Hi, all, and welcome back to Mindset Coach Academy podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson.
Excuse me. I still have that stuff in my throat. I know many of you do too. It's like these viruses this year, they just keep hanging on. I feel perfectly fine.
But every once in a while, I have my smokers cough that comes on. So I apologize if that happens. I want to talk about advanced degrees in this field. And this is a really, I think it's an interesting topic.
I think it's one that you should be asking, you should be thinking about. I do not have an advanced degree. I did not go back to school. And I'm going to talk to you about that path. And if there's anything I would have done differently and how I made that decision and just give you some background because I think it's a little confusing for some of you. And I get it because we've been taught that we need degrees.
And we should be taking money out and taking loans and going back to school if there's something that we want to do. And so I just want to talk to you about that. But I also want to admit that I have my own confirmation bias. The path that I took was not school. But I think I can honestly answer many of the questions that you guys have about whether it's a good or at least help you think through the right questions to ask. Let me say that because I don't know what the right path is for you because I've been doing this for a long time. And I've been in this field for a long time.
And I've seen what's worked. I've seen people that have had advanced degrees. I've seen people that have not had advanced degrees.
And then I've seen all kinds of people be successful and not successful. So I'm going to talk to you through that. Excuse me. Some of this came up. I mean, this always comes up when I'm starting the certification, launching that again, or just having conversations with so many of you. This conversation, these questions come up.
It came up recently with somebody on Instagram that does have an advanced degree. And I think he was a little bit wondering if we were doing it right as far as training people in the right things. And so again, I think these are good questions to ask.
And I'm an open book with all of it. I will tell you what I think as far as who should get a degree, who shouldn't get a degree, the questions again to think about when you're considering that. And of course, I am biased. I think our certification is an amazing path.
But of course, it's not for everybody. So that being said, I just want to kind of set up the ideas that we're talking about today. The first thing that I want to do is, as I do want to talk to you about my path. So I have been a mental training coach for about 18 years. I started right after college. I was doing, I was running my own basketball camp for young female athletes. And I was teaching the mindset training in that camp.
And I loved it. Really soon after that, I started working with college teams. So I was a collegiate. And at that point, I was a professional basketball player. And so I would basically use all my connections and say, hey, can I come talk to your team about XYZ, about positive self-talk, about pre-game preparation, about deep breathing, about visualization.
And they were like, yeah, totally. And so I started working very organically with coaches that either recruited me or I played against or I played for. And I would go and work with their teams. And so many of those, at that point, that was Division I collegiate female basketball players. And so many of them were like, why have I not learned this before? And I was like, I don't know.
I have no answer for you. Now, at that point, nobody was talking about mindfulness. We weren't talking about the mental health of athletes. I mean, that's really rather new. I mean, even I think it was six years ago, was it love started talking about mental health challenges?
And then it was Simone Biles. And like, this is all pretty new, right? So we know about 18 years ago, there wasn't a lot of talk about this. But there were resources on the psychology side, the mental health side, the sports psychology side. There were resources.
But someone had to ask for them, right? And really what we do is like, this is for everybody, all the time, it's helpful no matter what situation you're in. This is just part of training. That's sort of my philosophy. So anyway, I was working with teams.
But I would work with five or six teams in the summer and early fall, and then I would go overseas and play professionally. And that was my cadence for a while. And along that time, I really figured out that this is what I wanted to do in my life. Like, I love playing. I knew I wanted to play for a long time. And for someone like me that was super passionate about basketball, I was a point guard.
Like my personality, I think coaching, as in college coaching, probably would have been a very predictable path, if you will. But I didn't want to move around anymore. I knew that after I finished playing, I had played in six different countries. My whole 20s, I was gone. I knew I didn't want to move around anymore.
And frankly, as much as I love basketball, I wasn't really into the X's and O's. So I knew that I wanted to coach, but I knew that I wanted to coach on the mental side. That's where my passion was. And frankly, that's where I felt like I had the most impact. That was what was the most fulfilling for me. And so it was this little niche of coaching.
So I was like, OK, so can I do this as a career? There was a handful of people doing things similar, like a lot of team culture stuff. But I was not seeing a lot of mindset and mental performance coaches.
So but I do remember Jeff Jansen, who did a lot of team culture training. I remember him telling me, and I was 21 years old. This was what actually he came and talked to our college teams. He said, figure out what you want to do and then figure out how to get people to pay you to do it.
And I was like, OK, so that's the marching orders. But again, this was a while ago. This was in mid 2000s. And I was playing overseas and I was like, OK, so if I want to do this. And I was doing it, but I had no advanced degree. I didn't even have an undergrad degree in anything remotely related to it. I was English and sociology double major and a minor in women's studies. So like really zero training in this, except that I'd had amazing mentors and I played a really high level.
