through loud and clear in his podcast, ‘Finding Mastery,’ where he engages in in-depth conversations with high performers at the top of their game. His guests include top athletes like Alex Honnold, Misty Copeland, and Shaun White; renowned thought leaders like Dr. Brené Brown and Dr. Robert Sapolsky; and, of course, our mutual friend, the human potential expert Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. He even talks to astronauts.
He emphasizes that his goal was never about working exclusively with athletes. “I just wanted to work with people that were as obsessed with getting better — or maybe as committed is the healthy way of saying it — as I was,” he says before adding, “And as motivated.”
I tell him I can relate to the word obsession — I’ve been known to get obsessed about whatever I’m interested in and believe obsession is at the heart of what fuels the most passionate people. He agrees.
Over the last few years, Gervais has concentrated on even narrower slice of human excellence, what he considers the most significant barrier to our human potential: our fear of other people’s opinions, or what he calls FOPO. This concept addresses how deeply our fear of others’ judgments can constrain our capacity for excellence, and is the subject of his latest book, The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You.
When I tell him I spent the first few decades of my own life consumed by fear of what other people thought, he tells me I’m not alone. “FOPO just hit a nerve,” he says.
So what keeps him so fired up about this invisible world? He takes several seconds to think when I ask him this, looking up and to the left, as if he’s searching for the answer in the sky. I stay quiet and let him think.
“There are so many ways I want to take it,” he says, finally looking back at me. “The purest way to answer is that I'm infatuated with ‘aha.’”
In moments of insight or realization — these ‘aha’ moments or moments of awe — scientists hypothesize that there is an increase in gamma wave activity in the brain. This suggests that various parts of the brain are synchronizing to create a new understanding or perception of a situation. It’s a rare — and special — experience, and it’s one of the reasons Gervais loves what he does.
Surrounding himself with people who are having lightbulb moments helps him experience more awe. And that creates a cycle where he is more and more enraptured by — more and more on fire about — the human experience and all the possibilities that lie ahead.
“Our human potential has not even begun to be expressed,” he says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”
I think about Gervais as a teenager, paddling away on the glassy waters, fresh off his latest aha.
“If there are any limits,” he says, “they’re just the beginning of limits.”
Those limits, Gervais insists, are all in our mind.
Three takeaways from our conversation:
In Pursuing Your Passions, Think 'What Can Go Right.' Many of us never pursue our greatest passions — or get as obsessed as a deeper part of us wants to get — because we’re afraid of what will go wrong. Take a cue from sports psychology and instead train your mind to focus on the positive. List everything that could go right if you “go for it.” Doing this will help shift your energy from fear and hesitation to excitement and possibility.
Follow Your Innate Interests, Even Before Knowing the Destination: Gervais’ passion for the 'invisible world' of human excellence was present even before he knew sports psychology existed as a field. His journey highlights the importance of pursuing what naturally intrigues you, even if you don’t yet see a clear path or a defined field of study. Trust your instincts and explore your innate interests and areas that fascinate you — they may lead you to discover niche fields that align perfectly with your passions.
Keep Fine Tuning Your Passions. Emulate Gervais' journey by refining what excites you. Start broad, like his dive into psychology, then zero in on what fires you up. Remain adaptable and willing to experiment and learn. This evolving process will lead to deeper, more fulfilling engagement, mirroring Gervais' path to a specialized passion for high-performance psychology.
Links
The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You
How to Stop Worrying What Other People Think of You in the Harvard Business Review
Ahhh I'm so grateful to have stumbled across this! Beautifully written - Dr Mike is a gem, avid listener of Finding Mastery and this was such an enjoyable piece to read! Always love when the interviewer becomes the interviewee.
Great read! Thank you Krysta! Appreciate the takeaways at the end too. For me aha moments are like the golden nuggets of my Treasure Hunts, self-guided journeys to manifest an intention in my life. Aha moments give the invisible world of being human it’s epic importance. We don’t create aha moments, but in being aware of the invisible, the light that can’t be seen can be perceived.
I could relate so much to his non-profit model, creating a lab to develop his approach. His 18 year commitment every weekend was inspiring and impressive. He must bring so much to the table of achievement and growth.