Athletic
Fortitude
Performance Mindset
Who We Are
Athletic Fortitude helps athletes reach elite performance by engineering the identity that unlocks it. Founded by Colin Jonov, we believe high performance isn't about working harder—it's about becoming the person who performs at that level naturally.
Colin Jonov: From The Field to Identity Engineering
Colin is a former Division I football player who competed at Bucknell University and the University of Pittsburgh before attending Buffalo Bills rookie minicamp. He understands firsthand what separates athletes who have the talent from those who execute when it matters most.
After his playing career, Colin dedicated himself to answering one question: Why do some athletes thrive under pressure while others crumble—despite having equal or superior physical ability? The answer wasn't in the weight room or film study. It was in identity.
Our Philosophy: Identity-Driven High Performance
Most athletes struggle with inconsistent performance because they haven't engineered who they are at their core. They rely on motivation, which fades. They focus on what they do instead of who they are. At Athletic Fortitude, we build identity-driven discipline and systems that create sustainable excellence.
We translate cutting-edge research into phased training that includes identity diagnosis, strategic habit building, and systems designed for long-term elite performance and wellbeing. Our clients don't just perform better—they become the type of athlete who shows up elite when it matters most.
Subscribe to stay up-to-date on our latest discussions with our amazing guests on our YouTube channel. ​
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Athletic Fortitude
Colin Jonov
The Playbook with Colin Jonov
Through 100+ episodes of The Playbook podcast, Colin has interviewed the world's leading experts in sports psychology, performance coaching, and athletic development—including Sahil Bloom, Justin S'ua, Dr. Mitch Abrams, Dr. Julie Gurner, and Clint Hurdle. Each conversation explores the frameworks, mental models, and identity principles that separate good from great.
The podcast isn't just content—it's research and development for Athletic Fortitude's methodology, ensuring our approach stays grounded in what actually works at the highest levels.
Our Approach
We help athletes engineer identity-driven habits that improve performance and long-term wellbeing. This means:
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Identity diagnosis – Understanding who you are now versus who you need to become
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Strategic habit architecture – Building behaviors that flow from your engineered identity, not willpower
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High-performance systems – Creating frameworks that make elite execution your default under pressure
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Sustainable excellence – Developing mental fortitude that compounds over your entire career
Our clients experience measurable improvement within four months by transforming their athlete identity and building unshakeable mental fortitude.
Beyond Individual Athletes
Colin collaborates with college athletic programs and Empower Golf Performance, combining athlete identity development with high-performance mental fitness infrastructure. He also serves as mindset coach and player development specialist for Grossetti Performance's NFL Draft Prep program, working with elite athletes preparing for the highest levels of competition.
Subscribe to our Podcast Spotify and Apple Podcast for interviews with influential professionals on performance anxiety.​
Our Featured Blogs
You Don’t Need Affirmations. You Need Evidence.
Confidence isn’t your problem. Your system is.
Most athletes think they need more belief, more motivation, more positive self-talk. So they stand in the mirror repeating affirmations. They blast hype videos. They try to talk themselves into feeling ready.
Then pressure shows up and all of it evaporates.
Here’s why: your brain doesn’t trust words. It trusts proof.
The Miracle Is That You Exist. The Tragedy Is Wasting It.
You are impossibly rare. Not in some motivational-poster sense, but statistically, biologically, historically rare.
The exact combination of genetic material that became you had roughly a 1 in 400 trillion chance of existing. Your parents had to meet. Their parents had to meet. Going back just ten generations, you required a specific sequence of thousands of people crossing paths, surviving, choosing each other. One different decision in 1823 and you don't exist. One delayed train, one different college, one near-miss during wartime—and the entire genetic lottery reconfigures.
You won an impossibly specific draw. And then you had to show up and actually live it.
But here's the part most people miss: the version of you reading this right now is just as rare as the genetic odds that created you in the first place.
The Best Version of You Is Boring
YThe best version of you isn’t the “I can do anything” version. It’s the disciplined version. The one who does what they said they’d do long after the mood to do it has disappeared. The one who feels fear and moves anyway. The one who draws clear lines in the sand: I don’t drink this, I don’t eat that, I don’t hang out with those people. That version of you is not loud or flashy. It’s quietly, obsessively committed to your highest standard.
9 Quiet Levers That Separate The Ultra Successful From Everyone Else
Some conversations change your life. Mine with Dr. Julie Gurner did just that.
Most people wait for life to shock them into changing. A diagnosis, a car accident, a career-ending injury. The perspective hits hard…and then, somehow, behavior goes back to normal. The real separator isn’t who has seen pain; it’s who lets that awareness permanently upgrade how they think, choose, and work.
Here are the quiet levers that kept surfacing in that conversation about courage, fear, pressure, pain, and high performance.
The 10 Life Changing Lessons from My Interview with Sahil Bloom
Some conversations change how you think. This was one of them.
Sahil Bloom thinks differently about success, and after one hour with him, you understand why his ideas spread the way they do. These aren't platitudes dressed up as wisdom. They're frameworks that actually work.