Combining inspiration and brain science to achieve extraordinary performance.

Highlights

Dr. John Eliot helps leaders achieve extraordinary levels of performance with a combination of inspiration, education and scientific tools for performance enhancement.

His book, Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More, explains why traditional strategies for performance enhancement, like goal setting, relaxation and visualization, just don’t work for most people and offers his own counterintuitive alternatives.

With over fifteen years experience as a performance psychologist, Dr. Eliot has a proven record helping teams and individuals achieve their very best.

As the director of sport management at Rice, he helped the Owls win the College World Series in 2003, the school’s first national championship.

He is sought after by CEO’s worldwide, works with astronauts such as Dr. Mae Jemison, and has consulted with such legendary athletes and coaches as Nick Lowery, Lou Holtz, and George Foreman.

An award-winning athlete himself, Dr. John Eliot teaches performance psychology, sociology and ethics at several universities, including the University of Houston and Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business. He is the former director of Rice’s program in management and performance enhancement, where his Performance Psychology class was one of the campus favorites.

Raised by Olympic ski coach Rick Eliot, John won a Junior Ski Championship in Nordic Combined in Lake Placid in 1980… at the age of eight! He was Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth and All-American in both baseball and rugby.

He is the cofounder of The Milestone Group, a performance evaluation and consultation firm.

John is a dynamic, enthusiastic speaker who, with his groundbreaking scientific approach, transcends the usual motivational speech to truly transform his audiences’ potential.

Overachievement

John Eliot’s book, Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More, combines the latest research in cognitive neuroscience with his own leading-edge work with high performance leaders, from executives at Merrill Lynch and top surgeons at the Texas Medical Center to artists at the nation’s leading Shepherd School of Music.

The keys to extraordinary individual performance are
• the mindset of the overachiever—thriving under pressure, welcoming it, enjoying it, making it work to your advantage. The overachiever does not follow the rules we’ve all been taught: "setting goals" is for couch potatoes, "hard work" is overrated, all those eggs belong in one basket; and
  
  
• an education and coaching approach that uses positive psychology that focuses on happiness and success rather than a medical/clinical psychology model that finds ‘problems’ and tries to take them away.
  
  The key to extraordinary organizational performance is to put away the pencil and paper personality tests and standardized performance measures. They will only leave you stuck at the norm. If you want to pass your competitors, you have to analyze individuals and groups to find out what will take their performance to the next level, case by case. And you have to go beyond decorations and rewards to create a workplace atmosphere that feels good; then you’ll get consistently superior productivity.

Credentials

• Teacher, University of Houston and SMU Cox School of Business Leadership Center
• Former director, Management and Performance Enhancement Program, Rice University
• Former visiting professor, Stanford University
• Ph.D. in Education, Health and Human Performance, University of Virginia
• Phi Beta Kappa and Senior Fellow, Dartmouth College
• Honorable mention, All-American honors, Rugby
• Bill Koch Ski Champion in Nordic Combined, age 8

Client List

Houston Astros
Merrill Lynch
Goldman Sachs
NASA
The Texas Medical Center
Washington Capitols
USA Baseball
The Dallas Cowboys Golf Club
USA Track & Field
Xerox
Hospice of America
Texas A&M University