Michael Gervais On How To Stay Locked In When Things Are Boring and Hard
If you're like me, you might watch athletes or performers on TV and think about the endless, boring hours of practice they put in to get great and wonder how they stick with it. Where do they find the motivation? I have a challenge doing the same thing two days in a row! And then I feel guilty and bad about my "lack of motivation."
Understanding motivation is crucial if you’re neurodivergent or have a tricky brain. Like me, you may have been raised under the impression that it's "bad" to be extrinsically or externally motivated, and that the only "good" kind of motivation is intrinsic or internal. Today’s guest, one of the world’s foremost performance psychologists, says that’s just not true. The greats, he says, are both highly extrinsically and intrinsically motivated. They want to do work they love, and they want to be praised and well paid. Sounds good to me!
So how do they maintain motivation when things are boring or hard, which is the true secret to getting great? The key is that they have deep self-understanding and have built skills to stay in it. They manage their activation energy, and they don’t let it get too low or too revved up for too long.
This week on The Anxious Achiever, I spoke with Michael Gervais, the high-performance psychologist famous for his long-term work with the Seattle Seahawks, where he has helped Pete Carroll and the team develop mental skills for peak performance through mindfulness, focus, and pressure management. Right up front, I just want to say that Gervais is a hero of mine, and I absolutely love his work. He has helped rebrand the power of emotions and psychology as essential ingredients for strength and high performance, not as something we do when we’re sick or weak. He makes psychology cool, and that’s really important.
Before we even talked about motivation, I wanted to talk about the agency that comes with understanding your activation energy. As Gervais says, “I haven't met certainly a world’s best who has a problem getting activated for things. The best of the best of the best of the best, the true masters of craft and masters of self, are not waiting for the external environment to be stimulating or unstimulating for them to activate in an ideal way. So they’re looking at practice like, ‘This is a great day for me to work on A, B, and C.’ And so they’re looking to get into that ideal zone of activation so that they can be close to being at their best.” How?
Michael Gervais has spent decades working with elite performers from championship teams to CEOs, and his core proposition is this: people with a high command of their inner world decide how they show up. People without it are constantly reacting.
“For people that do not have a great command of their inner life, the external world dictates their internal experience,” says Gervais. “People who have a high command of their inner world determine their activation level, their state of being, their mindset, if you will, independent and in harmony with—or sometimes orthogonal to—the environment. Which position do you want to be in: the external world dictates your internal world, or the internal world decides and determines how you engage with the external world? The answer is simple. And I think it's a fundamental decision that we all need to make. The one that I want is: I determine, based on my skillset and my interpretation—my psychological skillset and my emotional skillset.”
When you don’t have that command, the external world runs you. Deadlines spike your stress. Feedback hijacks your mood. A bad meeting drains your energy for the rest of the day. By 2 p.m., you’re irritable, exhausted, and snapping at people you actually care about.
When you do have that command, something fundamental shifts. You can feel stress or anxiety without being driven by it. You can choose your activation level. You can decide how to engage, even when the environment is chaotic. Michael calls this an investable skill. And it starts with awareness.
If we didn’t have this weird taboo about psychology…
Michael and I laughed (a little grimly) about the cultural hangover many of us still carry: the idea that psychology is only for people who are “weak” or “falling apart.”
In reality, psychology is how you optimize your body and mind. Without awareness, you burn through energy early and inefficiently. With awareness, you conserve it, deploy it intentionally, and stay effective longer. That awareness begins with noticing what Michael calls your trip wires, or triggers.
Trip wires: the moments that matter most
Trip wires are the early signals that your system is getting activated, when your mind starts spinning, your body tightens, your breath gets shallow, or your tone sharpens.
Anxiety isn’t a flaw (you know this if you read this newsletter). It’s designed to optimize us. The problem isn’t activation; it’s unchecked activation. Most leaders don’t get into trouble because they care too little. They get into trouble because they care deeply but don’t know how to regulate the surge of energy that comes when emotions are triggered and the autonomic nervous system is activated.
Activation means you care. But as Michael pointed out, being constantly pushed into the red zone is expensive. It drains energy you’ll need later—for patience, creativity, judgment, and leadership. This is why chronic stress and anxiety is exhausting and depletes motivation.
High performers don’t eliminate activation. They learn to manage it and they understand and prepare for their trip wires. And this is where motivation finally enters the conversation.
Motivation isn’t something you “have” or “don’t have”
Everyone is motivated. All behavior has motivation embedded in it. The real question isn’t whether you’re motivated; it’s what’s driving you and what’s rewarding you. Michael broke this down into two axes that matter enormously, especially for anxious achievers:
Rewards Intrinsic: you’re rewarded by the process itself—learning, solving, unlocking insight. Extrinsic: you’re rewarded by outcomes—money, recognition, status.
