About

Igor Ardoris is the founder of Budo Mental Training—mental training for dealing with difficult situations. He is a mental trainer, writer, lecturer and educational consultant. Since 2007, Igor has trained elite athletes, teachers, police officers, ambulance attendants, business leaders, etc, how to remain calm and balanced in stressful situations.
Igor has direct experience in high-risk situations: He competed in elite-level martial arts since his early teens and worked as a nightclub bouncer; but, above all, through being a civilian and vulnerable young man in the middle of the Balkan civil war. These experiences have motivated him to devote most of his adult life to studying, understanding, and developing the skills to manage the human psyche under stressful and frightening circumstances.

I help people lose.
Sometimes people ask me what my work as a mental trainer is really about. My answer is always, “I help my clients learn to lose.” And I sometimes add, ”Winning, they can do themselves.”
It is my firm belief that you are not a worthy winner before you have learned to become a worthy loser. It is clear that everyone wants to win—everyone wants to succeed. But life is both light and dark, valleys and peaks, laughter and tears.
Before we have learned to lose and still maintain our peace and dignity, before we have learned to meet our cowardice, our jealousy, our envy and our uncertainty and yet retain our self-respect, our so-called ‘will to win’ will in fact be a desperate and anxiety-filled struggle to not lose.
What I believe helps people is self-awareness. My work is about being with my clients through their journey and providing support while learning to lose.”