So I’ve thought and prayed about it a lot the past year, and have decided to go back to school to become a Licensed Mental Health Counselor so I can work with athletes struggling with mental illness.
Until the past 1-2 years, I spent much of the last 10 years feeling hopeless and hating myself, falling into plenty of dark times that I’ve written about in the past (so I won’t re-write it all now). Recently, I’ve been fortunate enough to connect with tons of great experts and fellow athletes on my Podcast and via personal conversations. Now I'm finding tons of great research; and learning effective new strategies and ways of thinking about things on a daily basis that I never ONCE heard in the 7 years I spent seeing 4 different doctors and 3 different therapists. There are great doctors and therapists out there (many of which I’ve met and talked to this year), but overall, I think the practical application of comprehensive mental health treatment in this country is absolutely terrible.
I am not the smartest guy around, and I know I’ll never have all the answers; but I feel like I’ve been gifted with communication and the ability to take information and practically apply it to someone’s individual situation. My hope is to take that “Coaching” perspective, and translate that to Mental Health Counseling, so I can help people who are struggling to create a strategy and gameplan on how they can utilize Doctors (and medication if necessary), other Counselors, Nutritionists, Holistic Therapies, and any other effective methods in the best way possible so they don’t feel like they’re just wandering aimlessly through the broken healthcare system like I was for years.
I have to figure out what the details will look like, and it’ll likely take me some time since I’ll be taking classes part-time while working, but whatever I have to do to make it happen I'll do. Especially for the athlete population, who tends to struggle with identifying with the average counselor, I’m hoping I can be helpful to anyone that wants to talk to me or look at my educational content. I think with the platform I'm blessed to have with EliteFTS, there's a lot of potential for broad-reaching free content for athletes (and people in general) who can't afford a counselor on a regular basis. I know this will be a lot of work, but I'm pumped to take this on.
