Board Member Profile: Paddy Steinfort

Performance Director, Football Federation of Australia

With more than two decades in professional sport at the elite level, with championship teams and All-Star athletes in the MLB, NFL, NBA, NCAAF, and now leading Olympic and World Cup soccer teams, Paddy Steinfort has covered the gamut of performance in sport. Following nine years of experience as a professional athlete himself, he has worked across all areas of high performance: in medical & sports science (physical therapy), coaching (player development), psychology & wellbeing (mental performance), and leadership (director/executive level). With a master’s degree in Applied Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Paddy brings a unique lens to the themes of Readiness, Resilience, and Recovery to the board. He channels his passion for all of the above into the Toughness podcast: a show developed initially for the military audience, featuring conversations with elite performers about stress, pressure, and success. To learn more about the podcast, visit https://www.toughness.com and find it wherever you get your podcasts.

We sat down with Paddy to hear a little more about his perspective on the Tactical Athlete. Here is what he had to say:

(TA-LB): The themes of the Tactical Athlete Leadership Board are Readiness, Resilience, and Recovery. From your perspective, why are these themes essential, and what about them resonates with your experience in the human performance industry? 

(Paddy): The themes of the TALB - Readiness, Resilience, and Recovery - are essential as a collective foundation for elite performance in any human endeavor, but especially under the type of extreme pressure or stress experienced by tactical athletes in the mission-critical scenarios. In my experience across multiple sports at the highest levels, these function much like a tripod: if one of them fails, the whole thing falls over. You can be the most ready and resilient, but if you don't recover between battles, you're toast. Likewise, you can be fully recovered and exceptionally resilient, but you can miss vital opportunities or critical threats if you aren’t prepared. And even if you are strong in your preparation and diligent in your recovery, a lack of resilience can bring you undone at the most critical moment. Spending time on building capacity in each of these three areas is the wisest investment any elite performer or leader can make.

(TA-LB): Looking to the future, what technological innovation do you think will have the most significant impact on tactical athletes? 

(Paddy): Objective, real-time measures of the stress response (both acute and chronic), individual feedback & training, and program planning and monitoring at scale.

(TA-LB): The spirit of the TALB is to bring a diverse set of perspectives to the table aligned toward a singular purpose: to sustain the tactical athlete of today and preparing for the tactical athlete of tomorrow. Why is it essential for the broader human performance industry to work together towards this end? 

(Paddy): When it comes to the 'why' behind TALB, first and foremost, I believe we have a duty to provide the best available tools for improved wellbeing and enhanced resilience to today's tactical athlete. These are individuals who put so much on the line to enable the environment we all get to work in and benefit from - a stable society with the safety and freedom required for talented individuals to thrive - across a bunch of diverse industries. Then secondly, as the old saying goes, "all boats rise with the tide.” By taking part in this community devoted to sharing and elevating the knowledge and capabilities of the folks who serve, we each improve our population in parallel, which then has even larger scale impacts for the civilian community at large due to the positions of influence some of our performers hold in broader society.

(TA-LB): What is the greatest challenge to innovation in the human performance sector?

(Paddy): Our willingness to evolve the way we view core concepts and update our expectations of performers.