Beyond Talent: Jessi Smith Of Athletic Mental Performance On The Mindset and Disciplines of Professional Athletes

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

The 4 Agreements — Reading “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz radically changed my life. This simple yet profound book talks about four ancient agreements that lead to more personal freedom. The agreements are:

Be Impeccable With Your Word

Don’t Take Anything Personally

Don’t Make Assumptions

Always Do Your Best

In the world of sports, talent is abundant but individual greatness is defined by a unique mindset and steadfast discipline. In this series, we go one-on-one with athletes who raise the bar not just in skill, but in mental preparation and routine discipline. We’ll explore their thought processes and uncover the reasoning behind the specific habits that give them an edge. Prepare for a deep dive that could reshape how you approach discipline and mental resilience. This isn’t just about the game; it’s a blueprint for achieving peak performance in life. I had the honor of interviewing Jessi Smith.

Jessi is the co-founder of Athletic Mental Performance, a mental training company that works with professional athletes to ensure their mind is as well trained as their body. As a mental performance trainer, Jessi utilizes science-backed techniques such as Neuro Linguistic Programming, Hypnosis, Mental Emotional Release®, Yoga, and Conscious-Connected Breathwork. In partnership with her clients, Jessi helps to increase her client’s confidence, satisfaction, balance, and facilitates long-lasting transformation.

Thanks for being part of this series. Let’s jump in and focus on your early years. Can you share who was your biggest influence when you were young and provide specific examples of what you learned from them that helped shape who you’ve become and how you live your life today?

It took me until my mid-twenties to understand how big my father’s impact was on who I am today. My dad is a buddhist and lived in a monastery for years prior to having me. He was so wildly different from the other dads that were around me, that it felt embarrassing when I was growing up. He had prayer beads in his car, would chant mantras anytime he felt called, had statues all across his house, and would have me meditate with him starting from the age of 3. I spent so many years wishing he could be “normal” like all of my friends’ dads. Little did I know that his habits and ways of being he so lovingly introduced me to, would be the foundation that I built my life upon.

One of the biggest lessons that I learned from my father is the importance of cultivating present awareness and stillness in your daily life. Whether it is taking five minutes away from my computer to just sit in silence and focus on breathing or going on a walk with the purpose of noticing all the noises around me, I prioritize integrating stillness and awareness into my everyday life. These habits are also something that I teach my clients, who are professional athletes. While they might feel small or insignificant, these are the foundational practices that clients do that help to build new mindsets and change their well-being.

Staying on the topic of influence, who has been your biggest catalyst more recently and what can you share that you’ve learned from them that led you to making changes in your life?

One of the biggest influences in my life today is my friend and teacher, Annie Barry. I met Annie when I decided to take my first improv class with the organization she founded, Bandit Theater. A year and a half later, I have taken every class Bandit has to offer and we have become fast friends. Annie is fearless, kind, and whole-heartedly believes we all go farther when we work together and share resources. She was the first entrepreneur that I met that would just sit and talk about all the tips and tricks she learned while getting Bandit to be the successful theater that it is today. She also taught me how to not be precious with the decisions I make in life. She believes in failing fast so you can find the thing that will work.

Through her mentorship and friendship, I’ve become a better coach, business owner, and I’m able to have more flexibility and freedom within my life. Knowing that I will fail and with every failure, I am getting closer to a bigger success.

Resilience is a hallmark of high performers, especially in the world of athletics. Could you share the hardest thing you experienced as an athlete, how you dealt with it, what you learned, and the overall impact it’s had in your life?

One of the hardest moments I experienced as an athlete was on my club volleyball team in high school. We were at a national tournament in Salt Lake City and we were playing for a spot to go to the Junior Olympics. The traveling team that I was on had gone to the Junior Olympics for the past 4 years and this game was our last chance to qualify. It was the third set and we were behind almost 10 points and I was up to serve. I ended up scoring 3 points because at the time, I had a really tough float serve. Then on my fourth serve, I served it into the net and we lost. My body was flooded with shame because I was the reason the team wasn’t going to the Junior Olympics. I carried that shame between seasons, questioning if I even wanted to continue playing competitive volleyball.

Overtime, I built a healthier perspective on what happened. Yes, my serve was what lost the game. However, the team as a whole got us into that situation where we couldn’t make a mistake or we would lose. Additionally, that season we competed in four national tournaments where we could have qualified to go to the Junior Olympics and as a team, we weren’t able to do that. Ultimately, we played a team sport so any wins or losses occurred as a team, not as individual players. This memory has helped me remember to take a holistic perspective during tough moments in life.

