Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

How do great leaders build teams to become who they're capable of becoming, and prepare them to handle their emotions when the pressure is highest?
Eddie Jones is one of the most accomplished coaches in world rugby. He has led Australia, England, and Japan on the international stage, and guided Japan to one of the greatest upsets in rugby history at the 2015 World Cup. He has built a career on turning teams around, creating pressure, and challenging more from the people he leads. There is a fine line in that work. Too little challenge and we never understand who we can become. Too much and we create the wrong conditions to explore. That line has not always been easy to walk. Eddie’s demanding methods have drawn criticism over the years, and his exits from England in 2022 and Australia in 2023 came under intense public scrutiny... a chapter he alludes to here when he describes the mistake of letting the noise come down on top of him.
In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Eddie walks through how he builds team identity, starting with a picture in his head of how a team could play and then closing the gap between that vision and the group in front of him. He explains why he keeps training about 70% successful, so the 30% of failure becomes the learning, and why training should always be harder than the game. He makes the case that immediate, private feedback beats public humiliation every time, and that the best coaches ask far more questions than they answer.
Eddie also talks about understanding the individual, why coaching has shifted from team-based to one-on-one, and how a single moment of feeling important from a coach 30 years ago still moves him today. He opens up struggles he has faced with his own emotions, the mistakes he has made, the generation that taught him to never show vulnerability, and why he is still learning to make room for joy.
In this conversation, we explore:
How great coaches build a team identity and close the gap between vision and reality
Why training should be about 70% successful, so the failures become the learning
The value in training harder than the game
Why the best coaches ask more questions than they answer
How understanding the individual has become central to modern leadership
Why you should never assume, and always confirm by knowing the person
The thinking time every leader needs

By the end of the conversation the two land on a question every leader should ask: would you want to be coached by yourself?

Links & Resources
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Eddie Jones' Books: My Life and Rugby: The Autobiography and Leadership: Lessons from My Life in Rugby
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What if the most important work of parenting isn’t about your child at all... but about understanding yourself?
Dr. Dan Siegel is a Harvard-trained clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, a neuroscientist, and one of the leading voices helping us understand how relationships shape the developing mind. He has authored over 20 books, five of them New York Times bestsellers, including co-authoring The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. Trained as a developmental attachment researcher through the National Institute of Mental Health, Dan has spent more than 40 years studying how the adults who care for children influence who those children become. And his interest isn’t only academic. Dan describes his own childhood as decidedly non-optimal... a father who was intrusive and at times terrifying, a mother who was emotionally distant. He carried every non-secure attachment stance into adulthood, and earned security later in life, with the help of a therapist who finally saw him.
What he found over those four decades reframes how we think about raising kids. The research is remarkably clear: how a parent has made sense of their own childhood, assessed before their baby is even born, predicts how that child will attach. Children don’t need perfect parents. They need three things... to be seen, to be soothed, and to be safe. When those are reliably present, a fourth emerges: security. And when we inevitably blow it, because every parent does, what matters most is the repair. As Dan puts it, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting. There’s just being present.
In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Dan walks through the science of attachment and why the pop-culture version on social media is quoting a different field entirely, the myth that a mother should be able to do it all alone when children are wired for a village, and the daily Wheel of Awareness practice he uses to start every morning. The two also explore loneliness as the experience of a “partial mind,” the shift from a threat mindset to a challenge mindset that protects against burnout, and what it means to keep the “me” while belonging to a “we.” And Mike opens up about the moment his son was born, when he and his wife wrote down their first principles as parents and landed on two words: kindness and strength.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why there’s no such thing as perfect parenting, only being present
The four S’s every child needs: seen, soothed, safe, and secure
How your own childhood story quietly shapes the way you parent
Why repair after a rupture matters more than never rupturing at all
The myth of the lone parent, and why children are wired for a village
Why loneliness may be the experience of a partial mind
The daily Wheel of Awareness practice Dan has done with 77,000 people
How shifting from a threat mindset to a challenge mindset protects against burnout

