Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers

Learn how to perform at your very best, from the psychologist who has advised elite military operators, Olympic medalists, big wave surfers, neurosurgeons, cliff divers, first responders, Cirque du Soleil acrobats, professional athletes and coaches, Fortune 500 business executives, and CIA analysts.  

Learned Excellence is a comprehensive and practical guide to the mental disciplines of high performance, from the expert who developed the US Navy SEALs mental toughness curriculum and has worked with thousands of top athletes, elite military personnel, business executives, and first responders. 

These stars perform across a wide variety of fields, but they all have something in common: when they are at work they know how to think clearly, stay focused, and shrug off setbacks under very high levels of stress. They may have superb physical and intellectual traits, but it is the stuff going on above the neck and between the ears that makes them excellent. The difference between settling and achieving, between good and great, between contentment and fulfillment, is based entirely on their mental approach. 

This approach isn’t innate; it is 100% learned. The world’s top performers aren’t born that way, they learn excellence. So can everyone else, and Dr. Eric Potterat can teach us. 

One of the world’s leading performance psychologists and a retired US Navy Commander, Dr. Potterat has spent over three decades helping thousands of top performers from the military, sports, first responder, and business worlds improve. He served as the lead psychologist for the US Navy SEALs and the Los Angeles Dodgers, and has consulted with the US Women’s National Soccer team, the Miami Heat, Red Bull athletes, NASA astronauts, and dozens of Olympic medalists.

In Learned Excellence, Eric distills the insights he’s learned into five mental disciplines for high performance—Values & Goals, Mindset, Process, Adversity Tolerance, and Balance & Recovery. Illustrated with numerous stories and quotes, Learned Excellence features clear principles and practices that anyone can use to raise their game. 

We are all performers, at work, at school, at home, and at life. Learned Excellence provides the roadmap to help each of us perform at our very best.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.