A High-Performance Coach on the Key to Achieving Your Full Potential

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

Beethoven, mid-career, Karl Malone on the free throw line in the NBA finals, an MMA fighter walking into the cage, a CEO considering a big investment, a recent grad deciding between job offers, you prepping for your next presentation.

What all these people have in common is the potential for masterful performance, but they’re also united by something else, the very real risk that they will be derailed by what our guest today calls FOPO: fear of other people’s opinions. He says that true success only comes when you stop worrying about factors you can’t control, and instead focus on your own values, worth and goals. And he’s helped many people from extreme athletes to pro footballers to corporate executives do just that.

Michael Gervais is a performance psychologist and the founder of the consultancy Finding Mastery. He wrote the new book, “The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying about What People Think of You.” Michael, welcome.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Thank you so much for including me in your community and hosting this conversation.

ALISON BEARD: Before we dive into FOPO and h ow to overcome it, I want to ask about your background as a sports psychologist. What overlaps do you see between your work with Olympians, Seattle Seahawks, mountain marathoners, and the work you do with people in the business world?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: The essence of it is that we take our mind everywhere we go. So whether we’re on the pitch or we’re in the boardroom or sometimes the living room, our mind is the common thread and the way we work with our own experiences and how we make sense of our emotions and our feelings and our thoughts. When you want to be able to focus deeply at a task at hand or you want to be creative, you know, there’s very specific handful of mental skills that we can train to be able to have better mental faculty, certainly under stress and definitely under high pressured environments. So the common thread is that we take our mind everywhere we go.

ALISON BEARD: And also I would imagine that there are similarities in terms of it being a competitive arena, right? You are trying to perform and often outperform others.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: I love that you’re bringing that piece up. The way that we think about competition is not being better than others, and I’m coming from some of the most esteemed, most winning cultures and organizations on the planet, and what we’ve come to find is that the primary focus is on being one’s best, and the second order of that is being our best together. You just might happen to be the best in the world, but the focus is on controlling and or mastering what’s in your control. And when you do that, it’s so special. It’s so rare.

It ends up being a natural separator because most people find themselves in a compromised or a leveraged position because they are trying to influence or control things that are not in their control, which for example, being better than somebody else is not in your control. And so you put yourself in a position of authentic power when you are using your mind to focus on the things that you ultimately have 100% control over, and then you work from the inside out, you work from that orientation and then everything else flows from there.

ALISON BEARD: Tell me why FOPO became such a focus for you. Why is that sort of  a fundamental building block to stop worrying about what other people think?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: As a young kid, I was 15 years old, I just got my learner’s permit and I remember driving and I had this really bizarre moment that stuck with me even as a 50-year-old man now that I remember wanting to look cool in my new car. I saved up for it. I worked all summer or for a couple summer, saved up for my first car, bought the car, and there was somebody driving, passing me, going in the same direction. I adjusted my posture. I did this cool little, like what I thought was a cool little lean, and as they passed, I thought to myself, “I wonder what they’re going to think of me in my new car.” And they didn’t even look.

They had no interest. I remember in that moment thinking to myself, “What am I doing with myself that I’m doing all of this to look good?” And I don’t think it changed me, but I remember it now. So it had enough of an imprint that I remember thinking like, “This is not the way to go through life.” I noticed it so many more times thereafter, and I was embarrassed by it and I thought, “Why do I care so much about what other people think of me?”

And then I started spending time working with world’s best, and there was a version of it that they would express. Then I would spend time with coaches on the world stage, whether it’s sport coaches and or CEOs or leaders in organizations; they had the same type of thing. There’s this tension between this wanting to be accepted, this fear of rejection and being authentic, being free in a moment, and that tension is left uncovered for most of us.

ALISON BEARD: I do see how there can be some benefits to thinking about how you’re going to be perceived and the impact that you’re having on other people. So tell me a little bit more about why it is such a bad thing to be worrying about this, why it really slows you down, why it stops you from finding mastery.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Okay, so let’s split two words here. Caring about what people think of you and then worrying. The people who don’t care are dangerous. The people who don’t care are narcissists or sociopaths. They present with a hubris that is unbecoming. That’s not what we’re suggesting.

