In this episode of Max Value, host Ben Towne sits down with Lauren Johnson, a performance psychology consultant who has worked with Yankees players and C-suite executives alike. Lauren breaks down how the same mental performance principles she uses with elite athletes — managing pressure, building mental reps, developing neural pathways through repetition — apply directly to business leadership and enterprise value. She introduces the concept of ‘simple systems relentlessly executed’ as the through line between sports excellence and business excellence. Lauren also shares her new venture, Mental Reps Co., which brings foundational mental performance tools to children ages 3–6 through play-based toys. The conversation bridges sports science, developmental psychology, organizational behavior, and business valuation, with Lauren offering practical frameworks including her Three C’s model (Clarity, Choices, Consistency) and the power of decision filters to help leaders perform at their best.
Chapter 1: Welcome to Max Value
Ben Towne introduces the show and welcomes Lauren Johnson, framing her as a bridge between sports performance psychology and the business world. He sets up the central question of the episode: how do mental performance principles from elite athletics translate into leadership and enterprise value?
Chapter 2: The Defining Turning Point
Lauren explains that performance psychology is broader than sports — it applies to anyone performing under high stakes, including military personnel, surgeons, and business professionals. She shares how a client from Mass Mutual invited her to speak to business leaders while she was working with the Yankees, leading her to realize that ‘corporate athletes’ operate under the same mental performance principles as pro players, just speaking different languages.
Chapter 3: Leading Through Growth
Lauren introduces the concept of the mental rep as a bicep curl for the brain — a small, intentional step outside your comfort zone. She walks through how she trained Yankees pitchers to simulate pressure by physically elevating their heart rate before pitching, creating physiological familiarity with high-stakes moments. She references a skydiver study showing that viewing a situation as a challenge (vs. a threat) triggers a different biological response — creating the ‘biology of courage’ — and draws direct parallels to how executives should manage high-pressure business moments.
Chapter 4: Building Culture Intentionally
Lauren makes the case for starting mental skills development as early as age 3, describing neuroplasticity as most automatic during childhood. She uses the ABCs analogy — you don’t start with reading; you start with letters — to argue that foundational mental performance principles (growth mindset, perseverance, self-talk) should be introduced early. She references James Clear’s Atomic Habits plane metaphor: a 3-degree adjustment at takeoff puts you in a completely different destination over the length of a cross-country flight, just as small mindset shifts in early childhood create massive long-term impact.
Chapter 5: The Friction of Scaling
Lauren connects the through line between childhood mental development and business performance: simple systems relentlessly executed create excellence. She explains the neuroscience behind this — how repeated behaviors cause myelin to grow around neural pathways, making them faster and more automatic. She frames the question for business owners: what if we built an entire generation that defaulted to powerful self-talk, a growth mindset, and embracing challenges? These are the same traits that define elite executives, athletes, and performers in any domain.
Chapter 6: Systems that Enable Growth
Ben asks how to measure behavior change — and Lauren answers with feedback loops. She describes how she graphs athletes’ pregame confidence against game results to identify correlations. She also introduces Kurt Lewin’s equation: behavior is a function of the individual times the environment. For organizational change, this means identifying both the skills to teach and the environmental conditions to support them. She cites research showing that highly engaged organizations outperform competitors by about 21% in profitability, and references the book Teams That Work for its seven core drivers of team effectiveness. She then introduces her Three C’s framework: Clarity → Choices (via decision filters) → Consistency (via systems) → Evaluation → back to Clarity.
Chapter 7: Lessons Learned Over Time
Ben connects Lauren’s decision filter idea to the concept of pre-made choices through values — noting that when a company has clear values, difficult decisions about clients or partners are already made. Lauren reinforces this with the story of Ben Hunt Davis and the British rowing team, who went from nearly a century of losses to winning Olympic gold in 2000 by asking a single decision filter question before every choice: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ Ben coins the phrase ‘present-valuing your vision’ to describe how decision filters bring future goals into current decision-making.
Chapter 8: Advice for Leaders Today
The conversation reflects on how business owners are often too deep in the day-to-day to step back and identify their ‘one guiding question.’ Lauren and Ben agree that the best frameworks are ones that cut through mission/vision complexity and reduce every decision to a single, clear filter. Lauren also highlights the value of cross-domain thinking — studying comedians to become a better speaker, studying movie producers to become a better storyteller — and emphasizes that the best performers study excellence across fields.
Chapter 9: Get to Know: Lauren Johnson
Lauren shares personal details: she played soccer at the University of San Francisco and Point Loma Nazarene; her greatest loves are her husband, two young children, and their Black Lab; and her current reads include a research-based book on raising resilient children, Teams That Work, and The Brain That Changes Itself. She also shares where she can be found online, pointing to her website laurenjohnsonco.com as the central hub for all her social profiles.
