Dr. Michael Gervais on What Business Can Learn from Sports

ELISE HU: Our guest is Dr. Michael Gervais. He’s a high-performance psychologist who works with Olympic athletes, world record holders, musicians, artists, CEOs, and companies like Microsoft. Michael has advice for leaders on building relationships and creating a shared sense of purpose. How can business leaders help their teams through times of change? We’re living through one right now as so many companies and people are embracing more flexibility in how, when, and where we work. In the second half of our show, we have the inspirational paratriathlon athlete and data research scientist Kayla Woputz. Correspondent Desmond Dickerson talks with her about her powerful story as she shares insights about how mindset affects performance. But first, here’s my conversation with Michael.

ELISE HU: Michael, in your work, you talk a lot about mastery. You teach a course called Finding Mastery and have a podcast of the same name. So just to start, what does mastery mean to you?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: It’s a great question. If we think about mastery in two forms, there’s mastery of craft, which is what most people think of, and there’s a second dimension, which is mastery of self. There’s an extraordinary commitment to getting better at craft and extraordinary commitment to getting better at working from the inside out.

ELISE HU: So I know you work with a lot of Olympic athletes, musicians, CEOs on their performance, but for folks who might not be, you know, your direct clients and want to start improving their mindset toward mastery, where do you start?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: It’s a great question. First, it’s materially important to know what are your core principles, what are your first principles. If you can get your clarity around the first principles in life and put that into a workable form, we call that a personal philosophy. The second? What is your purpose, which is, What are you doing? And then third is, when you use your imagination, what do you want to have happen? An old way of thinking about that is goals, but the more nuanced and dynamic way is like, what is the vision that you hold? Those three tenets are incredibly important to work from the inside out. From that clarity, then we work on conviction. It means when you show up, you’re completely committed to bringing your very best.

ELISE HU: You talk a lot about relationship-based organizations; companies are embracing hybrid work. For organizations, what do you see as the primary mindset challenge, or maybe opportunity, about this moment we’re in?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: So if we pull back, we would say sport and arts are communities that have some best practices. They have some insights about how to support and challenge an individual or a team. Forty to 50 years ago, coaches did everything, just like leaders are trying to do so much now. They were the technical coach, they were the strategic coach, they were the life coach, they were the nutritionist. And then came along this science, the science of strength and conditioning. Call it fitness, if you want. But the progressive coaches were like, Hey, I think we could be more competitive. I think that we could be better if we brought in some experts that had some science. And sure enough, those athletes that did that work from that expert were bigger, faster, stronger in the fourth quarter, if you will. Then the next wave was nutrition. Well, let’s get the fuel systems right. And then that was probably about 15 years ago. And about 10 years ago, the next solution is, Let’s get our minds right. Well, we have been kind of stuck in the leaders not having the full sophistication of the sciences that arts and sports have had. And so if we saw ourselves as athletes or artists in some way, that we’re trying to get better, and we all of a sudden feel that we’re overstressed, it means that we’re undertrained. The opportunity is to treat psychology and the science of it, just like we would treat any other sciences—and we don’t wait. We front-load psychological skills so that you can more eloquently meet the demands and the stressors in the moment, whatever that moment might call on.

ELISE HU: Yeah, I’m curious what front-loading psychological skills for employees and for organizations looks like. Does it look like the way that Microsoft, for example, partnered with you on a high-performance mindset course? Or are there other takeaways that might be helpful for those who are part of organizations?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Yes, that is exactly it. So you can train confidence. That is not a mythical idea—you can train it. And there’s good science that will show us exactly how you can train being calm with intensity. So it’s not just bellow and relaxed and walking around shuffling your heels and being cruise-y. No, no, no. You can train being calm with intense fire. And the outlook you have, there’s only one of two about the future: it’s either optimism or pessimism. And I haven’t met a world’s best that is pessimistic yet. People that are squinted-eyed when we think about that phrase optimism cult —‘Ah, I knew it. This is about just being positive,’ which is the last thing from the truth. This is about a discipline, about how to make sense of the facts in front of you and how you interpret those bits of information to think about your future. Something good is about to take place or something bad’s about to take place.