So again, thinking about where your credibility comes from. It might come from coaching. It might come from playing. It might come from something else really challenging in your life. And I had those connections again, where the connections in your life.
I could call up people and they knew, liked and trust me because I knew them and so I had some of those early clients. Anyway, so I was sitting. Excuse me, I remember sitting in my apartment in Athens, Greece. OK, this is like, you know, those images from like, I don't know, a while ago and I like literally remember this is like pre social media. This was pre a lot of online learning. Like I remember it was just starting to have some access to online learning, but it certainly wasn't like it is now. I mean, five years ago, it isn't like it is now.
But there weren't a lot of great options. And I think it was like I could get my master's or my PhD, but it was like three to six years. And it was like 30,000 to like 80,000.
It's probably more now. And I was like, I didn't really want to do it. Like I had the time. I could have come up with the money. I probably had some of the money.
My expenses were really low, playing overseas. But I was like, first of all, I don't want to do online. And I knew that I was going to play for a lot longer. So I knew that if I was going to go back to school, it wasn't going to be right now.
It was going to be later. So anyway, I started thinking about it. And I kind of like asked around, right? I remember asking my what was going to end up being my mentor, Dr. James Hollingsworth. And he was like, I'll work with you and I'll teach you. And so he ended up teaching me a lot of what I do now, including hypnosis. I remember talking to my parents. I remember talking to other people.
And I was always kind of like, do I need to go back to school to do this? And and, you know, that's going to be a lot of money. And it's going to be a lot of time. And so like I got to make sure that this is the right thing, this is what I want to do. And pretty much across the board, it was like, yeah, but you're already doing it, right?
Like it's already working. And so I realized then that my desire to go back to school at that point was really because. I wanted to take myself more seriously. And I sort of believe that running the business and asking people to hire me and all the things that were like really hard at that point, because I'd never done it before. I kind of thought that if I got a degree that those things would be easier.
And what I can tell you now is that there's no shortcut to those things being easier. They're just you. They're just you learning those things and getting better.
And most people don't learn those things in school. So I decided not to get my degree. And I am so thankful because what it would have done for me is just delayed me going out and working my ass off to just do this. Because here's what would have happened for me. I would have done the two-year, three-year, five-year plan. And I wouldn't have been working on my business. I wouldn't have been learning how to market. I wouldn't have been learning how to sell.
I wouldn't have been learning how to work with athletes. And so I would have just taken that 30,000 or that 100,000 or that three to five years. And I would have just delayed. I would have just delayed all the hard work that it ended up taking me.
And that's how I feel about that. Now, again, you may have a different path. I also knew for me that I didn't want to work with disorders. I didn't want to work and I didn't want to deal with eating disorders.
I didn't want to deal with anxiety or depression. If you want to work with those things, you should get a degree. But if you want to just work with athletes on like the pretty common mental training challenges that almost all athletes deal with, you don't need an advanced degree. So I decided not to because I didn't want to work with disorders. The other thing that I didn't want to do is I didn't want to go work for an organization. I absolutely wanted to work with for myself.
That was part of what was appealing to me is I wanted to build my own thing. And some organizations want you to have a degree, not all of them. You know, we have some of our former students that are hiring some of our certified coaches, they do not have an advanced degree. So it's not a blanket statement. But, you know, if you want to work for an organization, figure out what their requirements are. But if you want to work for yourself, you do not need an advanced degree. So anyway, that was me in my like mid 20s trying to figure this out. And that was the path.
Again, I have confirmation bias. I'm really glad that I didn't go spend all that time and money, sort of delaying what I really needed to do, which was become an entrepreneur in this space and learn how to deliver these tools really, really well. I mean, the amount of teams, the amount of like learning that I did in those five years with teams and speaking and working with individual athletes, the amount of experience that I got in those three to five years on the coaching side, like amazing, the amount of experience I got on the business side, again, amazing, wouldn't have gotten that in school. So what a bitch has been delayed on learning those things for me. The other thing that I want to talk about is again, I'm really clear, and I'm really clear with my clients too. I'm really clear of my students and my like athlete clients. I don't work with disorders and my certification students don't either.
We do not work with disorders. So if that is the case, that's a referral. We refer out to somebody else.
Okay. So that's a really clear line for me. But again, like so many athletes are not, I mean, some of them are struggling with disorders, but many of them are not.
They're just low confidence or having like normal pregame nerves that have gotten a little out of control or they're struggling with how they talk to themselves or they need some deep breathing exercises. So that's what I do. That's what my certified students do. Okay. There's also no governing body. Now we can argue whether that's good or not from a coaching perspective or from the business of coaching, but there is no government oversight. There is no organizations that is saying, yes, you can do mindset coaching or no that you can't. So anybody that is saying you're accredited or you're allowed to do mental training, that doesn't exist.
