Engin’s Story

Until the age of 17, I played football in club academies, achieving regional championships, top scorer titles, and even national team trials. However, in my final year of high school, I chose education over sports. In just nine months, starting from scratch, I ranked among the top 1,000 out of 2 million students in Turkey’s national university entrance exam, earning a place at Boğaziçi University, the country’s top university.

I share this because I want you to understand something: If you train seriously and with discipline in any sport, you automatically develop an "Strong” Mindset. The mental toughness, discipline, and structure gained through sports, when combined with motivation and proper guidance, can take you anywhere—even into fields you’ve never explored before. Elite Mindset is built on a strong mind, combined with structured weekly plans, growth mindset, relentless learning from mistakes, 6 AM cold showers, and sacrifices made in hobbies and pleasures.

I never lost my connection with sports. During middle and high school, I played basketball, volleyball, and handball alongside football. After graduation, I moved to Berlin for work, then to Budapest, where I’ve lived since 2010. I also had six-month living experiences in the US and Spain, fully immersing myself in expat life. This gave me first-hand insight into the unique challenges and needs of expat athletes playing abroad.

In Budapest, I founded a proprietary trading firm and spent 12 years as a full-time trader. I quickly realized that success in trading was 90% mental. Staying consistently profitable for over a decade was incredibly challenging—but also exciting and rewarding.

During this time, football and trading also brought me serious injuries. There were moments when I feared I might never recover completely. But with the right mentality, resilience, and training, I made a full recovery and returned to an active life. Football remains at my core, but I also love tennis, indoor cycling, yoga, and surfing.

In recent years, I have focused on the mental side of trading and poker, coaching high-performing traders and poker players to optimize their mental performance, decision-making, and emotional control. As I always say: once you reach the Elite Mindset, the field you apply it to is entirely up to you.

To deepen my knowledge in this field, I started a Psychology & Neuroscience Master’s program at King’s College London in 2023 and continue to advance my expertise in performance psychology, neuroscience, and mental coaching.