ELISE HU: What are suggestions that people find most helpful when it comes to working on their psychological health or working on mindset shifts towards the discipline of optimism?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: There are no shortcuts for clarity, there’s no hacks when it comes to high-performance psychology or mastery or being your very best. There is the practice of the skills that sit underneath of it.

ELISE HU: It’s kind of a project of a lifetime.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: I love that phrase. And I am a project of my lifetime.

ELISE HU: I feel the same way.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Yeah, right. And that very much is just giving a nod to this idea of what a growth mindset is, which is leaning in and being interested over a lifetime of being a learner. When we feel stress, when we feel pressure or tension, that goes out the window. This idea, like, let me stay as a learner, because pressure is, I need to figure out how to survive right now. I’ll be this eloquent learner later. So growth mindset is a beautiful concept. It’s easy over a cup of tea or a glass of wine or dinner with friends. But when there is a high, consequential, demanding, stressful environment that you’re trying to operate well in, if you don’t train the psychological skills that sit under a growth mindset, growth mindset is just a beautiful idea. If we just expect the behavior without the thinking to be equally skilled, it becomes very, very flimsy.

ELISE HU: So it just strikes me that so much of this really valuable sort of framework for thinking requires a lot of tough work, right? Tough inner work by leaders, but also organizationally to create an environment that does lean into curiosity, that does shift its mindset. So when you work with teams and executives who need to motivate their teams, like the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, what kind of conversations are you having?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Satya has been very public about this piece of the work that we did with him and his leadership team, which is deeply connected to purpose. He wants Microsoft to be an amazing place for people to work, understands the value of optimism and the importance of having a reality-based eye on the challenges that are in the ecosystem and the opportunities outside of the company. And the tax that comes with pessimism—complaining, finding what’s broken, the negativity, that edgy internal dissatisfaction with how things are and how things are always going to be that way. There’s a tax that comes with that, both culturally and there’s a tax from a recovery standpoint. If we want to do amazing things, we need to feel amazing. So he installed this practice with his team. He said, okay, at the start of every meeting, I want us to condition our minds to find what’s good and celebrate it amongst each other. And so he and his leadership team, they would start their meetings by saying, okay, one thing I saw today at Microsoft was, or one thing I experienced today at Microsoft was—what it was and what was the emotional component to it. And in that small little simple exercise, not only are we training our minds and brains to scan the world and find what’s good—to become a researcher of amazing—we’re also damping down the energy spent on a pessimistic or an anxious or an irritated mindset. And so we’re winning the game of recovery and stress.

ELISE HU: Yeah, I really love this. Just the idea of operationalizing it, you know, because in my family, we do gratitude at the dinner table, where we go around and say something that we’re grateful for during the day. And they can often be so small, but also surprising, right? My littlest daughter mentioned the other day that she was grateful that her oldest sister helped her get a popsicle down from where she couldn’t reach it. You know, you don’t think about how a small action like that can really be a huge boost for somebody who might have a challenge that we didn’t think of.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: So there’s that material experience of it. And then there’s also the training of your brain. And so we’ve got this ancient brain that is quite remarkable. It’s designed to scan the world and find the threats. And if we don’t work with our brain, the brain will win.

ELISE HU: And you mean the lizard brain, right? The lizard brain could win.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Yeah. Well, it does win unless we’re more sophisticated and we actually condition ourselves to find what’s good, what’s amazing. If we don’t do that work, that lizard brain will win.

