Dr. Michael Gervais

Mental health is not just reserved for a month.

It’s an everyday practice to work well in this wild world.

There are two things you can do today:

1. Invest in yourself

Know yourself, develop the skills, work with your self-talk, breathe, develop a clear intention or mindfulness practice.

Give yourself a chance to be your very best.

2. Invest in relationships

We’re all going through something. None of us do it alone.

You probably have a hunch of somebody that would love a call from you, a text from you.

Your intuition is stronger than you might imagine.

Reach out and just say, hey, I’m thinking about you.

A phone call, a text, spending time face-to-face is so materially important.

Not only does it help them, it helps you as well.

Tag someone you’re thinking about 👇🏼

There’s something about drive and motivation in kids that we must understand.

For kids that have a lot, we need to understand what drives them and how we can open up the aperture for internal motivation.

There are 2 types of motivation:

1. External motivation - rewards, money, recognition, celebration

There’s nothing wrong with them, but they’re fleeting and don’t have staying power.

2. Internal motivation - the drive that comes from loving the process of figuring things out and the feeling you get from unlocking something.

The best thing we can do it help them understand the love affair with figuring things out.

Help them figure out the ahas, that natural spark and energy that comes from when they figure something out.

If you can love unlocking those things, whatever they are, whether in science or math, sport or arts, that are internally driven, that’s enduring.

As a parent, our job is to understand what is most alive in our kids and give them as many different experiences that they can say, I find that feeling most in this.

It has nothing to do with externals, but in the love of trying to figure things out.

The best teammates wrestle with their dragons.

The folks that have experienced trauma and work through it, because they’ve embraced their fragility.

They’ve looked the dragon in the eyes and wrestled it down and become friends with the dragon so now they go out into the world with the dragon.

There are two types of people you’ll encounter:

1. The ones who do the work

They wrestled with the dragon in their own life and they can talk about it.

You can feel that they are not whipped around by the external world because they are governed by their values and their principles.

They’ve got some purpose that’s bigger than them.

These are the ones you want in your life because they will have your back.

2. The ones who don’t do the work

Still thumping their chest to say, I’m an alpha.

Don’t trust them.

They haven’t done the work to know what they really stand for.

The best teammates are the ones that you want to partner with because you go further when you work with other people.

Thank you for having me on the show

Wishing everyone a happy Memorial Day from myself and our team here at

I have no interest in rewriting my past.

The experiences I uniquely had, the way I make sense of them is what makes me, me.

I have no interest in rewriting hardships or adversities or traumas.

There’s something unique about you.

Understanding that unique specialness shaped by all your experiences—hardships, fun, whatever.

I do have a deep investment in helping bring that spark, that unique thing to life.

Celebrating that uniqueness forever forward.

That doesn’t happen without all the traumas, unique experiences, adversities.

It doesn’t happen without them, so why would we want to rewrite them?

That’s what is beautiful about the becoming of who you’re capable of becoming.

It’s already in you. That special spark. It’s our job to know it and figure it out.

Are you pursuing you very best, or are you pursuing a life compared to others?

That’s not a choice for me to make for you.

I will say that I’m much more interested in me personally. I’m working on being my very best every day.

Small little micro choices each day end up adding up.

Confidence is a trainable skill. It’s at the cornerstone of being great at anything. ��Confidence is a state of being. It moves quickly. �
Your parents were informing your sense of self.

They had a lot of work to do.

They were trying their very best.

There’s a lot of programming that happens at a young age about your sense of self, about the world around you.

They’re basically installing or building your psychological framework.

It’s influenced by them.

It’s influenced by the work you put in, the promises you make, but ultimately it comes down—it’s not past success, it’s not hard work.

What it ultimately arrives at is the way you speak to yourself.

How are you speaking to yourself? 👇🏼

We search for hacks and shortcuts and listicles and secrets.

There are none, especially in this game of mastery, especially when it comes to performing well and flourishing.

This is about the heavy lifting, doing the difficult, lonely work to understand and explore and discover.

As custodians of real information based in science and grounded theories, I owe it to my customers and myself to know the science forward and backward.

Those of us in the applied field don’t have anywhere to go without good science.

If you don’t go deep and wrestle with the dragon that scares you.

If you don’t go and dig into the corners you’re trying to keep the light out of.

If you don’t go and examine some of the hurts you’re carrying forward, then you’re always gonna be protecting those hurts.

That is the golden shackle that we can all feel.

What dragon are you avoiding? 👇🏼

When you do gratitude work, see if you can fully be flooded with the emotions of the thing you’re really grateful for.

For me this morning, it was my eyes. Quite simple.

But when you really get underneath it, just to be so grateful for a part of your body, a person you’re connected to, $5 in your pocket, whatever it might be, it changes you.

What are you grateful for as we go into the weekend? ⬇️

Emotions are at the center of the human experience.

If you want a great life, understand how to work with emotions.

Emotions are physiological. The way you experience emotions is what we call feelings.

Feelings and emotions are different.

Emotions are physiological. Heart pounds, breathing changes, palms sweat.

You can see an emotion in another person, but never how they’re interpreting it.

That’s their feelings.

Practice being tuned to your body.

When I step on the tripwire of anxiety or grief, there’s a flooded feeling. Observe them.

If I can label them, I’m into the feelings category.

If I can put words to them, feel the sensations, put a label, choose words to share—now we’ve got something.