On July 13th, 2026 we gathered with Dory community members to discuss the four archetypes of performance and how we can use them to bring our best selves to our biggest challenges.

At Dory, we study high-achievers under pressure.
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We constantly ask ourselves what makes them tick.
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We're specifically interested in strategies for influencing future performance while high-achievers experience high levels of pressure over long periods of time.

It's easy to perform at your best for one day or one week. Doing it for months or years is a completely different sport and this is our primary area of inquiry.

Across ten years, seven studies, and 50 million data points we've observed that high-achievers enable high-performance through four primary avenues.
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We call these avenues the four archetypes of performance and we've named them the Believers, Lifters, Pacers, and Burners.
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We determine archetypes by looking at the things that most often change in the periods of time before mental resilience improves across each study participant's check-ins with the Dory Protocol app.
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The size of these circles represent the predominance of each of the four archetypes across our study population of thousands of high achievers.

About 50% are Lifters. Around 5% are Burners.
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Each archetype has a different grouping of metrics that most frequently change before periods of change in their mental resilience, which indicate how they grow their performance while experiencing high pressure.

Believers unlock performance with confidence.

Lifters unlock performance with pressure.

Pacers unlock performance with effort, and

Burners unlock performance with motivation.
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In this session, Dory members learned:

• How archetypes enable or disable performance when pressure goes up
• Which archetype powers their personal performance, and
• How to use their archetype to make everything easier when life gets challenging
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