Can you share the single most significant sports moment or achievement from your career and provide some context around why it’s your most significant highlight?

The biggest achievement in my career was when I left my stable corporate job and started my business, Athletic Mental Performance, with my business partner. It was such an exhilarating, scary, and exciting time in my life and I felt so passionate that it was going to be successful. Because of our shared passion, discipline, and vision, we were able to build Athletic Mental Performance to be what it is today. It is my biggest achievement because it required so much risk and grit to bring it into fruition and neither one of us had a back-up plan. We were all in from the very beginning and it is a special time to reflect back on. We had a fair share of setbacks, failures, and dead ends but we kept moving forward — gathering data from every failure so we could avoid it in the future.

You’re clearly driven by a specific set of disciplines that guide you. Can you share your top five that you personally prioritize and how they influence your daily routine?

I firmly believe that in order to coach or train anyone, I first must embody the practices that I am trying to teach. Or more simply put, in order to be an effective teacher, I must first be a dedicated student. These are the daily practices that most influence my life.

1. Meditation — I meditate every morning and night and it has been the single most transformative practice that I have encountered. It was tough in the beginning because my brain would throw fits, not wanting to sit with myself and in silence. Thankfully it got easier over time and now it is something I crave every morning and night. I feel more at ease in my own body, more patient with others, and able to balance the intricacies of life in a more grounded manner.

2. Journaling — This discipline was the one I was most resistant to for many years. I would buy a journal and write for 3–4 days and never touch it again. I just found it to be redundant and pointless. It all changed for me when I started journaling about things I was grateful for instead of recapping the day. Now, I journal every morning about all the little things that happened the day before that I am grateful for. They can be as small as drinking a delicious warm cup of coffee, hearing the birds chirp in the morning, or walking past beautiful flowers on a walk. Journaling helps me fall in love with my life — even when times are challenging. It makes me find joy in everyday moments and I know it all builds on each other, creating more joy and things to be grateful for.

3. The 4 Agreements — Reading “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz radically changed my life. This simple yet profound book talks about four ancient agreements that lead to more personal freedom. The agreements are:

• Be Impeccable With Your Word
• Don’t Take Anything Personally
• Don’t Make Assumptions
• Always Do Your Best

I try to keep these agreements top of mind whenever I am interacting with people because it makes life so much easier. It feels so empowering not to take anything personally or not to make assumptions about people. And when I am impeccable with my word and actually follow through with what I say I will do, I know that I am doing my best. I highly recommend everyone have a copy of this book in their home.

4. Walking — Daily walks are a non-negotiable habit for me. It is one of the simplest ways for me to increase my mental health and reset my mind after meetings or working with clients. Surprisingly, some of my best business ideas have come to me on walks when I let my mind wander. Walking is my creative superpower.

5. Reading — I am an avid reader and read every morning and night for 10–30 minutes. It helps to fuel my brain, makes me consider new perspectives, and keeps me learning every single day. I am a better coach, friend, and business partner because I read so much.

Nobody’s perfect. Share an instance where taking on too much served as a critical lesson that you learned from. What happened and how did you respond?

When I reflect back on a time where I took on too much, I think about when I was working at a tech startup, completing a yoga teacher training on the weekends, and coaching clients on the side. I stayed so busy because I was trying to negate the fact that I was miserable working 80 hour weeks at my tech startup. It was not a sustainable lifestyle and it all came crashing down on me when I started feeling terrible and doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. After extensive testing and bloodwork, I found out that I was close to adrenal collapse and I had to radically alter my lifestyle. I started working normal hours at my startup and prioritized restorative rest and relaxation. After about a year of healing my body and having work life balance, I ended up leaving my startup all together to start my own business.

I am forever grateful for that wake up call because it helped lead me to the life I live today.

Discipline can be a solo endeavor, but successful people tend to “borrow” other people’s disciplines. Can you share some specific examples of some of your disciplines that your teammates have picked up and the difference it made for them?

When I was playing volleyball, many of my teammates started incorporating a pre-game ritual because that was something that was important to me. For instance, I would listen to the same 3 songs before every game because they made me feel confident, focused, and energized. And right before we would leave the locker room, I would take 3 deep breaths to center myself. Slowly, many of my teammates would do a similar routine — listening to their own hype songs and then we would all take 3 deep breaths together. It was so helpful to connect before a big game and to get on the same wavelength.

