Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

What is the change you seek to make?
On today's episode we go back to the Finding Mastery Vault for a conversation with Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur, teacher, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time on leadership, creativity, and making meaningful change. Seth has written more than twenty international bestsellers, including The Dip, Purple Cow, and The Song of Significance, alongside one of the longest-running daily blogs in the world. His claim is that naming the change you're actually trying to make is more than a branding exercise. It's what helps make every downstream decision clearer… what to commit to, what to quit, whose opinion to take seriously, and who you will have to become to pull it off.
We first released this one a few years ago, and since then the world has only gotten noisier, faster and more demanding of change, which is exactly why we felt it was worth bringing back.
In this episode, you'll learn:
What Seth means by the change you seek to make, and why it clarifies everything downstream
Leadership as a voluntary act, and why enrollment and inspiration come before authority
Why consistency is what makes you trustworthy enough to lead change at all
How to tell a dead end from the dip when you're deciding whether to quit
Whose judgment has actually earned the right to shape your work
Who to go to for reassurance, and who to go to for insight

If you have ever felt your choices quietly bending toward the approval of people who have not earned it, this conversation offers you a perspective you need to hear.
Links & Resources
Seth Godin Photo Credit: Brian Bloom
For More on Seth, go to https://www.sethgodin.com/
Seth Godin’s Books: The Dip, Purple Cow, Linchpin, Tribes, This Is Marketing, The Practice, and The Song of Significance. His newest book, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved, is set to be released in September 2026.
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

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers to those questions help unlock your potential?
For this 30th installment of our popular Ask Me Anything series, Dr. Michael Gervais is joined by co-host Victoria Garrick Browne, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, former Division I volleyball player at USC, mental health advocate, creator, and speaker. Victoria turned her own private struggle with performance anxiety and depression into a gift for millions, and she founded The Hidden Opponent, a nonprofit that brings mental health education and support to student-athletes on campuses around the country. She's the ideal person to sit alongside Mike for this AMA and help answer these questions with care.
The questions our community submitted are honest and vulnerable, and they keep circling the same root: identity. What happens when who you are gets fused to what you do? Mike and Victoria explore why the culture around us so easily hands young people a performance-based identity, what it looks like to move toward a purpose-based one instead, and why the way a parent talks about their child at the dinner table quietly shapes how that child sees themselves.
This is a practical and useful conversation for anyone who competes, coaches, parents, or is simply trying to figure out who they are.
In this conversation, we explore:
How to help young people build an identity rooted in who they are, not only in how they perform
Why the way you talk about your child, even at Thanksgiving, is shaping their identity
How to tell the difference between healthy competitiveness and unhealthy pressure
The warning signs of burnout in a young athlete, and why competing too early can backfire
How to share a mental health story in recruiting without it becoming a liability
Whether real confidence can exist without external validation
The difference between formal instruction and guided discovery in coaching and parenting
A simple, honest way to work with imposter syndrome

