Category: Flourishing

The college years are a crucial time for young adults to cultivate the skills of leadership and character, which significantly influence not just students’ personal and professional development, but shape the values of the next generation of leaders. Mastering values-based leadership helps students effectively guide and inspire teams, fostering collaboration and problem-solving abilities that are vital in today’s dynamic work environments. Moreover, developing strong character traits such as integrity, empathy, and resilience lays the foundation for ethical decision-making and builds trust with peers and colleagues. Together, these skills not only enhance academic and career success but also contribute to creating purposeful change within oneself, one’s community, and beyond. The educators entrusted and charged with imparting these skills must translate abstract ideas into practical frameworks. What does it mean to teach character? To nurture leaders of integrity and purpose? Steve Sosland, vice chancellor for Leader & Culture Development for the Texas Tech University System, has spent his career finding answers to these questions across different organizations and sectors.

Higher education is Sosland’s fifth industry. After graduating from West Point, he began his career in the U.S. military, where he spent 11 years as an infantry soldier. He later worked in corporate America, first in the restaurant industry and later helping other junior military officers find jobs in the business world with companies that sought to hire veterans for their leadership and character skills. In 2010, Sosland became the chief operating officer of Hill Country Memorial hospital in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he and a team of leaders transformed the then-failing hospital into a pillar of excellent healthcare and leader development, for which President Obama awarded the hospital the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2014. 

Sosland’s first role in higher education was as the executive vice president and chief people and performance officer at the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center at Fort Worth. Today, in his role at Texas Tech, Sosland reflects on this unlikely trajectory and highlights the thread that connects each disparate sector and organization: in every dimension, his career has been dedicated to “working with organizations to incorporate a values-based approach to leadership,” which, he says, “advances personal development, quality of life, and wellbeing by helping individuals live in alignment with their own core values.” 

Sosland’s own life is an example of this dynamic process. Today, he says his purpose is “to influence those who will transform the lives of others,” but that mission wasn’t apparent to him at the outset. “When I was in my twenties, looking ahead at my career, I could not have predicted the path,” he explains. “When I was in my fifties, looking back at it, I wanted to find the common thread, and what I found was that I had worked in environments with a strong sense of core values and a culture built around those values. That culture was either there when I arrived, or I used leadership development as an opportunity to create it.”

Leader & Culture Development at Texas Tech takes a comprehensive, bird’s-eye view approach to bringing values-based leadership and purposeful work to the university system’s five campuses. “If we are going to help students, it is fundamentally important for us to first focus on faculty, staff, and administration,” Sosland says. “If we work with the students by directing them to leader development programs and helping them become leaders of character, but they don’t see role models around them, then it brings into question all of our work.” 

The Path to Purpose

To ensure that students have those role models, Sosland works directly with university leadership, shaping the tone and character of the institution. Part of that work involves  exploring purpose, both personally and institutionally. “The way that I work with senior leaders — college and university presidents, deans, department chairs — is by helping them to identify their purpose, both personally and for their entity,” he says. “We then identify their challenges — be them challenges of morale, wellbeing, efficiency, inter- and intrapersonal issues — and we address those challenges within the cultural environment, taking a people-first approach. I call this concept generational leadership. I might very rarely interact with students, but I interact with deans to help them lead their department chairs, who then help the faculty members, who help the students.”

“Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them.”

Purposeful work is often described as “aligning who you are with what you do.” Sosland describes this alignment as “a sense of oneness in a person’s values at home and at work, which is one way to define integrity: from the root integris, meaning oneness or unity.” Though research suggests that purposeful work can promote wellbeing and fulfillment throughout life, a 2022 Harvard University study found that 58 percent of teens and young adults reported having little to no sense of purpose in life. It is a remarkable figure, but not an entirely surprising one. In a 2021 study of more than 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 56 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds surveyed said they believed humanity was doomed due to the climate crisis. The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, also found that 60 percent of respondents blamed their national governments for this bleak state of affairs. 

Amid a youth mental health national emergency, growing sentiments of dread and nihilism plaguing young people, and Gen Z taking to the internet to voice their existentialist views in the form of political memes and parody videos, the idea of finding purpose could seem almost quaint. But initiatives focused on character and values-based leadership have material impact and the potential to change lives—particularly the lives of college students, who are on the lookout for purpose and in the process of creating and sustaining their core values.

To make the case for purpose, leaders in higher education must not overlook the fact that high tuition costs and poor financial wellbeing lead students to increasingly seeking pay over purpose. In addressing this concern, Sosland cites James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase “the American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. “Adams said that our college education largely focuses on how to make a living, but perhaps it should be how to make a life,” he explains. “How to make a living is important, but I think that as universities, we’ve lost our way. We are so hyper-focused on teaching how to make a living that we lose sight of teaching how to make a life. What we are doing at the Texas Tech University System is raising these as equally important matters. We are focused just as much on building the character of the students as we are on helping them get a job, because it is their character that will help them survive in challenging times. We are preparing them to find work that aligns with their core values.”

