Jon Pitts
Jon Pitts is a Human Performance Specialist with a background in neuroscience, elite sport, and corporate leadership. He is the founder of IHP Analytics, where he helps individuals...
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Who are you?
Hi, I am John Pitts and I'm a performance coach and founder of IHP Analytics. My background academically, originally is in sports science, psychology, and more laterally cognitive neuroscience, and I've been very privileged to work with some of the most amazing people around the world in sport and military theatres. Outside of that, I live at home with my family in Somerset, where my two boys and my wife, we are desperately trying to rebuild an old farmhouse, which takes up most of my time along with ferrying my children around and living the normal life of a parent.
What is your background?
My background is originally a failed footballer. A long time ago I really wasn't very good and I worked it out quite soon after that. Carried on to study sports science at Brunell University in London, where I basically spent a lot of time playing sports and not doing an awful lot of work academically wise. I went on then to study performance psychology at the same university as a master's. And then more laterally, I've gone on to study cognitive neuroscience down in Australia, and that's fundamentally because my career has been a journey of learning and experiencing different environments, travelling around all the different kinds of sports, and very, again, privileged to have been able to get to the elite end of many different sports rather than just specialising in one. So that can be anything from equestrian sports at the Olympic Games, right the way through to free diving and other extreme sports, such as jumping out of balloons in space and then more mainstream sports like football. I've worked at five different professional football clubs. I've also worked with the England Cricket team and other elements of cricket across golf and tennis at the highest levels on the PGA tour and the different tours around the world, and five Olympic games, two with Australia, one with Team gb, and then lastly one with Team Sweden as well. So I've had a fantastic opportunity to observe some of the best in the world doing what they do so brilliantly
What is your background in the corporate world?
So I think often business is looking at sport to find ways of doing things better, and I think often in my experience, it's a symbiotic relationship. We can learn a lot from the business world as well. In more recent years as I've kind of aged and experienced a little bit more, I found myself doing more corporate work, working with executive boards, and also then across management consultancies, for instance, with partner programmes and then wider workforce programmes as well. The company I have, IHP Analytics is designed to provide companies and organisations with workforce analytics to help us to understand the future of work and how our working lives impacts our wellbeing and our productivity. But fundamentally, it's very interesting to see how we can try and translate some of the aspects of professional sports, such as things like recovery, which are very prevalent in sport, but less so in the corporate environment and how we translate that into the office environment and the workforce in general. I feel like we are getting challenged an awful lot more with the ways that we work, longer hours, blurred lines, that sort of thing. So how we can translate those lessons is becoming more and more important.