By the Numbers: Inside the Mind of the Athlete

Summary

Anya — a former WTA professional from Slovenia who played ITF juniors and WTA-level tennis before retiring at 25 — and Yoda — a former Slovenian table tennis national champion who studied sports at the University of Sport and competed professionally in Spain — join Lisa Stone to discuss their coaching methodology, which integrates numerology as an intake tool for understanding a player’s psychological profile. The episode is unusual for ParentingAces — Lisa prefaces it by acknowledging her own initial skepticism and explicitly asking listeners to stay open-minded. The central framework: by calculating numerical values from a player’s name, surname, and date of birth using a Chaldean (ancient) alphabet, Anya and Yoda can map a player’s psychological “programs” — the unconscious messages that drive self-sabotage, fear-based play, or performance under pressure — and then coach both the player and the coach on how to address them. Anya describes her personal breakthrough as an example: a coach told her to “just hit full power, every ball” and she played her best tennis, reaching a tournament final against Elina Svitolina.

Guest Background

Anya is a former WTA professional born in Slovenia who moved to Germany at age 20 to access better training environments and competition. She played professionally through her mid-20s, experiencing success but chronic mental performance struggles — coaches consistently identified mental weakness without being able to explain or fix it. At 25, following an injury that forced her off tour, she met a group including Yoda who were working with numerology and mindset transformation. She returned to competition and achieved better results training less, attributing this to mental freedom. She subsequently worked as a coach at a German tennis academy. At the time of recording she is based in the Dominican Republic.

Yoda is a former Slovenian table tennis champion who competed nationally (champion under-15 and under-17) and professionally in Spain. He studied at the University of Sport and was always interested in the mental-spiritual dimensions of competition — practicing yoga at age 15, studying psychology books as a teenager, attending workshops in London. He met Anya through a meditation group, subsequently joined her coaching work, and now works with her applying numerology as a player profiling tool. They are a couple and co-founders of trainyourvibration.com.

Key Findings

1. The Mental Performance Gap Is Universal and Underserved

Both guests describe the same problem from their own athletic careers: coaches could identify mental weakness (“your head is not there”) but could not explain it or provide actionable solutions. Anya recalls: “What is mental? I need to work on my head, I need to be more focused — I never really got a good answer to my question.” Yoda describes being labeled “too aggressive” and “too emotional” under pressure throughout his career, with no coach providing a systematic method for addressing it. The absence of mental performance tooling is not a niche problem — it is endemic across the sport at every level.

2. Numerology as an Intake/Assessment Tool, Not a Belief System

Yoda is explicit that the numerology method is presented as a practical intake tool, not a spiritual belief: “It doesn’t matter the name actually — it’s just a matter of even if it’s spiritual energy or just numerology.” The Chaldean alphabet converts letters (name, surname, middle name, nickname) and birth date into single-digit numbers that then map to psychological tendencies — using the same logic as traditional Chinese medicine’s organ-emotion correlations (e.g., lungs storing worry, sadness, tension; kidneys storing fear). Yoda compares skepticism about this approach to “being skeptical regarding antibiotics in 2018” — arguing that empirical effectiveness matters more than methodological purity.

3. The “Vicious Circle” and “Positive Circle” Framework

The core diagnostic output is two circles: a “vicious circle” representing the player’s self-sabotaging patterns (self-doubt, fear-based decisions, negative internal voice) and a “positive aspiring circle” representing the player’s latent potential and strengths. The coaching work is to shift the player from operating in the vicious circle toward the positive circle — which, according to Yoda, is a competitive advantage: “A lot of players are winning games and they are negative. They are winning just to survive — under pressure and winning from their arrogance and fear, not out of love of the game.” A player who loses while positive is already winning the internal competition.

4. Early Intervention Is More Effective Than Late Intervention

Anya describes working with both junior and adult players and observing that juniors carry fewer entrenched negative messages: “Juniors have less negative messages than some adult players already — because they are growing up slowly.” Adult players have accumulated years of competitive failures, personal problems, and solidified psychological patterns. The earlier a coach or parent can help a player identify and reprogram self-limiting messages, the less mental reconstruction is needed later. Anya uses the stroke analogy: reprogramming a forehand is easier at eight than at sixteen; the same is true for mental patterns.

