Raj Gavurla was carrying two careers at once. During the workday he was an electrical engineering analyst, later advancing into automation and controls engineering, designing distributed control systems to help utility and pulp and paper companies. Outside of work he was competing in sports: pursuing semi-pro basketball and professional soccer. Two tracks that eventually converged on a single question.
Performers and achievers at every level, he observed, showed up prepared. The technical preparation was in place, and so were the coaching hours and the accumulated reps. What professional training rarely addressed was the mental dimension: how to hold composure under pressure, and how to stop overthinking in the moment that counted most. For Gavurla, that absence became a business.
In 2001, he founded LiiiVEN and expanded, over the years that followed, into a professional coaching, training, and speaking company centered on the mental performance work professional preparation tends to skip.
Gavurla groups the problems he works on into five categories: performance anxiety, pressure, and stress; overthinking; unsteady confidence and underperformance; workplace culture and communication problems driven by specific individuals; and apprehension about competing at their next level. He is deliberate about the scope of the work. His expertise and specialization is non medical. He creates a beneficial, enjoyable, and fun experience for his customers (performers and achievers) based on their dreams, priorities, clear goals, and most important tasks. I have customers who also see a medical professional. I do not diagnose anyone with a medical condition. Psychologists, therapists, counselors, and medical doctors diagnose and treat medical conditions.
He translated his expertise and specialization into a body of services, programs, and published work. Winning at Entrepreneurship, his book, addresses the mental conditioning side of building and running a business. Pat Williams, who served as Senior Vice President of the Orlando Magic, testimonial is “Read this book with a good marking pen because it contains a ton of valuable advice for all business owners.” Bob Rathbun, voice of the Atlanta Hawks, described his book as “We all have in us something special to share with the world. Raj has given us a step-by-step blueprint to turn those dreams into reality.” Tom Cramer, Founder and Co-Chairman of The Brain Trust, wrote “In your presentation, you showed us how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the company. Of particular value to me, I came to understand the importance of my mood in motivating and influencing people.” Gavurla has also published the Your Raise The Bar Primer workbook series covering mental performance tools to help you consistently perform in your tennis, basketball, track and field, sports, and an Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking Tools Manual.
The delivery structure runs three ways to help you: the book itself, a companion platform through Praxis offering 18 AI-guided sessions keyed to the book’s strategies at no cost, and private personal, professional, and confidential services and programs.
His education background includes a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in human resource development, both from Clemson University. The graduate work was housed in the Eugene T. Moore School of Education, with a focus on human and organization performance. He holds a Senior Certified Professional credential from the Society for Human Resource Management, Mental Performance Mastery certified, Champions Mental Edge trained, and mental toughness trained through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, and is Safe Sport trained. He learned and applied his practical learning as an expert who speaks professionally at the National Speakers Association, NSA Georgia, and The Speaker Lab.
The sports connection extends well past playing sports. He serves as a professional official for high school and middle school basketball and soccer, and holds a US Soccer grassroots coaching license. His private personal professional confidential mental performance coaching offers services and programs for individual soccer players, tennis players, basketball players, baseball players, and track & field at the professional/semi-pro, college, youth, and recreational athletes. Rhonda Mapp, a WNBA champion, wrote about a basketball camp appearance by Gavurla that “We would like to thank you for coming to the girl’s basketball camp to speak with girls about consistently playing at the top of their game. When you spoke about having the right mindset, mood, and motivation to stay at the top of the game, I noticed the girls were very attentive and focused on the message you were conveying. Having the right attitude to reflect a positive spirit is very powerful! The girls absorbed the information and brought a different attitude to camp the remainder of the time.”
On the organizational side, the audiences he has spoken to include founders and owners, executives, entrepreneurs, professionals, healthcare workers, students, retirement community staff, actors, actresses, and teachers.
His talks are built around inspiring, what he calls “edu-train-ment,” blending education, training, entertainment, and motivation with clean humor woven through. The aim, as he describes it, is applied learning that shows up in what people do after the session, not simply in what they recall sitting through it.
For more than two decades, what has run through his engineering career, playing competitive sports, and his work at LiiiVEN is a single observation tested across enough industries and contexts to have held up: technical preparation builds what someone is capable of, and mental performance (mental preparation mental strategies, mental skills, and mental tools) determines what that capability does when the pressure is on.