What we’re suggesting is to care from those people that have a very specific criteria. They have been in the amphitheater or the arena that you find to be valuable, and they’ve demonstrated to you that they have a care for you and they have a genuine care for your growth.

So that would be like the first magnitude. The second magnitude, it dilutes just a little bit, are people that maybe don’t know you, but they’ve been there, they’ve seen the experiences, they’ve traveled the path, they’ve got some insight and wisdom, and they are leaving some breadcrumbs with the way that they offer opinions. That’s cool, but they don’t really know you, so it has some dilution impact. Okay, so that’s the caring.

The worry part is this excessive latent just below the surface filter that we navigate the world through, and it’s this preoccupation with what will they think of me? It shows up in really benign ways. It shows up when you’re in your closet and you’re deciding what you’re going to wear, not because you’re feeling a certain way, but because that’s what everyone else will approve of.

ALISON BEARD: I intentionally did not put on makeup today before greeting you on video because I thought I’m not going to care what he thinks about how I look.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Yeah, exactly. That is it. And there’s freedom on the other side, but FOPO, it shows up in small ways too, when you check your phone so you appear busy or in demand, when you stay late at work because you want to send a signal, even though your work is done, when you laugh at a joke that you don’t find funny, even worse if you laugh or smile at a joke that’s mildly too radically offensive. FOPO has range. It shows up in very subtle ways; it’s the on-ramp to caring more about what they want from you as opposed to you deciding how you’re going to show up and what you’re going to bring into the world around you.

ALISON BEARD: And as you said, it happens to the best of us, and it must take constant vigilance to fight off. There’s a great story in your book about Scottie Pippen saying the mailman doesn’t deliver on Sunday and him missing two free throws that would’ve helped them to win the game. Why does it still afflict people who have reached the pinnacle of their fields?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Let’s oversimplify this relationship between brain and mind for just a minute. So if brain is the 3.2 pounds of tissue that sits in your skull and it’s got electricity, it’s got chemistry, it’s got this really wonderfully complicated connectivity that takes place. And think about that like the hardware of your computer. And to oversimplify your mind is a bit like the software. So if you don’t train your mind or invest in a high quality software, the engine, the brain, the hardware is going to run the show.

So it has a prime motive, and that prime motive is survival. And our ancestors pass down a gift to us, and they pass down the gift of survival. And there’s very specific mechanisms that’s happening for you and I. And they figured out how to be strong enough and clever enough to survive the wildebeest. Okay, so thank you great, great, great grandparents.

And they also kept us tuned to figuring out how to be part of the pack. And so that’s the very specific modern-day challenge that was primed hundreds of thousands of years ago, if not millions of years ago, to be part of the tribe. And if you don’t perform well enough, you could get pushed out. And if you’re pushed out, it was a near death sentence because it’s too hard to build a fire, to have a tent to protect maybe your spouse or your children from animals or conditions or warring tribes.

We still have that mechanism, but we haven’t trained our software, our mind to be able to work with that. That’s the exponential opportunity to talk about, it’s like, what do we do? How can we free ourselves from this ancient brain programming to better meet modern day opportunities?

ALISON BEARD: And so even if you’re someone who has been training all your life to focus on what you can control, be masterful at what you do, that sort of primordial instinct can still rear its ugly head.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: That’s a great word. And yes, that’s exactly, I mean, the brain’s dictum is survival. So it is constantly scanning the world to find all the things that are dangerous or could be dangerous. And one of the most dangerous things are the way that eyeballs come back to you, the way that somebody frowns or their head or asks a specific question. Am I on the fringe of being accepted or on the fringe of being rejected? And it’s a constrictor to your potential. It is the thing that keeps you safe, helps you fit in, helps you belong, but holds you back from being your very best. Because to be your very best means that you’re going to have to disappoint some people because you’re going to rise. You’re going to change your socioeconomic status. You’re going to change the way that you view your spirituality, your business, your family dynamics. There’s a change that takes place.

