Interview with Dr. Christine Silverstein - Cover Story - November 2026

Hello Dr. Chrstine, it is an honor to have you in the Relatable Voice Magazine. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hello! I am a Peak Performance Coach, Behavioral Health RN, and Hypnosis Specialist. I opened the doors to my private practice, The Summit Center for Ideal Performance, 30 years ago that is now located in Oakland, NJ where I hold in-person and online sessions. At my center, I assist clients of all ages, from nursery schools to nursing homes, to aid them in achieving their best performance in areas of health and wellness, athletics, academics, business, and performing arts. My specialty is in working with children, teens, and young adults to assist them in using the power of their own minds and to teach them how to optimize their amazing brains.

I use approaches rooted in whole-brained integration, such as Mindful Toughness ® skill sets that focus on strengthening neural pathways through self-hypnosis, controlled breathing, mental rehearsal, positive self-talk, and performance-based feedback loops. These are not simply psychological tools. They are neuro-regulatory strategies that help stabilize attention, reduce stress reactivity, and reinforce adaptive neuro-patterns over time. In addition to my work in-office, I am the author of an award-winning book, Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults to Win in Life.

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.

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.

What inspires you in your work?

As a Peak Performance Coach, it is not so much what inspires me in my work but who inspires me in it. I have worked with many clients of all ages who have trusted me to assist them on their journeys to be the best they were born to be. It takes courage, fortitude, and self-reflection to overcome adversity and succeed using the Mindful Toughness® skillsets I teach them. I am merely the facilitator in the process who guides them, but it is up to them to follow through to win in life. This effort makes my work shine brighter, but they are the true stars.

Who inspired me was the 9-year-old girl I worked with who had disordered eating and almost died because of an appendectomy that she healed from physically but not mentally or spiritually. She had to work hard just to go to school, and that year, she won the school spelling bee, got all As on her report card, and won a leadership award. After graduating from high school, she set off to study psychology and nutrition to help kids who have similar eating problems. I am inspired by all my clients like Karen, whom I speak about in my book, and I am proud of them and their accomplishment for using the power of the mind that is innate within all of us.

Share something that our audience might not know about you.

When I was 10, my father was the director of the Police Athletic League (PAL) in my town. At his center he had many sports for boys, such as basketball, football, and baseball, but no competitive sports for girls, except on “Girl’s Day” during the school year where we would run relay races each Wednesday afternoon. This was long before Title 9.

One day while at a public-school playground, I saw a sign on the outside wall of the equipment building where the manager announced an upcoming NY city-wide roller -skating race that I could sign up for. I got measured for my height at the handball court and was placed in the “Mite” class for my age. Since I did not know the definition of a mite, I called myself “Mighty Mouse.”

I did not tell my parents and coached myself by imagining crossing the finish line first while skating “like the wind” with Pegasus wings on my heels.

After winning my first race, I placed my prize, a new pair of shinny roller skates, on the kitchen table. When my mother saw them, she was surprised by my win. My proud dad took me to the Queens Championship, and I won first place. From there I qualified for the NYC championship and placed there as well. From then on in my life, whenever I have a situation when I must wrestle through adversity to thrive, the Mighty Mouse within me always comes to the rescue.

How did you get started in writing?

While attending the Program for Nurse Executives at Teachers College, Columbia University, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the history of nursing science development. After graduation, I wrote history articles for professional journals, starting in 2006, when I published a seminal paper: “Therapeutic Interpersonal Interactions: The Sacrificial Lamb?” From there I wrote papers on the history of psychiatric nursing, but I never considered myself a “writer.”

It wasn’t until I sent a 7-page letter to my dad when he was ill to help him overcome paralysis, and he called me in tears, while my mother held the phone. He said he had never realized until then that I was a good writer, and he wanted me to promise him on his deathbed that I would become an author in his stead because he never got the opportunity.

But it was not until over 20 years later that I began my journey as a writer after I almost drowned at the Outer Banks in NC. I was walking along the shoreline in ankle-deep water during a storm, got swept away by a giant wave and thought I was going to die. At that moment, I felt the presence of angels, and I told them I had to write a book to fulfill a promise to my father before I succumbed to death. Immediately afterwards, a man came from nowhere into the water and reached out his hand to save me. I looked like a human sandcastle.