If your sense of who you are has ever felt a little too tied to what you do, this one is well-worth your time.
Links & Resources
To learn more about Victoria, please visit: https://victoriagarrickbrowne.com/
To learn more about The Hidden Opponent, the non-profit Victoria started, please visit: https://www.thehiddenopponent.org/
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
Learn more about The Hidden Opponent: thehiddenopponent.org
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When the moment arrives and you don’t have a script, are you trying to impress, or working to connect?
Matt Abrahams is a lecturer in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, host of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, and author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. His path into this work starts very young and is almost comically literal. His last name starts with AB, so all through school he was the one teachers called on first. He felt what it is to be put on the spot before he had any tools for it. Later, in the corporate world and then at Stanford, he watched how much rides on those unscripted and authentic moments, and he set out to study what actually helps.
The central idea of this conversation is freeing: speaking in the moment is a skill, not a gift you’re either born with or not. Like any athlete, you can learn it and train it, and, as Matt puts it, you can prepare to be spontaneous. That reframe changes everything downstream. When the spotlight hits and the heart starts pounding, the body reads the moment as a threat. The work is learning to meet it as an opportunity instead, to buy yourself a little space, and to put your attention where it belongs: on the person in front of you rather than on your own performance.
Matt and Mike spend time in this conversation getting quite practica. Matt shares the two tools to reach for when your mind goes blank, the simple What, So What, Now What structure for organizing a thought under pressure, and a listening practice he calls pace, space, grace. Mike opens up too, telling the story of a first international conference where he tried to breathe his way to calm on stage and realized, mid-panic, that he had never trained the skill he needed most. In the end, they land on this simple concept: being present, grounded, and in service of the other person is the big rock that makes the rest work.
In this conversation, we explore:
How speaking in the moment is a trainable skill
What actually happens in the body when you’re put on the spot
How to shift from seeing a moment as a threat to seeing it as an opportunity
The two tools to use when your mind goes blank
The What, So What, Now What structure for organizing a thought quickly
Why great listening is pace, space, and grace
How to turn the spotlight off yourself and onto connection
Why the goal is never to sound perfect, only to connect
Matt’s work is a reminder to all of us that the goal was never to sound perfect. It was always to connect.
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
Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X
Matt Abrahams’ Book: Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the kids who look like they’re doing just fine on the outside are quietly struggling to make sense of what’s happening on the inside?
Ross Szabo is one of the leading voices in youth mental health education: founding Wellness Director at Geffen Academy at UCLA, founder of the Human Power Project, co-author of Behind Happy Faces, and author of A Kids Book About Anxiety. His story starts long before the titles. Born into a family with severe mental health disorders and addiction, Ross was 11 when he visited his older brother in a psychiatric ward, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder himself at 16, and coped with drinking that began at age 12. In his senior year of high school, after months of crippling depression, he attempted to take his own life… and this occurred while serving as class president, playing varsity basketball, and carrying a high GPA. On the outside, everything looked fine. The inside was a different story. That distance between the outside and the inside became the through line of his life’s work.
The idea Ross has organized his career around sounds simple: treat mental health the same way we treat physical health. That means a clear definition, a shared language, and trainable skills. His definition is a helpful place to start… mental health is not about having a problem, it’s how you address the different challenges in your life. At Geffen Academy, he built what he describes as the only program in the country where students learn about mental health and healthy relationships once a week, every week, from grade six through grade 12, timed to the second largest period of brain growth, which happens between the ages of 12 to 25. His graduates report feeling far more prepared for college than their peers, especially in the interpersonal sense: living with new roommates, managing relationships, and knowing how to ask for support.
Ross and Mike walk through how mapping the self-defining memories that shaped you helps build coping mechanisms the way athletes build skills (the more consistently you do something, the better you get at it). And they discuss how expanding your emotional vocabulary improves your mental health. Ross and Mike dive into the difference between vulnerability and trauma dumping, how the crisis shows up differently in young men and young women, why modeling beats lecturing at home, and what a shared language for mental health could unlock in families, schools, and businesses.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why so many young people look fine on the outside while struggling on the inside
A clear, working definition of mental health, and why most of us don’t have one
The difference between feeling nervous and having anxiety
Why the more words you have for your feelings, the better your mental health
The neuroscience of coping, and how to actually rewire a habit
How the youth mental health crisis shows up differently in young men and young women
What parents overlook when preparing kids for college
Why every family, team, and business needs a shared language for mental health

Ross's work is an invitation to care for the mind with the same clarity we bring to the body. And if you're raising, teaching, or leading young people, this conversation offers the language and the skills to close the gap between the outside and the inside.
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
Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X
Ross Szabo’s Books: Behind Happy Faces (co-authored) and A Kids Book About Anxiety
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What has been the cost to women of relying on research that was never designed around female physiology?
Dr. Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and bestselling author of ROAR, which challenged the idea that women should train and fuel like men, and Next Level, which focuses on health, performance, and physiology through perimenopause and menopause. Over two decades of research, she has become one of the leading voices reshaping how we understand women's health, with a message that has become synonymous with her work: women are not small men. That line started as a throwaway teaching point during her postdoc at Stanford, and it has since become a paradigm shift.
At the center of this conversation is a quiet, costly problem. For decades, much of the science on training, nutrition, and medicine was built on male bodies and then applied to women as if they were simply smaller versions of men. Stacy walks through what that gap has cost, why the literature thins out for women between the ages of thirty and fifty, and how a hormone fluctuation can get mistaken for a panic attack, leading to solutions that were never going to fully work.
Stacy and Mike then move into what to actually do about it. They get into why "eat less, train more" often backfires and drives the body into a low energy state, why fasting through the morning for women can dysregulate appetite and stress hormones, and why lifting heavier loads may protect not just muscle and bone but the aging brain. They also draw the line that runs through the whole conversation, the symptoms of perimenopause are the physiology, not the person, and explore why this episode isn't just for the women in the community. Stacy explains why having men in the conversation helps drive action, what partners can actually do... listen first rather than rush to fix... and why the rising noise around menopause online, along with AI tools built on outdated male data, makes clear thinking here more valuable than ever.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why so much health and performance research was never actually done on women
What "women are not small men" really means in training and nutrition
Why "eat less, train more" often backfires for women through midlife
Why fasting through the morning can dysregulate appetite and stress hormones
How lifting heavier loads may help protect the aging brain
Why men belong in this conversation, and how to show up for the women in their lives
Why most AI health tools still run on outdated male data

Whether this conversation is about your body or the body of someone you love, it offers a science-backed way to understand what's happening and what to do next.
Guest Links & Resources
Website: Learn more about Dr. Sims here: https://www.drstacysims.com/
Dr. Sims' Books: ROAR, Revised Edition (2024) and Next Level (2022)
Finding Mastery 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
Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X
Dr. Stacy Sims’ Books: ROAR and Next Level
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.