Grit is one value that comes up in Sosland’s conversations with higher education leadership, faculty, and students. “When it comes to purpose, we are asking, Why do I exist? We ask it on a personal level, and we ask it on an organizational level. Why does this organization exist? How do we create an environment that is rich and allows people to grow and develop to their full potential? And how do we do it so that, along the way, they gain the skills of resilience and grit that will get them through life’s challenging times and help them when they face failure?” Dr. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and renowned scholar of grit and self-control, defines grit as the combination of passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal. Sosland cites Duckworth’s philosophy of grit as influential to his work in character and leadership development. “Our universities are in West Texas,” he explains. “Most of the population of Texas is in the eastern third of the state, but West Texas is largely rural. Our universities primarily serve rural areas with harsh weather conditions — sand storms, harsh winds, harsh temperatures. In these conditions where a lot of our students grow up, they have to be resilient. They have to navigate tough environmental conditions just to survive. Their grandparents and great-grandparents lived through the Dust Bowl. In their backgrounds, grit and resilience are imprinted deep within them. But, as with anyone, this gets lost. They get caught up in the what-ifs of life, and they sometimes forget what was imprinted from parents and teachers and coaches early on. Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them. That is what identifying and living in alignment with core values does for both individuals and organizations.”

Students at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering enter their studies with a sense of hope and purpose. They are often young people with an interest in public welfare and socially conscious work, setting out to design auspicious futures for an ever-changing, ever-complicated world. But what happens when four years of stress, hustle culture, and careerism obscure the sense of purpose that brought them to engineering in the first place? When students lose sight of their purpose, the effect is not only demoralizing in the short term — it can have lifelong implications for wellbeing, work engagement, and fulfillment.

Dr. Harly Ramsey observed firsthand how an engineering education culture can obscure purpose and impair wellbeing in students as a professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC. She has been dedicated to offsetting this trend for several years, teaching in the Viterbi School’s Engineering in Society program (formerly the Engineering Writing Program), a unique program designed to integrate humanities topics such as ethics and communication into the engineering curriculum. It is from this intersection of thought that Ramsey, a professor of technical communication practice whose PhD is in English, approaches her role as an engineering educator. In 2021, The Coalition for Transformational Education gave USC a grant to launch the Vision Venture video series, an interview project that connects engineering students to recent alumni as a way of helping students reconnect to their sense of purpose, agency, and direction. 

When, in response to the Vision Venture project, Ramsey’s students participated in a series of anonymous surveys related to wellbeing, she was surprised by the troubling results. “These students sit in front of me twice a week. I feel like I know them.” Yet, she recalls, “I had no idea how stressed and isolated many of them felt.” She was also struck by her students’ warped perception of time, noting that many had lost sight of the future — and forgotten the reasons they wanted to be engineers in the first place. 

That lost sense of purpose is now central to Ramsey’s research, as well as to her approach to teaching. “The process of education that we put engineering students through in the course of four years has been found to decrease their interest in public welfare,” Ramsey says. Indeed, a 2014 article by sociologist Erin A. Cech, which Ramsey cites as influential to her work, reveals that despite widespread discourse on “the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers,” longitudinal data suggest that “students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education.”

“As a moral agent and a person who cares about my students,” Ramsey says she feels obligated to use the classroom to promote purpose and agency, laying the foundation for wellbeing after graduation. “Enough of them need help; let’s bring it to them,” she said.

It was with this mission in mind that Ramsey joined forces with Dr. Julie Loppacher, the director of USC’s Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity, to bring 5-minute self-regulation exercises into the classroom. Loppacher and Ramsey designed the accessible, co-curricular model for improving student wellbeing, learning, and sense of purpose based on self-determination theory and presented the results at the 2023 Frontiers in Education Conference.

The culture of “pride in the grind culture” among engineering students adds to the collective stigma around mental health.

Triage Time

Stress and its impact on mental health are pervasive issues among college students across all disciplines, but for engineering students, the problem may be especially pronounced. A demanding academic workload, pressure to perform well in exams, and “a culture of normalized stress” among engineering students all contribute to the phenomenon of lost time (and loss of purpose) that Ramsey identified among her students and for which she coined the term “triage time” in 2022. Hustle culture, grind culture, careerism — by any name, normalized stress can be detrimental to students’ sense of agency and meaning, as the pressure to succeed obscures the pursuit of passion and purpose. For some, a social environment that rewards stress and encourages burnout for bragging points compounds the pressure. As 2024 Viterbi School graduate Jesse Tennant put it, “There is an environment where many are struggling and few want to admit it. Students seem to ‘out-stress’ each other. Many students stack their schedules to the max and constantly talk about how busy they are.” This, Tennant adds, culminates in “a cycle of escalating stress, where interacting with classmates can make one feel inadequate for not being stressed enough.” 

The sentiment echoes the findings of a 2023 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education that rates of anxiety and depression among 18- to 25-year-olds, which are twice as high as rates among teens, are exacerbated by a pre-professional hustle culture that favors employability and income over purpose. That careerist approach to education may pose financial and social barriers to leading a meaningful life, causing some students to neglect the pursuit of joy and purposeful work.

While the culture of stress is not unique to the field of engineering, Tennant says, “I believe that engineering students have a unique learning experience. Many engineering classes routinely have low exam and project scores. I took a class last semester where the average for every exam was below 50%. While the class was curved at the end of the semester, scoring in the traditional F range is demoralizing and can make you question your intelligence and whether you ‘belong’ in the program.” Moreover, research suggests that engineering students, many of whom operate in a climate of normalized — and, at times, celebrated — stress, may be especially reluctant to seek help. The culture of “pride in the grind culture” among engineering students adds to the collective stigma around mental health, Ramsey says, compounding the barriers to getting help. 