Drivers Internal: you don’t need to be chased or pushed; you set your own alarm. External: you need reminders, pressure, carrots, or sticks.
We often moralize these distinctions. We say intrinsic is “better,” or that needing external motivation is a character flaw. But the world-class performers Michael works with don’t choose. They integrate. They love the work and the recognition. They’re internally driven and aware of external rewards.
Why motivation gets tricky for different brains
People with ADHD or anxiety are often labeled “unmotivated,” when what’s really happening is structural. Their systems are more expensive to run. Their attention funnels are wider open. They’re processing more input, burning more energy, and often missing the signal that tells them what matters most: the attention bounces. This exhausts us. That can look like procrastination or apathy.
Gervais’s research shows attention—and motivation—are trainable. Deep focus isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill. You don’t train focus by yelling at yourself to “try harder.” You train it the same way elite athletes train anything else: in short, deliberate reps. That’s why practices like mindfulness work—not because they make you calm, but because they teach you to notice when you’ve drifted and refocus.
As many meditators say, “Simply begin again.”
Purpose is the ultimate stabilizer of motivation
Near the end of our conversation, Michael shared what I think may be the most important reframe of all: purpose settles motivation. Not a grand, Instagram-worthy purpose. Not saving the world. Just clarity about what matters to you.
The greats don’t enter rooms asking, How am I doing? They enter asking, What am I here to serve?
And I think it’s important—especially for those of us with tricky brains—that we don’t judge our purpose. It doesn’t have to be highfalutin or Mother Teresa–like. Sometimes the purpose is to pay the bills. Sometimes it’s to quell restlessness. Sometimes it’s that we need a challenge or something new. And sometimes our purpose is to give ourselves the comfort that comes with praise or recognition. It’s all okay.
That shift—from performance-based identity to purpose-based identity—quietly reduces anxiety, sharpens focus, and stabilizes motivation. When the signal is strong, the noise fades.
And purpose doesn’t have to be forever. It can be thin-sliced: What matters today? How do I want to show up in this meeting, this practice, this conversation?
I asked Michael Gervais something I ask on behalf of so many of us—especially people with fast, associative, “spicy” brains: What do we need to understand about our minds and motivation that will help us stay locked in even when things are boring or hard?
Attention that bounces and motivation that drops
There’s a difference between attention that bounces and motivation that drops. One is about how your mind moves—how easily you get pulled toward novelty, how quickly your focus shifts, how hard it is to sustain concentration. The other is about energy and replenishment: whether your system is resourced enough to engage. And those two problems can look the same from the outside (“They’re not motivated”), but they’re not the same problem internally, and they don’t require the same fix.
Then he offered the most hopeful reframe: we can train ourselves to focus and show up. Not with shame. Not with “just try harder.” With reps, just like strength or speed. The reps are to notice you’ve drifted and refocus. That moment you catch yourself—when you realize you’re off-task—isn’t failure. That’s the rep. That’s the muscle being built.
Staying locked in during boring or hard moments isn’t a personality trait. It’s building enough capacity—through short, deliberate practice—to return to the task again and again without getting yanked around by restlessness, emotion, or distraction. The goal isn’t becoming someone who never loses focus. The goal is becoming someone who can reliably come back.
Michael also named something that I think is profoundly relieving for neurodivergent people to hear: for many of us, it is simply more expensive to run our systems. When your attention is wider, your nervous system more sensitive, or your mind more active, you burn through energy faster—often long before the day is over. That doesn’t show up as “low motivation” on the inside. It shows up as irritability, withdrawal, snapping at people you care about, decision fatigue, or that brittle feeling of I just can’t do one more thing.
As Michael put it, when you’re spending too much energy managing worry, stimulation, or internal noise early in the day, you hit depletion by mid-afternoon—and then you start acting in ways that don’t match your values. Not because you don’t care, but because you’re empty.
The solution isn’t pushing harder. It’s learning how you replenish—sleep, movement, nature, quiet, focused work blocks, boundaries, medication for some, mindfulness for others—and protecting those inputs as seriously as you protect output. Motivation doesn’t disappear when you’re depleted; it gets buried under exhaustion. When you design your life to lower the cost of running your system, your best self shows up more often—without force.
Whoa. That was a lot. I suggest you listen to the interview.
You also might want to check out this helpful article showing why mindfulness meditation helps ADHD. And if most meditation doesn’t work for your busy self, I love Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and Josh Warren.
Morra