Valorie Kondos Field, UCLA Gymnastics Head Coach

Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

Dr. Michael Gervais

Sport Psychology, Finding Mastery, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Business, Self Help, Michael Gervais, Health & Fitness, Mindset, Psychology, Self-improvement, Education

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2018

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week’s conversation is with Valorie Kondos Field, often referred to as “Miss Val.”

She’s the head coach of the six-time NCAA Champion, 21 NCAA Regional Champion and 17-time PAC 12 Champion UCLA Women’s Gymnastics team.

Valorie was recently named the Pac-12 “Coach of the Century,” and in 2010, she became one of only two active coaches to be inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame.

She considers the late John Wooden, the legendary and most successful collegiate basketball coach of all time, as one of her inspirations, and closest mentor and friend.

Countless student-athletes praise Valorie for her guidance during their athletic careers, and after they’ve graduated from UCLA and have entered the next chapter in their lives. Included in the hundreds of athletes she has coached or mentored are Olympic champions Simone Biles, Jordan Wieber, Kyla Ross, Madison Kocian, Laurie Hernandez and Nastia Liukin.

For Valorie, life is a grand adventure that all comes down to choices.

The moment she found out she had breast cancer is a prime example of the way she chooses to live her life.

In essence, she became grateful that her form of cancer was treatable. Grateful that she could go get chemotherapy for it and she’s continued to live her life that way ever since.

In this conversation, we discuss why she doesn’t believe in failure, why being a pessimist is the easy way out, and why gratitude is the most important habit to train.

Valerie has an infectious personality and this incredible mindset that, “I get to…” rather than “I have to…” and I think it’s something we can all apply to our own lives.

I think you’re really going to love learning from her.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I remember reading the little saying that life is a journey.
0:04.0	I'm like, life is not a journey.
0:06.8	A journey is a walk through the park.
0:08.8	Life is scary and there are boulders that hit you all the time.
0:12.8	And what are you going to do?
0:14.0	You're going to go down on your knees and cover your head and hope it goes away,
0:17.3	the big scary thing goes away.
0:18.8	Are you going to stand up, take a deep breath and figure out how to plow through it,
0:21.7	or go around it or something.
0:23.0	And that's what makes life so much fun. I'm going to
0:36.0	welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Jervais
0:41.0	and the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery.
0:45.0	We want to better understand what they're searching for, their psychological framework,
0:49.0	how they see the world, how they make sense of events and people.
0:53.0	And we also want to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.
0:58.0	Finding Mastery is brought to you by natural stacks.
1:01.0	Your brain is one of the hungriest organs in your body. It's been found
1:05.2	to consume roughly around 20% of your energy every day. That means an important
1:10.2	factor between the days you feel sluggish and the days that you feel sharp
1:14.0	is how fuel efficient your brain is.
1:17.0	And that's why I'm excited to be partnered with natural stacks.
1:20.0	They've got a product, they're dopamine brain food supplement that's designed to
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