Taking five

Self-determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Loppacher and Ramsey wanted to test whether dedicating 5 minutes of class time to self-regulation techniques, such as goal-setting, journaling, and cognitive reframing, could help students meet these needs. “Emotions have an impact on our cognitive state and ability to learn,” Loppacher explains. “They can be profoundly positive, and they can be profoundly limiting.” Self-regulation techniques are academic and emotional tools that improve a person’s cognitive state, preparing them to learn, feel, and be better. Each technique is grounded in data, which Loppacher shares with students to provide a basis for every prompt. Rather than simply telling students that goal-setting increases self-efficacy and achievement, for example, Loppacher presents research that students who set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are more likely to attain them. Participation is optional, and exercises are capped at 5 minutes at the start of class. 

At a time when youth mental health is considered a national emergency and experts fret over a seemingly irremediable generational divide, fostering open, intergenerational dialogue can dispel panic and misunderstanding.

While some professors may be reluctant to yield valuable class time to student wellbeing, restricting the exercises to 5 minutes and conducting research on their efficacy ensure that the process is accessible and productive. Ramsey and Loppacher emphasize that professors are not expected to be mental health professionals, nor should they be obligated to go beyond their scope of expertise or deduct learning time from their classes. In fact, Ramsey says, “Whether or not professors care about student wellbeing, self-determination theory is a learning tool that helps students perform better in class.” By fostering holistic learners, this approach can also increase professors’ self-efficacy by improving classroom engagement and performance. 

The student response

Ramsey and Loppacher will expand the program beyond the Viterbi School of Engineering in the 2024-2025 academic year, as they recognize a ubiquitous need for co-curricular supports. Loppacher conducts optional interviews with students who have participated in courses that implemented self-regulation techniques and concludes that there are many benefits to the program, both obvious and subtle. Many have noted the importance of intergenerational understanding as it relates to stress, hustle culture, and wellbeing. At a time when youth mental health is considered a national emergency and experts fret over a seemingly irremediable generational divide, fostering open, intergenerational dialogue can dispel panic and misunderstanding. “Intergenerational relationships are extremely important in our lives, especially as learners,” Loppacher says. In one interview, a student stated, “The intergenerational recognition of my stress levels was incredibly powerful.” When asked about the role faculty and staff play in student mental health, Tennant echoed this idea of recognition and care. “While many professors and staff genuinely care about students, this should be the standard, rather than an exceptional attribute,” he says. “Students should feel confident each semester that their mental health will be prioritized by the entire institution, rather than hoping they have a caring professor.”

The idea of care — for others, for oneself, and for the future — reverberates throughout many students’ reflections on the 5-minute self-regulation exercises. “The demonstration of care from my professor was the most important thing,” one student reflected. “This isn’t just a writing class,” said another, “you actually care.” Research underscores the importance of care: in the 2018 Gallup Alumni Survey, alumni who reported having “someone who cared about me as a person” during their undergraduate years were more than twice as likely to report high levels of well-being and work engagement later in life — but fewer than 5 percent of alumni said they had. Some students have reported that a mere acknowledgement of their “human-ness” by a professor was novel: “We’re all people…engineering is a very work-heavy major…so it’s helpful to have a reminder that you are not a machine…you need to do these things [self-regulation strategies] for the human part of yourself.”

For college students getting ready to embark on their post-graduate lives, a sense of purpose can be a North Star, illuminating the path toward personal development, fulfillment, and success. Having a clear sense of purpose provides students with direction and resilience, brings meaning to their endeavors, improves their mental health, and empowers them to make informed decisions about their futures. When students can identify and live according to their purpose, they can cultivate a deep sense of belonging within themselves and their communities. The pursuit of purpose shapes the college experience and lays the foundation for meaningful living beyond graduation — but how do students find something as elusive and individual as purpose? At Belmont University, they are finding it through alumni in the Purpose Mentorship Program.

“We are trying to help students know who they are, who they were made to be, what makes them unique — and how they can capitalize on that for the sake of communal flourishing,” said Joe Mankowski, the Transformational Project Strategist at Belmont University, where he heads the Purpose Mentorship Program. 

Belmont is a private Christian university in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee. It attracts students with dreams of making it on Music Row, young entrepreneurs, aspiring medical professionals, and — like most college students — young adults who are still trying to find their passion and understand how to pursue it. A 2019 study conducted by Gallup in partnership with Bates College explored that pursuit, defining and measuring purposeful work experiences among college graduates. The study found that 80 percent of college graduates say that it is extremely important (43 percent) or very important (37 percent) to find purpose in their work — yet, less than half of those graduates reported finding it. Graduates who report a strong sense of purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to meet the criteria of overall well-being, which encompasses mental, emotional, physical, and financial health. This research reiterated previous findings that deriving purpose from one’s work is correlated with “having someone who encourages students’ goals and dreams.” 

“We aren’t just training students for a job; we are forming whole people.”

