Why Build Mental Wellness?

HLN Wellness is the emotionally intelligent approach to mental health and well-being consulting. Our mission is to empower parents to help their children increase their focus and find their passion for life by developing valuable mental health skills.   We motivate parents to team with their children to pursue the realization of their potential whether the best fit is college or a direct career path after high school graduation.  It is through this pursuit that youth develop mental stability, joy, and self-worth by impacting their generation and those that follow.

We ensure that students’ unique stories, ambitious goals, and authentic passions are the drivers in students’ day-to-day lives.

16% of our lives are spent at our jobs and this is what our schools devote nearly all of their focus.  Our mental wellness is most challenged through the remaining 84% of the time spent engaging in personal life experiences.  As students, we are rarely taught to manage personal emotions, relationships with others, and trauma, including:

• grief/heartbreak

• parenting/childhood

• sickness/emotional pain

• addiction

• life/death

• healthy views of politics, economics, spirituality

While our schools devote nearly all of their focus on the job preparation, HLN incubates student’s passions and take their interests to the next level, while learning to self-manage the personal life experiences that can derail even our most academically talented students.  This diminishes the quality of life of the student and their potential family and workplace impact.

HLN students aren’t just encouraged to do well in class.  They are guided on the importance of personal development, mental health and well-being.

Why Healthy Living Nation?

At HLN, It’s not only grades and test scores. HLN offers the guidance students need and the peace of mind that parents seek. When students are empowered to develop focus, identify and own their passions, they build mental wellness and increase their odds of surviving and thriving in school and the workplace.

HLN Guides Students To:

·      Create a strategic plan based on their goals—starting 9th grade or earlier

·      Examine and navigate their key life pillars with unlimited, 24/7 support

·      Identify their passions and launch a meaningful passion project

·      Polish and exhibit their independent research, community outreach initiatives, or entrepreneurial activity

 ·      Tailor their extracurricular activities, internships, and summer opportunities around their passion

·      Achieve their goal grades, and SAT/ACT score through tutoring and test-taking support

·      Gain admission to their dream schools

·      Build contacts and launch their careers as employees and entrepreneurs

·      Develop ongoing life skills, interests, and personal goals through near-peer mentorship

After years of research, workshops, conferences and personal life experience in the mental illness space, HLN founder, Mark Lawrence, encourages a different approach. Building mental wellness is very different than treatment and prevention of mental illness. “If our entire society were to concentrate on building mental wellness muscles, the mental illness pipeline would sharply decline and nearly choke itself out,” states Lawrence. While there has always been and will always be a percentage of our society that faces mental illness challenges, research indicates that we can slow down, halt and ultimately reverse this trend. To accomplish this feat, members of society must be prepared to become slightly uncomfortable. We must questions some things that we’ve long not known, but accepted as truth. We must learn to embrace the power of gradually accepting that there are things we simply do not know. The power in this approach is that it opens the floodgates for truth.

Memory & Imagination vs. Truth

For the past decade, resilience (the ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change) has been a popular goal and overused term in mental wellness. Rather than focus on the process of recovery and adjustment to adversity or change, HLN focuses on acceptance that change is inevitable. Instead of a mindset of reaction, it promotes acceptance that life is ongoing change that must be anticipated and embraced. Stress and anxiety exist only in our memory of the past and imagination of the future. The cannot exist when we learn to focus on the now, where the truths of ongoing adversity and change are embraced.

While much of our society has decided to allow emotions like anger and fear to be commonly acceptable, (even believed by some to be healthy), HLN students are taught that such emotions are a choice. It is not difficult to choose not to allow others the privilege of igniting such emotions, but this habit must be taught. Like many emotions, because we believe in anger and fear, they are thought to be truths.

HLN students learn that they are not truths, but exist only in our imagination.

6 Reasons Why HLN Succeeds

Passion-focused Growth

While academics, standardized test scores, college admissions, and jobs lay at the foundation of an impressive youth development process, our mentoring approach places emphasis on students exploring their passions through participation in extracurriculars and the building of individual passion projects. We help students not only demonstrate academic excellence, but also develop leadership skills and the drive to be self-starters and go-getters. 

Through an emotionally intelligent approach, we help our students identify leadership opportunities in their schools and communities and provide guidance in taking those opportunities to the next level. Not only do our students focus on building their communities and giving back, these projects help enhance their self-worth and mental wellness. 