He was a professor of English literature, and he held up a book in front of my eyes to show me, The Count of Monte Cristo, he was reading. Then I got the message in spirit from my dad, and I knew it was time to write my epic, which I started some months later.

Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your book and the story behind it?

The motivation for writing my book in English in 2022 was the situations that took place around the globe and in the US at that time, such as the war in Ukraine, deaths from COVID-19, the Uvalde school shooting, high rates of anxiety and depression of our children, teens, and young adults, as well as suicides while our teens had no treatments available that could help them.

At that time, my book was a call-to-action because I knew that my work of over 25 years with these age groups could help desperate parents to help themselves through trauma and help their children to do the same. By using the power of their minds, I was confident that through the use of Mindful Toughness ® skill sets I teach that are innate within, easy to learn and use, and are as free as the air we breathe once learned, could help us build resilient young people who would thrive.

I was inspired to translate my book into Arabic because of a transformative spiritual experience I had when visiting Egypt on a Nile River boat tour, where I wrote the Introduction to my book. My tour guide , who was an Egyptologist, helped me to understand the hieroglyphics on the temple walls and ancient medical treatments for all people who were treated with respect no matter their class or religion. After seeing where the Holy Family stayed while running from the wrath of Herod, that is now located in a cave under a Catholic church in Old Cairo, I began to cry and could not speak. After this transformation, I promised to publish my book in Arabic. (You can read about my motivations for writing and publishing my books in English and Arabic on my website at: drchristinesilverstein.com.)

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I enjoy combining business with pleasure to travel around the world as a public speaker, historian, and peak performance coach. As a person who loves immersive experiences in places I have never visited before, I’ve presented my work in Rome, Helsinki, and in the US in Kona, Hawaii, St. Louis, Missouri, and Los Angeles, CA. I have enjoyed giving speeches and keynote addresses at Universities, such as at the Sciences Po in Paris, Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and at NYU, Columbia University, and Fordham University.

If you had to describe yourself in three words, what would they be?

I would describe myself as a deep individual, characterized by intense self-reflection, high emotional intelligence, and a preference for meaning over surface-level interactions. I am also one who is goal-oriented,  and compassionate.

Are you working on any new projects or ideas that you’d like to share?

I am currently working on becoming a guest on Arabic podcasts, and I am beginning to develop courses that would aid readers to incorporate Mindful Toughness® skill sets into their everyday lives, like how to win a wrestling tournament, how to heal drug-free from surgery using Mind Power, and how to get the best sleep at night and accomplish your goals.

What are your goals and aspirations moving forward?

My goal is the same as when I first started out on my journey of writing Wrestling Through Adversity, that is, to convey the message that there is a need for a paradigm shift in mental health care because neither our government, families, schools, or healthcare professionals alone are prepared to do the job of promoting mental health beyond the sparsity of programs and low funding that can help our young people to thrive.

I hope that we, as societies, aspire higher to become independent practitioners of Mindful Toughness® skill sets and that we work together in communities to help each other and our children to help themselves to win in life with our wisdom and guidance.

Dr. Christine Silverstein is a compassionate author, hypnotherapist, educator, and Peak Performance Coach supporting children, teens, and adults.

Her personalized Hypno-Coaching approach typically involves nine to twelve one-hour sessions, helping clients harness their subconscious minds and develop skills for everyday challenges. Her programs include Winning Ways for Teens and Winning Ways for Wrestlers, which cultivate resilience and peak performance. Operation Heal focuses on reducing stress and supporting healing before, during, and after surgery.

She uses imagery, storytelling, therapeutic metaphors, and the Affect Bridge Technique to address past traumas and encourage personal growth. Her manuals offer inspiration and practical guidance, while Metamorphosis and Train to Regain support individuals seeking fertility enhancement and stroke recovery, respectively, with empathy, insight, and tailored coaching. Her work emphasizes understanding each client’s unique challenges and providing tools that extend beyond coaching sessions, helping individuals apply newfound confidence and resilience across sports, education, work, and personal life.

Find out more at https://drchristinesilverstein.com.

Interview by Lucia Matuonto.

Cover story published in The Relatable Voice Magazine - November 2026. Download the full magazine for free at https://www.relatable-media.com/the-relatable-voice-magazine