Hello Dr.Christine, welcome to BrandEducation! Your career has taken you from nursing and education to peak performance coaching and authorship. What inspired this remarkable journey, and how have these different roles shaped who you are today?
Nursing. Nursing, teaching, peak performance coaching, and authorship all came naturally to me during the different stages of my life and blended together. What might seem like a career change to some was a life transition to me, like climbing a set of stairs from the bottom to the top. That’s how you can see it. You just take one step at a time—one after another in your life until you reach the top floor. For me it all started with nursing.
My idea of becoming a nurse came to me at 15 when I witnessed my friend having a seizure in the middle of the street outside the candy store where we hung out. He collapsed in front of me and was shaking all over with his eyes rolling back and was unconscious. Up to that point, I did not know he had epilepsy.
My friends and I did not know how to help him, but we thought we should put a stick down his throat, so he would not swallow his tongue. We probably saw this on TV. When he awoke, he had soiled himself, and being embarrassed, I never saw him again.
At the same time, my mother told me that at 15 she had had a ruptured appendix and had an extended hospital stay. From this experience, she aspired to become a nurse. Since there were no antibiotics, she almost died. She never had the opportunity to study nursing while raising five children, which was her biggest life regret. With my mom’s encouragement and my friend’s seizure I decided to apply to nursing school at 16 to help people with their health issues.
The nurse director who interviewed me for entry said I had to be 18 to study there and asked me why I was so young to graduate from high school. I paused for a moment and told her that I was smart. This plus my aptitude for nursing, demonstrated by a high score on an exam, further helped me gain admittance, and I graduated as an RN at 19.
Teaching: The natural flow into teaching from nursing came early on in nursing curriculum when, at 18, I taught young mothers-to-be how to eat nutritiously during their pregnancies and instructed patients on how to take prescribed drugs, such as insulin.
I earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing (BSN) some years later, and a master’s in public administration, culminating in a Doctorate in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and was inducted into the Nursing Hall of Fame there. I wrote journal papers and traveled worldwide giving presentations on nursing history and coaching.
Peak Performance Coaching: I coached myself to win roller-skating races at 10 and became the champion of Queens in NYC. From an early age at nursing school, I learned how to interact with others therapeutically starting from my internship at a mental hospital and in mental health clinics. As an extension of my work, I studied hypnosis for personal use when I was deemed infertile, and taught others how to use the power of the mind with Mindful Toughness® skill sets I developed and opened my office, The Summit Center for Ideal Performance, in 1996. There I worked with helping people of all ages to improve their performance in health, athletics, academics, education, and performing arts.
Authorship: I started writing poetry as a young adult. An example of a poem I wrote is in the Epilogue of my book titled: “The Phantom Limbs.” After earning my doctorate, I published research papers in professional journals as a historian. However, I never thought of myself as a writer and never studied writing formally. That is, until my father made me promise to become an author and writer on his deathbed because he never accomplished his goal as a journalist and saw my talent in a letter I had written to him to help him become well again.
The commencement of writing my book came about in 2021 when I was drowning at the Outer Banks of NC, and a professor who was reading a book on a beach chair during a storm heard my screams, dragged me out of the water, and saved me. I knew then that it was my dad speaking to me in spirit, so I wrote my book: Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults to Win in Life and published it in 2023.
Your book is titled Wrestling Through Adversity. What does “wrestling” symbolize for you beyond the sport itself, and why did you choose it as the central metaphor?
I began studying peak performance coaching and hypnosis in 1994 simply out of personal and family need because I saw that my four children were having challenges with their performances in sports, school, music, and socially, and although I sought professional assistance for them, I found none. So, I opened my private practice in my hometown to help them help themselves and then branched out to work with other families and team members.
Since my son was a wrestler from the age of 7, I gave peak performance coaching sessions at his wrestling club at first, to teach their team members how to de-stress, focus and score, and I worked with many individual wrestlers from his club. By1997, I had the opportunity to present a workshop to high school coaches in Pennsylvania along with the Olympic Champion, Kurt Angle.
