Health mentoring benefits people in a variety of amazing ways. Whatever your well-being goals, a good mentor can help you reach them. Here are some of the big ways in which a health mentor can make all the difference.
Expertise: There’s perhaps no resource more valuable than your mentor’s knowledge — and his or her ability to convey that knowledge to you. A mentor will distill the most important advice for any health journey, cutting through a lot of the contradictory information you may have heard to give you the most effective, up-to-date, and actionable advice. It’s expertise you can trust.
Experience: The plan you devise with your health mentor is tailored to your needs and circumstances. But there’s no substitute for the experience the mentor has acquired working with countless other patients, even if their own plans looked nothing like your own. Mentors understand how to handle any situation that develops, how to motivate, how to communicate, and how to adapt.
Accountability: Being in regular contact with someone does wonders for your motivation. Aside from the mentor’s expertise, merely having an objective person involved in your goal-setting and progress makes the process far likelier to succeed. Externalizing your intentions — discussing them openly with a mentor, instead of just letting them bounce around your head — is one of the keys to putting forward the effort required to follow through on them. A health mentor makes you accountable.
Big Picture Thinking: It’s all too easy for us to get discouraged by short-term failure when pursuing health goals. A health mentor helps to keep our eyes on the prize. Progress will not always follow a straight line. Mentoring keeps us on track with a plan, which is essential to maintaining momentum, even through the tough moments.
Partnership: A health mentor is your partner in a journey toward well-being. At the end of the day, having another person walk with you, step by step, as you attempt to elevate your quality of healthy living, makes the experience less lonely and more engaging. Your friends and family support you, and a mentor doesn’t replace the emotional lift you can get from loved ones. But having a partner whose only interest is your health progress can be uniquely beneficial.
Ultimately, health mentoring benefits you by making you more educated and confident about the process of sustaining healthy habits over the long term. Regular contact with an expert makes you likelier to maintain momentum and positive results, even after the period of mentoring ends. In this way, health mentoring actually becomes one of the best ways to ensure long-term self-sufficiency.
If you’re an EHE patient, we really encourage you to use our health mentoring program. It’s an opportunity to learn more than you ever have about what goes into good health and holistic, preventive care. It helps you identify goals and stay on track. It enhances your journey toward well-being.