Professional Background

Bryan founded Top Mental Game LLC to provide business leaders and elite athletes with the mental skills needed to perform at their best when it matters the most. He is also the founding Executive Director of the Buccino Leadership Institute, a comprehensive 4-year leadership program at Seton Hall University.

Before starting Top Mental Game, Bryan served for 20 years as a U.S. Army officer, retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2018. He was a 3-year starter and co-captain of the baseball team at the U.S. Military Academy, earning Patriot League All-Decade team in the process. He was commissioned as an aviation officer after graduating from West Point and flew the AH-64D Apache Longbow, the Army’s premier attack helicopter. Bryan served in a variety of command and staff positions in the first half of his 20-year career, including 33 months of company command of the same unit across three continents and a 12-month combat deployment to Afghanistan.

The Army then sent Bryan to Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D. in political science in three years. He then returned to teach international relations and U.S. national security in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy.

Following another combat deployment to Iraq, he came back to West Point to serve as an Academy Professor and the Director of the Combating Terrorism Center from 2012-to 2018. In this capacity, Bryan briefed the nation’s most senior leaders about the Center’s counterterrorism research. This included briefings to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, two Directors of the CIA, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the commanders of U.S. Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command, and numerous four-star geographic combatant commanders. Bryan’s personal research focused on terrorist group leadership, and his book Targeting Top Terrorists was published by Columbia University Press in 2019.

Through Top Mental Game, Bryan has worked with business leaders and Division-I coaches, athletes, and teams. He’s served as an executive coach and given talks on leadership to JP Morgan Chase, Citi Group, T. Rowe Price, Hancock Whitney Bank, Moog, Infinex, Hilltop Securities, World Insurance, and the Bank Insurance and Securities Association. He is certified to administer the Hogan assessment, Eq-i 2.0 Emotional Intelligence assessment, and the DISC Behavioral assessment, and he is an ICF-certified leadership coach (PCC).