Seahawks sports psychologist Michael Gervais on competition and philosophy

The Seahawks may have had a disappointing day last Sunday after their loss to the New Orleans Saints, but if you ask Dr. Michael Gervais, the team’s sports psychologist, there is good news — performing at their best is “100-percent under our control.”

“On the psychology of it, it’s really promising, because we’re not trying to control or manipulate something that is not in our control,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

Gervais, who also co-founded online educational platform Compete to Create with Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, works with the Hawks three to four days a week to support the players and “help them take their psychological skills further.”

“Competition is not about being better than others,” he said. “It’s about how to figure out how to be better than you were yesterday.”

Meet the secret weapon behind the Seahawks’ head games, Dr. Michael Gervais

Gervais also hosts a high performance psychology podcast called “Finding Mastery.” On an upcoming episode, which will be recorded live in Seattle this Friday, Gervais will interview Carroll. There are no more tickets available, but the recording will be available to stream live here.

“We’re going to take a look and deconstruct the art of coaching from one of the great coaches in our era,” Gervais explained. “How does he help people find their very best?”

The Gervais-Carroll partnership began eight years ago, when mutual friend first introduced the sports psychologist to the coach. It soon became clear that the two were a perfect match.

“Coach Carroll has an advanced understanding of psychology … he’s definitely influenced my thinking,” Gervais said.

Carroll, according to Gervais, appreciates “the core principles that help people flourish in life.” Everyone has a philosophy, but “the real work is to undercover the core principles” upon which that philosophy is based, Gervais explained. These core principles traverse “geographic, environmental, and cultural attributes.”

For example, Gervais said, one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s biggest core principles was likely equality.

“What the average person does is, they have a sense of what those are, and they do their very best to try to live in alignment with them,” Gervais said. “What the ‘extraordinaries’ do is, they’re very clear, and they organize their life into living in alignment with those principles across every condition that they place their feet in. And that is what the most powerful human beings in the world do.”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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