Posted on Tuesday, July 18 2006 - 12:45 AM - Alumni

Dr. John Eliot ’93 says his life in Houston, Texas is a bit chaotic, and he likes it that way.

Eliot doesn’t have just one job title, but simultaneously holds a teaching post at Rice University, helps direct the National Center for Human Performance at the Texas Medical Center, acts as executive director of The Milestone Group, a performance consulting firm that he co-founded, and works with individual high-profile clients like athletes and corporate leaders to improve their performance.

The common thread that ties the branches of Eliot’s career together is an interest in performance psychology, something he honed studying psychology at Dartmouth and perhaps even earlier when he won a National Ski Championship in Nordic Combined at the early age of ten.

By his senior year, Eliot knew he wanted to focus on applied psychology, so he chose to do his senior fellowship under professor John Corson. Corson was affiliated with Dartmouth Medical School but also maintained a private practice in the area. After completing his senior year, Eliot went on to earn a doctorate in Sport Science from the University of Virginia.

“It’s always been my philosophy that the real success stories in psychology come from figuring out what models fit with that individual,” Eliot says. “A lot of teams will call and say, ‘What methods do you use, what’s your philosophy?’ And I’ll say, ‘I have no idea…what I do is based on what needs to be done, and I won’t know that until we start working together.’”

Eliot has also written a book on peak performance called “Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance,” inspired by the questions and feedback he has received at his lectures and workshops.

“The philosophy at Dartmouth, the energy and the passion of all the professors I had, the charisma and outgoingness of all my classmates…I’ve carried those with me for my whole career,” he says. “That really shaped the way I do things.”

“Don’t assume that there’s one path or one right direction,” he says. “Steer away from goal-setting and think more in terms of being open to inspiration.”

Courtesy: Rebekah Rombom '08

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