That is a for-profit company that has ordained themselves as a governing body, if that makes sense. So again, you can argue whether that's good or not. For me, it's like the market is telling us, if you're not a good mental training coach, you won't get clients.
So I think it kind of solves itself. So again, you have to figure out if you want training or a degree or anything, you have to make sure that that thing is going to make you into a good coach. The market is determining which coaches make it. There's no governing body that ordains you as a mental training, even our certification. We are certifying you in our philosophy, in our training principles and all that. You can be a coach without our certification.
Right? But again, we're talking about developing the skills to be a great coach. And so the question is really, where can you get those skills? So all right.
So here's a couple other ways that I think are helpful to think about. There is no place that will make starting a business as a mental training coach like an immediate thing. There is no rubber stamp. There is no letters after your name or certificate that when you finish, you're going to have a line out the door of clients waiting for you. If anybody's trying to sell you that, run in the opposite direction because it's a lie.
You need to learn two very basic things, and you will hear me say this over and over and over again. To be successful in this business, you need to develop two skills. One, the skill of coaching, being able to get results for your clients. This is value. You are creating value in the world. The second skill is being able to communicate that value. In other words, you're going to be marketing what you can do and selling what you can do. So being good at coaching, being able to communicating about that coaching. Those are the two skill sets. You can learn those. By the way, you definitely are not going to learn how to communicate, market and sell yourself in any advanced degree for sports psychology that I know of.
I've even heard sometimes that you don't even actually learn about coaching. There's not a lot of applied practice as far as getting an advanced degree. You may learn about research and academic side and that sort of thing. But if you're considering getting a degree, make sure that you're going to learn how to be a really good coach. So just a couple of things that I've heard from other people within the mental training space that have gotten advanced degrees. So the other thing is, I think a lot of people want to get their advanced degree for the wrong reason.
And if you're interested in this, you have the time, you have the money and you want to nerd out on all the research and the academic side, like, cool. But if you are trying to start a mental training business, getting a degree is not going to give you just automatic confidence to do this. A certification is not going to either. Again, it's about the experience of doing this and getting good at doing it and getting good at communicating about the results that you're getting and doing that one million trillion times over and over again. And the other thing that I want to say is, again, for me, you do have to be good at this. And sometimes that comes from experience, experience in coaching. For me, at that point, a lot of it was experience in playing. And so for yourself, where is your experience and credibility coming from right now?
And again, you can build up the coaching skills if you don't have so much success on the playing side or the coaching side. But where are you going to sort of mind that wisdom, if you will, from your own life? Just think about that, because you're not going to get that in a degree either. And so making sure that you're able to think about yourself that way. And that's where you're going to have to push yourself.
You're going to have to start recognizing your voice, your special gift, what makes you you, faults and all, by the way, successes and failures, all of it are going to go into your credibility. That's not going to happen in any kind of program. The other thing that I think you can, the way that I think about it a little bit is like the difference between a personal trainer and like, let's say, an athletic trainer or physical therapist. Again, the physical trainer is really, really important, but they're not, they're not diagnosing anything. In fact, they're really helping you do things you probably could do on your own. Whereas on the physical therapist side or the athletic trainer side, they're really diagnosing things. And so they really do need an advanced degree, because that's serious.
They're things that you can't do on your own and you can't diagnose on your own. So that's another way that I kind of think about it. And so I hope this episode was helpful for you. I, and I will also tell you, we have people that come through our certification that have advanced degrees. They're already counselors or mental health, you know, therapists, and they're coming to us because they want to work one more with athletes and they want to expand their skill set, and they want to learn the business side and how they can market and sell their, their training. And so again, you're going to make the best decision for you and for your family. I just want you to sort of have like a bigger picture of advanced degrees and whether you really need one. And if you're going to go that path to do it for the right reasons and understand exactly why you're doing it, not just because you think, Oh, well, this is what I'm told to do.
You know, our society, hopefully it's changing a little bit is like, you know, you got to get your master's and your PhD, you got to take out student loans, and you got to do that. And like, no, you care what it costs, you just got to do it. And this is a field where you do not have to do it.
And again, do it for the right reasons if you want to do it. But that is not the difference between who is successful in this field and who isn't. And again, for me, I fully believe that it would have taken me a lot longer to be successful because I would have spent that time studying instead of doing. Now, when I think about the things that I would do differently, I would have gotten a business coach earlier.
That's what I would have done differently. I didn't need more academic training. I didn't need more theory. I didn't need more research. I didn't need more mental training tools. I didn't need to bump up my coaching toolbox. I was doing that. I needed more on the business side.
That would have fast tracked me faster than any advanced degree. So again, I hope this just gave you some things to think about because again, I can't make that decision for you. Nobody can make that decision for you. And everybody has their own confirmation bias, but hopefully it gave you some of the right questions to ask and just the different ways for you to see it.