This event was intimidating for me at first, because I was the only woman present, and I never wrestled a day in my life. Of course, this was true for most women at the time because of bias against them. Looking back, I was very brave to come with hand-drawn graphics of “The Highway to Succes” and “The Humpty Dumpty Syndrome” (that are now in my book under Mindful Toughness® skill sets).
At first the group members were skeptical of my hypnosis session during the workshop. That is, until Kurt, who navigated many injuries during the Olympic competition, said they should listen to me because that is how he became a Champion. Overall, the workshop was a success in the unique way I introduced wrestling to the world as a “holistic” sport in body, mind, and spirit, whose story I included in Chapter 3 of my book.
Although I have worked with many sports, I’ve learned so much from wrestlers because of their work ethics, their discipline, their culture, and their desire to become winners, no matter what. They are the true grapplers, and they teach all of us so much, especially this one wrestler and coach I found in my research named Phil Nowick who was the author of the book: “Wrestling with Life,”
In his book, he wrote about how he was in the World Trade Center when it was attacked and how he ran out of the building but later succumbed to cancer and died. Phil showed us how to sprint faster away from the towers, when his lungs burned like wildfire.
Phil demonstrated to us how to wrestle and overcome fear that sustained him through extreme exhaustion to make it through the thick, black smoke to safety. As a junior investment banker at Merrill Lynch, on 9/11 he didn’t look like the others with his short statue and wrestler’s build, and he did not study at Harvard like the others.
But Phil always told the truth by using his gifts of analytics. Phil’s story was emblematic of all of ours—a metaphor for how to grapple with life and bounce back—so I took Phil’s book with me on a riverboat cruise in Egypt, while visiting the ancient temples there.
After passing by the Old Cataract Hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile, I began to write my book’s Introduction and told his story, which empowered me to write my book and to choose the title, Wrestling Through Adversity.
You share both deeply personal experiences and stories from your professional life. Was there a chapter that was particularly difficult—or especially meaningful—for you to write?
Yes. Out of the 12 chapters, Chapter 10 titled: “Empowering Elite College Athletes in Transition to Win in Life” was the most emotionally challenging of all of them. This is because of the story I wrote about 5 college athletes—4 women, and 1 male—from the sports of soccer, lacrosse, and softball, who committed suicide. Ironically, the first suicide occurred on March 1, 2022, which was the date I commenced the writing of my book with a writing coach, whose partner subsequently committed suicide the following week.
The first suicide was committed by Katie Meyer, who was the captain of a soccer team and honor student at Standford. She was smart and was getting ready to graduate when she just got off the phone with her parents, being her jovial self while speaking to them. It was a shock to her parents and to soccer athletes around the globe and took place while disciplinary action was in progress, which threatened her status at the school.
After collecting my research on the deaths, it took me weeks to get started with the writing because I was very emotional staring at their pictures pinned up with magnets on my office file cabinet, so I could pick up their vibes and speak to them before going to bed at night.
What I wanted to know from them in spirit was what happened, what they were thinking and feeling, why they committed suicide, and, most importantly, what we could do, as a society, that could prevent this from happening again. I wanted to know how to help elite college athletes to use their gifts of sports to empower them to become successful.
When starting this process, I awoke nightly in tears during my dreams. I took the time to sort out everything during the day, but to no avail. Most people I spoke to about these deaths were totally unaware of the high rates of suicide of those 15-24 years of age, who have a high degree of mental heath issues in the US.
Many people questioned why I even wrote a chapter about young adults, and they didn’t understand my challenges, so it was a very intense and lonely process for me as a writer during this time. However, I was committed to my cause because I could not let these athletes—as a peak performance coach who worked with this age group—die in vain.
It was fortunate that Ernest Hemmingway came to my rescue. Do you want to know how?
While shopping at an antique store called “Granny’s Attic” for a small cabinet to contain my recipe books in my new home, I found just the right one on the third cluttered floor. Behind the cabinet there was a table stacked haphazardly with old books and magazines. I noticed there a 562-page biography of Ernest Hemmingway written by Carlos Baker in 1969 among the mess but left it there, until I reached the register of the store to pay, and went back for it. I was intrigued by his history because I had been to a NYC museum exhibit that told me about his life challenges, and it was great to get to know him.
