What Elite Performers Actually Do Differently With Ex Military Sniper Turned Performance Coach Shaun Kober

Everyone wants to know what elite performers do differently under pressure.

The answer is almost always disappointing, because the work that decides the outcome was done months earlier, in conditions nobody was watching.

Coach Kobes, aka Shaun Kober, has tested that idea in places most people will never see or even comprehend. I have been lucky enough to call this man a friend for nearly a decade, and I have watched him grow and evolve as a coach and an elite practitioner.

Six years in the Australian Army as a sniper taught him more about pressure and performing when it matters than any book ever will. Three deployments across Iraq, Timor and Afghanistan, then a career coaching elite fighters to world titles.

In this episode I wanted to understand his process, and the difference between good performers and great ones. What actually separates the elite when the pressure arrives.

A few of the concepts we cover:

The gap between your expectations and the level of your training is the real differentiator under pressure. Shaun takes this from a military setting all the way through to helping Petr Yan win a world championship.

Everyone has a fight, flight or freeze response, and none of us know which one we own until we are in it. If you have not trained to work inside that response in real time, you will not be effective when it counts.

The third is the one I think most leaders get wrong. Shaun explains that coaching professional athletes is almost never about lighting a fire. It is about applying the brakes. General population need the opposite. They need pushing. Elite performers need to learn how to steer in real time with more precision.

Then there is the personal piece, and I think most people will take strength from it. When you are handed compromising circumstances, how do you find acceptance and keep moving? After a serious spinal infection at the start of this year, Shaun has not only come back to perform, he is chasing a professional MMA debut before he turns forty two.

Other lessons and experiences in this episode:

- Growing up as the eldest of six with no electricity or running water, and leaving home before he turned fifteen