5. Anya’s Breakthrough — Permission to Play Full Power

The most concrete case study in the episode is Anya’s personal breakthrough at a WTA tournament in Turkey. Her coach (informed by the numerology profiling) gave her a specific instruction: “Just hit full power, every ball. Enjoy. Do not worry.” That single message unlocked something: “I was finally free — finally mentally free to play my game. It doesn’t matter who is on the other side.” In the next tournament, she played a final against Elina Svitolina and played “unbelievable.” The mechanism: the instruction targeted precisely her vicious-circle pattern (hesitation, self-doubt about whether her technique was good enough) and replaced it with a simple, positive action directive.

6. Coach Communication Is the Practical Application of the Profiling

The value for coaches is not the numerology itself but what it enables: knowing which communication approach activates a player versus which amplifies their fear. Yoda explains: “You know that that person is coming from fear — so you are not pushing them with certain messages that enhance their fear. You give them courageous messages, bold messages, audacious.” A coach who knows a player tends to self-sabotage from insecurity will approach differently than a coach who knows a player struggles with over-aggression under pressure. The profile is a communication map, not a destiny.

7. Parent Profiling Is as Important as Player Profiling

Anya and Yoda extend the framework explicitly to parents: understanding a parent’s numerical profile helps coaches explain why a parent behaves in certain ways and how to reframe coaching conversations so the parent supports rather than undermines the work. This triangular application — player, coach, parent all profiled — is a more comprehensive model of the family system that creates junior players. It acknowledges that a child’s psychological patterns are often modeled from and reinforced by parents.

8. Players Winning Negatively vs. Players Winning Positively

One of Yoda’s most provocative observations: many players are winning while in a vicious-circle mental state — operating from arrogance, fear of losing, or survival mode — and this winning is not sustainable and is physically damaging. “Winning games and they are negative — injuries happen.” By contrast, a player who plays in a positive aspirational state — competing from love of the game, genuine confidence — may win less in the short term but builds a sustainable performance platform and protects physical health. This is a fundamentally different theory of competitive performance from the “results at all costs” model.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Be open to non-traditional mental performance tools — the inability to define what “working on your head” means concretely is a gap that coaches, sports psychologists, and alternative practitioners are all trying to fill, and no single approach holds all the answers
• Observe whether your child competes from a place of joy and engagement or from a place of fear and survival — the competitive emotion, not just the result, is a development indicator
• Understand that the messages coaches give should be calibrated to the player’s psychological profile — the same instruction (“hit harder”) can be liberating for one player and paralyzing for another
• Early mental pattern work — at the junior level before negative programs entrench — is more efficient than late-stage reconstruction
• Consider that parent psychological patterns may be as influential as player psychological patterns in shaping competitive behavior

INTENNSE Relevance

• Player mental profiling for roster management: Anya and Yoda’s core tool — understanding what psychological patterns drive a player’s competitive behavior — is directly applicable to INTENNSE’s roster management. A league that can identify players who compete from positive aspiration versus players who perform from fear and survival instinct makes better team-building decisions and reduces in-season conflict
• Coach communication training: The practical output of the numerology framework — knowing which message activates each player — is a formalized version of what great INTENNSE coaches must do naturally. Training INTENNSE coaches to develop individual communication profiles for each player on their roster would be a differentiating capability
• Broadcast emotional narrative: Players who compete from love of the game are broadcast assets. The players who visibly enjoy competition, fight from a place of confidence rather than fear, and express genuine emotion — positive and negative — are the players audiences attach to. INTENNSE’s selection for players who compete positively is both a performance strategy and a production strategy
• Holistic player support infrastructure: INTENNSE’s stated commitment to professional player infrastructure (training, S&C, nutrition) should extend to mental performance as a formal element. Anya and Yoda’s framework is one possible tool — and their case that early mental intervention is more effective than late intervention supports investing in mental performance support before problems surface rather than as crisis response
• WTA/women’s player pipeline: Anya’s profile — WTA professional who achieved better results after adopting holistic mental training, now coaching at academy level — is exactly the kind of former player that INTENNSE’s women’s roster strategy could engage. Former WTA players who understood the mental demands of professional tennis are pipeline coaches and scouts for INTENNSE’s women’s signing process

Notable Quotes

“I never really got a good answer to my question — they would say ‘you need to work on your head’ but what does that mean?” — Anya

“A lot of players are winning games and they are negative — they are winning just to survive, under pressure, winning from their arrogance and fear, not out of love of the game.” — Yoda

“I was finally free — finally mentally free to play my game. It doesn’t matter who is on the other side.” — Anya (on her WTA breakthrough in Turkey)

“The person that is insecure — you understand why they are this way, and you stop giving them messages that enhance the fear. You give them courageous, bold, audacious messages.” — Yoda