Michael Gervais

The first order of business is awareness, how your thoughts and emotions work together to influence your behaviors, how your thoughts and emotions and behaviors work together to influence your performance, the way you're expressing your ideas, emotions, and behaviors.

And so that's where...

That's where we need to start is increasing awareness of how we work from the inside out.

So there's three best practices.

Those best practices that hold up in the laboratory of research as well as on the frontier of high stakes, high pressured environments, mindfulness, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom.

Those three are the best practices that we know that those hold up the best when it comes to increasing awareness.

From that, once you are aware, then you've got some decisions to make.

And the question that you're asking is, how do we push through it?

I don't think we push through, we work with.

So we become aware of the triggers.

We become aware of our reflexive response.

And then we decide from that place, once we're aware, it's like now we realize there's a fork in the road.

And which direction am I going to move forward with?

And so that's the difference between reflective response

reactions versus contemplative responses.

It's just that nanosecond of awareness that gives you a path in the direction that is closer aligned to the person that you want to be.

Actually, instead of me being analytical, I'll tell you exactly how it shows up for me.

We're in the holiday season right now, and there is such a thing for me and for others called pre-party anxiety.

So you're going to a place where you're going to see some people that you know and some people that you don't know, and you can feel that sense of anxiousness just walking into that environment.

So there's also a parallel path that you could take where you're walking in and you're excited and you're feeling generative and you're curious about catching up with people.