Athletes and Teams

We are now booking affordable pre-season team-building programs to improve player confidence, team chemistry, and mental toughness to set the stage for an old-school season of unity and championship attitudes.

Here is more information on this program.

And please read our blog post on vulnerability for more information about our approach.


Can leadership, confidence, and teamwork be taught?

Absolutely.

Communicating with and motivating today’s “modern” kids can be a challenge for coaches today. My team-building programs provide an airtight methodology for coaches to improve those dynamics on and off the field.

Just as athletes need to work on their physical skills, they also need to work on their emotional and mental skills. With a combination of group and individual meetings, I bring participants to a spot where they know each other much more deeply, are committed to their goals as individuals and as a team, and players have the self-knowledge to remove mental and emotional obstacles standing in the way of peak performance.

Here is more information on my team-building program.

Here is more information on my work with individual athletes.

After two hours with Jeff, not a single boy in the room had checked the time. It was a transformative experience for us. Jeff has a gift in reading people and fundamentally wants to improve our outlook on our seasons, our relationships and our lives. Between the group and individual connections, all our emotions were in play, and he created a powerfully trusting and positive environment. He is a healer, a motivator, an entertainer and always an ally. – Chip Davis, Deerfield Academy Athletic Director and boys’ lacrosse head coach.

The curriculum includes hard skills such as:

  • Mental steadiness and focus
  • Ability to use adversity to fuel success instead of failure
  • To play with lasting, intentional confidence,
  • To manage the “gremlins” in their heads, so positivity prevails
  • Manage stress and anxiety, both individually and as a group
  • To set goals: participants learn to devise a plan, implement that plan, achieve benchmarks and reach goals
  • Drive: Find a sense of purpose – what does it look like if they’re successful? What is it going to look like if they don’t achieve their goals?
  • Be a better teammate and more coachable player.

I then teach players to apply these skills to specific aspects of their game: mental steadiness and focus allow you to see the ball or puck more clearly, the ability to use adversity to fuel success allows you to not lose your composure when you miss a shot, and so on.

How am I different from a sports psychologist? Sport psychologists have many techniques to help players perform better despite their issues. I delve deeper and focus on why a player has issues in the first place and work with them, using the forward-thinking methodology of life-coaching, to get past their issues and thus reduce their impact on the player.

The work is intense, but fun. I teach athletes about the work they need to do as a team and as individuals to reach their goals and achieve their individual and collective visions and discuss the methodology for doing so. The confidence kids learn, combined with an increasing sense of family, is an unbeatable combination.

I customize every workshop to the circumstances of the situation: Please contact me to discuss your team’s particular requirements and how can they can best be met in a workshop or consultation setting. I am glad to discuss your goals and how we can achieve them.

I also offer both short- and long-term individual life coaching as well as keynote addresses.

I am a senior on the softball team. I just wanted to take the time to email you and let you know that I really enjoyed the leadership workshop with Jeff Levin last night. Going into the meeting I figured it was going to be someone just talking at us giving us pointers on how to grow as a leader on an athletic team. However, Jeff made it so much more than that. The workshop was interactive and everyone participated. I feel like after only an hour-long meeting with him I have learned more about myself and how to grow into a better leader than I have in any other way. After talking to a few athletes who were also at one of the workshops last night, I have heard nothing but positive feedback.

I just wanted to take the time to personally let you know how much we enjoyed the workshop and how much we learned from it. – Emily M.

For us, this is about sports, but also so much more than sports. Here is our mission statement:

JLC Team Building offers aspiring athletes and their families and coaches an opportunity for a variety of immersion experiences in leadership and character development. Athletes across this country have opportunities to create team experiences together that, going well beyond wins and losses, are life changing. Our mission is to teach and inspire student athletes to become the best they can be in all facets of the game on and off the field—to behave selflessly for the Team… to believe in the power of the experience… and to generally come to see that the world needs leaders who are creative, confident, focused, perseverant, caring, courageous, tough, fair, and, most of all, independent in thought and action. We seek to do our part to create young leaders who will advocate for themselves, lead their peers on and off the field, and, when the time comes, guide the families they raise, the companies for which they work, and the young people whom they coach in directions that exemplify true values, keeping the Golden Rule at the heart of everything they do, everything they teach, and everything they are.