Michael Gervais
Gervais’ influence can be felt across many touchpoints of popular culture. His clients include the NFL’s Super Bowl Champions, Seattle Seahawks, world record holders, Olympians, MVPs from every major sport, internationally acclaimed music artists, and Fortune 50 CEO’s.
Gervais has worked across three summer Olympic Games (Tokyo, Rio, London) and two winter Olympic Games as a high-performance psychologist supporting Team USA, most recently for USA Surfing in Tokyo 2021.
Dr. Gervais is the host of the Finding Mastery podcast that explores the psychology of the world’s most extraordinary thinkers and doers. In the top 1% of podcasts globally, Finding Mastery crossed the 25 million downloads milestone in 2021.
In 2020, Gervais wrote an Audible Original, Compete to Create: An Approach to Living and Leading Authentically, with NFL coach Pete Carroll. He has also authored a book being published by Harvard Business Review in the fall of 2023.
Gervais created a six-week online course, Finding Your Best, to bring the principles and practices of high performance psychology and wellbeing into businesses and homes.
Gervais is the co-creator of the Performance Science Institute at the USC Marshall School of Business, dedicated to teaching, training and researching the science, applied principles and best practices for high performance in any domain .
A published, peer-reviewed author and nationally recognized speaker on optimal human performance, Dr. Gervais has been featured in premier media outlets including NBC, ABC, FOX, CNN, ESPN, NFL Network, Red Bull TV, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Outside Magazine, WIRED, Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine.
Dr. Gervais holds a doctorate degree in psychology, specializing in sport performance, and a master’s degree in kinesiology. He completed his PhD under the mentorship of Dr. Bruce Ogilvie, often referred to as the father of American applied sport psychology.
Finding Mastery
The path of mastery captures deep understanding and insight — it’s not a path that is laying a bet now, by investing in a craft, for payment or recognition at some later time. The spoils of victory might just happen, but the orientation of the intent is paramount.
Today we are becoming overwhelmed with the need for instant reward, immediate verification that we are significant — as a misguided attempt to satiate our thirst for meaning and belonging — rather, we are propelling ourselves toward an emptiness that can only be filled by temporary pleasures.
Our need to belong, to understand, to explore, to connect to others and the world around us, to know safety and to know risk, to express and create are foundational to the human experience.
Mastery is a journey — It’s a curious and wonderful trail — that has few, if any, guides. It’s much more than the pursuit of expert performance. It’s far deeper than high performance and the achievement of success.
If Mastery is a path, let’s learn from as many voices as we can. The best in the world, from worlds who happen to have cameras pointed at them — AND — from the worlds in which no camera is present — either by design — or because culturally we might have forgotten to be curious about their path and insights.
Simple Joys.
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