When Doug Baldwin first met the sports psychologist who would profoundly affect his life, he resisted.
“Skeptical is kind of a nice way of putting it,” Baldwin said. “I was against it.”
It was 2011, and Baldwin had just joined the Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted rookie receiver. The draft snub fed his intensity and insecurities. For years, he had used the feeling that he wasn’t good enough as motivation to prove that he was. That combination had helped him reach the pros, going from an unheralded two-star prospect out of high school to Stanford’s leading receiver as a senior.
Only later, as he learned how to frame and consider his internal thoughts, did he truly understand the personal costs of that mindset.
So when Baldwin met Michael Gervais, a sports psychologist that Seahawks coach Pete Carroll had brought in to work with players, he wasn’t sold. Baldwin believed the way he had always carried himself was what made him successful.
But when Gervais explained the intent of his work — to unlock the best versions of players through training their minds — Baldwin decided to give him a shot.
If this is what he says it is, Baldwin thought, then why not try it?
For Gervais, that initial meeting came as he was returning to the sports world after his first attempt to work with athletes a decade earlier had frustrated him.
He had earned a doctorate in sports psychology with the belief that all athletes could benefit from his work. But he became deflated, feeling as if some of them did not fully believe in the correlation between mental-skills training and performance.
So instead, he worked to help high performers at Microsoft develop mental skills and played a crucial role in the Red Bull Stratos project, where he counseled Felix Baumgartner before his record-setting skydive from 128,000 feet.
In 2011, Gervais had dinner with Carroll before his second season as Seahawks coach. Carroll explained that he wanted to instill a culture built around training players’ minds as well as their bodies, and he convinced Gervais that he would find that working with the Seahawks would be better than his previous experience.
The first time Gervais worked with Baldwin was during a group session focusing on basic breathing exercises. He started the session with box breathing. Baldwin and his teammates inhaled for five seconds, paused at the top for five seconds, exhaled for five seconds, then paused at the bottom for five seconds before breathing in again.
Next, they switched to down-regulation breathing: inhaling for eight seconds, pausing, exhaling for 16 seconds, then pausing again.
Before the session finished, Gervais asked the group to participate in a “gratitude meditation.”
“It’s completely attuning to one thing you’re grateful for,” Gervais said.
Afterward, as Gervais exchanged goodbyes with players, Baldwin made his way to the front. Gervais wasn’t sure what Baldwin was going to say. When they were face-to-face, Baldwin just stood there, grinning and nodding.
“OK,” Baldwin finally said. “Yep. OK.”
Gervais didn’t have to say anything back.
“I knew and he knew what that stood for,” Gervais said. “OK, I just went somewhere. I just felt something.”
The first breath-work session had been a “gate opener,” Baldwin said, the first time that he felt like he could control his intense emotions.
“My body had never felt that type of stillness and that type of relaxation,” he said.
Still, Baldwin’s skepticism did not immediately vanish. Gervais chipped away at it by painting a mental picture. As thoughts came into his mind, Gervais suggested viewing them as clouds: Just because a thought existed didn’t mean Baldwin needed to judge it as good or bad, but simply as a thought that floats by as a cloud does.
He also connected with Baldwin on a personal level. It wasn’t unusual for their check-ins to turn into hourslong conversations, or for shared meals in the lunchroom to extend into a long walk-and-talk session to practice.
“It was basically counseling sessions,” Baldwin said. “It was about finding a deeper understanding of myself and what I’m capable of.”
Gervais helped Baldwin understand his intense emotions and energy with an analogy: “It’s like you’re trying to dictate which way a herd of mustangs is going. You’re not going to be able to do that. What you can try to do is try to guide them in the general direction that you want to go.”
The sessions helped Baldwin gain a deeper understanding of himself and his thought processes, connecting his mindset to the difficulties of his childhood and his insecurities, which in turn helped him attain the self-awareness to make adjustments.
Baldwin began breath work twice a day, and the physical and mental benefits surprised him. Not only could he could stay calm under pressure on the field, but he felt more peaceful and relaxed off it.
Gervais helped Baldwin establish pregame and presnap routines. Most important, from Gervais’ perspective, each part of every routine put Baldwin in control. Baldwin could not control scoring touchdowns, for example, but he could control the way he caught the ball or moved his feet.
This, Gervais explained, allowed Baldwin to “put himself in the best position to be himself.”
The purpose of the approach was to master how to stay calm under stress, generate confidence, envision performance excellence, let go of mistakes and be a better teammate.
“Thoughts drive actions,” Gervais said. “Thoughts impact emotions. Thoughts and emotions together impact behavior. And thoughts, emotions and behavior stacked up is what creates performance.”
Baldwin incorporated visualization into his routine. He would imagine himself making specific plays to convince his mind that the moment had already happened — another way to give himself a sense of control.
Still, Baldwin said, “no matter how hard you prepare, there’s always something that comes up that you weren’t prepared for or makes you question your preparation.”
That’s where the work with Gervais really kicked in.
During a big playoff game, Baldwin’s heart pounded so rapidly that he began to feel anxious.
“Just get grounded,” he told himself. “Get grounded.”
As he pressed his thumbs to each of his fingertips, he continued to take deep breaths, reminding himself of where he was and the techniques he had learned from Gervais.
“I’m in control of my body. I’m connected to it,” he recited.
“It’s somewhat similar to a muscle,” he added. “You have to work it out in order to strengthen it, and there are going to be times where it fails because that’s the only way that it grows and gets stronger.”
As his work with Gervais continued, Baldwin noticed changes off the field, too. He felt more confident and reliable as a friend, husband, brother and son.
Baldwin retired at 30 after the 2018 season. He wanted to ensure that the adverse side effects of his many years playing football did not interfere with his family. (He and his wife, Tara, have three daughters.)
Without football, he finds himself occasionally tempted to fall back into old habits because deep down they still feel safer to him, and more familiar. It’s at those times that he returns to the blueprint Gervais gave him years ago.
On his phone, he has one of Gervais’ guided meditation recordings. When he wakes up some mornings, he does breathing exercises and visualizes how his day is going to go — the same tools he used to catch passes and score touchdowns.
“And that’s been profound in my life,” Baldwin said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
