Dr. Michael Gervais has been teaching athletes “the essential psychological skills to thrive under pressure” at Pinnacle Performance in Marina Del Ray since 1999. If he were an athlete himself, you might call him a journeyman; he mentored the jocks at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach before landing a gig with the Long Beach Ice Dogs that ultimately introduced him to some of the most elite athletes in the world.
His clientele features high-risk, highreward sportsmen (and women) from the NFL, UFC and action sports arenas, including those whose talents defy classification—like Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian skydiver who broke the sound barrier in a free fall from space. Michael’s travels throughout the world of human potential have led him to a single conclusion: The best is yet to come. How did you first become interested in the field of sports psychology? Were you an anxious athlete once yourself? Michael Gervais: I grew up here in Redondo Beach, so I was a surfer. And for me, there was a big difference between free surfing and competitive surfing. In free surfing, there’s no structure; it’s expression, it’s challenge, it’s opportunity. As soon as I entered a competition, all of a sudden I was being judged, and I was being evaluated, and there was a ranking. I felt like I couldn’t feel my surfboard, and I didn’t know how my body worked any more. There was such a noticeable difference, that a competitor paddled over to me in the middle of a heat and says, “Gervais, you gotta stop thinking about what could go wrong.” And I was like, “How did he know?!” And so I sat there in the water and started thinking about what I wanted to happen on the next wave. I had no idea there was a field of sports psychology, but that was my first introduction to the value of having my mind and body connected in a way that impacted my performance. That was really powerful. Do you see those same anxieties reflected in the athletes you work with today? MG: I think the greatest fear of man is the fear of not being good enough. I also think it stems from a real danger that if we didn’t perform in the tribe—when we were hunting a