In Belmont’s Purpose Mentorship Program, that “someone” is a university alum — a person who has been in the student’s position, often within the last several years, and made the transition from commencement day to purposeful work. Launched in the 2021-2022 academic year with funding from the Coalition for Transformational Education and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the initiative is emblematic of a broader mission that President Greg Jones and Reverend Susan Pendleton Jones brought with them to Belmont. Making it a focal point of his administration, President Jones’s Discovering Purpose course asks students, “What’s your why?” This question, which is also the driving concept behind the Purpose Mentorship Program, prompts students to reflect on the process of meaning-making both as individuals and as members of a vibrant community. 

Originally piloted by the Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business and the Massey College of Business, the Purpose Mentorship Program fosters meaningful connection between alumni and students, helping students to envision their futures and articulate their goals. Alumni are recommended by faculty and staff based on character, humility, and leadership skills in addition to professional success. Each mentor circle is composed of one alumni mentor and a cohort of 2-5 students. Mentors are prepared with curriculum-based discussion points and encouraged to engage in their own self-reflection on purpose and identity. The groups meet monthly to walk through how one’s purpose develops over the course of the college years and manifests in life beyond graduation.

As a Belmont alumnus himself, Mankowski views the Purpose Mentorship Program as a reflection of Belmont’s mission to cultivate “whole-person development,” educating leaders of character and wisdom. “Being part of a community that has so consistently and fully invested in its students has motivated me to find ways to invest back into the community,” he says. 

Mankowski understands just how vital the relationships formed through the program are for students making decisions about their futures. Equally significant, he says, are the questions it asks. As he explains, “If you know why you’re here, it gives you so much latitude and freedom.” The program begins by asking students who they are in the context of their communities — college students, interns, roommates, daughters, sons, partners. While understanding those identities can begin to help students locate their goals, Mankowski says, it also is imperative that they “take a step back and ask, ‘Why do I think humans exist? Why do I think we work? Why do I think we love?’”

“In an achievement-based culture, it’s so easy for students to prioritize work at the expense of self-reflection, self-awareness and introspection. We are holding space for that exploration.”

In a climate of careerism, immense student debt, and hustle culture, students may fall into the trap of basing their identities entirely on work in an effort to secure high-income jobs. When students pursue these bestowed metrics of status and worth —  job titles, grade-point averages, salaries — at the expense of finding their purpose, their overall well-being can suffer. That’s why, according to Dr. Amy Crook, Vice President for Transformative Innovation, Character and Purpose, the search for purpose is more than work. It is a lifelong quest for identity and understanding — not just within oneself, but in service to others. “We want students to realize they are more than their job,” Crook said. “Their ultimate happiness, fulfillment, joy and ability to make the world a better place is much larger than their job titles. We aren’t just training students for a job; we are forming whole people, and we want them to feel confident in exploring these bigger questions. And we are doing so through supportive, caring contacts who can be honest about the obstacles they faced and the opportunities where they were able to make choices to have a more fulfilling life.”

Mankowski echoed this sentiment, noting that “in an achievement-based culture, it’s so easy for students to prioritize work at the expense of self-reflection, self-awareness and introspection. We are holding space for that exploration.” 

What better guides for their North Star journey than those who paved the way before them? Mankowski views alumni relationships as crucial to the purpose initiative. The program pairs students with alumni mentors based on 5 distinct areas of purpose designed to gauge motivations and values, rather than organizing them by career or major. These 5 personalities — the creative visionary, the compassionate guide, the sincere storyteller, the thoughtful investigator, and the organizational innovator — act as a litmus test for students and alumni to connect across professional disciplines, forming what Mankowski calls “unlikely partnerships” that reinforce the belief that purpose is not a professional identity, but an ideological one. The program also directs students to courses that may be best suited to their style of purpose — the sincere storyteller might enjoy a creative writing workshop, while the organizational innovator may gravitate toward the biology lab — bringing meaning and individuality into the classroom. This approach helps students connect their curriculum to real-world experiences, building the relationship between purpose and academic or professional life.

The transformative potential of the Purpose Mentorship Program lies in these relationships — between students and alumni mentors, and between academic life and self-reflection. Mankowski notes that the program gives students “a sense of unconditional mattering — that is how we connect with ourselves, with our life’s purpose, and with each other.”

In his book Languishing, psychologist Corey Keyes describes burnout as “finding it hard to bring joy or meaning to activities that you once found greatly fulfilling.” This flattening out of your emotions takes many forms: the parent struggling to read a bedtime story to his child; the graphic artist unable to remember the thrill of creation; or the mid-career physician who wonders, “How did I get so removed from the work I once loved?” In the medical profession, burnout is particularly insidious. Its hold is both personal and systemic, moving from institution to practitioner to patients, families, and communities. 

Fortunately, that same causality can work in the reverse. The Kern National Network for Flourishing in Medicine (KNN) has started a movement to bring connection and fulfillment back to the medical profession in the hope of transforming a system that, in many ways, is putting the health of its stakeholders at risk. The KNN is infusing a framework for flourishing into medical schools and academic medicine so that what is taught, learned and practiced is not just skill and competency, but also models of character, ethics and purpose. Recognizing the interconnectedness of medicine, and its relationship to public health, the KNN is also working with health systems and within health professions to rethread medicine’s frayed social compact. 

