Your Mindset Matters - An HSNT Board Member Spotlight

It can be common for individuals who major in English in college to end up somewhere they didn’t quite intend. English is such a broad discipline that there are dozens and dozens of ways someone can put their skills to use, and that often leads them to something they weren’t expecting. For HSNT board member Sara Schroeder, she actually did end up using her English degree, as an Adjunct Instructor at UNT in the freshman writing courses.

But she still ended up somewhere completely different.

“I was at UNT as an adjunct instructor in college Writing 1 and 2,” Sara says. “But what I noticed was, working with freshman, they would talk to me more about their struggles with their schoolwork than the schoolwork itself, and I saw a lot of ‘mindset’ work there. And I realized I really loved that aspect.”

When Sara says, “mindset work,” she’s talking about her current career as a success coach. With her experiences as a college instructor – and later, as a Certified Personal Trainer – she noticed that people have an easy time knowing what they want to accomplish but have difficulty with getting into the right “mindset.”

“What I saw a lot when I was in the fitness industry was that people are always throwing supplements and diets at you, but when I sat down and spoke to [my students] about what was going on with in their mind and how to address that, they overcame things just like that,” Sara says, snapping her fingers.

During her time in the fitness world, founding the Group Fitness Program, Camp Gladiator, in Denton, Sara met Pam Barnes, HSNT’s Chief Financial Officer, and her interactions with Pam were her first steps towards joining the board.

“I think in the beginning I was so interested in it because I didn’t know anything about it, and I was interested in it because of her passion for it. The way Pam spoke about it and how much she believed in it – I’m drawn to people when they have that kind of energy.”

Sara’s goal for her time on the HSNT board is to amplify HSNT’s efforts at providing patient care and to really make it known that if someone is in need, HSNT is the place to go.

“I would love to make HSNT a staple. I really want everybody to understand what is offered here and what the impact has been,” Sara says. “And for my own work, too, just giving people an opportunity to see how amazing they are and to get people really healthy in their mindset and how they feel about themselves – because how they feels about themselves will be how they’ll treat others – and making that difference [in the community] is so important to me.”