If you’ve ever lost your cool with your kids and worried you’ve done lasting damage, this conversation offers a hopeful, science-backed way to repair... and grow.
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Links & Resources
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery
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Dr. Dan Siegel’s Books: The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline, Parenting from the Inside Out, The Power of Showing Up, Aware, and Becoming Aware
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If your body already has powerful systems designed to repair and protect you, are your daily habits helping switch them on... or working against them?
Dr. Valter Longo is a professor and director of the Longevity Institute at USC, one of the world’s leading researchers on aging, nutrition, and lifespan, and the author of The Longevity Diet and his latest book, Fasting Cancer. His path into this work is an unusual one. He started as a jazz performance major, chasing rock guitar, and walked away the moment they told him he had to direct a marching band. What pulled him toward aging traces back to being five years old, in the room when his grandfather died, and a question that lodged in him and never left: what if little things can make such a big difference?
That question became a career. Longo walks Dr. Michael Gervais through the science of living to 110, a number drawn from two real people he followed personally, and the trade-off at the heart of aging: the body can pour its energy into growth and reproduction, or into protection and repair, but not both at once. From there he challenges one of the loudest narratives in health and performance today, the push for high protein, laying out why he believes most people are eating far more than the research supports, and what a safer balance actually looks like.
The conversation moves into the work Longo is best known for: fasting-mimicking diets, why he says fasting on its own doesn’t mean anything, and how cycles of eating less may activate the body’s own repair and regeneration. He and Mike explore what this could mean for cancer, where Longo is careful and precise about what the science does and doesn’t yet show, and they close on what it takes to unlearn a foundational belief when the evidence stops holding up. Mike opens up about how this conversation pushed against a narrative he’d carried his whole life, and why he wanted to have it anyway.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why aging and cancer are deeply connected, and what that means for prevention
The trade-off between growth and protection that shapes how we age
Why Longo believes most people eat far too much protein
What a safer, mostly plant-based protein balance looks like
Why fasting on its own is a meaningless word, and what to do instead
How fasting-mimicking cycles may trigger the body’s repair and regeneration
What the science does and doesn’t yet show about food and cancer
What it takes to unlearn a belief when the evidence stops holding up

If you’ve ever wondered whether your daily choices are quietly helping or hurting the systems meant to keep you well, this conversation offers a science-backed place to start thinking about your health and lifestyle.
A note from the team: This episode doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Over the last several months, Mike has had numerous conversations on health, nutrition with world-renowned experts like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Dr. Jason Fung, and Dr. Tim Spector, among others. These are all rich conversations that at times hold conflicting advice and guidance. We encourage you to listen to all of them, and as always, consult your doctor on what practices are best for you. Health, nutrition, and longevity are all deeply intertwined with living a life of full potential, and we’re committed to having these great conversations with world experts on these subjects. Keep commenting with what’s working in your life, keep passing these onto your friends, and as always keep pushing the frontiers of your own performance!
Links & Resources
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery
Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter
Download Dr. Mike’s Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset
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Dr. Valter Longo’s Books: The Longevity Diet and Fasting Cancer
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it take to build a team that trusts each other enough to go through hard things together... not around them?
Mike Macdonald is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and one of the youngest head coaches in modern NFL history to win a Super Bowl. His path is an unusual one. He grew up with almost no family pipeline into football, a baseball kid in Georgia who fell in love with the strategy of the game watching his dad’s home video of his eighth-grade football games. When an injury ended his playing days in high school, he didn’t walk away. He filmed practice, coached the linebackers his senior year, and discovered the itch that would carry him from the pressure cooker of big-time college football at Georgia to the Baltimore Ravens, and eventually to Seattle.
At the center of how he leads is a principle his team lives by: through, not around. Earn what you achieve. No excuses. Work the problem together, and in a way that’s matter of fact rather than personal. Mike tells the story of the biggest adversity of his NFL career, a blown multiple-score lead as Baltimore’s new defensive coordinator, and the decision that followed: no blame game, name himself the common denominator, and square up with the problem alongside his players. When the players felt the coaches were in the fight with them, the buy-in came, and the defense turned.
This conversation is also a rare one for Finding Mastery: Dr. Michael Gervais has spent the past year working alongside Coach Mike and the Seahawks, and that shared history opens avenues for discussion most interviews never reach. They dig into why confidence and self-efficacy are trainable skills, even for a Super Bowl winning head coach, why clarity is one of the deepest forms of respect a leader can offer, and the Harvard baseball dream a young Coach Mike let slip because, in his words, he played it too safe. Mike Gervais opens up about recognizing that same story in his own life... the fear of looking like you don’t have what it takes. They close with imposter syndrome on the way to a Super Bowl, a graduation photo full of badges, and what it means to hand the trophy back to the team.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why “through, not around” is the foundation of the Seahawks’ culture
How confidence and self-efficacy become trainable skills
Why clarity from leadership is one of the deepest forms of trust
How taking responsibility in front of the room earns buy-in
Why players always know which leaders are authentic
How fear of failure quietly keeps us playing it safe
What imposter syndrome looks like on the way to a Super Bowl