“With the ever-changing demands in healthcare, physicians are met with complex challenges testing their ability to make the best decisions for their patients, communities and their own flourishing as practitioners, said Dr. Cheryl Maurana, the Founding Director of KNN and professor and senior vice president at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). “KNN places an intentional focus on character, caring and practical wisdom to ensure that physicians are best positioned to successfully navigate these demands.”

The theory is that centering these values and behaviors within individual students, faculty, residents, and practitioners will have a cascading effect on the profession and health systems overall. It’s not about payment reform, though market dynamics are a consideration. And it’s not about individual wellbeing, though that, too, is a part. The KNN’s framework for flourishing in medicine is inherently relational and rooted in connection with others. Though it addresses deficits in the system, it adopts an asset-based approach that involves drawing from one’s own strengths and values when making some of the most ethically challenging decisions any professional can make. 

The movement, which began several years ago, may just now be reaching its tipping point, thanks to a number of factors including two large grants from the Kern Family Foundation and the global pandemic which exposed long simmering issues within the healthcare system. As early as 2012, Foundation leaders were meeting with a group of medical educators, including Maurana, who were struggling to address growing problems within medical schools and academic medicine. These included burnout characterized by the deterioration of hopefulness and vigor in medical students and faculty. Studies have demonstrated that high rates of burnout correspond with lower levels of physician empathy and altruism in caring for patients. “We were looking for an antidote to that,” said Maurana.

By the mid 20-teens, in addition to MCW, the group included six other medical heavyweights: Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine; along with passionate leaders like Dr. John Raymond who was early in his presidency of MCW and dedicated to helping transform medical education towards these goals. 

Many within the profession felt as though the pendulum had swung so far in medical education that it was concerned only about competence, and it had lost the idea of the whole person formation. The schools’ believed what the medical profession needed was a foundation for flourishing and they set about establishing the pillars that would lead to that outcome by working together and examining the literature. They eventually arrived at: character, based on the elements of the Jubilee Centre’s framework of moral, civic, intellectual and performance virtues; caring, described as “emphasizing an ongoing practice and approach that recognizes human interdependence and works toward a stronger democracy”; and practical wisdom, as noted in the work of Kenneth Sharpe and Barry Schwartz, which is continually developed through experience and critical reflection toward action, something Maurana calls “doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.”

“What flourishing in medicine means is reflected in the solid framework the KNN has developed so It’s not just a nice word to hear – who doesn’t want to flourish? – it provides a research base to consider flourishing in individuals and systems and to understand practices and conditions conducive to flourishing,” said Christopher Stawski, senior program director and senior fellow of the Kern Family Foundation, which formally established the consortium as the KNN with their first investment in 2017. Another grant, approved in 2022, is helping to fuel its growth. 

Kimara Ellefson is KNN’s National Director of Strategy and Partnership, a position that reflects the expansion of the organization’s targeted impact. She says the focus of the KNN, and the Foundation, has grown from medical education, to all medical professions, to health systems overall, in an acknowledgement of the interdependency of these domains, once again laid bare by the pandemic. She points to work KNN is now doing with hospital systems, including large, for-profits which are concerned about the wellbeing of their residents and the effect it can have on patient care. While the systems work is nascent, individuals representing over 50 organizations within the health care ecosystems are now engaged with the KNN in a variety of ways through student chapters, organizational members, and project partners. 

“We hope that the lens of flourishing is adopted by the majority of medical schools and healthcare systems in this country so that policy decisions, education decisions, staffing decisions, and leadership decisions are made through a flourishing lens,” she said. 

Living the Movement

When asked what “flourishing in medicine,” means to him, med student Vincent Busque said “to me, flourishing in medicine means taking pride in the authentic ways in which we take care of our patients, both through medical care and especially as fellow humans, while contributing to and being supported by the broader medical community.” 

Busque is a third year student at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and has been involved with the KNN since he arrived in both formal and informal ways. He attends KNN student conferences and has led student workshops but he also incorporates the KNN principles into everyday actions like sending congratulatory notes to his classmates at the end of the year. A natural optimist with a gift for coaching, Brusque tries hard not to let negativity, like attitudes between battle-worn educators and anxious students, get him down. But Brusque is also the first to say, “med school is no joke.” As he begins his clinical rotation when the challenges of his chosen profession become very real, he will lean heavily on the KNN framework which he says gave him a unique kind of mental toughness. 

“I try to do something caring every day – even if it’s little things like getting someone a blanket or popping back in on a patient,” he said. “I think that is what is going to make me a better physician because when the going gets tough, you need to connect back to why you went to medical school in the first place and for most of us that’s about caring for people in really difficult and emotional situations.” 

“Flourishing in medicine means taking pride in the authentic ways in which we take care of our patients, both through medical care and especially as fellow humans.”

As a KNN student leader, Busque helps his classmates understand what words like flourishing, caring and practical wisdom mean in a clinical scenario, particularly a challenging one. He says use of love languages like affirmation, physical touch and acts of service can help illuminate caring. Relevant questions like how best to support a struggling colleague provide relatable examples for practical wisdom. 

