Dear Dartmouth,

This week, we begin our exploration of our approach to wellbeing with the foundation of our framework: the pathway of cultivating perspective. The journey along this pathway involves developing your capacities for reflection and reframing. Reflection is a key tool for awareness that involves stepping back from your immediate experience and observing things non-judgmentally. It can help you to better understand your reactions, thoughts, and feelings related to different events.

Reframing is a refined reflective skill where you utilize that awareness to notice the story you are telling yourself about a particular event or situation. When that story is the not the most helpful for achieving your desired outcome, you can re-author the narrative that is shaping your experience.

Consider any challenge you may be facing (e.g. academics, relationships, adjusting to different transitions). Notice the story that accompanies that adversity. What do you tell yourself when things are not going as well as you had hoped? This pathway is often about moving from attributions about personal shortcomings (“I’m not ________ enough”) to explanations based on behaviors (“I could have done ________ differently”) in order to generate possibilities for realizing different outcomes in the future.

You can even cultivate a new perspective toward yourself. Rather than focusing on what you’re lacking, you can instead develop a greater appreciation for your strengths, and bring forth the best within yourself to tackle your challenges and drive your success.

Taking ownership of your perspective empowers you to become the primary author of your own story, and makes it possible for you claim agency over your own identities and how you make sense of the events and experiences that you encounter in life. Recognizing that you have a choice in how you respond to your circumstances and author the story of your life provides a strong foundation for wellbeing.

Ask Yourself (Reflective Questions)

• How do I typically make sense of challenges or adversity that I encounter in life? Does this perspective limit me or empower me?
• What would it look like to talk to myself in the same way I would talk to my best friend?
• What is the story I’m currently telling myself about my life? Am I the hero of this story? Is it one I want to be living? Is there anything I’d like to change about it?

Try This (Wellbeing Practices)

• Build a Growth Mindset
• Start a Gratitude Journal and note 3 Good Things each day
• Explore your strengths

Explore Further (Dartmouth Resources)

• Use the many resources of the Academic Skills Center to become a better student and achieve your academic and professional goals.
• Schedule a Wellness Check-In to discuss your strengths, share your story, and jump-start your journey toward creating the life you want to be living.

We encourage you to reflect on the questions above and select one of the practices to try over the next couple weeks. In our next post, we’ll explore our second pathway: Engaging Mindfully. Until then…

Take care and be well,
Todd

Dear Dartmouth,

WELCOME (BACK)!!!

Whether this is your first term of enrollment or you’re a seasoned Dartmouth student, our team at the Student Wellness Center (SWC) is grateful to have you as part of our ’20-’21 community. As everyone is acknowledging everywhere, this is a unique year in the life of the institution, and we want to understand and support you through the experiences that await you throughout this academic year.

This is a year marked by transitions and uncertainty. As you navigate the impact of those factors on your life, it can be easy to fall into some less-than-helpful beliefs about yourself. You might feel like an imposter, encounter new questions about your academic abilities or relationships, or feel that you need to prove yourself in some way in order to fit in. We can assure you that you are not alone. Many students are feeling the same thing. But know this:

You are here because you deserve to be here.

You belong at Dartmouth, and you can be successful here.

And you’re an important member of this community. You matter here.

Your time at Dartmouth may involve experiences that are challenging or even humbling, but those same moments can also be opportunities to discover who you want to be and what you’re capable of accomplishing. And because you are part of Dartmouth, you can leverage the tremendous resources of this institution to start creating the life you want to be living right now.

Whoever you are and wherever you may be, please know that in addition to the transitions and uncertainty, this is also a year of opportunity for you. In all the turmoil of 2020, we are reminded that change is a constant in the world. It’s a reminder that you’re not stuck, and that literally anything can (and sometimes does) happen. The capacities you cultivate to respond to the ever-changing contexts around you will help you develop awareness and strengths that you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

Over the next term, we will be using this blog to share a framework of capacities that we believe can contribute to your wellbeing. We refer to this framework as the Pathways to Wellbeing. There are five components that make up our approach: Cultivating Perspective, Engaging Mindfully, Connecting Authentically, Acting Intentionally, and Living Meaningfully. Every other week (or so) we will dive in to one of the pathways, offer some questions to help you reflect on where you’re at along this pathway, invite you to try some practices that can help you further develop this capacity for yourself, and highlight some of the resources on campus that connect well with each area.

We look forward to introducing you to a deeper understanding of our wellbeing work, and learning more with you about the different dimensions of the human experience that connect with each of these pathways. We encourage you to place equal importance on both doing well and BEING well during your time as a student here, and look forward to meeting or deepening our relationship with you over the course of this year.

Take care and be well,
Todd