Welcome to Connecting with Our Purpose where we at the Student Wellness Center will be exploring with our community the various pathways for pursuing purpose. A wonderful step to serve you on your journey towards more meaning and fulfillment is by recognizing the character strengths you hold and express, which can help you tap into one of the many entry points for living your strongest life possible.

What are character strengths? Character strengths are, according to the field of positive psychology, a family of constructive traits expressed through a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are universally recognized for the strength that they create in individuals and communities. Understanding your own character strengths can help you realize what you intuitively gravitate towards and contribute. With awareness and intention you can maximize that which makes your life most worth living.

There are more than few tools out there to help you connect to character strengths. But did you know that Dartmouth students have free access to the renowned Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment, which guides you through your unique talents and how to use those talents to succeed in your role as a student? Understanding your top strengths can help you thrive academically, socially and in your future career. Explore the assessment (available for Dartmouth students) here. Or perhaps you already have a heightened awareness of your unique strengths or understanding of your heart’s compass through a reflective journaling or other wellbeing practice. What next?

Try Gallup’s “Name It, Claim It, and Aim It” framework to make meaning of your strengths and leverage them to fortify your connection to purpose:

1. Name it: Raising self-awareness of your unique talents and intentions helps you gain clarity on what you naturally do well and enjoy. Take the CliftonStrengths survey and/or try these steps for strengthening your self-awareness.

2. Claim it: Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, posits that “your obligation is to the highest contribution you can make”. So how do you know what unique contributions you have for this world? By not only understanding your strengths but accepting them too. By appreciating what powers and values you are bringing to the table, you are empowered to claim ownership of them and better articulate your needs moving forward.

3. Aim it: When you have identified your talents and claimed them as strengths, you might ask: ‘how can I leverage these strengths to accomplish what is most important to helping me live a purposeful life?’ Intentionally practice using and developing your strengths. Schedule a Wellness Check In with a trained Wellness Coach at the Student Wellness Center or connect with a Career Coach from the Center for Professional Development to strategize how to meaningfully apply your strengths towards personal growth in areas like your career, relationships, and wellbeing.

You can thrive and live more fully into your life’s purpose when you take a strengths-based approach to your life. By doing more of what you do best, and you can feel more engaged, empowered, and energized.

The buzzing sense of anticipation in the air must mean that Fall Term 2024 has officially arrived! Cars full of students, twin XL bedsheets, and mini fridges deluge our dorm parking lots, and our campus transforms into a vibrant and diverse tapestry of people, talents, interests, and experiences. It’s like showing up to a garden at the peak of a harvest (coincidentally, it is peak harvest season!). All around you are opportunities ripe for the picking.

As an integral and deserved member of this community, you are offered an abundance of opportunity. “You can leverage the tremendous resources of this institution to start creating the life you want to be living right now.”  And the abundance of choices and commitments might leave you feeling overwhelmed as you pile on the classes, social commitments, and extracurriculars that sound most exciting. Our Fall theme of Connecting to Our Purpose can help you realize your core values and develop a systematic approach for determining which opportunities at Dartmouth serve you on your path towards meaning and fulfillment.

Before we jump in, we first invite you to consider how you might leverage the tools and resources here to deepen your connection to your life’s purpose:

1. Discover and embrace your core values. Recognizing what your values are early on can provide you with the assurance that the goals and opportunities you pursue in your time as student are anchored in your larger vision. Professional staff and campus resources can help you unearth what matters most, and help you design a criterion that makes a thousand decisions and opportunities dissolve into just a few priorities. Check out this sampling of Dartmouth services that can help you narrow in on your core vision:

1. Student Wellness Center – Set up 1:1 time with a trained, non-judgmental listener to deepen your self-awareness and embrace your path towards flourishing.
2.  Counseling Center – Meet with a licensed mental health provider in a confidential setting to help you understand your emotions as you explore your identity and other challenges.
3. Tucker Center – Seek confidential spiritual guidance through Pastoral Counseling with a College Chaplain.
4. Center for Professional Development – Schedule a coaching appointment to discover self-assessment tools that help you identify your interests and strengths, and which career pathways they most align with.

Reflect: What brings my life a sense of fulfillment and meaning?

2. Maximize opportunities that connect you to a future life vision rooted in your core values. Once you have unearthed what you instinctively most value, your role as a student is to explore and grow the avenues that connect you with your purpose. So many departments and groups are poised to help in this regard. Here are some, just to name a few:

1. Center for Social Impact
2. Dartmouth Sustainability
3. Academic Skills Center
4. Office of Pluralism and Leadership
5. Outdoor Programs
6. Hopkins Center for the Arts
7. Dartmouth Athletics
8. Student Groups

Reflect: Which Dartmouth experiences and opportunities can connect me to what gives my life meaning?

3. Sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop about additional, actionable steps for connecting with your and deepening your connection with your purpose. We will provide tools, resources, student experiences and more to help you recognize your strengths and potential, weed out that which does not serve you, cultivate that which does, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Happy harvesting this fall!

Your friends at the SWC