In Carlos’ book, he wrote about Hemmingway’s’ depression, his early life all the way up to the details of his suicide and kept a record of it for us to see. I loved reading Hemmingway’s books as a young adult from the beginning to the end. I thank him in spirit for helping me find the words to say to present the stories of the five athletes from the start to the conclusion of this chapter to help our young adults thrive today.
One of the recurring themes in your work is resilience. Do you believe resilience is something we’re born with, or is it a skill that anyone can develop?
As human beings we are born with the ability to see but our vision needs to be developed during our early years as newborns for eyesight is the only sense that is not fully formed at birth. I think the same thing is true of gaining resilience to bounce back from adversity. I believe that resilience is built on failure and on overcoming traumas and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in our lives, as well as how we dealt with them in our lives on an emotional level.
All of us have negative lived experiences and traumas. It is a fact of life, and as much as we, as parents, naturally want to protect our children from ACEs, they are inevitable. With no exposure to traumas, they will not learn how to overcome adversity on the first day of school when they are bullied in the school yard and don’t know what to do.
For example, he or she will not know how to handle it, like a teenager, a child actor in my hometown. He was bullied in the locker room by a classmate, got punched in the abdomen really hard, and became paralyzed for the rest of his life. He had complained to the officials at school to no avail but never talked to his parents about it.
I believe it is our job, as parents, to assist our children in the case of bullying by going to the principal’s office to speak about it. But the direct things we can do are to show our kids how to relax with deep breaths and to put their reactions in a feedback loop, to see how they can improve. Mental rehearsal is another great Mindful Toughness skill to show our children before life events occur that can help them face challenges on their own the next time around, with our assistance.
From my experiences I learned that it is important for us to work to overcome our challenges as early as possible in life, because those that linger could block progress in our lives and negativity impact on us and our families when we have unresolved traumas.
In my book, I talk about my own ACEs in childhood and how I overcame them and showed how I used the Affect Bridge Technique to help my clients overcome them with this hypnotherapeutic tool by using Mind Power.
You teach techniques such as self-hypnosis, mental rehearsal, breathing exercises, and positive self-talk. Which of these practices do you find people underestimate the most, and how can it make a difference in everyday life?
I remember a teen wrestler I once worked with whom I taught “Breathing Easy” to on his first visit to decrease anxiety. It seems like an easy skill to learn, right? This is because it is a necessity for us as humans to breathe in our everyday lives to survive from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Some mental health practitioners call breathing in the air “therapy.”
However, this teen was so tense during competition that he told his mom that it was too hard to breathe and wrestle at the same time. So, he convinced his mother that he should quit with his sessions, even after I explained to him that he might as well breathe as a relaxation tool to prevent injury and energize his body and brain to focus and score.
I think the Mindful Toughness skill sets are life skills and are sometimes underestimated because they are natural, easy-to-use, and innate within us as humans, and once learned, they are as free as the air we breathe. Mental rehearsal, which kids are skilled at using, is very natural for them to learn in their imagination, and kids are open to using this skill.
I naturally used these Mindful Toughness skill sets at 10 when I trained myself for roller-skating competitions to get in the zone and won by seeing Pegasus wings on my heels and by imagining I was Mighty Mouse. I’ve used the book, The Little Engine that Could to demonstrate positive self-talk to a nine-year old wrestler who was afraid of failure, and he won state championships from there.
What do you believe is the greatest obstacle facing young people today, and what gives you hope for the next generation?
The greatest obstacle, I believe, is that our younger generations, especially the Gen Z’s (born 1997-2012) have not been educated on how to survive no less thrive in today’s tumultuous world, as evidenced by the continuing rise of depression, anxiety, and suicide, despite efforts to improve it. This generation consists of teenagers, like two of my grandchildren, and young adults.
I believe this is occurring because of disparities in values between our young people and older generations who are near retirement, as particularly seen in today’s job market where the CEOs are not focused on the present time but are living in the past.