I am totally biased. I think our certification is the best because it teaches you those two things. It teaches you the coaching skills. There's practicum. You actually start working with clients really early on and get that practice again, not with any disorders. We work with athletes on the very common things that most athletes struggle with, almost all athletes struggle with. So we stay in our lane with that, have a huge impact on people, then learn how to communicate that value and that impact with marketing and selling and all the things. And that's all in four months.
So that's what I think about that. If you have any questions, you guys, again, I'm an open book on this. And I literally got on the phone with somebody the other day that was really highly considering going back to school and she was really into mental health. And I said, look, if you want to work with anxiety and depression, do not do the certification. Go to school. But if you don't, and maybe you want to do that later, but if you don't and you just want to get started and you want to start working with clients now and get paid clients and then see if you like it and then maybe later get an advanced degree, then you should join our certification.
It's really that simple. And she wanted to work for herself too. So anyway, she ended up joining the certification. But again, those are the ways that I want you to think about it because I think sometimes with our society, we think, well, I was going to get an advanced degree. And it's like, yeah, but you're not working on learning how to start a business. You're not actually working with any clients. You're studying. So anyway, if you are watching this, we have a three day summit coming up.
If you're interested in being a mindset coach, we are going to do our three day summit for aspiring mind coaches on February 20th, 21st and 22nd. If you can't listen in on every day, that's okay. We'll have a limited time replay.
But you guys, this is like, we have so much information. We have guest coaches. We have some of our coaches coming back. Some of them had made multiple six figures as mental training coaches. Some of them have just got graduated and just gotten started, which I think is also really cool. Because you can see how they made like their first paid client, made their first couple of thousand. Like you can see how a few months ago, they weren't even working with clients. I didn't even know if they could. They were sitting in your chair like, oh, should I go back to school?
Should I do this? And now they're like actually getting paid to do this work. So that's kind of cool too, to see people that are just getting started. Day one is all about the belief of if you can do this, if you should do this as a career or even as a side hustle. Day two is about our eight step workshop, which you guys, this is like the foundational work of so many of the questions you have, who should I work with? What should I work with them on?
How am I going to get clients? Like all the things that seem really big and confusing in your mind, I'm going to walk you through it and it's going to be actionable. We have a workbook. We're going to teach you all the stuff. And day three is all about our certification. So again, it's like if you're considering doing this, you should do your due diligence.
You should be listening to podcasts like this. You should be thinking through every, every step of the way. And then it's time to make a decision. Like we really try to help you make the right, the best decision for you and then the ways to think about it because we don't want you in the certification if it's not the right fit. If it doesn't meet your long term goals or even your short term goals in this field or anywhere in your life, then you shouldn't join. So we really help you through that decision, show you what it's all about, really walk through so you can feel really confident in making that decision. Making that decision, yes or no too.
Like really getting it all out on the table so that you can make that decision and just feel really good about it. All right. So that summit is coming up February 20th, 21st, 22nd. It's at positiveperformancetraining.com forward slash mindset coach summit. Mindset coach summit. All one word at the end.
It's also going to be in the show notes. So anyway, hope to see you at the summit. Spots are limited. You have to pre-register and that's that. I hope this out so it was helpful.
If it was, please like it, subscribe, leave a review. We sure appreciate it. And as always, if you have any questions about this, getting an advanced degree or not, my path, what helps, what didn't help all the things come on over to Instagram at Lindsay Positive Performance. I also talk a lot about the certifications and trainings that I did get, which is like things like hypnosis. I learned hypnosis, which is what some of the things we talk about in the certification. So I did get trained in this. I just didn't go back to school. So I can talk a little bit about that on Instagram too. So anyway, have a great day and talk to you later. Bye for now. Hey guys, real quick, I wanted to make sure that you knew about our three day summit.
If you're an aspiring mindset coach or even ever just thought about being one and wondered if you could do it, wondering how to get started, all the questions are coming up for you, including all the doubts. I want you to come to our three day summit. I'm here with my little daughter, Grace. Can you say hi? Hi.
And I wanted to make sure that you knew about it. It's February 20th, 21st and 22nd. We're on noon Pacific time every single day. And you guys, again, if you've ever wanted to be a mindset coach, you do not want to miss this. There's also replays available through that next weekend. So if you miss one of the days or anything like that, you can watch it that weekend. So register, we're going to put the link in the show notes, but you can also go to positiveperformancetraining.com forward slash mindset coach summit. I'm going to be on all three days with some of our certified coaches. We're also going to have a lot of times going to be workshop style. I'm going to answer all of your questions live. So I'd love to see you there. Click the link in the show notes or again, go to positiveperformancetraining.com forward slash mindset coach summit. I can't wait to see you at our three day summit.
