Darlene Williams-Prades focuses on coaching her clients through mediation and holistic mentoring with her coaching businesses Invisible Me and Superior Life Forever. Williams-Prades promotes positive change and empowers athletes to navigate the pressures of their careers and personal lives, contributing to their overall well-being.
Williams-Prades spoke with rolling out about her coaching businesses and the benefits of holistic mentoring.
Why did you create Invisible Me and Superior Life Forever?
When it comes to athletes, especially young athletes, when they’re living in their car, or they live in a single-parent home, they get these so-called friends until they get their money, and then they’re the gravy train. They don’t have anyone to say to them, here are the things you need to avoid immediately. Their agent and their manager not going to say that because that is their meal ticket. But someone like me and someone like my husband, who has been in sports, who has been out there, understands you can make this, and you don’t have to be bankrupt by the time you hit a certain age, but recognize you’re never always going to be safe, no matter what sport you play, because the minute you get hurt, if it’s a serious injury, you may not recover from that. You have to think about what’s next. But you’re not thinking what’s next at that moment. You need to think about what’s next when you start making a plan for your life.
What are the benefits of holistic mentoring for athletes instead of therapy?
Therapy is different. Some therapists give you medication because they feel that it affects you. That’s not what the problem is. The root of any problem starts at someone’s core. If I grew up in a single-parent home, that’s the start of my problem because there are things that I do know and things I don’t. If I grew up in a home with violence, there are things that I do know and things that I don’t. An example of that, and I said this to someone, do you yell at your kids like to tell them to go to bed through the house? You don’t like to walk into the room and say, “Hey, it’s time to go to bed?” They were like, “Yeah, I’ve been doing that all my life. My parents did it to me, and I’m fine.” You’re not fine. Because what you did was you just broke this tradition of you screaming through your house to tell your kids to go to bed so when they get older, they’re going to scream through the house to get people to do what they want to get done. The person asked me what I do, and I said I would walk to each child’s room and say, “Hey, it’s whatever o’clock. It’s time for bed.” It teaches the psychological mind to be calm. If you’re telling them to go to sleep in a calm manner, they don’t have nightmares. They don’t wake up angry. If you’re screaming at them, when they go to sleep, they’re gonna go sleep angry, versus [just] relaxed. That holistic approach allows children and adults to build a better future for what we have to deal with.