“KNN has allowed me to say that it is actually OK in medical school to care about your values, your character, and your community. With time, we will all come to understand the science (of medicine), but it is these things that are going to allow us to be truly great physicians,” he said.

One of Busque’s models for professional excellence is Dr. Roshini Pinto-Powell, an educator and administrator who is co-leading the KNN curriculum development at Geisel. She is also the school’s associate dean of admissions and only partly jokes that she is personally responsible for dedicated learners like Vincent Busque. A physician for forty years, Pinto-Powell is a KNN devotee who sees the framework not so much as programming, but as a mindset shift and a pledge that permeates everything that goes into medical education. She is currently completing a masters degree, funded by the Kern Family Foundation, from the University of Birmingham at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. 

Pinto-Powell will be using the KNN framework in her “On Doctoring” class, and this coming year will include a new seven-session pilot class called “Professional Values Formation.” This is a re-envisioning of Geisel’s Coaching Program which was created in 2019 to connect all incoming medical students with a faculty coach for the duration of their studies, to maintain consistent academic & professional support throughout training. In this program, students connected with their coaches in small group coaching sessions, focusing on broad topics like the medical school roadmap, professional identity formation, professional enculturation, and self-regulated learning. Students also met with their coach to receive individualized support in building and reflecting on their goals, challenges, and experiences.

As Geisel dives into developing the new “Professional Values Formation” pilot, leaning deeply into the KNN framework, Pinto-Powell is particularly focused on bringing the appropriate vocabulary to this pilot program, which will be introduced with both students and faculty, in order to have a common vernacular she believes was lost with the secularization of education. She says that while biomedical ethics has an important role in medicine, a practical wisdom framework of thinking allows for nuance and particulars, critical to wise decision-making.

“The separation of church and state has sort of muddled the idea of morality and virtue in medicine into thinking its religiosity and it’s not,” she said. “I think our young people really lack moral vocabulary as a framework and we need to bring that back for them.” 

Pinto-Powell has a strong advocate in Dr. Sonia Chimienti, the school’s Dean of Educational Affairs. In an indication of the school’s broad perspective on health care, she also oversees the masters in public health and masters of science programs as well as the MD program at Geisel. “What we are trying to do is create opportunities to do more learning together earlier in education. This will help us to understand each other better, and ultimately improve how we work together,” she said. 

Chimienti believes Pinto-Powell’s work with faculty, as well as students, is a critical part of the KNN framework. “A focus of our work in creating our learning collaboratives is to help with the development, the nurturing, the appreciation, and the ongoing respect of our educators so they can role model and be those physicians that the students aspire to be,” she said. 

In many ways, Busque, Pinto-Powell and Chimienti are the embodiment of the KNN movement. While they acknowledge the challenges inherent in health care, they all hope to change the conversation from burnout and blame to a renewed sense of joy within the profession itself. 

“When I think about this as a movement, I think about reclaiming the narrative of what it means to be a professional, a physician, a public health specialist, a nurse in this era, in this time,” said Chimienti. “It’s about showing up every day and bringing the character and caring that you grew up with and developed to the moment that you are in; to the person who is front of you – whether it’s a student, a patient, or a colleague – and upholding the standards of the profession we all hold so dear.”

When Kylie Martin was studying abroad in Gdansk, Poland, she visited the Stutthof concentration camp with classmates. They walked the paths where victims took their last steps, and somberly regarded the piles of shoes. But the quiet detail Martin found most arresting was one that few others even noticed: In the women’s housing, wooden support beams were covered with old graffiti, messages etched in languages she couldn’t read.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Here were these women experiencing genocide first-hand, yet something had moved them to carve messages on the columns. Was it an act of rebellion? A source of motivation to keep going? Or was it just a form of preservation, to nick up a beam with writing that could endure after death?” wrote Martin in the pages of her journal. As an aspiring journalist, she found herself naturally attuned to finding meaning in small details. “To me, that represented something so magnificently human — leaving behind something that’s proof to ourselves and the world, ‘I was here’.” 

When she returned for her senior year at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she was invited to share her reflections as part of the school’s new Digital Storytelling Program. The program had been launched with a grant from the Coalition for Transformational Education, designed to encourage Dearborn students to craft personal narratives in a multimedia format. It also allocated funds to hire the students to become digital storytelling mentors to other students, in turn teaching them the skills they’d learned. 

Martin’s five-minute digital story included curated images of Stutthof, paired with the audio recording of her script. In its conclusion, she wondered if this was to be her role in the world — amplifying the voices of others unable to share their stories.

Using the storytelling format in an academic setting was new for her. “Digital storytelling was a method of portraying what you’ve learned that’s so much more meaningful than an academic paper. It says something very unique about the person who created it. You’re seeing a whole other side to them that you wouldn’t see if you were just reading a paper,” says Martin, who has since graduated and is working as an intern at the Detroit Free Press. “Storytelling might not come naturally or easily to some students, but it’s a strong way of getting across a message or experience. Creativity can be like a muscle — the more you work at it, the better it gets.”

