about us

Eric Potterat, Ph.D. is a high performance sport and clinical psychologist and a retired U.S. Navy Commander. Eric served for 10 years as the psychologist for the US Navy SEALs, and was responsible for the mental assessment, selection, development, maintenance and enhancement programs for the Navy’s best warriors and highest performers. He was also responsible for the mental toughness and performance psychology training, clinical care, operational readiness/resilience training, and neurocognitive evaluation programs for all active duty personnel across the Navy’s Special Operations Force worldwide. Eric is credited with developing and implementing the mental toughness curriculum for the U.S. Navy SEALs and embedding it into their training pipeline. Eric was awarded the Legion of Merit medal upon his retirement from the Navy in 2016.

From 2016 through 2023, Eric served as the Director of Specialized Performance Programs for the Los Angeles Dodgers. During his tenure with the Dodgers as their performance psychologist, the team had the most regular season wins in baseball and won 3 National League Championships and the 2020 World Series. Eric also served as the high performance psychologist for Red Bull for 5 years, where he managed the development and implementation of the mental performance program for the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center Los Angeles. He was responsible for the delivery of mental performance content to hundreds of Red Bull athletes. He also worked as the mental coach for the US Women’s National Soccer Team as they won the World Cup in 2019.

Eric has served as an executive and organizational consultant and coach with numerous Fortune 500 companies. In this work he has aided with talent acquisition, resiliency training, high performance culture training, change management, mindset training, and leadership coaching. He also delivers 20-30 keynotes annually to corporate retreats and sales meetings.

Over the course of his 30+ year career, Eric’s research and practice emphasizes teachable and actionable mental performance techniques, stress resilience, character development, selection, neuropsychology, decision-making under stress, mental toughness training, and elite human performance in high pressure situations. He is considered one of the leading experts in individual and organizational resilience and performance enhancement. He has personally worked with approximately 25,000 elite performers within multiple performance occupations: military, athletics, first responders, medicine, law, and business. Years of working with and researching these elite performers has allowed him to better understand the science of mental toughness and how the same techniques that make elite performers amazingly successful are 100% teachable.

Eric has 30 peer-reviewed, professional journal and/or chapter publications, has been featured on national media (History Channel, MSNBC, national magazines, etc.), and has served as a consultant to many organizations including numerous professional (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.) and collegiate sports teams, individual professional athletes, NASA, dozens of Olympians, and numerous law enforcement, firefighting, and government agencies. In 2019, he co-founded a talent acquisition consulting company which focuses on assessments, development, analytics, sustainment, data-driven decision making and individualized-tailored talent reports.

Eric and his wife have two children, one a twentysomething SpaceX rocket scientist and the other a soon-to-be college bound high schooler. They split their time between homes in San Diego, CA and Whitefish, MT.

Eric Potterat, ph.d.