Dear Dartmouth,

At the Student Wellness Center, our strengths-based perspective helps us to frame our work from a positive, inclusive, and empowering stance. Explicitly focusing on strengths themselves as resources for supporting the wellbeing of individuals, organizations, and communities can be an empowering way for us to thrive.

We introduced the concept of strengths and shared ways that you can learn more about your particular strengths constellation in our first Strengths Spotlight post. It’s fun to revisit the strengths-based lens now, as we explore kindness and connection together, as a strengths-based perspective can reinforce your stance of kindness toward yourself and others in and of itself. Believing that you have strengths within you, and using those strengths to resolve different challenges is a fundamentally kind approach to life.

If you’d like to identify your strengths prior to reading on, you can try the free, online VIA Survey of Character Strengths. The 24 strengths that make up this framework are considered universal, positive human capacities (e.g. honesty, bravery, creativity) that are valued in every culture and exist in every person.

The VIA is designed to illustrate only your strengths – NOT your weaknesses, so even though your results are presented as a subjective ranking of your strengths from 1-24 they are all strengths that you possess, and the ranking is more about the intentionality it requires for you to access and make use of them. Typically, the strengths at the top of your list tend to be qualities that you embody without even thinking about it. They frequently feel natural or effortless to engage and require little intention. By contrast, strengths that are lower on the list might feel like they take a bit more effort and willpower to enact, but they are still very much strengths that you possess.

If you’ve taken the VIA, consider the signature themes from your results (i.e. the top 6-8 strengths). If you haven’t taken the VIA, look at the 24 strengths in the image above and see which ones seem like the best fit for you. With those strengths in mind, consider the following:

• Which of these strengths are related to your ability to be kind to yourself or others?
• What does this look like for you? Try to come up with 2-3 examples of a time when a particular strength helped you to be kind.
• Which of these strengths are related to the way that you connect with others?
• What does this look like for you? Try to come up with 2-3 examples of a time when a particular strength helped you to connect authentically.
• Were there any instances where the same strength supported both kindness and connection? If so, how could you leverage those strengths more fully, or in new ways to broaden, deepen, or otherwise enhance the relationships in your life?

Perhaps some of the strengths where there are obvious connections like social intelligence or kindness will stand out, but allowing yourself to be open to any of the strengths could result in some interesting surprises. Maybe a strength like humility could boost your ability to be kind to yourself when you’ve experienced a setback by helping you accept that you’re as human as everyone else, and mistakes happen. There’s an expression that honesty is always ultimately a form of kindness, and perhaps you could find ways that your strength of honesty can help you connect with others by being more authentic too.

Before we wrap up, I want to mention an article that came out today (!) highlighting a new study that helped me understand the relationship between kindness, happiness, and wellbeing more fully. A meta-analysis of 126 research articles on the character strength of kindness, involving almost 200,000 participants from around the world concluded that kindness is positively associated with wellbeing in many ways – boosting happiness, self-esteem, physical health, and self-efficacy while buffering against depression and anxiety. The research suggests that being kind:

“may make us feel better about ourselves as a person or about the meaning of our lives, confirm our self-competence, distract us from our own troubles and stressors, give us a warm-glow feeling, or help us be more socially connected with others. All of these could potentially improve our well-being—reducing our stress, improving our mood, or providing community.”

Of course, every strength has the capacity to support your wellbeing by bringing good things to your life, but studies like this underscore the importance of kindness for connection, health, and happiness. Wishing you all a little more kindness, and a strong sense of connection.

Take care and be well,
Todd

Dear Dartmouth,

It’s February in New Hampshire. For the winter lovers among us, it’s a dream come true. With our snow-frosted trees and abundant opportunities for getting outdoors to enjoy the season, it’s fair to say that New Hampshire does winter well! We celebrate this season at Dartmouth in many ways, including the “Mardi Gras of the North,” our annual Winter Carnival.

Of course, whether or not you’re a winter fan, the weather conditions and the realities of living, working, and studying during the COVID outbreak also mean that this can be a challenging month for many people. So while it may seem obvious that you need to keep your body warm when the temps drop, here at the SWC we also want to emphasize other sources of warmth in your life. Our wellbeing theme for February is Kindness and Connection, about which my colleague, LB wrote:

“Kindness and Connection is all about making time in your life for others. Whether it’s through the simple enjoyment of another’s company or the giving and receiving of support from one another, connecting with kindness and authenticity can help bolster all the other elements in your life that need your attention.”

We know that relationships can feel difficult even at the best of times, and we also know that there are few things that have a greater impact on our wellbeing. Kindness and connection can awaken a deep sense of happiness and joy in us that can sustain us through the toughest of challenges. So this month, we want to reconnect with our wellbeing pathway of connecting authentically, and do so in a way that emphasizes the role of kindness in that process.

The first relationship that might be worth considering is the one you have with yourself. Do you relate to yourself from a place of kindness? Many of the people I’ve known over the years have found this to be a struggle at times. It can be easy to believe that there is something wrong with us that needs to be fixed, to hold ourselves to unrealistic standards, to override our intuition and our feelings with “shoulds.” Here’s a quick self-test. Read the following sentence and notice what comes up:

“I’m not ______ enough”

If you found thoughts immediately springing to mind to fill in that blank, it may be a good time to consider what it would look like to extend kindness toward yourself. We sometimes recommend thinking about how you would talk to a best friend, and using that kind of language to replace any self-talk that you use to criticize yourself.

As you grow in kindness toward yourself, you might find yourself becoming more and more open to others. Howard Cutler describes people who can access happiness as “more sociable, flexible, and creative, and are able to tolerate life’s daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving that unhappy people.”

Sociability, flexibility, love and forgiveness are all qualities that can contribute to meaningful relationships, and also represent different ways that we can extend kindness to others. Of course, it’s not necessarily a lack of kindness that gets in the way of our relationships. One of the most common factors is simply busy-ness. It can be difficult to find the time to connect in ways that bring much-needed feelings of safety, belonging, understanding, and acceptance.

So, a second challenge that you might offer yourself this February is setting aside time to connect with others in the midst of the many other demands on your life. You might even be able to integrate some opportunities to connect into your existing schedule, through study groups, shared walks or meals, or inviting others to different campus events.

In addition to the activities listed above, February is also when Dartmouth hosts events for Black Legacy Month and Visibility, Dartmouth’s annual student-led campaign to promote gender equity and end gender- and power-based violence. Engaging with friends in the events that make up these programs could be an ideal way to bring more connection and kindness to your life.

I’m currently reading “The Book of Joy,” and keep thinking about the following passage:

“Some might wonder what our own joy has to do with countering injustice and inequality. What does our happiness have to do with addressing the suffering of the world? In short, the more we heal our own pain, the more we can turn to the pain of others. But in a surprising way, the way we heal our own pain is actually by turning to the pain of others. It is a virtuous cycle. The more we turn toward others, the more joy we experience, and the more joy we experience, the more we can bring joy to others….So being more joyful is not just about having more fun. We’re talking about a more empathic, more empowered, even more spiritual state of mind that is totally engaged with the world.”

For me, this captures the relationship between kindness, connection, justice, and equity, and how our practice of these qualities can bring both individual and community wellbeing.

All of us at the SWC are wishing you all a wonderful February, and we’re here if there are ways we can help. Please explore what we have to offer, and don’t ever hesitate to reach out!

Take care and be well,
Todd