Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

What happens to the rest of your relationships when the one you have with yourself goes untended? Dr. Thema Bryant is a clinical psychologist, tenured professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, director of the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory, and former president of the American Psychological Association. She hosts The Homecoming Podcast and wrote Matters of the Heart: Healing Your R...

“…the stories that we tell ourselves and other people become our lives.” — IN-Q This is a conversation about the story you are living inside, about creativity as a practice rather than a talent, and about why being witnessed helps us release what we might otherwise carry alone. Before this conversation started, IN-Q walked the entire Finding Mastery team through a poetry workshop. Each person wrot...

What if the calmest person in the room isn’t avoiding pressure, but experiencing it differently? Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is one of the world’s most recognized spiritual teachers and humanitarian leaders. He founded the Art of Living, which teaches meditation, breathwork, and service in over 180 countries, and he is the author of Notes for the Journey Within . Stress has a use, and Gurudev com...

How much of the time you spend in pain comes from the injury itself, and how much comes from the fear around it? Dr. Tom Walters is a board-certified orthopedic physical therapist, strength and conditioning specialist, educator, and founder of Rehab Science. He has spent more than two decades helping people understand pain, movement, and injury recovery, and he is the author of Rehab Science: How...

A letter landed on Masud Husain’s desk about a man in his thirties who had stopped doing anything at all. Dr. Masud Husain is a clinical neurologist, neuroscientist, and Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain and author of Our Brains, Our Selves, winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. The lette...

What moral code do we need when our tools can reshape intelligence and biology itself? Jamie Metzl is a technology and healthcare futurist and geopolitical expert, founder and chair of OneShared. World, and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He has served on the U.S. National Security Council and with the United Nations in Cambodia, and he is the author of Hacking Darwin , Superconvergence ,...

Tamsen Fadal was 47 and anchoring the evening news when the first hot flash hit. She got off the set and lay down on the bathroom floor. No one had prepared her well for any of this. The answer, when it finally came, was a short note from her doctor in her patient portal with four words: "In menopause, any questions?" Tamsen Fadal is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, executive producer of the PBS...

What are the things we can do today to help minimize our chances of developing dementia as we age? Dr. Tommy Wood is a physician and neuroscientist, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington, and author of The Stimulated Mind . The book takes on a belief many of us still hold, that the adult brain becomes fixed at an early age and then declines from there....

This is a conversation about habits, the ones you want to build and the ones you want to get rid of. Jon Gordon has written more than 30 books on leadership, habits and mindset, including numerous bestsellers. Jon's most recent book is titled The Power of Positive Habits , and it tackles a critical issue so many of us face: how do I break the habits that no longer serve me, and how do I build ones...

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, along...

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 he...

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...

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 l...

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 res...

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 tur...

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...

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 wo...

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 strateg...

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...

What if the real crisis we're facing right now isn't political or technological… but a crisis of attention? Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist, professor emeritus of medicine, and the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program that helped move mindfulness from contemplative tradition into modern medicine, psychology, and high performance. The last time Jon joined Findin...

What if the most important skill of our moment isn't knowing more, but knowing what's actually worth caring about? Mark Manson is the bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked , with three #1 New York Times bestsellers and tens of millions of readers around the world. The last time Mark joined Finding Mastery was in 2020, mid-COVID, when uncertainty was lou...

Why is it that so many of us are loved... and yet don’t actually feel loved? Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness. Her newest book, How to Feel Loved , co-authored with relationship scientist Harry Reis, lands at a strange moment: a time when more people than ever say they are connected, and more people than ever...

Why do so many conversations break down, even when both people are trying to connect? Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators . This is his third conversation on Finding Mastery, and the timing matters. The world has shifted since the last time he and Dr. Michael Gervais spoke. Families, friendships, even whole c...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers help you live and perform with more clarity? We're back with another special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast: an Ask Me Anything episode, built from the deep and sometimes vulnerable questions submitted by our community. Joining Dr. Michael Gervais again is Jeff Byers, former NFL player, Co-Founder and CEO of M...

What does it really take to stay at the top for 16 years and still know who you are when it ends?  Andrew Whitworth is a Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowler, and the oldest left tackle in NFL history to start a Super Bowl. He spent 16 seasons protecting the most valuable position on the field, finished his career by winning a championship at 40, and walked off in one of the most viral m...