How I know about these disparities and imbalances between generations is because I earned a master’s degree in public administration in 1993 when I studied organizational behavior in business and because I opened my office as an entrepreneur in 1996 and worked with Gen Zers when they were young athletes through the crises of the WTC attack, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the great recession, and, of course, during the devastation of the pandemic, where young people felt isolated and alone when schools were closed.
As a historian and peak performance coach, I wrote a piece about the current job market for Gen Zers published on September 28, 2025, in the CEO World magazine titled: “ Why CEOs Must Adapt: Gen Z’s Workforce Challenge” in which I defended the Gen Zers who are being disparaged and fired because they do not want to join the “rat race” of business. Instead, they want peace and harmony with a 4-day work week, and meditation rooms, and yoga studios on work premises. They are more socially aware being not driven in the same way as my friend Phil was as an investment banker or that of their parents.
The solution I stated in my article is for both groups to harmonize by listening to each other’s needs and values, by guiding young people who are interested in community and in conflict resolution to band together in supporting people’s rights as citizens.
What gives me great hope is that we are beginning to see progress around the globe for young people in India, for example, where jobs are few and qualifying for higher education is difficult, raising suicide rates. However, the hope is that the government is beginning to bend in favor of the students. The same thing recently occurred in Bangladesh, and in Nepal, where young people are fighting back with their voices and actions, as well as on US campuses.
For me I felt a burst of hope through the sport of soccer after the final match of the FIFA World Cup 2026 when Spain won against Argentina. Despite the fact that there was a brawl with team members on both sides afterwards, the great Lionel Messi, who was distraught trying to process the loss, was hugged out of empathy and respect for his extraordinary contribution to soccer by most of Spain’s team members, including a teenager.
I was fascinated by your decision to translate your book into Arabic after your travels in Egypt. Could you share that story and explain why it became such a meaningful part of your mission?
Naysayers always ask me why I am making the effort to translate my book from English to the Arabic language of which I do not speak a single word. They ask: “Why don’t you translate your book into another language like Spanish or Italian instead?
Even after describing how I visited Moracco twice, and then Egypt for my wedding anniversary in January 2023, they don’t get it. Perhaps you will. So, here’s my story.
My husband, Jeff, and I, took a 7-day cruise on the Nile River and explored the ancient Temples and King Tut’s tomb. My tour guide, Walid, was knowledgeable in Egyptology and took an interest in my book and my work as a peak performance coach and registered nurse who works with Mind Power.
Walid translated hieroglyphics written on the walls of the Temples and showed me the “hospital” within them and how the ancient priests/doctors/shamans, treated patients who had physical ailments with natural remedies, for which the Egyptians were advanced as a civilization. There were rooms dedicated to those with mental disorders as well, but everyone was cared for with respect no matter their social status or health issues.
Four transcendental events took place for me. One was in Luxor, Egypt, where we stopped to have our names, Jeffrey and Chistine, written in hieroglyphics on parchment in cartouches—an oval frame for royal names in ancient Egypt—to celebrate our anniversary. This bonded us maritally and helped me to remember who I am as a spiritual being with the name “Christine,” which means “follower of Christ.”
The second event happened as our boat passed by the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile, which inspired me to write the Introduction to my book in the boat’s library, as mentioned previously.
The third sacred moment materialized in Old Cairo when three major Faiths of the world united us in the crossroads of the city, that is, me as a Catholic, Walid as a Muslim, and Jeff as a Jew, where we stood spiritually together hand-in-hand like ancient Egyptians did.
The fourth and most powerful transcendence occurred in the cave beneath the Abu Serga Catholic Church when I stood by the site where the Holy Family lived for some time while fleeing from Herod’s path of the slaughter of baby boys. While there I cried so hard I could not breathe or speak.
During this epiphany, along with Walid’s encouragement, I promised to translate my book into Arabic, so we can all join together to help our young people grow holistically in mind, body, and spirit, face adversity, and use Mindful Toughness ® skillsets in today’s tumultuous world.
What message do you hope someone who is currently struggling with adversity takes away after reading your book?
When I first began writing my book on March 1, 2022, there was much hardship in US society and around the globe because we were in the midst of the pandemic, which had a negative impact on everyone. The Ukraine War had just begun, and we had a high rate of mental disorders of our young people, including suicide.