And sometimes the people that love us, but want us to be the same self are the ones that we’re closest to because they don’t want that delta between the way they operate and you operate. And so there’s risk in there to change the operating system that your culture or your family or your neighborhood has passed on to you. And so the fear of what they think keeps us from raising our hand when we’ve got a brilliant idea, when we’ve got an idea that could shape the future of the company.

ALISON BEARD: It also seems to me that the higher you rise in your field, the more public scrutiny is put upon you and the more difficult it might be to not care what other people think. If you’re Novak Djokovic, you’re supposed to win Wimbledon. If you’re Karl Malone, you’re supposed to make those free throws. If you’re the CEO of a company, you’re supposed to give a brilliant, inspiring speech. How does the problem get worse the better you get?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Actually, Moby, one of the great producers of music, he shared this idea that when he first saw himself on the cover of a magazine in his early days as a musician, he was like, “Oh my gosh, I made it. I’m validated. I did it. This is what love feels like. People know me and this means that I have meaning. They care about me.” And then he spent the next 15 years obsessing over what people said about him. And then, what he had to do is literally make a deliberate decision that he had to stop giving and handing over his sense of self to people who didn’t even know him.

As your circle extends, there is the likelihood to get drunk on what they think of you. And that intoxication that takes place is the problem as the circle gets bigger. However, FOPO is when you’re in a public place or you’re on social media or you’re in a boardroom talking to 15 people, and one person just looks sideways. 14 people say, “That’s a great idea, Alison, I love what you’re talking about.” And then one person does the kind of head nod and like, “I don’t know,” whether it’s one of one billion people in social media or it’s one in 15 people in a small room, that’s the thing we attune to because that dictum to fear rejection is so primal. That’s true for everybody, not just the famous ones.

ALISON BEARD: So let’s talk about getting over FOPO. Walk me through how you start working with a client who is struggling with this and finding that they can’t get to the next level because this is holding them back.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Well, there’s some very predictable on-ramps to FOPO that accelerate your experience of it. And one of those on-ramps is having a performance-based identity. We arrive at an understanding of who we are by comparing our performance results to others. Our self-worth is contingent on how well we do. There’s a looming fear that just sits in the background of failing, of not being good enough. And there’s this appreciation, if not radical commitment, to wanting to be perfect.

And when we’ve got those things in place, it becomes very difficult to not tune to what other people are thinking of us. So if the on-ramp is identity, the single greatest bulwark against FOPO is having a strong sense of self knowing who you are and the opinions of others – they cease to be a constant threat.

So we want to build our identity on who we are, not what we do, not how well we do it, not who we do it with, and not where we do it. So moving from a performance-based identity to a purpose-based identity, that’s the crosswalk to get in place. And when you can have this learner’s mindset about, look, I’m a work in progress. And I’m going to start today to just think about my purpose for today, then maybe my purpose for the week.

Maybe it’s my purpose for the month or six months. And eventually, as you practice being tuned to your purpose, why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re here, how you’re going to spend your time, you end up becoming more familiar with, potentially, your overall purpose in life.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And so tell me more about how you get clients to move past that performance-based identity into purpose?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Purpose basically has three components to it. And nobody can give you your purpose, it has to personally matter to you. So that’s the first leg of the three-legged stool is that your purpose has to have meaning to you. How do I want to design and spend my time? How do I want to apply my efforts to what aim? What am I doing here?

The second leg to the stool is that it’s bigger than you. There’s something so magnificent, so big about your purpose that you can’t solve it alone. So you need to be involved and connected with other people. And the third, there’s a future orientation, meaning that you are committed to this for the long haul. And so it’s not something you can solve today. It’s not something that you can easily solve, period. But you’re going to drive towards it.

And then the application is, once you do something well, once you have a good performance, once you’re getting cheers from other people, is to not let that be an intoxication. That’s their experience. That is not them saying that you now matter. That’s them going, “This is amazing. I love watching this. I love seeing what you’ve done. Thank you for sharing.” But for you to be honest with yourself, like what parts of my experience was I authentic in what I just shared? How can I get better? Have a moment of gratitude for maybe their experience in it or the opportunity that you got to share something in a certain way.