In developing their projects, students work with our full-service in-house marketing team to build websites, branding and social media strategies.

Near Peer Mentorship

At HLN, our mentors are all full-time, recent graduates, trade professionals and entrepreneurs. Because they are closer in age to their students, they can therefore relate better to them. Our students truly view their mentors as mentors, not as counselors or teachers. In addition to establishing a non-parental relationship through near-peer mentorship, we match each student to a mentor based on their academic and professional goals and interests, personalities and strengths. Each of our students (and their parents) complete a detailed questionnaire before being assigned a mentor. Carefully matching students to mentors enables students and mentors to build strong, productive relationships.

Our mentors can speak to the qualities crucial for success in college, the workplace, and beyond, and help foster these skills in their students. Our mentors have successfully completed rigorous academic courses at their respective colleges and universities, or work in fields directly related to the student’s interests. This allows them to equip their mentees with the studying and time management skills necessary for success at higher level institutions. 

Colleges, employers and investors want to partner with students they believe will succeed in the face of adversity and who they believe will rise to the challenge, playing on their strengths to produce impressive work. Our mentors teach their students how to recognize their strengths and how to create something impactful through those strengths. 

Small Student to Mentor Ratio

HLN is a boutique firm, which allows our team to provide high level strategy and individualized mentoring to each student. We intentionally limit the number of students each of our mentors works with in order to ensure that mentors can devote their undivided attention to their students. Mentors customize each part of the mentoring process, building out personalized roadmaps for each of their students in accordance with their strengths and goals.

While other wellness programs may hire part-time or contracted therapists to help students address their challenges, each and every one of our mentors works full time, ensuring fast response rates and flexible meeting times.

Emotionally Intelligent Mentoring

Each of our mentors are trained in emotional intelligence, and incorporate this philosophy into their mentoring. Based on research from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, 75% of high school students used negative words to describe how they feel at school, including “Tired,” “Stressed,” and “Bored.” Students want to achieve the mindset that will lead to success, but they need help—and that’s where HLN comes in. Our near-peer mentors are trained to inspire, empower, and support students to discover what they are truly excited and passionate about.

Our mission is to empower each individual to find their passion while developing valuable life skills for college, work after high school or entrepreneurship. We motivate students to view education as a path to realizing their potential and making an impact on their generation.

Once our students have reduced their stress and refocused their energy on their passions, we often hear from parents, “I have never seen my child so motivated.” With our mentors supporting and encouraging them, 100% of our students feel empowered to pursue their passions and feel proud of their accomplishments.

All the Support You Need in a One-Time Fee

Fees for wellness therapy begin at a few hundred dollars per hour. What sets our services apart at HLN is our emphasis on the individual student and their genuine passions, goals and strengths. Starting as early as 8th grade, our dedicated Senior Mentors partner with students to create personalized roadmaps, focusing on how they can reach their full potential as both a student and an individual. Through this authentic, emotionally intelligent approach to mentoring, our students organically develop into the mentally sound college students, employees and entrepreneurs.

All of our services are custom designed to fit you and your child’s needs, which is why we only work with a limited number of students at any given time. Year after year, our approach consistently proves that an investment in our services will not only help your child thrive as mentally well-rounded, but also to reach their post-high school and beyond potential.

Unlimited mentoring from any location

Unlike some other therapy programs, we offer flexibility when it comes to scheduling with our students, as we know high school coursework, extracurriculars and youth life responsibilities can be very demanding. While other firms may hire part-time or contracted mentors, each and every one of our mentors works full time, ensuring fast response rates and flexible meeting times. Our mentors are not on a 9-5; they are available to meet with students seven days a week, at their students’ convenience. We work successfully via remote meetings. No matter where our students are located in the world, we work with them on their own time to allow them to make the most of their mentoring year round.

It is said that to err is human. “ERR” means to violate an accepted standard of conduct. But what is “standard conduct” and who sets those standards? In truth, every living being carries trauma in their cellular memory. It has been transferred generationally and compounded with experiences since birth. These memories can be denied, but not ignored, as they manifest uniquely in our lives, often varying significantly — even within families, cultures, societies and races.

Only through ERR (Experience, Recognition & Recovery), can we define, acknowledge and accept our trauma — however lasting and disruptive it might be. Once accepted and embraced, we can all be taught to remove the barriers to our productivity and greatness — at work, in school, in our communities and within our families.