ELISE HU: So if you just had to tick off some components of a thriving organization, what would they be?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Well, it starts in a relatively simple definition, which is a thriving organization is made up of thriving people. And if we can just think about what it takes for them to thrive, there’s two ways to think about it. We need the internal skills to be able to thrive in any environment. And then from the outside in is to have the right conditions for people to thrive. That doesn’t mean a ping-pong table and a pool table and a coffee shop. Those are great, but it’s having that right intensity between support and challenge. It’s making sure from the outside in that people have a sense of autonomy. They have a sense of agency. They have a sense of empowerment. They are able to be agile and make decisions. They understand how their work ladders to the purpose of the company. They can see themselves in it. And then you can throw on the pool tables and the whatevers. So the idea is that you’re working from the inside out and the outside in, with psychology as part of the lever and the dial that can either facilitate people to come alive or debilitate. And if we don’t pay attention, the index is to over-rotate on outcomes, the bottom line, if you will, and just say, Hey, figure it out or you’re going to be pushed out. Great leaders that want a thriving organization will understand the psychology of what that means.

ELISE HU: I love that. So given Microsoft being in Seattle, I’m really curious about your work with Pete Carroll, coach Pete Carroll, and if there’s anything that we can learn from that experience.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: So 2011 to 2020 was the time that I spent with the Seattle Seahawks, and it was wild, it was wonderful. There were two Super Bowl stints over that time and we won one and we lost one in dramatic fashion. And so we definitely have an understanding of what it takes to have an organization perform towards their collective best. That is electric. It is wonderful to have belly buttons and noses pointed in the same direction for months on end. I mean, it’s phenomenal. And one of the things that was materially important for us is that we were building the culture that was grounded in relationships. It first begins with your relationship with yourself, and then your relationship with other people, then your relationship with our planet, and then eventually—this is outside the Seahawks—your relationship with machines. It’s a pebble-in-the-pond approach, and it completely begins with your relationship with yourself, and in a high-performing environment, your relationship with other people. Now, why is that materially important? It’s because nobody can do the extraordinary alone. It’s too big. It’s too multifaceted and dynamic and complicated and messy. And so we need each other. We would over-rotate on knowing each other, and then we would over-index on knowing oneself to our very best abilities. And then we would layer on top of that all the great science from technical training and physical training and strategy. One of the deep insights is that there’s only three things that we can train. We can train our craft. We can train our body. And we can train our mind. And we did not leave any of those up to chance. We did not make, what most people do, training your mind extra, do it at home, do it later, do it right before you go to bed when you’re exhausted. We made it part of the DNA of the organization, and we made psychology a tall tent pole. We did not stigmatize it. We front-loaded the work. And I’m not just talking about the psychology of interesting words, but the practicing of psychological skills. And so those are a handful of insights that I think are portable for all of us.

ELISE HU: Absolutely. I can already hear all the parallels. Alright, before we let you go, I just want to look ahead because we are still in such tumultuous times. What do you expect will be the next big challenges that leaders of organizations will have to confront? And how can the things that we’ve talked about apply to those challenges?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: I think about this a lot. If we pull way back—I know I’m biased, but I can’t quite see a more powerful, impactful investment in not only the organization but to people’s lives at scale, is to deepen the experience that we’re able to have by having access to skills that will allow us to be our very best, more often. Winning without the spirit of the human being part of it is a failure. And that’s where many businesses have been. I’m an entrepreneur. I understand the demands that must get done. If we don’t invest in the psychology of the humans—those companies that missed this opportunity, it’s as if they’re pushing off from the docks but their nose of the boat is just about four degrees off of center. And so I think those that are able to build those cultures that really have humanity at the center, that are purpose-driven in an authentic way, and are making the investment in the psychology across the DNA of the organization, we’re going to see human flourishing take off in a different way. And the opportunity that organizations have is to help people know how to be fully present more often. And that’s a balance between thoughts, words, and actions. We don’t know the limits of the human experience. We don’t know it yet. It’s coming and I’m excited.

ELISE HU: Psychology matters. Dr. Michael Gervais, a psychologist himself. Thank you so much, doctor.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Pleasure to be with you.

ELISE HU: We just heard from Michael Gervais about how everyone from athletes to CEOs can train their mindsets to unlock their potential. Next up, we check in with our correspondent Desmond Dickerson and hear what he learned from his conversation with Kayla Woputz, a Microsoft data research scientist and paratriathlon athlete. Here’s their conversation.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Welcome, and thanks for joining us today.