The University of Michigan-Dearborn is one of a growing number of campuses recognizing the power of storytelling as a life skill worth teaching. This isn’t news for students in the arts, media, or communications, and the ability to build a compelling narrative has obvious applications and benefits across all kinds of industries — sales and marketing, law and politics, conservation and urban planning, and so on. This is what happened. This is what we need to solve. This is why it matters. In recent years, the job title “Chief Storyteller” has infiltrated the org chart in companies like Nike, Microsoft, and IBM, and narrative techniques are becoming more widely applied in STEM fields like engineering and medicine. Storytelling combines the “hard” skills of problem-solving with the “soft” skills of communication and empathy, bridging the personal and the professional. Little surprise then that campus leaders find storytelling a good tool to approach a range of important conversations including equity, career development, wellbeing, and more.

More Than a Single Story

Dr. Domenico Grasso, Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, was first intrigued by how storytelling might influence identity formation in students when he watched, and was deeply moved by, the “The Danger of a Single Story,” the TEDGlobal talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie recalls arriving on campus in the U.S. and meeting her roommate, who was surprised to learn Nigerian people spoke English and listened to more than tribal music. In her talk, Adichie warns about the risk of widespread cultural misunderstanding that occurs when people make assumptions about a group of people, thinking one version of the way they live represents the narrative of an entire place.  

The message made an impact on Grasso, who saw the beneficial applications for breaking down cultural misperceptions on his suburban Detroit campus. “Storytelling is the act of considering the things we take as a given and articulating them, so that they’re out in the open,” he says. “When we put into words what we assume or presume, we put it on the table to be able to talk about it.”

Dr. Grasso worked with Dr. Maureen Linker, Associate Provost and Professor of Philosophy, to create a digital storytelling project that would solicit, hire, and train students in the art of multimedia technology. After two successful cohorts of the digital storytelling project, he had an idea: What if the skills of storytelling, and the benefits of learned empathy, could be harnessed in the service of more authentic Diversity, Equity And Inclusion (DEI) initiatives? 

Just last month, he revolutionized the school’s DEI process, and re-established it as the Office of Holistic Excellence. An important part of the new office’s outreach takes the form of learning about other people’s perspectives through storytelling, with a model that takes inspiration from NPR’s StoryCorps. 

“The initial concept of DEI was to bring onto campus people with diverse ideas and views and origin stories,” he said. “But in our traditional DEI approach, we never asked people to tell their stories. It was enough that they checked the box, which was African-American or Hispanic or LGBTQ or veteran, and so on. And then that was it. That was where the DEI ended. We have a very diverse and heterogeneous community, but we never asked them to enrich the campus by engaging with their stories.” 

In the initial digital storytelling project, as in as her philosophy classes, Linker worked with the students in the storytelling cohorts—which often began with overcoming their default mode of assuming their lives weren’t “storyworthy.”

“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can’t do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller.’”

“They could look at philosophical writing from the lived experience of people on the margins, but still say their own life was not particularly interesting. And once they started working on assignments and had to share aspects of their lives, they were fascinating and complex and full of insight,” says Linker. “It has a lot to do with our demographics as a regional campus, a commuter campus. There are so many stories and perceptions of the Detroit metropolitan area. So I used Adichie’s work as a springboard for the digital storytelling project, and I was interested in having the students address and lean into the myths and stereotypes about the area and tell stories from their point of view.”

Storytelling is as old as humanity, traced back to our earliest ancestors’ campfires and cave paintings. Narratives have always been used to pass down knowledge, traditions, and culture; they make sense of the world, foster shared identities, and ensure survival. Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould calls humans “primates who tell stories.”

And yet we aren’t born with the ability to tell a story; we have to acquire language to communicate, and function in social circles so we have others to communicate with. It’s a basic but critical life skill to live in community with others: persuasive storytelling compels others to partner with you, listen to your vision, and avoid the dangerous path, follow your plan. Storytelling as a genre is a broad umbrella, encompassing the skills of telling a story — the rollout and pacing of critical details, sometimes incorporating humor, culminating in a relatable larger message. But it can also mean knowing how to understand and tell your story, with the self-awareness of the personal narrative.

“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can’t do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller,’” says Jonathan Adler, a psychology professor at Olin College of Engineering. Adler is also co-founder of The Story Lab at Olin, designing and coaching storytelling experiences grounded in literary practice, the performing arts, and psychological science. Beyond Olin, he also works with doctors in the Health Story Collaborative, a non-profit organization aimed at elevating personal stories in the healthcare ecosystem. 

Medicine, engineering, STEM — they all rely on stories, he stresses, as much as the so-called arts. “The narrative is sort of the default mode of human cognition. Even if you’re going to spend your life writing computer code, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing and why you did it that way and why it matters to the people around you. ‘Well, my goal was X, so then I did Y.’ That’s a story,” he says. “Effective communication depends on narrative fluency. And there is no profession about which you don’t have to communicate the work you’re doing.” 

The narrative ecology we live in starts young. High schoolers need to tell their stories to get into college, and are asked in job interviews, Why do you want to work here? Why are you the best person for the job? Students might have spent their school years crafting persuasive academic essays. But the careers they’re entering require narrative powers of expression to put their goals in context. And sometimes they call for the self-awareness and insight to fit themselves into the story, making the case for their vision, and why they’re the person to make it happen. 

“Storytelling has the potential to do something much deeper and more transformational, which is to help people articulate why they care about the things that they care about, and what they’re trying to do with their lives,” he says. 