Measuring discipline can be tricky. How do you track or assess how your discipline impacts your results? Do you track or keep a scorecard of any of your daily habits or disciplines?

The only daily habit that I consistently track is my morning and nightly meditations and I use the free app, Insight Timer. For many years I didn’t track my meditation practice but I found I would forget how many months or years I had been doing the practice. So I decided to start tracking and it has been a wonderful way to slowly increase how many minutes I meditate each day.

While I don’t track in a formal way, I do journal and read almost every day. The combination of mediation, journaling and reading every morning has allowed me to be more present and patient in my life. I find that I am slower to react in situations — giving myself space to sense how I am feeling in my body, take a breath, and then respond. This has been a gift in my life because I am able to confidently navigate relationships or situations that in the past would have been tricky or difficult. Additionally, I am able to notice themes a lot quicker because of my journaling practice. It helps to bring unconscious thoughts and patterns to my awareness so that I can address them and shift my behavior.

Ever found yourself at a crossroads, where your commitment to discipline clashed with other realities in your life, like team dynamics or short-term goals? How did you handle it and what was the outcome?

I have experienced the clash of trying to balance disciplines with the realities of life too many times to count. For many years, I would only be disciplined when life felt simple and almost boring. During those times, it was easy to wake up early, meditate, work out, and eat right. Those habits would boost my ego, making me feel like I had my life together and nothing could knock me from my routine of discipline.

Then life would get busy again and I would find myself being stretched thin with personal and professional obligations and the first thing I would drop was my routine of discipline. My excuse would be that I didn’t have time and my mental and physical health wouldn’t be impacted if I stopped for a few weeks. Probably a surprise to no-one, I would feel terrible when I wasn’t sticking to the routine that I knew made me feel better. The tricky thing about when you are feeling terrible and stressed, you crave more activities and food that will perpetuate those feelings and you get into a vicious cycle.

Over the past few years, I have come to realize that my routines of discipline are non-negotiables for me, regardless of how tired, stressed, or busy I am. I know that having discipline is the reason I can get through busy seasons of life and still feel relatively balanced and grounded.

Reflecting on your athletic journey, what’s one thing you would go back and do differently if given the chance?

I would have focused as much attention on my mental training as I did my physical training. Being a mental performance coach today, it is easy for me to reflect back on my athletic career and see all the opportunities that I didn’t take full advantage of because I was stuck in my head. The amazing thing about mental training is it not only improves your athletic abilities but it also strengthens your ability to stay present, engaged, and flexible in all areas of your life. Sports act as a conduit to learn more about yourself and life; learning how to be resilient, work together, and have patience when things get tough. If I had worked with a mental performance coach when I was growing up, it would have benefited my athletic career, my mental health, and would have gotten me to where I am today a lot faster.

When it comes to pursuing the highest level in your sport, what valuable advice could you give someone that you wish someone would have told you?

To have fun. It sounds so simple but it is something that many college and professional athletes lose once they start playing at such a high level. Think about it, in the beginning we all get into sports to have fun and that is often the first thing that we lose once we start playing more competitively. Athletes play their best when they are having fun because they are relaxed, loose, and can reach flow state more easily. When we aren’t having fun, our bodies and minds often are tense, rigid, and nervous and we can’t play to the best of our ability when we are in that state.

One of the first things I work with my clients on is how to find the fun in whatever sport they play. And many are resistant at first, thinking they came to me to get better at their sport (especially if it is also the way they make money). However, once they start to incorporate more fun into their workouts, practices, and games — their performance starts to drastically improve and they fall back in love with the sport they have been playing most of their life.

If we were sitting together two years from now, looking back at the past 24 months, what specifically has to happen for you personally and professionally, for you to be happy with your results?

What is most important to me is being able to remain present, flexible, and passionate about the life that I am creating. Working with college and professional athletes has been one of the greatest joys of my life and I look forward to being able to coach more athletes and witness how they transform their lives. Additionally, I created my business, Athletic Mental Performance, with my best friend and fellow coach, Renee Yomtob. We have been friends for 23 years and it has been amazing to see what we have been able to build together and I can only imagine the new heights we will achieve in the next two years. I know a big reason we have had the success we’ve had is because of how deeply we trust each other. That trust has allowed us to take big swings in our business and try new things — knowing that we will have each other back regardless of the outcome.

Finally, where can fans and fellow athletes follow your journey of talent and discipline?

Any competitive athlete who wants to learn more about mental training, visit www.athleticmentalperformance.com or Instagram @athleticmentalperformance

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com