So in engineering, there’s the signal-to-noise ratio is a very important theorem. And that’s also shows up in psychology, is to know the difference between the noise so that you can attune to the signal. And the noise is their opinion and the signal is the place that you come from, the micro choices that you make to be able to influence your thoughts, your words, and your actions that are lining up to your first principles in life, to your deepest values.

And when you can do that in any environment, you are now committed to the path of mastery. And so it is a rare and special thing. And I bet if you listed a handful of people, historic figures that change the way you think about the world, whether it’s Gandhi or Jesus or Buddha or fill in the blanks, Mother Teresa. Whoever you say, “Those ones are special,” they’re special because they were able to line up their thoughts, words, and actions in every environment that they walked in. They were not letting the noise of adulation or rejection change their commitment to their purpose. And it was available to them, it’s available to you, it’s available to me, it’s available to our entire community. We need these people right now. We need more of them.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and what you’re saying makes so much logical sense. But those are some of the revered, most selfless people in the world. And we seem to live in this society that’s sort of set up for us to think about social comparison, worry about our performance, care about the opinions of others. Our educational system is teachers judging us based on A to F grades. I completely understand the logic, but in practice it’s so hard to do. So what advice do you give people who are just still struggling even though they understand the goal?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Your point is so well taken that we are in a world from a very young age that rewards performance and comparison. With the advent of social media, we’re outmatched. So how do you practically apply letting go of the opinions of other people or not being so compromised by what they might think is to be incredibly clear on your first principles. And you got to write these things down. What are the principles that matter most to me in my life?

So if you take any of the historic greats, they too had conditions that they grew up in. But they said, “No. There’s a more honest way to go through life and I’m going to radically commit to it.” So the first bit of work to do is to get out a pen and paper and write down the principles that matter most to you. And they could be inspired from song lyrics or poems or speeches from people. You could borrow it from any of the 11 world religions.

But then you look at a handful of first principles and you say, “What are the values that are espoused in these first principles?” You have to train your mind to be skilled enough, mentally disciplined enough, mentally tough enough, mentally flexible enough to be able to live attuned to those values and first principles. xElite athletes, when we see at the Olympics or world championships or whatever it might be, and we see them on the top of the podium and we say, “Gosh, look at them. They’re different. They were born that way. They’re special.” No, what we miss is the grind that they go through, the uncomfortable commitment that they make on a fundamental level every day to go at practice, get right to the messy edge of what they’re capable of, be critiqued and judged by their peers, by their coaches, and to not be overrun by that judging feedback critique system because they’re working from a first principle, which is I want to grow. I want to see how good I can get. That is the real lesson that athletes have to teach us, how to make fundamental commitments in our life and push all in.

ALISON BEARD: And talk about the mental training that you’ve done with clients, that you’ve seen athletes go through in order to get to that place where they can turn off the FOPO and really focus?

MICHAEL GERVAIS: There’s a handful of mental skills that are available to everybody. The challenge is, is that most people don’t learn them in grade school or high school or college. One of those basic mental skills is mental imagery, using the power of your mind to see a compelling future and to see yourself being great in those moments, whatever that compelling future might be. That’s something that we did in a fantastic way as children. And then as we became serious adults, we stopped using our imagination for a compelling, beautiful, amazing future, and we use our imagination to think about all the things that could go wrong.

And that’s why one of the reasons at least anxiety is on the rise, is because we’re trying to solve our safety. We’re trying to solve our survival rather than put this incredible machinery of a mind, and brain, and body, and to play for the way that we would like to see our future. And just because you see it does not mean it happens. That is not how this works. I’m talking about in a grounded, disciplined way to see a future, to see it from multiple angles, to see how you operate in those compelling future moments, and then to be able to hydrate that experience so you’re more familiar with it so it can grow. You’re growing that seed of your future self. So that’s one.