For Olin’s Story Lab, one of the key forums for students to perform their narratives is a story slam held during Candidates’ Weekend, when accepted undergraduates visit to decide whether this is the place they want to matriculate. It’s a bold move and an act of faith for the college to display these authentic voices at the same time the college admissions office is spinning its own persuasive narrative. In this context, student storytelling does more than entertain and inform with candor and empathy. It lets the listener in on the secret that it’s okay not to be perfect — to experience academic stress, social anxiety, identity confusion — which might just make Olin the perfect place to feel at home.

Adler recalls one impactful story — “a tell-without-telling story” — in which a student shares an episode of taking care of her little sister. In the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that the experience took place in the context of poverty, darker than expected, and that she was in fact only three years old trying to microwave a hot dog for a baby. 

“Working with students on their stories, we’ve developed a really good attunement for what’s the right amount of vulnerability to share in a story. When it became clear that we were dealing with trauma here, it took us all by surprise, and we decided, ‘Let’s just tell the story of making the hot dog in the microwave,’” recalls Adler. “Then the story can be infused with little moments where you as the listener are like, Oh, there’s more here, it goes a lot deeper, while keeping things on this subtler level in a way that was manageable, and resulted in a really captivating story. And partly what was captivating was that you knew there were layers beneath that you weren’t getting access to.”

In this way, he helps students master this technique of understatement, telling-without-telling, to help them process the story and keep it from becoming too raw. 

“And that’s what makes these experiences brilliant and beautiful. It’s a metaphoric way of thinking that I take for granted, because that’s the way I live in the world, but the students experience it for the first time as a superpower. Once they do that, it’s a skill that’s going to serve them for life, because they’re not going to need you sitting on their shoulder telling them where their metaphorical moments are like epiphanies.”​

Students who gain a well-developed sense of their own story benefit from the combined biological maturity and cognitive perspective to weave together the past, present, and future —and if they’re fortunate, with humor and grace. This is particularly true of young people who dealt with trauma, or shame. The act of processing the experience — and then sharing it and being received with support and understanding — helps them better appreciate variables that were beyond their control. 

“When we share our story with others, it reorganizes our experiences, makes them more categorized, and makes sense of it,” says Laura McKowen, founder of the recovery community The Luckiest Club dedicated to substance-use disorder. McKowen is a fan of storytelling because cognitively linking our life experiences — and seeing others identify with our experience — helps de-fang the otherness and humiliation. “We are meaning-making machines, and what we can’t put into a story and don’t have words for stays disorganized and festering and causes suffering and shame.”

Stories Are Pathways to Wellbeing

Will Schwalbe is a writer whose thoughtful insights into relationships characterized his 2012 memoir, The End of your Life Book Club. Last year he published a second memoir, We Should Not Be Friends, about an unlikely and lifelong relationship between him (gay theater kid) and Maxey (ebullient jock-Navy Seal) forged in a secret society at Yale in the early 1980s. This small society’s members, hand-selected for their vastly different paths in life, share awkward meals twice weekly until a capstone storytelling experience called the “audit.” Each member is given an entire evening to tell their life story — uninterrupted, for hour upon hour. 

“Each drew the group closer. Most of us admitted to suffering from imposter syndrome; there was relief in that admission. Inadequacy loves company,” he wrote. “It wasn’t the stories that bound us; it was the way we framed them for one another and the fact that we shared them in the first place.”

Advocates believe students who are making this cognitive leap in understanding their own stories are far better equipped to be making new connections with others — their peers, their professors, their coaches, their future bosses, and partners. They gain insight into which of their narratives land well — humility versus grandiosity. And they become far better listeners, better able to see the meaning behind the words and stories others share and respond in a way that means more than awkward small talk. The self-aware storyteller understands that the purpose of the story is connection, not painting himself as impressive.

“If you’ve got the floor in front of a group of people and go on about how great you are, or the greatest thing you did, you would really have to find some way to couch that to make it socially acceptable. For most people who have normal situational awareness, it’s going to tamp down the urge for self-aggrandizement or to boast, because it keeps you from connecting and getting anywhere,” says Matthew Dicks, a nine-time winner of The Moth GrandSLAM (the championship round of the country’s premier live storytelling competition) and author of Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. “The need to show yourself like a perfectly curated story or Instagram post is dishonest, when you’d be better off telling a story that’s funny, with a certain amount of deprecation, or a small disaster that led to moments of realization. Better knowledge of storytelling encourages people not to share their glorified moments, because those aren’t the ones that are going to connect.”

The therapeutic value of storytelling, among emerging adults, remains one of the craft’s most important benefits. The chronic loneliness that exists for young adults today isn’t made any easier by time spent reading their phones instead of reading the room. “Storytelling forces you to make eye contact with another human being. And then they say things that make you remember things from your own life, and connect to that person,” says Dicks. “I think the value in that is enormous for people trapped on their screens all the time. It used to be pretty normal in the world for that to happen, but I think now it actually sort of has to be coached and encouraged.”

This time in late adolescence is when young adults are laying down the first version of what scientists call their narrative identity, Adler says. So for traditionally aged college students, the college experience is happening while they are in the process of laying down the first draft of their story. “And we know that draft is going to stick around and influence their wellbeing over the course of their lives.”