At that time, parents did not know what to do to help their young family members to succeed and thrive. Sometimes they felt alone and were grappling with personal struggles that had a negative impact on their mental health as well as food insecurity that limited their kids’ growth and development. At times the stress was so great they felt that the pressure cooker of life was going to implode!
But do you know what? We have the same conditions today in our current economy, and the second leading cause of death of 15 to 24-year-olds remains suicide, despite efforts to improve the statistics. In addition, our government has made so many budget cuts for mental health counseling and there are shortages of staff counselors as well as for cost-effective treatments.
And just like back in 2022, there continues to be something you can do to help yourselves and help your children to do the same by using actionable, neuroscientific tools that are evidence-based, such as Mindful Toughness ® skill sets that I developed and have outlined in my book in Chapter 5.
I, as an expert peak performance coach for 30 years, encourage everyone in our communities to fight back with a paradigm shift that supports the promotion of mental health before there is a need to treat mental illness.
The best news is that such life tools are easy to learn and use, are portable for every situation for every family member, starting from infancy, aiding you in using your innate gifts of Mind Power, and the best news is, they are as free as the air you breathe once learned!
Now you don’t have to believe what I say. Instead, you can start to empower yourselves and see the many positive reviews of my book on Amazon and Goodreads with your own eyes.
You recently received the 2025 Hustle & Heart Award for Social Impact. What did that recognition mean to you personally?
As you can imagine, I was thrilled to receive the 2025 Hustle & Heart Gold Book Award for Social Impact because from the beginning of my private practice on April 2, 1996, my intention was to show people how to use their Mind Power to win in life for those of all ages, but especially for young people.
There was so much opposition when I first opened my office in my hometown for which I needed much confidence to present my work. From a town board member, who wanted to deny me my rental certificate and called me a “tealeaf reader,” to those who said I was doing the work of the devil, I persisted in believing in the power of the mind, no matter what.
Winning the award brought me back to when I was a newbie entrepreneur and experienced anaphylactic shock from drinking ginseng tea for energy and collapsed on a dance floor while having a near-death experience. But I came back for my kids, my husband, and my mission and for the near drowning and for fulfilling my promise to my father to write a book that would make him proud.
There were many who told me that I should leave out most of the case stories because my book was too long and that no one would read it. They said I should cut my book in half and should leave out Chapter 2 on the history of psychiatry because of its horror.
But most of all, when I received the award, I was in Copenhagen, and I was so happy for all the brave student athletes and clients who trusted me to work with them and to guide them forward using Mindful Toughness skillsets to win in life. For all of this I am eternally grateful to have such a deep impact socially and globally.
Looking ahead, what projects are you most excited about, and what impact do you hope your work continues to have on readers, families, and communities around the world?
Since I have worked for three decades successfully assisting children, teens, and young adults to reach their best performance through accessing the power of their minds by teaching Mindful Toughness skill sets, I feel a sense of urgency and obligation to continue my work with young people.
In doing so, they can have a “How-to-list,” learn what to do hands-on, and benefit from my wellness programs, such as “Winning Ways for Teens.” I believe that more research is needed on prevention of mental illness and on how to nurture the growth and development of our youth with the natural resources of the mind— innate within them through imagination so that the positive habit patterns learned are integrated into who they are as persons throughout their lives.
Since the launching of my Arabic edition on January 13, 2026, I have been excited to promote it in Arabic-speaking countries and have presented it in bookstores in France where I recently visited. In addition, just last month my press release came out in Arabic, French, and British English to countries in the Middle East and in Africa. My book was presented in both English and Arabic at the Dublin Book Festival at Trinity College there on August 15.
During the epiphany I had in Egypt, I promised to join with others of different Faiths and cultures globally and holistically in body, mind, and spirit, to help young people to overcome adversity during tumult. As a common goal in the family of humankind, I will continue to focus on community around the globe.
Won’t you join me on this communal adventure to secure a better future for our young people by engaging in my book? Thank you for your support and bless you.
Find out more at: https://drchristinesilverstein.com/about-author/