500 episodes listed below
Performance psychology without the noise.
Finding Mastery is a measured interview show about how capable people think, train, decide, and recover under pressure. Episodes turn stories from people working through performance, happiness, honesty, and emotional skill into usable frames for daily life.
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Finding Mastery is built around a disciplined question: what helps people meet the most demanding parts of life with more skill? The show answers through interviews, guided reflection, and occasional AMA-style conversations. Its center of gravity is performance psychology, but the territory is broader than sports. Episodes move through happiness research, intermittent fasting, pressure, misinformation, limiting beliefs, creator discipline, anger, anxiety, meditation, and identity. The tone is steady. It favors clarity over hype. Guests often bring the story, while Dr. Michael Gervais shapes the conversation toward pattern, practice, and meaning. A discussion about sadness becomes a closer look at emotional acceptance. A conversation about food becomes a challenge to simple calorie thinking and a turn toward hormones and hunger. A talk about winning asks whether competition should be normalized or treated as a fundamentally different environment. The show is especially interested in the moment when a mental model starts to affect behavior. Beliefs are examined as perceptions that can either drain motivation or make action possible. Anxiety is treated as something to understand, not merely escape. Anger is handled carefully, as a powerful state that may be useful in narrow conditions but risky to inhabit for long. Creativity is presented as requiring structure, mentors, coaches, and deliberate preparation rather than pure spontaneity. Truth becomes a practice of honesty and attention to reality amid misinformation and tribal pressure. The show’s rhythm is patient, with questions that often begin simply and then widen. It can feel coaching-adjacent, but it avoids turning every answer into a slogan. The value is in the translation: stories from public performers and thinkers become practical language for private work. Finding Mastery is best for listeners who want ambition, emotional literacy, and evidence-minded self-development in the same place.
Made for: For listeners drawn to high performance, emotional skill, leadership, and self-examination. It suits people who prefer patient interviews, practical reflection, and ideas that can be tested in daily life.
What sets it apart: The show does not just collect impressive life stories; it keeps translating them into mental models, practices, and questions. Its edge is the steady movement from anecdote to principle without losing the human texture of the conversation.
Dive into the minds of the world’s greatest athletes, leaders, thinkers, and doers with Dr. Michael Gervais—a high performance psychologist and world-renowned expert on the relationship between high performance and the mind. Dr. Gervais’s client roster includes Super Bowl winning NFL teams, Fortune 50 CEOs, Olympic medalists, internationally acclaimed artists, and more. On Finding Mastery, Dr. Gervais sits down with the best at what they do, like David Goggins, Brene Brown, Toto Wolff, soccer legend Abby Wambach, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — translating their life stories, mental skills, and personal practices into applicable tools you can use to unlo…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Michael Gervais makes performance psychology concrete by tracing how guests work with emotion, fear, discipline and creative pressure.
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais turns performance interviews into close examinations of how people handle fear, emotion, discipline and uncertainty.
Panic, hunger, and Beyonce become working material for how you perform when your wiring protests.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful case for letting sadness be felt until attention naturally shifts.
The episode focuses on a practical question: what changes when sadness is met directly instead of being treated like an emergency to outrun. Its strongest stretch comes when the speaker tries the practice, doubts it will help, and then notices attention drifting to dinner a few…
A clear insulin-first case for intermittent fasting, built around food choices that make the science feel concrete.
The episode frames intermittent fasting as a question of hormones rather than willpower. It keeps returning to insulin as the core mechanism, using cookies and grilled salmon to show how different meals can be stored or used for energy.
A sharp look at Olympic pressure as a preparation problem, where treating the moment as ordinary or exceptional carries real consequences.
This single-episode review frames winning as a matter of judgment, not bravado. The central question is whether an Olympic race should be treated like any other assignment, or whether its lights, cameras, rivals, and distractions make it a different kind of test.
A thoughtful conversation about making creative freedom sturdier through support, planning, and a little Beyonce.
Dr. Michael Gervais's conversation with the creator behind Challenge Accepted frames creative courage as something built, not simply summoned. Its clearest thread is practical: bold work can depend on structure, and a plan can make risk feel less chaotic rather than less free.
A focused discussion of choosing a usable emotional state when fear enters high-stakes performance.
This Finding Mastery episode turns anger into a study of emotional choice when pressure is already in the room. Dr. Michael Gervais follows the feeling back to early lessons about anger being bad, then weighs that belief against moments when action is required, from a threat at…
Dan Harris turns a public panic attack into a grounded conversation about meditation, training, and living with fear.
Dan Harris brings the familiar origin point: a panic attack on Good Morning America during his 21 years at ABC News, following time in war zones after 9-11, depression, and self-medication with cocaine and other recreational drugs.
A clear challenge to calorie arithmetic, linking weight, hunger, insulin, and fasting to biology.
Dr. Jason Fung starts with a plain question: why do people get fat? His answer moves the frame away from calorie arithmetic and toward hunger, hormones, insulin, and the body's choice to store or burn energy.
Blunt business coaching for leaders carrying payroll.
Workforce strategy for the AI enterprise.
Better work, by design.
Leadership balance before burnout takes over.
The episode opens with the question of why people get fat.
Dan Harris begins with the panic attack he had on Good Morning America.
This episode features a conversation with Rhonda Morris, former CHRO at Chevron, exploring authentic leadership in human resources and how to build confidence and inclusivity in the modern workplace.
This episode explores how Neal Arthur, CEO of Wieden+Kennedy, fosters creativity by building inclusive cultures and navigating AI's impact on creative work.
This episode features a conversation with Ellyn Shook, former chief leadership and human resources officer at Accenture, exploring how purpose-driven leadership can transform workplace culture and help teams thrive in the modern era.
This episode explores how empathy serves as a crucial element in modern leadership for unlocking human potential, featuring an interview with leadership expert Matt Breitfelder.
On Finding Mastery, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar frames stress as "the pinch of salt," arguing that excess harms mental health and social behavior.
The host and the guest talk through sadness, attention, and the value of actually trying the techniques in real life.
The conversation makes the case that weight loss is not just about calories.
["Finding Mastery with Dr.
This episode explores the psychology of truth with neuroscientist Sam Harris, discussing how to discern reality in a world of misinformation and the importance of radical honesty.
This episode explores the psychology of limiting beliefs with Nir Eyal, discussing how hidden assumptions shape our capabilities and potential.
Michelle Khare tells Michael Gervais how Challenge Accepted grew from fears written on a whiteboard into stunts like boxing in front of 15,000 people and studying chess for 10 months.
Jeff Byers reframes anger as a signal, then uses the five R's to change state.
Dan Harris discusses his journey from a panic attack on live TV to finding meditation and managing anxiety, exploring mental health strategies with host Dr.