The best way to build resilience and support student retention is to help students gain critical life skills, such as focusing, staying motivated, organizing, and eliminating distractions. And recent evidence underscores the power of human support in this process. 

Participants in an October 2025 study who received one-on-one coaching alongside a skill-building app saw significantly greater reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms over 30 days compared to those who used the app alone. The results held true for individuals with severe symptoms as well, proving that coaching is the critical differentiator. 

With one-on-one coaching, students can effectively tackle daily challenges, create their own self-guided goals, and work through common non-clinical challenges, ultimately leading to greater self-efficacy and better student retention rates.

What coaching is and isn’t

Coaching is subclinical and is designed to meet students upstream. It offers a structured, supportive environment for students to set their own self-guided goals and work through common non-clinical challenges like:

• Examining personal values
• Problem solving and organizing
• Uncovering motivations 
• Learning mindfulness

Coaching is not therapy. It is not a form of tutoring, nor is it mentorship. This is what makes coaching so beneficial. It is a program tailored to a student’s individual challenges and needs. 

Why invest in evidence-based coaching 

When working with a professional coach, students should feel seen, supported, and encouraged. Coaches aren’t there to dictate the student’s goals. Rather, they provide non-judgemental, compassionate, and culturally-sensitive guidance.

The Mantra Health coaching program, more specifically, focuses on teaching skills derived from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Students are encouraged to learn, practice, and apply healthy coping strategies to every day challenges.

“One of the things that is so important about coaching interventions is their ability to reach and stabilize students upstream of any significant challenges or symptoms they might develop. By intervening early, teaching them how to independently manage their challenges and stressors, we prevent symptom escalation as well as the need for more costly and time-intensive services, such as therapy,” says Carla Chugani, PhD, LPC, Vice President of Clinical Programs.

Two tracks, one goal: student success

The Mantra coaching program includes two different tracks: Productivity and Emotional Wellness Coaching, both of which include one-on-one support, 24/7 access to self-guided wellness courses, and a personalized plan centered around the students’ self-guided goals.

Productivity Coaching

This track focuses on improving students’ executive functioning skills. Working with a dedicated coach, students can tackle time management, organization, planning, problem solving, and more. This is vital for academic performance and semester-to-semester consistency.

Emotional Wellness Coaching

This track focuses on wellness-oriented goals, such as building confidence, improving communication skills, and navigating anxiety. Students learn critical life skills and how to apply them to everyday situations. It is this focus on resilience and emotional regulation that fundamentally changes the student’s capacity to stay enrolled.

Case in point: a student success story

Coaching delivers tangible results. One of our professional coaches worked one-on-one with a university student who wanted to build more self-awareness and learn how to set better boundaries with family. Here’s what resulted:

• The student learned mindfulness meditation, which he incorporated into his day-to-day routine. 
• He learned how to name emotions so he could build awareness into how certain emotions affected his overall mindset.
• After eight weeks, his sense of flourishing improved by nine points, and his perceived sense of stress decreased by nine points. 
• When he finished the coaching program, his self-proclaimed mantra was “If I don’t change my life, who will?”

An integrated, evidence-based coaching program can transform your retention outcomes. Our coaching program is built to support your students and your institution’s retention goals by offering professional, trained coaches who understand the student experience. 

Learn more about the coaching program and its benefits in this resource or contact partner@mantrahealth.com to get more details.