If you’ve ever been tempted to go around a hard conversation, a hard problem, or a hard moment, this conversation offers a way to go through it... together.
Links & Resources
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery
Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter
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What if the reason so many of us are struggling right now isn’t a lack of success… but a lack of connection to something deeper?
Dr. Lisa Miller is a clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University, and author of The Awakened Brain, and her research challenges something many of us have been taught to overlook: that spirituality isn’t optional, and it isn’t just religion… it’s a core part of how we’re wired. Her journey began at 26, on an inpatient psychiatric unit, where she watched the best available treatments fall short for people in their darkest moments. When the unit had no clergy for Yom Kippur, she showed up with her grandmother’s prayer book and led a service in the back hall… and watched patients who had been despairing for months sit up, brighten, and begin to heal. That day set her on a 30-year scientific quest.
What she found reframes how we think about mental health. Buried in the back of large national data sets was a single question: how personally important is spirituality or religion to you? When Dr. Miller ran the numbers, a strong personal spirituality, with or without religion, turned out to be 80% protective against addiction and 82% protective against completed suicide — more protective against the diseases of despair than anything else known to the clinical sciences. Twin studies show this capacity is one-third innate and two-thirds environmentally formed, which means every one of us is born with it, and every one of us can strengthen it. Her MRI research, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that a sustained spiritual life builds cortical thickness across the regions of the awakened brain, protecting against the recurrence of depression.
In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Lisa walks through the difference between achieving awareness and awakened awareness, the three neural circuits behind feeling loved, guided, and never alone, and how parents and leaders can put this science to work. Mike opens up about his own path… the early pull he felt toward a spiritual life, the pendulum swing toward achievement, and the hypocrisy he witnessed as a teenager that nearly cost him his connection to what Lisa calls the flame.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why spirituality is an inborn capacity, not a belief
The single research finding that reframes how we think about mental health
The difference between the achieving brain and the awakened brain
The three neural circuits behind feeling loved, guided, and never alone
Why a sustained spiritual life physically strengthens the brain
How parents can support a child’s natural spiritual awareness
Why 90% of leaders made the most important decision of their lives through an awakened form of knowing
How to heal from spiritual injury when a bad messenger breaks your trust
If you’ve ever felt successful on paper but disconnected in your life, this conversation offers a science-backed way back to something deeper.
Links & Resources
This episode is brought to you in part by our partner, Sunlighten, the company that has pioneered infrared sauna technology. Go to https://findingmastery.com/sunlighten to see how you can save up to $2,100 on their mPulse Intelligent Sauna.
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery
Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!
Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/
Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter
Download Dr. Mike’s Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset
Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X
Dr. Lisa Miller’s Books: The Awakened Brain and The Spiritual Child
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.