Biography
Where elite performance meets executive leadership.
Jason Donahue is an executive coach in Minnesota and the founder of Level Up Fusion Coaching, a practice built on a single fusion: the mental performance methods that produce elite athletes, applied to the people running organizations.
That fusion is not theoretical. Alongside his executive work, Jason actively coaches competitive athletes and the coaches who train them. The methods move in both directions — arena to boardroom and back — and get tested in each.
He works with CEOs and presidents, founders navigating the transition to CEO, family businesses managing next-generation ownership transitions, and leadership teams that have stopped functioning as teams. Engagements typically address executive derailment, team dysfunction, and the performance plateau that arrives when competence is no longer the constraint.
Operator first, coach second. Across 25+ years as both an operator and a coach, Jason has held CEO, COO, and Vice President roles and served Fortune 500 clients as a Deloitte alum, with leadership experience spanning healthcare, energy, manufacturing, marketing, construction, tech, and consumer goods. He coaches executives through problems he has personally owned rather than frameworks he has only read about.
Method. Engagements run on The Level Up Method, a six-pillar architecture spanning personalized guidance, holistic development, empowerment through self-discovery, self-coaching capability, emotional intelligence, and lifelong learning. Inside it sits the Clarity–Skill–Will Diagnostic™, which establishes whether a performance gap is a clarity problem, a skill problem, or a will problem before anyone prescribes a solution. Most stalled executives are misdiagnosed at exactly this step. Jason builds AI directly into that diagnostic work — surfacing patterns across sessions, sharpening assessment, and producing between-session tools clients actually use. The relationship stays entirely human. The infrastructure behind it doesn't have to be.
Work runs one-on-one with senior leaders, with intact leadership teams, and in workshop and offsite formats — from current team engagements across the Twin Cities to organizations around the globe. Clients leave making faster decisions with less second-guessing, and running teams that surface conflict instead of routing around it. Client retention runs at 95%.
His father was a Mayor who taught him to see systems and communities. His mother was a nursing instructor who taught him to see the individual. Macro and micro at once — that inheritance is the architecture of how he coaches.
Credentials
- Professional Certified Coach (PCC), International Coaching Federation
- Board Certified Coach (BCC), CCE
- SPHR / GPHR · Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- Genos Emotional Intelligence Certified · Profile XT Select Certified
- Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach and DISC Behavioral Analysis Trainer
- Mental Performance Mastery Certified (Brian Cain) · Certified Mental Coach, Mental Training Inc. · US Olympic Committee certifications
- Center for Executive Coaching
- MBA, Organizational Psychology & Development · BS, Psychology
Based in Saint Michael, Minnesota. Serving Twin Cities executives in person and clients nationally and internationally by video. Available for keynotes, workshops, and leadership team facilitation. New engagements begin with a short conversation.