John E. Farren
I've spent my career making decisions when the answer wasn't always obvious.
For more than 30 years, I've worked alongside leaders, professionals, boards, families, and organizations navigating consequential decisions, competing priorities, uncertainty, and change.
Along the way, I became fascinated by a simple question:
Why can capable people think clearly in one moment—and struggle to access that same capability when the pressure rises?
That question eventually became Decision Fitness.
I didn't set out to create Decision Fitness.
I was trying to understand myself.
I learned early through competitive athletics that performing under pressure doesn't just happen. You train for it. You practice, prepare, review what went wrong, and keep working until you can rely on yourself when the moment comes.
But as my career progressed and the decisions became more consequential, I discovered that professional pressure was different. There were times I overthought decisions, carried difficult situations home, lost sleep replaying conversations, and spent far too much energy worrying about outcomes I couldn't yet know.
I wanted to get better.
So I sought out executive coaching and leadership training. I read dozens of books on decision-making, performance, psychology, leadership, and the brain. I studied my own reactions and began paying attention to what happened to my thinking when the pressure increased.
Over time, patterns began to emerge.
And I came back to something I had learned years earlier through athletics: performing well under pressure is something you can train.
Decision Fitness grew from that journey.
Decision Fitness is built from a synthesis of key aspects of human performance.
Experience behind the system.
My experience spans law, wealth management, private equity, investments, organizational leadership, governance, strategy, sales, and executive development. Along the way, I've had the opportunity to learn from some of the country's leading leadership and performance programs.
But Decision Fitness wasn't built from experience alone. It grew from combining those experiences with athletics, executive coaching, leadership development, decision science, psychology, and years of studying my own performance under pressure.
My role isn't to make decisions for you. It's to help you become better at making them when they matter.