A second is deep focus. So go back to the signal-to-noise ratio idea. The noise is the world around you, the signal is only available in the present moment. Deep focus is the entry point into flow state. Flow state is the most optimal state we can be in. Everything is fluid, time is distorted, there’s this ease to adjust, and it’s the sense of awe that comes with it. And we can train deep focus. Mindfulness and meditation is one way.

The way that we train deep focus is actually through the skill of refocusing. When your mind wanders from focusing on the inhale or exhale that you gently, quickly, swiftly bring it back to the next exhale or back to that inhale. So it’s this thousand times a moment, restarting and refocusing is kind of the art of mindfulness.

And one of the benefits of mindfulness, is it builds our awareness. And with great awareness, we get to choose upstream, rather than choose when we’re in the rapids of the emotional turbulence of life. And so mindfulness meditation certainly has incredible research. It’s been around 2,600 years. And then using the power of imagination to be able to see a compelling future and how you want to be able to navigate challenging moments and wonderful moments in the future.

ALISON BEARD: So I want to shift before we end from the individual to the organization. You’re employing all these best practices that you’ve just outlined for us as an individual. How do you make sure if you’re a manager, that people on your team are doing the same thing? That different groups within an organization are all sort of, “Yes, we’re a bunch of individuals finding mastery, but we’re all working in concert?” Explain a bit to me how this sort of relentless focus on self-worth, individual mastery, your purpose-driven identity translates into creating a broader organization that works really well and is successful too.

MICHAEL GERVAIS:  I love the idea of being able to take best practices from performance psychology into a group setting, whether it’s business or some other team. And one of the real issues that we’re running into in corporate environments is that there is a human energy crisis. We are tired, and fatigued, we are no longer accepting the terms saying that we will be extracted, the best of us to be extracted for the bottom line of the company. We are now requiring that leaders, and cultures help us unlock purpose, and meaning and impact, so that we can flourish.

We’re taking a page in big business right out of a page in elite sport, 10 to 15 years ago. Couldn’t find somebody in elite sport that didn’t say, “Yeah, the mental part of the game’s important, and at this level it’s really important.” And then when you double click, you’d say, “Where’s the sports psych? Or how does sports psych happen here?” And they go, “Oh, well, we’ve got somebody outside the building that we really trust.” Well, that was like 20 years ago, 15 years ago. It’s like, “Oh, we brought a sports psych in and they’re down the hall. I’m not sure what their name is, but they’re down there.” 10 to five years ago.

They are part of the culture, they have a seat at the coach’s table. So they’re part of the high performance program that’s being built because psychology is so ground zero for flourishing and high performance.

So that’s what we’re seeing in big business right now is that we’re teaching people best practices to use their mind so that they’re less expensive as a organ. And I don’t mean expensive from a bottom line, I mean, when I know how to use my mind, it doesn’t cost me as much to get through 2:00 in the afternoon. I’m more efficient. I’ve got more available energy by the time I’m going to make that afternoon push. I’ve got some buoyancy by the time I get home to see my family, so I’m not exhausted by 3:00 in the afternoon and agitated by the time I get home. I’ve trained my mind to be eloquent with adjusting. I’ve trained it to be more calm. I’ve trained it to be more deeply focused, and I know my purpose, so I’m not shape-shifting to fit in, I am committed to the path that matters most to me and my teammates.

The energy crisis is here and it’s real. And when we add what I just talked about, the psychological skills training with best practices of recovery, like sleeping well, and eating well, and exercising properly and thinking well, those are the big four rocks, that we end up again, being less expensive as an organism because we’re more robust, we adapt better, we have more available energy to be creative, to solve the hard problems, and to be good teammates to other people that might be going through a hard time or a hard moment.

ALISON BEARD: Michael, thank you so much for being with us. I really learned a lot and I’m going to try to put your advice into practice.

MICHAEL GERVAIS: Thank you for hosting this conversation and allowing me to talk about the things that I care so much about.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Michael Gervais, a performance psychologist and author of the book, the First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about what People Think of you.

We have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search, HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Our audio product manager is Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.