Mon Nimrod Brokman has trained Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, IPL captains and Olympic golfers from a small office in Bangalore. On a new episode of Expressions, the former special forces commander explains why mental performance is India's most under-built industry — and why loneliness, not pressure, is the real enemy at the top.
He commanded special forces missions before he was old enough to drink in the United States. He fenced at the Olympic level for twelve years. And for the last decade, he has been the man India's most decorated athletes call when their minds begin to fold under pressure.
Almost no one in the country knows his name.
Mon Nimrod Brokman runs a multidisciplinary practice out of a low-key office on Miller's Road in Bangalore — no signage, no press, no social campaign. Athletes fly in from across the country, sit down in his rooms, and walk out with something they cannot quite describe. On a recent episode of the podcast Expressions, Brokman discussed, for the first time in any depth, the system he has been quietly building.
What emerges is a portrait of an industry India barely knows it has.
Born in Israel to a family of Olympians — his father competed at Los Angeles 1984, his mother at Munich 1972 — Brokman grew up at a dinner table where sport was not metaphor but vocabulary. By 22, he had fenced against European champions and led search-and-rescue operations in Israel's special forces, a unit whose mandate, in his words, was "to save life — while learning to take many risks."
He arrived in India in 2016 with no clients, no contracts, and what he calls "a strong urge to learn what the East has to offer." A 10-day Vipassana retreat — silent, phone-less, eyes lowered — sealed the decision. "It is the biggest gift India has," he said on the podcast. "More advanced than any technology invented in the East or the West."
Today, his firm, Behavioural Foresight, has worked with some of India's most recognizable athletes — among them the badminton stars Lakshya Sen and HS Prannoy, IPL captains, and Olympian golfers. The training is not abstract. Sessions begin with biofeedback and neurofeedback data, sensors that read the nervous system, brainwaves, and, increasingly, full fMRI mappings of brain networks. "We're not interested in my judgment of you," he said. "We want objective data, so we can both look at it and improve it together."
His method is built on a contrarian idea: that elite performance is not about adding more — more drills, more discipline, more grit — but about subtracting. He calls it the economy of behaviour, or, more bluntly, mental currency.
"Every story you tell yourself, every excuse, every judgment — it costs something," he told the host. "Ninety percent of what people carry in their heads is just a defence of their own life. Erase it, and suddenly you have the currency to spend on what actually matters."
It is a philosophy refined in the most punishing of environments. When Lakshya Sen plays a tight rally and his heart rate climbs past 170 beats per minute, the brain's primal response is panic. Brokman's training, drawn directly from special forces protocol, is to artificially recreate that physiological state under controlled conditions until panic loses its grip. "If you walk every day with lions," he said, "you are not afraid of a lion."
But the deepest insight from the episode is not technical. It is human.
The athletes everyone wants a selfie with, he said, are often the loneliest people he meets. "The higher you are in the pyramid, the more difficult the battles. You travel the world alone. Five days in a hotel, repack, fly again. In your best season, you lose more than you win."
It is this — not pressure, not panic — that he believes is the unspoken cost of modern sporting greatness, and the part of the human behind the athlete that India's sports system has yet to learn how to repair.
Brokman's next leaps are already underway. He is partnered with Biopeak, an Indian longevity venture, building a neuroscience lab to engineer "states of mind on demand"; and developing an AI-powered psychological support tool, intended to be free and personalised, for anyone with a phone.
For an industry India is only beginning to imagine, the quiet room on Miller's Road may turn out to be where it started.
The full conversation with Mon Nimrod Brokman is available on Expressions, wherever you listen to podcasts.