The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You

  • 5h 3m 3s
  • Kevin Lake, Michael Gervais
  • Gildan Media
  • 2024

High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a groundbreaking guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people's opinions (FOPO).

As founder and executive chairman of MarineMax, William H. McGill Jr. helped transform the company from a disparate group of boat dealers into a highly profitable $2 billion global conglomerate.

FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives—and the consequences are great. When we let FOPO take control, we play it safe and small because we're afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. When challenged, we surrender our viewpoint. We trade in authenticity for approval. We please rather than provoke. We chase the dreams of others rather than our own. But it doesn't have to be this way.

In The First Rule of Mastery, Michael Gervais shows us that the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us. He reveals the mental skills and practices we need to overcome FOPO—the same skills he's taught to the top performers in the world, including sports MVPs, world-renowned artists and musicians, and Fortune 100 leaders and teams. Filled with fascinating stories from the worlds of sports and business, leading-edge science, and insights from the frontier of human performance, The First Rule of Mastery is a much-needed wake-up call that when we give more value to other people's opinions than we do our own, we live life on their terms, not ours.

About the Author

Michael Gervais, PhD, is one of the world's top high-performance psychologists. His clients include world record holders, Olympians, internationally acclaimed artists and musicians, MVPs from every major sport, and Fortune 100 CEOs. He is also the founder of Finding Mastery, a high-performance psychology consulting agency, the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, and the cocreator of the Performance Science Institute at the University of Southern California.

Kevin Lake is the Chief Creative Officer at Finding Mastery. He has collaborated with some of the world's leading performers. He produced Gleason, a feature documentary film that was short-listed for an Academy Award. He created and produced Playing It Forward in partnership with Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey. For seven years, he led the film division of Mel Gibson's Icon Productions.

In this Audiobook

  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 - Beethoven’s Secret
  • Chapter 2 - The Mechanics of FOPO
  • Chapter 3 - Fear Factors
  • Chapter 4 - Identity: A Breeding Ground for FOPO
  • Chapter 5 - Outsourcing Self-Worth
  • Chapter 6 - The Neurobiology of FOPO
  • Chapter 7 - Barry Manilow and the Spotlight Effect
  • Chapter 8 - Do We Really Know What Someone Else Is Thinking?
  • Chapter 9 - We See Things as They We Are
  • Chapter 10 - Social Beings Masquerading as Separate Selves
  • Chapter 11 - Challenges to Our Closely Held Beliefs
  • Chapter 12 - Look Who’s Talking
  • Chapter 13 - The Litmus Test
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