Podcast
Dr. Jonathan Fader on The Psychology of High Performers
You’ve sat across the table from someone with every credential, every pedigree, every reason to dominate the room and watched them fall apart the moment it turned on them. You’ve also watched the quiet one, the one nobody bet on, walk away with the deal.
The gap between those two people isn’t talent. It’s something you can practice.
Dr. Jonathan Fader has been building that argument his whole career. First inside Major League dugouts with the Mets. Then on the sidelines with the Giants. Then inside firehouses, hospitals and boardrooms. He calls it the psychology of improvement, and he’s spent two decades watching what actually separates the people who keep climbing from the ones who plateau.
The answer is not what most people in credit, in law, in restructuring want to hear. It is not IQ. It is not a better résumé. It is the ability to metabolize non-catastrophe. To notice the space between stimulus and response and choose differently inside it. Over and over. Under pressure.
Fader, who co-founded Strata Performance and Union Square Practice, takes Jenny Bain through the framework he calls X Factor the idea that the same intensity that builds founders also blinds them, and the same empathy that makes a great leader can stall a decision a team needs in the next ten minutes.
The most interesting thing he says is not about athletes. It is about why people resist coaching in the first place. It is not laziness. It is threat detection. The old brain steps in, decides this conversation is unsafe and pulls the person back into self-preservation. The leaders who break through are not the ones who power past that. They are the ones who learn to recognize it, name it and stay in the room anyway.
He also says something credit professionals working through AI adoption should hear directly. AI is not a technology problem. It is a change management problem. The resistance is not about the tool. It is about embarrassment and the human default of staying away from anything that might get you kicked out of the clan.
Hear the rest from Fader. The story about getting schooled by a veteran in the Mets clubhouse, the line about being buried with the white belt, the bit about washing dishes as a longevity practice. None of it lands the same in summary.
Press play.
Have feedback? Email the team at [email protected]. We actually read them.
Hosted by Jenny Bain. Produced and edited by two-time Emmy Award-winning producer Tanya Hubbard.
People You Should Know is presented by Octus and part of the Octus Podcast Network. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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