KAYLA WOPUTZ: Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Tell us a bit about the paratriathlon event. What goes into preparing for that, not just the day of, but how do you prepare your body for such a grueling endeavor?

KAYLA WOPUTZ: Yeah, paratriathlon is amazing. Most people don’t know about para sports. I did not know about para sports. I first got a spinal cord injury back in 2005 while I was a collegiate athlete and had no idea that there was another avenue for me to continue to be super competitive. Someone who was like, Hey, you know that there are para sports in the world. I said, Nope, I did not know that, tell me more. Having had been a college athlete and doing multiple sports before, every sport that I’ve approached, that mental preparation is very different. For me to perform my best, I have to really be in the right mental frame of mind, and that can be very different depending on what I’m about to do. When I swim—my event is a 50 freestyle, which is a drop dead sprint, all out as fast as you can move—that is very different than mentally preparing myself to do a two-hour triathlon. So for me, I have found, even in the sprint, a 30-second sprint, if I don’t have the right visualizations and I don’t have the right mindset when I step onto the block, I will swim slower. So part of my training has really been to zero in on where I can put my mind to make it the most effective for whatever I’m about to tackle.

DESMOND DICKERSON: How would you relate that to a workplace, as many organizations prepare to transition into hybrid work, folks just don’t know what to expect.

KAYLA WOPUTZ: Yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, just in my own life. So with my disability, right now it’s a degenerative condition, so there is daily uncertainty. And what is my body going to be able to do in any given day? What is it going to look like tomorrow? What’s it going to look like in two years? No idea, until I’m in the moment. I will say I noticed that it was really interesting when the pandemic hit and folks were working from home and everyone collectively was faced with this immense amount of unknown. And the way people around me started describing that was the words that I was like, Yes, that’s actually exactly how I’ve been feeling with this disability. It’s just now everyone has this collective experience. And so to be able to live in that gray area can feel really uncomfortable initially. But the more you’re in it and the more that you see yourself accomplish the things within that space and the more that you live in it and still have positive outcomes, I think it’s that reinforcement.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah. You know, when you’re faced with uncertainty and that anxiety starts to creep in, so often you can spiral into these negative thoughts and these worries about what’s going to happen next.

KAYLA WOPUTZ: Yeah, definitely. I am a really big proponent of, you feel overwhelmed, you feel anxiety is creeping in. Acknowledge it. It’s okay to embrace it momentarily. At some point, you’re going to have to be like, Okay, that’s there. Now, what do I do about it? If it’s something I can address, I can address it; if it’s not something I can address, even knowing where it’s coming from is super helpful. Understanding that space helps me be able to be optimistic about the next step. And knowing that I have a community around me that is supportive, knowing that I have colleagues that are supportive, knowing that I’m a human and I make mistakes and that’s totally normal, and that collectively together we’re still all striving to do this great thing is pretty great, and it takes a lot of the anxiety off of trying to do all the perfect things yourself.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, absolutely. I think those are lessons that everyone could stand to internalize a little bit more. So I’ll close with this. What element of the future of work has you most excited right now?

KAYLA WOPUTZ: I am really loving the flexibility that is showing up in the workplace. It is like the biggest silver lining of the pandemic. The ability to work from home and be flexible has really allowed people to be more productive, to have less stress—there’s a lot of stress that goes into going to the workplace if you have a disability—and really be seen for who they are beyond their disability. Most people that I work with don’t know that I have a disability, and when I say, Oh yes, I do para sports, they’re like, What’s that and why? Because they’ve never met me in person. So it’s a really interesting way to present yourself and to work without these biases—we all have bias, right? And we bring it to the table. So it’s been an incredible game changer in that space.

ELISE HU: That was Desmond Dickerson talking with Microsoft employee and para athlete Kayla Woputz. And that’s it for this episode of the WorkLab podcast from Microsoft. Check out the WorkLab digital publication, too, where you can find, among many other things, a transcript of this very episode. That is all at Microsoft.com/WorkLab. And for this podcast, please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. Those ratings make a big difference. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produced this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thanks for listening.