Trained, caring and structured guidance – at a human-to-human level to fulfill personal empowerment for all. 

“LifeGuides is fundamentally about supporting people in their very personal life journeys,” says LifeGuides founder Mark Donohue. He’s talking about mentoring, a well-respected concept to be sure, but Mark has organized it to a transformative level as a subscription-based benefit employers can purchase for their employees. “LifeGuides is the mentor network to find the right person at the right time when you need them and a user experience that’s very much like a Match.com, yet another level is like clinical therapy in that it’s HIPAA-compliant, medically compliant, completely confidential and integrated with all the other benefits provided by an employer.”

While making the point that the mentors and guides are paid, trained and certified, Mark notes that LifeGuides’ key differentiator is its peer-to-peer model. “Whether you suddenly realize your child is autistic or you suddenly realize your mother has dementia or you suddenly realize your spouse has prostate cancer or breast cancer, whatever that life journey is, one thing for sure is that other people who’ve been through that specific journey ahead of you have a level of understanding that you wish you had when you started the journey,” he explains. Fundamental to the process, therefore, is the matching. “You get to personally choose who you might want to engage with as a guide, mentor … based on that lived experience. And that is really where the connection of deeper empathy, deeper trust, deeper connection, deeper personal growth happens, deeper learning. You can’t get that from AI or chat.”

Making this service available to employees and their families, LifeGuides does not limit topics to career development. “We have aspects here that are about purpose and meaning in life,” Mark says. Adding, “And then of course, non-clinical mental health,” he observes, “Who really wants to be diagnosed to get human support?”

As enthusiastic as he is about the potential LifeGuides opens up for its users, Mark is also open about his personal journey. “I’m not like some gazillionaire, billionaire and doing things consciously in that way and empathetically; and trying to build a mission-driven, purpose-driven enterprise as opposed to just profit-maximizing mercenary capitalism and then giving it away, which a lot of people do. They give it away philanthropy when they get to be my age and feel like their soul is clean all of a sudden. Which I’m glad people do give it away, but how about if we changed the whole process from the beginning?”

For this, he brings up broad-ranging philosophical influences, from Yogic ashrams to studying with Cherokee American elders to shamanic practices to Kabala and across the spectrum, including Buddhism and Hinduism. “So, I had my awakening then to a directionality that many people would call God,” he shares. Going further, he connects his spirituality to business: “As far as I know, every religion calls God the creator in one term or another in different languages.

“Think of the Book of Genesis with Christianity, but we can go on further. And why is God called the creator? Because God’s the greatest known entrepreneur. … So, what we realized is that the whole God story, the whole manifestation story, is really an entrepreneurial journey. And so how do we use entrepreneurial mindset to be transformative and realize our full potential as a species as souls?”

Click on the link below to listen in to Mark’s thought-provoking conversation with Center for Social Capital Founder Chris Benguhe about supporting people in their journey of personal choice and personal empowerment “to create the world of your — hopefully fullest — dreams.”